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How To Figure Out What You Want To Do With Your Life

2021-05-26 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 10:01 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Goals, purpose and life design · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, His medical past, Sponsor segment present

Ali shares three exercises he uses to work out what to do with his life: the gravestone technique (gravestone, funeral and Wikipedia-page questions), the Odyssey Plan of three five-year lives, and Simon Severino's ideal ordinary week, then asking what stops him living it now.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Trying to figure out what to do with his life: passion, the next 20 years, medicine

  • ★★ Trying to work out what to do with his life, Ali says he does not know what his passion is, whether his current work is what he wants for the next 20 years, or what part medicine plays in his life plan. (unsure) — 00:00:00

00:00:30 — The gravestone technique: gravestone, funeral and Wikipedia page

  • ★★★ Ali's first exercise for working out what to do with his life is the gravestone technique: think about what you want written on your gravestone. — 00:00:34

  • ★★ Imagining his own gravestone, Ali would want it to say good dad, good husband and, to his surprise, inspirational teacher. — 00:00:34

    “something along the lines of inspirational teacher”

  • ★★ Ali realised teaching gave much of his life's meaning, from teaching at school and medical students at university to his YouTube channel, "teaching at scale", so it should maybe be part of his life plan. (hedged) — 00:01:03

  • ★★ A second form of the gravestone technique: imagine what different people, such as close friends, family and work colleagues, might say at your funeral, and what you want them to say. — 00:01:03
  • ★★ Ali thinks what friends would say at our funeral would be about our character and how good a friend or family member we were, not our achievements or accolades. (hedged) — 00:01:32
  • ★★ Ali says high achievers easily optimise far too much for career and achievements and too little for relationships and being a nice person; he struggles with this and is trying to remedy it. — 00:02:01
  • ★★ The third part of the gravestone technique asks what you want written on your Wikipedia page by the time you die: the achievements and the impact you want on the world overall. — 00:02:01 · Wikipedia
  • ★★ Ali says he never did any long-term planning until he started thinking about the gravestone questions. — 00:02:31
  • ★★ Ali calls How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen, which he read a few months ago, a great book that turned him onto long-term thinking. — 00:02:31
  • ★★ Without long-term thinking, Ali says, a busy person easily gets caught up in the rat race of subscriber counts and career accolades and never thinks about what truly matters. — 00:02:31

00:03:15 — The Odyssey Plan: three versions of life five years from now

  • ★★★ Ali's second exercise is the Odyssey Plan from Designing Your Life, by authors at Stanford: first write in detail a day of your life five years from now on your current path. — 00:03:20
  • ★ Ali first came across the Odyssey Plan about two years ago, when his friend Unjaded Jade made a video about it on her YouTube channel. (hedged) — 00:03:20
  • ★★ The Odyssey Plan then asks what your life would look like five years from now on an entirely different path, if the current one were closed, and if money, others' opinions and societal expectations did not matter. — 00:03:49
  • ★★ Ali at first could not be bothered to do the Odyssey Plan, then spent half an hour writing out his answers and shared some of them in his email newsletter. — 00:04:19 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★★ Ali's current five-year path, a part-time trainee in anaesthetics still living in Cambridge with some teaching, some writing and the YouTube channel going well, felt depressing to him: too easy. — 00:04:43 · Cambridge
  • ★★★ Because that anaesthetics path was not challenging, interesting or uncomfortable enough, and he is, as Yes Theory would say, a big fan of seeking discomfort, Ali decided it was not the path he wants. — 00:05:12
  • ★★★ To anyone struggling to figure out what to do with their life, Ali fully recommends the Odyssey Plan: it takes effort, but it is a life plan. — 00:05:12
  • ★★ Ali repeats the Odyssey Plan in his head every few months and says he will now write it out properly each time, since writing something down beats doing it in your head. — 00:05:42
  • ★★★ Ali's third exercise is the ideal ordinary week, which he learned from his friend Simon Severino, a business coach at Strategy Sprints. — 00:05:42

00:06:00 — The ideal ordinary week and Ali's own two years from now

  • ★★★ For the ideal ordinary week, fast-forward a few years (Ali likes two), open your calendar and plot an ideal but ordinary, standard week, not a holiday or a novel week. — 00:06:11
  • ★★ In Ali's ideal ordinary week two years from now, he wakes at eight every morning, spends an hour on his morning routine, and exercises (tennis, gym or squash) first thing on most weekdays. — 00:06:11
  • ★★★ Ali's ideal ordinary week two years from now has team meetings on Mondays from 10 to 1 and full days in the emergency department, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., on Tuesdays and Fridays. — 00:06:52
  • ★★ Ali's ideal ordinary week has World of Warcraft raid nights with his guild on Thursdays and Sundays, takeaway and board games on Wednesdays, and meals out with friends on Monday night and at Saturday brunch. — 00:06:52 · World of Warcraft
  • ★★ Most other daytime in Ali's ideal ordinary week goes to blocks of deep work or filming YouTube videos, with an hour of music practice (guitar, piano or singing) on Monday and Wednesday evenings. — 00:06:52 · deep work (concept)
  • ★★ Ali's ideal ordinary week also holds a Saturday evening group art class, time for lunch and cooking, blocks of doing nothing as margin, and evenings for reading or learning. — 00:07:21

00:07:43 — Sponsor read for Brilliant

  • ★ Ali redid the ideal ordinary week exercise on the morning of the video, in about 10 minutes. — 00:08:19

00:08:31 — What is stopping me from living my ideal ordinary week now?

  • ★★★ Once you have drawn your ideal ordinary week, Ali says, the next question is what stops you from having it now: what barriers stand between you and that vision of your life. — 00:08:48
  • ★★ Since doing the ideal ordinary week exercise, Ali has realised he could get pretty close to it now: the pandemic limits seeing friends, but he controls his own calendar. (hedged) — 00:08:48 · COVID-19
  • ★★ Ali has not found the answer to what to do with his life, but each time he does the three exercises he feels a little more clarity about it. — 00:09:27

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: gravestone technique · ideal ordinary week · Odyssey plan

Also: People: Clayton Christensen · Simon Severino · Unjaded Jade

Projects: Sunday Snippets

Works: How Will You Measure Your Life

Organizations: Stanford University · Strategy Sprints · Wikipedia · Yes Theory

Concepts: deep work (concept) · Emergency medicine · lifelong learning · voluntary discomfort

Places: Cambridge

Products: World of Warcraft

Also centred on Odyssey plan: I'm Moving to America 🇺🇸 - Life Update · 20 Lessons that Improved My Life · How to Make Productivity Healthier

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