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How to Change your Life in a Year (3 Simple Ideas)

2024-01-31 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 19:15 · watch on YouTube

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

In the last part of his three-part series on working out what you want, Ali boils it down to the next 12 months with three methods: dreamlining ten-year dreams, the Odyssey Plan's three five-year paths, and the 12-month celebration of three to five goals, each with a why, a how and a when.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Changing your life in a year: from point A to point B, the third part of the series

  • ★★★ Ali says changing your life in a year comes down to going from where you are now, point A, to where you want to be in 12 months, point B, in as few steps as possible while enjoying the journey. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali's first method for changing your life in a year is the dreamlining method, which he first found in Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek and calls a blend of methods by Jim Rohn and Zig Ziglar. — 00:00:29 · The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss

00:00:43 — The dreamlining method: dreams for the next 10 years

  • ★★★ Ali's dreamlining prompt asks what, in the next 10 years, you want to learn, have, be, try, see and do, where you want to go, and what you want to create, contribute to and overcome. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ For the dreamlining prompt, Ali advises setting a 10-minute timer and writing, going for quantity rather than quality. — 00:01:27
  • ★ Ali thinks writing such a list by hand is even more powerful than typing it. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Ali advises putting on the 10-year dream list anything you might want, even with only a remote possibility of wanting it, such as 0.1% certainty that you might want to write a book. — 00:02:36
  • ★★ Ali says it is fine to put materialistic wants on the 10-year dream list; his own list includes a nice big house and a loving family, and also a nicer car, an upgrade to the Tesla Model S. — 00:03:05

00:04:04 — Sponsor read for Brilliant

  • ★ When applying to medical school, Ali was torn between medicine and computer science because he was interested in coding. — 00:04:04

00:05:15 — The Odyssey Plan: current, alternative and radical paths, and Ali's own in 2019

  • ★★★ Ali's second method, on a five-year horizon, is the Odyssey Plan, which he calls an amazing exercise from Designing Your Life by Dave Evans and Bill Burnett, who he says teach applying design thinking to your life at Stanford. — 00:05:31
  • ★★ The Odyssey Plan's first prompt is your current path: write out in detail what your life looks like five years from now if you continue down it. — 00:05:31
  • ★★ For the Odyssey Plan's current path, Ali advises imagining an actual day in your life five years from now: when you wake up, breakfast, the commute, work, lunch and evenings. — 00:06:01
  • ★★ The Odyssey Plan's second prompt is an alternative path: write out in detail your life five years from now if you took a completely different path. — 00:06:01 · first in: 2024-01-18, How to figure out what you want in life ✍️
  • ★★ A few months before the video, Ali took software engineers through the Odyssey Plan at a talk at Google; for their alternative path he told them they could no longer work in software engineering and were fired from Google. — 00:06:01 · Google
  • ★★ The Odyssey Plan's third prompt is the radical path: your life five years from now if money, social obligations and what people would think were completely irrelevant. — 00:06:47
  • ★★★ Ali says the point of the Odyssey Plan is not to pick one path but to give you permission to think divergently: we tend to stick to the path we are on and fail to see that we have many options. — 00:07:35
  • ★★ The Odyssey Plan's radical path does not mean abandoning your kids, Ali says: it means not worrying what other people will think, since the fear of their judgement holds us back from what we want. — 00:08:34
  • ★★ Ali did the Odyssey Plan in 2019; its main value for him was recognising the life he would have if he continued down his current path. — 00:09:03
  • ★★ Ali wrote about his Odyssey Plan in his weekly newsletter, which he has written every week since 2018. — 00:09:03 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★ Ali wrote his Odyssey Plan's current path at around 25, and wrote in his email afterwards that writing it out left him feeling a bit depressed, asking whether this was really it. — 00:09:03
  • ★★★ The Odyssey Plan made Ali realise that his current path was not the one he wanted: he liked making YouTube videos, but training part-time in anaesthetics and supervising physiology on the side did not excite him. — 00:09:46
  • ★★ That realisation showed Ali he could change what he was doing and choose the direction of his life. — 00:10:18
  • ★★ Ali says working out what you want in the next 10 years and what you might aim for in the next five is meant to boil down to a list of things to achieve in the next 12 months. — 00:10:18

00:10:30 — The 12-month celebration: three to five goals with why, how and when

  • ★★★ Ali's third method, the 12-month celebration: pick three to five goals for the next 12 months by imagining sitting with a friend over coffee 12 months from now, celebrating the progress you have made. — 00:10:48
  • ★★ For the 12-month celebration Ali likes at least one goal each for health, relationships and work, and no more than five, since with more you stop remembering what you are focusing on. — 00:10:48
  • ★★ Ali says most people find that many of their 10-year dreams could be accomplished in the next 12 months if they really set their mind to it. — 00:11:24
  • ★★ Ali says manifestation is really just setting a goal in your mind: the brain, its default mode network and reticular activating system, then focuses on recognising what gets you closer to the goal. — 00:11:24
  • ★★★ To make the 12-month celebration more powerful, Ali advises asking three follow-up questions of each of the three to five goals: why, how and when. — 00:11:53
  • ★★ Ali's first follow-up question for a goal is why it matters to you: the more reasons you have for doing something, the more likely you are to do it. — 00:11:53
  • ★★ Ali's second follow-up question for a goal is how: the three to five major moves that will get you to it. — 00:11:53
  • ★★★ One of Ali's goals for 2024 is to get into the best shape of his life. — 00:11:53
  • ★★ Ali's reasons for getting into the best shape of his life include his appearance, cardiovascular health and stamina; he does not want to die young and says he has a bit of a belly and poor genetics. — 00:12:41
  • ★★ Ali's main moves for getting into the best shape of his life are the gym three to four times a week with progressive overload, eating healthily and eating lots of protein. — 00:12:41
  • ★★ Ali's last follow-up question for a goal is when you will find the time for it, which he calls ridiculously important to get specific on; he manages his time with his Trident method. — 00:13:11 · Trident calendar system

00:13:35 — One goal: Ali's pursuit of financial freedom and the student tutor at Cambridge

  • ★★ Ali says he did not have a systematic way of setting goals back in the day and has only recently come across it, reading a lot about the science of goal setting. — 00:13:40
  • ★★ Every year Ali would set a bunch of random goals; he has done annual reviews in Notion since 2019. — 00:13:40 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali's yearly goals were too many: learning the guitar and to sing, getting into a relationship, improving his posture, becoming a Gymshark athlete. — 00:14:02 · Gymshark
  • ★★★ Ali says he really had one goal when he started his YouTube channel and business, financial freedom: he never wanted to be shackled to a job he did not enjoy, and saw many doctors around him miserable at work. — 00:14:02 · work optional
  • ★★ Everything Ali thought about in the shower and the podcasts, YouTube videos, courses and books he consumed were focused on achieving financial freedom. — 00:14:02 · work optional
  • ★★ On 30 January 2024 Ali gave a talk at Cambridge to medical students, many of whom asked for his tips on making money. — 00:14:02 · Cambridge
  • ★★ One student at Ali's Cambridge talk made 40 pounds an hour from private tutoring and wanted to build a business, make lots of money and achieve financial freedom. — 00:14:49 · Cambridge
  • ★★ The tutoring student at Cambridge told Ali he had read zero books on building a business, watched only Ali's YouTube videos and no Alex Hormozi, and had no time for podcasts as a student. — 00:15:14 · Alex Hormozi, Cambridge
  • ★★★ Ali says to set your goal on one thing and orient your life towards it, like Michael Phelps, who he says probably thinks only about swimming rather than 18 other goals. — 00:15:14
  • ★★ Ali is still focused on growing his business, one of his three goals for 2024, and on his health, which is why he had a personal trainer session that morning. — 00:15:43
  • ★ By half past two that day Ali had listened to about three podcasts on growing a business at 2.5x speed. — 00:15:43
  • ★★★ Ali has not met a single entrepreneur who achieved financial freedom without dedicating a lot of their life to the pursuit of that one thing. — 00:16:08 · work optional
  • ★★ Felix Dennis (quoted): Felix Dennis's book How to Get Rich, which Ali calls good, says that if you actually want to get rich you have to devote your life to that one goal. — 00:16:08
  • ★★ Ali does not say you should want to get rich, but if you do, there is value in focusing on that goal and orienting your life and your reading, podcasts and audiobooks towards it. — 00:16:08

00:16:29 — Write down what you want and look at it; the end of the three-part series

  • ★★ Just as students spend their time on exam grades when that is their goal, Ali says you should change your behaviour to fit any goal you actually care about achieving. — 00:16:29
  • ★★ Ali calls going from 10-year dreams to 12-month goals the standard advice of every self-help book but still ridiculously valuable: many people set 12-month goals but rarely ask why, how and when or look at them. — 00:16:29
  • ★★ Ali says that if you write down what you want and look at it every day, the brain often finds things to latch onto that move you towards it, even without a timeline; but you have to write it down. — 00:17:18
  • ★★★ Ali says no one can tell you what you want in life: it is a hard question but, unlike the meaning of life, it has answers you can reach through a systematic process of journaling prompts, reflection and writing things down. — 00:18:08
  • ★★ Ali compares working out what you want to a complex mathematical equation: you would not solve it in your head but write it down, and it benefits from serious thought and effort. — 00:18:37
  • ★★ Ali says the more effort you put into working out what you actually want, the more likely you are to get it. — 00:18:37

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): The journalling prompts the video offers as a free Google doc are a Notion page, linked in the video description. — video description · Google, Notion

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: 12-month celebration · Dreamlining · Odyssey plan · work optional

Also: People: Alex Hormozi · Bill Burnett · Dave Evans · Felix Dennis · Jim Rohn · Michael Phelps · Tim Ferriss · Zig Ziglar

Projects: Sunday Snippets

Works: Designing Your Life · How to Get Rich · The 4-Hour Workweek

Organizations: Google · Gymshark · Stanford University

Concepts: default mode network · manifestation · Trident calendar system

Places: Cambridge

Products: Notion · Tesla Model S

Also centred on 12-month celebration: How to Make Next Year The Best Year of Your Life · How to actually achieve your goals 🎉

Also centred on Odyssey plan: I'm Moving to America 🇺🇸 - Life Update · 20 Lessons that Improved My Life · How To Figure Out What You Want To Do With Your Life · How to Make Productivity Healthier · How To Build A Life You Love · How to figure out what you want in life ✍️

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