How to Change Your Miserable Life

If your life sucks, then watch this video because I'm going to share some brutal life truths that you probably don't want to hear, but will for sure make your life better in the long run. And in this video, I'm going to share exactly how to fix your miserable life. Hey guys, I'm Alex Hine over at Modern Health Monk, author of the book Milk the Pigeon, a field guide for anyone lost in life. You know, in my mind, there's a stupid simple reason why your life probably sucks right now and you're watching this. I think of the concept of drift as one of the most important principles in a human being's life because drift is the only reason at 25 or 45 or 65 you wake up and you have that feeling I thought I would be somewhere else in life. I thought I would have a different life by now. And the only reason we get to these life regrets where we aren't as far as we thought we would be is purely because of drift. And drift is the most dangerous concept in life. When I think about it, I think a lot about my 20s and my early 30s where I was desperately trying to find what was my life purpose and what was I really trying to do in my existence. I didn't really find it to be very fulfilling to wake up, work at a 9 toive job, commute home, and then watch TV. In fact, I thought I'd rather kill myself than repeat this existence every day for the rest of my life. I mean, I looked all around me. I was the only person I knew living what I called a deliberate life, a life aligned with my personal goals and my personal dreams. So until 26, I had realized that I was trying to live a life that I loved. But in reality, I was allowing drift to get the best of me. I was not being deliberate about my career. I was just accepting the opportunities that came to me. I wasn't being deliberate about building my friend groups. I was just accepting the friends I still had from childhood or college. I was not even building like new community, building new hobbies that excited me and enlivened my life. I was just accepting status quo life. And because of that, I was living a freaking miserable life. I didn't understand why my life was where it was. And at 26, I was making almost no money, didn't have great friends, was single, and didn't have a great level of fitness and health. But in reality, drift, not paying attention to those 1% changes in the wrong direction was actually what was happening. And I learned a very important lesson that day and that year right around the year age 26 which was that if you're not consciously directing your life in some way either by following passions by working daily towards what you love or by setting goals you are not going to be where you want to be in that one day someday over the rainbow all have the person the job the kids the six figures the travels that will never happen if you don't change your life will not change now that year at 26 I started ed a challenge to myself that changed my life forever. I decided for 90 days I was going to do a 12step process [music] where for every week I worked on one domain of life to reinvent my life. And I've since put that into a free guide. If you're going through a quarter or midlife crisis, you're lost, you don't know what to do next, you want to find a meaningful life and find work you love, download the guide right below this video, which is those exact 12 steps you can do in the next 90 days to check that out. Now, I want to introduce three steps here. three steps that I think will really change the direction of your life. And step one is always the most charming and romantic. Step one, stop bullshitting yourself. One thing I think, and I pose this question to coaching clients all the time, if you're so smart, so driven, so special, so different, why don't you have the life that you want? I'm not saying that to criticize you. I'm saying it because I one day had to look at myself in the mirror and think, I think I'm way smarter than most people. I think I'm way more driven. And yet, I don't have any of the life that I want. I had to have a really brutal reality check with myself to realize that maybe some of those were true, but others were not true. And in the case of the things that weren't true, I really wasn't that hardworking. I learned I had wanted to be a YouTuber, but was I uploading a video per week for a year? No. I'd wanted to be an author, but was I writing 1,000 words per day? No. I had wanted to be fully self-employed, but was I making any money from my business? Also, no. Stop BSing yourself is so essential because I've seen through coaching thousands of 20 and 30 and 40 and 50somes, the number one reason why people do not get the life they want is they truly are not taking the action. And it doesn't require massive action. It just requires daily action. And that brings us to step two on how to fix your miserable life. Do the daily work. My first book is called Master the Day for a Reason. It's all about how small little habits can dramatically change the course of your life. The premise is simple. You may have a goal to, let's [clears throat] say, become like a YouTuber or build a business, but inevitably, how do you write a book? As someone who's written two of them, how do you you sit down and you write 500 or a thousand words? You sit down and you write for [snorts] an hour a day. You sit down and you write whatever time you have in the morning, whatever time you have in the evening. Some of the best books in literature history were written in a in part-time work hours. And because of that, these things have been birthed into existence without like 9 hours a day of work or even 3 hours a day of work. One thing I want you to think of is that it only takes an hour a day to change your life. It only took me an hour a day to write each of my books. It took me an hour a day to build two YouTube channels to over half a million subscribers. It really doesn't take a dramatic amount of work. It just takes that one hour a day because it just takes an hour a day to change your life. But are you able to protect that key one hour? And are you able to be focused enough to know this is my number one goal? Because if you can do those two things, you're already ahead of 99% of people. Step three to fix your miserable life is to escape the mud and follow aligned action. Initially, when you're trying to work on build on rebuilding your life and reinventing it, it probably sucks, right? You're probably really unhappy. You're out of shape. You don't have much money. Your work is like whatever at best or at the worst worst is it sucks and you're not making any money. That's definitely city. In reality, when you start, there's a lot you have to work on. There's a lot of your life you have to reinvent. And that's very difficult because it's like someone who's at rock bottom. When you have no friends, you're out of shape, you're depressed, you don't have any money, you hate your job, or you can't find a job, you have lots of zeros in your lineup of like the the quadrants of life. And each of those zeros is a gravitational pull downward, which is why I call it the mud with my clients. So escaping the mud is much harder than just running on flat land. The mud is like a negative force that pulls you down. It's like that metaphor about like crabs in a bucket. When one crab tries to crawl out, the rest of the crabs pull it pull it back in. The way that I think about how you actually begin reinventing yourself is you have to just accept that if you're in the mud, it's going to be hard for a little while. And it might mean forcing yourself. It might mean forcing yourself out of bed. It might mean forcing yourself in that job for another 6 months or a year. And just think of it though, like I'm in the mud. I won't be here forever. I'm not going to be in the mud till the day I die. It's just a phase. And once I get enough momentum to escape that mud and I'm building that escape velocity, I'm going to be way easier to live the life I love. It's going to be so much easier. The second part of that is once you've escaped the mud to focus really heavily on what I call aligned action. Doing work you don't like requires effort and requires energy, but passion and meaning have a pull to them. escaping the mud, you have to push. You have to use your personal energy. You have to fight. But once you're out of that, when you're following a path of excitement, a path that intrigues you, a path you really love, at that point you have a certain level of baseline energy. Because it's a lot like showing up to do a work project that you really, really care about. You know, even if you take someone who hates their work, they procrastinate all day long, but then they love making music in the evenings. They could do that for hours, [music] right? But then why is it at work they can't focus? It's not that they have ADHD. It's that they're doing something that's not aligned with what they want to be doing. As you escape the mud, find that escape velocity. Find that momentum. And the fastest way you do that is to also fill your life with as many things that are aligned as possible, that excite you, that light you up. Try to keep a little notebook of every little thing that feels like it actually [music] gives you those goosebumps. You feel excited. you can't stop talking about it. And as time goes on, you're basically calibrating a sort of internal radar to find work you love. Now, from my point of view, the fastest way to escape the mud is to go through this 12step process to reinvent yourself. Remember that guide I put together. If you're lost or in a quarter or midlife crisis trying to figure out what to do with your life, you want to find work you love and live an amazing existence and life, download the free guide right below this video, modernhealthmunk.com/lost, because I give you my exact playbook I use to reinvent my life. Now, there's one final thought here, which is that I've seen three habits more than any others destroy people's lives. And even in a group coaching capacity, I've seen these three habits hold people back. And I actually shot an entire video on the three habits that are ruining your life. So, make sure you check it out right here.