I'm almost 40. If you're in your 20s or 30s, watch this.

I'm 38 and if you're in your 20s or 30s this video is going to save you a decade of your life. Human beings have this fantasy that as time goes on and as we age our life naturally just gets better and usually the exact opposite is true and the good news though is that there's a specific and repeatable process you can do to ensure that every year that you age your life gets better and better and better. What's up guys Alex Hein over at Modern Health Monk, author of the book Milk the Pigeon, a field guide for anyone lost in their 20s or 30s or 40s. Let's jump in. So here's the sad truth about life. When you're young, and young is of course relatively speaking, you think you have time but you actually don't. You know there's that great quote that youth is wasted on the young meaning that when you're like in your 20s or your teens or 30s you have the most energy you ever will in your life. You also have the fewest responsibilities, you don't have children probably, you don't have massive things to worry about, you can always move back in with your parents if your dreams don't work out and it's not catastrophic, right? Your life doesn't end if you try to be a filmmaker for a year and you move back home to North Carolina. Your life's not over, you'll be completely fine. When you're young you have a false belief that there's plenty of time because you think, well if the average life expectancy is going to be 80, my parents are in their 60s, I have plenty of time to go do whatever I want to do. But the irony is that time sneaks up faster than you could ever imagine and you could ever dream. Now I want to comment on one thing that is so common in your 20s and 30s, maybe your whole life, which is the feeling of feeling lost. I remember when I was in my 20s, when I first moved back from China, I had this intense, overwhelming existential angst that I felt so lost in life. You know, I had this incredible epic year where I quit my day job, I was like, screw this, if this nine to five is what the next 40 years of my life are going to look like, I'm out. I can always come back after I go on this grand adventure to China to become a monk and kung fu master. When I came back I felt so miserable because I was like, I have no friends, I moved back in with my parents, I'm not sure what I'm doing in my career, I don't even know what work I like, so I'm taking all these odd jobs that make me so miserable just to exist on this freaking piece of land just to pay my rent. And I was like, this makes no sense, like I'm directionless, I don't like my work, I'm spending 40 hours a week there and I refuse to believe the rhetoric from like the boomers, you just get the job and be grateful you have a job, kid. Screw that. I don't believe that even for a second. I've coached thousands of people who feel lost and they feel directionless in life and what I found is that you have to reframe feeling lost as, I'm lost, this is a big problem, into your next chapter is emerging. If we internalize being lost as a bad thing, it creates anxiety. But if we internalize being lost as something that is actually a sign from our inner psyche, from God, the universe, whatever you believe in, and you heed that sign, you explore. Okay, I've been an accountant for 10 years, this is obviously not my life's work. I explore. Okay, you know what, I've always thought about maybe taking a month off in summer to go to Spain and learn Spanish and take dance classes. And you've been thinking about it for years, but now you're like formulating that plan. And when you take that trip it leads to the next thing and the next thing, a whole new reinvention of you and a whole new career calling. So what I've seen is that feeling lost is a very frustrating existential sort of feeling, right? But if you view it as my next chapter is trying to come out and you nurture that little baby seed while it's fragile, it will lead you to an incredible life and a whole new exciting life. Now, if you're in your 20s or 30s, there are two important quadrants to figure out. And this will help provide a little bit of direction. Because in my opinion, I love this quote from Freud where he says, love and work, work and love, what else is there? And what he was implying was that the biggest rocks in your life that will make the biggest difference in your quality of life and the direction of your life are what you do for work, because that's literally what you're doing 8 a.m to 6 p.m. You'll spend more time at work than you do with any of your friends, your family, your loved ones, and then love, which I translate as people in your life. I think back to when I had that first job when I was in my early 20s. I was an undergraduate bio and environmental science degree and I couldn't get a job because it was during the major crisis of 2009. So I just took the first job that came up and he was a teaching assistant in a high school. While it was a good job and I didn't hate it, at the end of that year I remember thinking, I have 40 more years to be working, am I really going to spend it doing this? And so I began thinking, well maybe because work takes up the majority of my life, maybe that's the quadrant I should figure out the most. So what I would recommend is if you're lost and you're trying to figure out what to do, spend a disproportionate amount of time figuring out what field you want to be in. Call the people in that field or 10 different fields, see what the job's like, see what the reality of the profession is like. Whether or not you like it, that's actually going to be the dominant focus of your entire life. So if you dislike your nine to six hours, you're still going to have to be doing it. And if you love your nine to six hours, you're still going to have to be doing it. So choose very carefully. And the other domain of life is love, which is your romantic relationship or relationships, as well as your friendships and your family and eventually your children. Those two things are going to make up the bulk of your waking hours in your life. So try to spend a disproportionate amount of time there. That can include things like hobbies, what you're doing in the evening, doing nine to six, and then coming home and doom scrolling on Instagram and watching a show is probably not a very fulfilling life for most human beings on the planet. Those two quadrants of life are the ones I spent the most time attempting to figure out because it is going to be most of your life. So why not make it awesome? Now the final pro tip that I wish someone would have told me is that your life is a reflection of your days. What happens inevitably is in the people that I've coached, you know, especially when I coach people having a midlife crisis, they're like 45, going through a divorce, going through a career transition, they always say the same thing. Which is a bit like, I don't know how I ended up here or I thought my life would look differently at this age. And it's a very sad thing to hear and it's a very human thing to hear, but inevitably what that comes from is a incongruency between how we spend our days and how we would like our life to end up. Because ultimately, if you want to lose weight, if you want to write books, if you want to be a creator, if you want to change your career, if you want to travel the world, if you want to get rich, all of those things come back to rituals you do on a daily basis. The problem is that it's so hard to be self-aware around what we do on a daily basis because autopilot is often what takes over. It's like, for example, if a cheeseburger made me fat after just eating one cheeseburger, well that's an immediate feedback loop, right? You wouldn't eat cheeseburgers every day. But the problem is diet is a lot like finance. It's a combination of the little things you do every day, those three meals and snacks, that eventually over three months or six months lead to that tire around the midsection and gaining 20 pounds. So the problem is it's hard to be self-aware enough to recognize how my days are creating my life without me even realizing it. For example, even when it came to writing my books, writing Milk the Pigeon, I didn't have on my goal board, write a book. My daily ritual became write 1,000 words per day. And then I figured out how much time do I need for that? Maybe 90 minutes. So at 8 p.m. every night, I'm going to write 1,000 words per day. The idea of building something big, like writing a book, ultimately becomes what is the 90 minutes every single day that I'm allocating to make that goal happen. We think we have this fantasy that at a certain age, things will naturally just happen. And it is a fantasy because what actually makes the life happen is what you do on a daily basis. And the easiest way to make sure you're aligned with that is to track what those daily rituals are. So what's the best way to really be conscious of those daily rituals? It's to have actually a strategic plan. So if you're someone in your 20s or 30s or even your 40s going through a quarter or midlife crisis, feeling lost, directionless, and you're like, is this all there is? Make sure you download my free guide right below this video, which is my 12-step process for reinventing yourself. To go from unlost and directionless to have a clear strategic roadmap to reinvent yourself and design your next most exciting chapter of your life. So it's right below this video. You can also go to modernhelpmonk.com forward slash reinvent. Now inevitably, I loved talking to people when I was in my 20s and 30s about, you know, I was like, I'm smart. Let me try to be strategic here. So I said to 50 and 60 year olds, what's the number one piece of you wish you were given in your twenties? Well, I actually shot an entire video on that exact topic right up here.