How to Change Your Life

If your life sucks, congratulations, you're watching the right video this afternoon. Look, if you wanna change your life, you have to do something differently than you've done up until this point. And I know that sounds extremely obvious, but you would be baffled at the number of 30 and 40 and 50 and 60 year olds I've talked to who do the exact same day, repeated every single day, 365 days a year. And then when they're 50, they wake up and they're like, why does my life still suck? I thought it was all gonna work out. But in reality, if you want to change your miserable or unhappy or lost life, you have to do something different. 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. I can tell you firsthand, the biggest transformations typically follow the worst years of your life. So if you're going through death, divorce, chronic illness, you're 25 and you feel lost, chin up, because if you follow a process, the next year is probably gonna be one of the best of your life. But I can tell you firsthand, when I was 24 and I had moved back from this amazing trip I had in China, I was vagabonding for a year, I was like, I'm gonna do everything on my bucket list in one year, quit my job. So I did. And it was like the ultimate dopamine filled life, right? Dopamine and adrenaline. Come back home to my parents in Connecticut, no friends, no career, no money, don't know what the hell I wanted to do with my life. And then for a year, I dilly-dallied, thinking that, all right, something will just fall in my lap. And when it didn't, I got super depressed. And it was around that time where I really began thinking about what factors lead to someone changing or designing their life? What concretely, scientifically leads to your life getting better and better every year or better every few years? And I started to really think of this like a practical scientist. And a lot of this is in Milk the Pigeon, right? I thought about three questions more than anything, which is number one, what the hell should I do with my life? Number two, how do I find work I love because I hated my nine to five? And number three, how do I live a life worth living? And so my life became an obsession about answering those three questions. I have 300 painstaking pages on that in this book, Subtle Pitch. But this became my focal point. Realistically, what it looked like was for three years and three months, I worked a nine to five. From 5.30 to 6.30, I went to the gym. Then from seven to 10, I went to the same cafe five nights a week and I worked on my business. When I look back, I think, well, no wonder my life finally changed with that work ethic. Because most of us say we want to become a YouTuber, say we want to write a book, say we want to quit our job, but we're literally not even driven enough to take one freaking hour per night towards our goals and dreams. And what I learned was during this time, it wasn't passion driving me. It was the thought of having to wake up to another goddamn nine to five workday where I did two hours of productive work and I sat there and milked my afternoon coffee and scone for three hours because I was so goddamn bored. The clock is ticking on my life. Why am I doing this? Why am I wasting my life? It wasn't love driving me. It wasn't passion. It was pain. And I find that for most of us, pain will be the initial driver that drives you to change your life. Jim Rohn said that you either have to suffer the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. And this is a great example because if you're trying to change your life and you find that one hour of going to the gym every day inconvenient, but you want to look different in the mirror, you want to have better blood sugar, you don't want to have acid reflux and sleep horribly and have anxiety, then really the pain of regret is going to be stronger for you. Your life clearly isn't bad enough that you're willing to inconvenience yourself to work on things. Do you want to have the pain of discipline or the pain of regret, of waking up when you're 30, 40, 50, realizing you could have been and could have done all these things, but you didn't. Now, one of the best ways to do that is through a repeatable process and a strategy. Well, I've actually put together a brand new guide called the 12-step guide to reinvent yourself. If you're going through a quarter or a midlife crisis, you're feeling lost and you're sort of like, is this all there is? Then I strongly recommend downloading the guide below this video, modernhealthmonk.com forward slash reinvent and it'll show you how to reinvent yourself, how to get unlost, how to design that next chapter of your life so that your life is freaking incredible in the coming years. So check it out below. Most people at the beginning of their finding their fire journey, finding their drive, is finding something that pisses you off or hurts you enough that it forces you to change. Now in psychological research, this is called loss aversion. And researchers have found that people are often driven more by avoiding pain than by gaining pleasure or gaining something. Like check out this 1979 study from Kahneman. What the researchers found was that people weigh losses more heavily than equivalent gains. Losing $1,000 produces stronger emotional impact than the pleasure gained from winning 1,000. In these behavioral experiments, people needed a much larger potential gain to compensate for an equal or equivalent potential loss in order to take the same risk. Basically, the researchers concluded the pain of losing motivates stronger behavior than the pleasure of an equivalent gain. For many of us, it will be pain that drives you more than the potential of living some amazing life, the potential of writing that book. It is going to be pain and suffering that drives you. Learn to channel that pain and learn to turn it into an incredible life. Now inevitably, if you wanna change your life, you know, you start going to the gym. Two months later, you don't look that different. You start working on your appearance and your personality and social skills. Two months later after dates, you still don't have the dream girl or dream guy. You know, you're working at your job. You're trying to save money for that Spanish sabbatical to work on your book. Two months later, you save like 200 bucks. You're like, this is gonna cost five grand. How am I ever gonna get there? I find that having a timeline for reinvention to be very helpful here. And what I found is that there's sort of a three year process. Year one, you're sort of in the suck. You're trying to get the momentum of the ball going. It's a lot like, you know, that huge ball in Indiana Jones that just like rolls over in that cave and almost kills him. Imagine trying to push that boulder if you have like 10 men. In the beginning, no matter how hard you push, nothing budges, but that's the first year. It's getting the ball going. The second year is where you start to see some quite good success and progress. Some goals in the first 90 days will improve. Making friends, going on dates, earning more money, maybe starting your YouTube channel. Those can happen in 90 days. But usually it's like year two where your whole life reinvention, the ball starts moving slowly. And usually what I find is in year three, if you keep up with the processes, the roadmaps, the exercises we talk about here and on the channel, by year three, your life will have the ball rolling effect. Your health will be good, finance is good, career is great, you have friends, you're in a relationship. So three years, 1,000 days, personally is not that big of a price to pay for living an incredible life. Now, if you want a quick dopamine hit, when I work with coaching clients one-to-one, one thing I do is try to give them a process to change your life in 24 hours. A kick in the butt, something to get them going, stop BSing themselves so they can see that transformation can happen quickly. And so I've actually shot an entire video on how to change your life in 24 hours right up here.