- All right, so recently I've been trying to figure out very hard what I'm gonna do with my life. It's like, you know, I wanna do something that I enjoy, that feels meaningful and fulfilling and brings me happiness and that helps people and
trying to find my passion. But at the same time, I'm thinking, "Well, I don't really
know what my passion is. I don't know if this is the thing that I wanna do for the next 20 years. I don't know to what extent
medicine plays a role in this overall life plan." And so to try and untangle all this stuff, there are three exercises
that I've been finding really useful that I wanna
share with you in this video. And let's get started with number one, The Gravestone Technique. All right, so the Gravestone Technique is a little bit morbid but the idea is that we wanna think about what do we want written on our gravestone? And so I thought about this quite a lot. And for me, sort of
three things came to mind if I imagine my future gravestone what I'd want to be written on it. Number one, a good dad,
or words to that effect. Number two, good husband,
or words to that effect. And number three was the
one that most surprised me, which was something along the lines of inspirational teacher. And that phrase came to me, this inspirational teacher thing and it kind of made me realize that a lot of the things
I found most meaningful throughout my life have been
when I've been teaching. So whether it's teaching
students when I was in school or teaching medical
students at university, or even this YouTube channel, it's basically teaching at scale. I realized that, "Oh,
wow that is a big part of what I find meaningful and fulfilling. And so being a teacher
should maybe make up some aspect of my life plan." So that's one way of using
the Gravestone Technique. The other way is to imagine
what different people might say at your funeral and what you want them
to say at your funeral. So for example, close
friends, close family members, work colleagues or random
people on the street or random people on the internet. And the idea behind that is
that it gives us a different way of trying to figure out
what is the sort of person I want to be to different people. If we imagine what our friends
would say at our funeral, it will probably be based
around our character and about how nice and
warm and friendly we were and how accommodating we were
and how much of a good friend or family member we were. It wouldn't really be about
our achievements or accolades and especially as high achievers, like often, we can very
easily fall into the trap of optimizing far too much
for career and achievements and not enough on relationships and just being a generally nice person. This is something that
I struggle with a lot that I'm trying to remedy over time. And the third aspect of
the Gravestone Technique, is what do you want to have been written on your Wikipedia page
by the time you die? And the Wikipedia page question is more about achievements and accolades and what's the impact you wanna
have on the world overall, rather than just kind of the impact you wanna have on your close
friends and family members. And so in a way these
three different exercises, I've been finding quite helpful because I just never, ever,
ever do any long-term planning until I started thinking about these. And I guess when it comes to
finding stuff that's meaningful and fulfilling, that seems to vary a lot depending on who we are and our own kind of internal compass for
what, what is meaningful. I think when we think that long-term, like okay, 60 years
from now, when I'm dead, what do I want my life
to have looked like? I think that's particularly interesting. And there's a great book called "How Will You Measure Your
Life?" by Clayton Christensen that I read a few months ago that really turned me on to
this mode of long-term thinking, because otherwise if you're a busy person and you're doing a lot of
stuff it's just way too easy to get caught up in the rat
race, climbing the greasy pole of subscribe accounts and career accolades and all that stuff. And actually not think about what are the things that
actually truly matter? Method number two, for how
I'm trying to figure out what to do with my life. It's called the Odyssey Plan. Now this is from a book
called "Designing Your Life" I don't know who it's by, but it's by these authors
at Stanford Business School. And I first came across this I think, two years ago
when my friend Unjaded Jade put out a video about it
on her YouTube channel, link in the video description, and again, because we
all love a list of three, with the Odyssey Plan, there are three things that
we want to be thinking about. The first is that we
want to ask ourselves, "what would my life look
like five years from now if I continued down exactly the same path that I'm currently on?" And we want to write out,
in as much detail as we can, what a day in our life would
look like five years from now if we carry on down exactly the same path. The second aspect of the Odyssey Plan is to ask yourself the same question. "What would my life look
like five years from now If I took an entirely different path? if the current path that
I'm on was closed off to me what's the alternative
path that I might take, and what would my life look like?" Then, in the third aspect
of the Odyssey Plan, is the same question. "What's my life going to look
like five years from now?" Except this time, we're asking ourselves "what would it look like if
money and what people think and societal expectations, if these things didn't matter at all?" So those were the three
components of the Odyssey Plan. And when I first discovered
them from Unjaded Jade's video, part of me thought, "oh, I
can't be bothered to do this. It seems like too much effort." But then I actually took the time to, spending half an hour
to write out my answers to each of these, I shared some of them in my email newsletter, linked
in the video description, if you want to check out my oversharing about what my life would have looked like, but essentially, I realized
that the path that I was on like for the next five years,
that was kind of depressing. It felt too easy, almost. The path will involve
becoming a part-time resident or trainee in anesthetics
or anesthesiology, which was the thing I was
interested in at the time. I was still living in Cambridge, where I've been for the
last nine years so far. And, you know I was
doing a bit of teaching, a bit of writing, the YouTube
channel was going well and it was all fine. And it was all very reasonable and I could easily see how
I might end up on this path but that was a big part
of me that was just like, "oh is this really what I want to do?" And I kind of felt a bit depressed thinking that this was what
my life would amount to five years from now. Because it just didn't seem
challenging or interesting or uncomfortable enough and you know, as the folks at Yes Theory would say, I'm a big fan of seeking discomfort. And because this path felt so easy, I sort of thought, "okay no, this is not really the path
that I want to be going down." And so, if you're struggling to figure out what to do with your life, genuinely a hundred percent recommend trying out the Odyssey Plan. I get that it's going to take some effort but this is like a life plan. And you know it's obviously
going to take effort to figure it out but I can
guarantee that if you write out this vision for what
your life will look like five years from now, under
these three conditions, you will get some kind of clarity about how you want to move forward. And in fact, this is something that I try and repeat in
my head every few months. And now that I'm saying this, I'm actually going to start
writing it out properly, every time I repeat the exercise because there is something magical about writing something down, rather than just doing it in our heads and hoping for the best. And finally, method number three for how I'm trying to figure
out what to do with my life. It's called the Ideal Ordinary Week. I came across this from
my friend, Simon Severino, who's a business coach
at Strategy Sprints, link below if you want to check it out. But essentially, the idea is
that we fast forward our life a few years into the future. And I like thinking
two years in the future and we open up our
calendars and we plot out what would our ideal
ordinary week look like on our calendar? And it's like an ideal week because it's what we would
like it to look like. But it's an ordinary week. It's like a normal book
standard week in our lives. It's not awake when we're on holiday or doing something particularly novel. And so again, because I'm
in an oversharing mood, this is what my ideal
ordinary week looks like two years from now. So firstly, I'm going to start off by waking up every
morning at eight o'clock and I'll spend an hour doing my wake-up and the morning routine,
whatever that looks like. Next, on most of the weekdays, I'm gonna do some sort of exercise first thing in the
morning after I wake up. So that's tennis or gym or squash. On Mondays, I'm gonna have team meetings from 10 o'clock to one o'clock. And then on Tuesdays on
Fridays, I'd be doing a full day in the emergency department
from 10 o'clock to 6:00 p.m. Thursday and Sunday nights are gonna be my World of Warcraft and gaming
great nights with my guild. Wednesday night, is gonna be takeaway and board games night at my place. And I'm going to go out to a restaurant to have food with
friends on a Monday night and on a Saturday brunch time. For most of the rest of the daytime, I'm going to have blocks of deep work or filming YouTube videos. And on Monday and Wednesday evenings I'd be spending an hour practicing music or guitar or piano or
singing of some sort. And on Saturday evenings, I'd be attending a group evening art class or something like that. Then we've got a bit of
time for having lunch, a bit of time for cooking
and having dinner, a few blocks of doing absolutely nothing to add some margin to my calendar. And the rest, usually in the evenings, will be my time for reading
or learning something because you guys know, we're all fans of lifelong learning here on this channel. I'm going to talk more about
exactly how this calendar, this ideal ordinary week,
fits into my life plan. But before I do so, if you
want to kickstart your journey for lifelong learning and
you don't want to wait two years for it, I'd
highly recommend signing up to Brilliant, who are very
kindly sponsoring this video. If you haven't heard, Brilliant
is a fantastic platform with online courses on maths,
science and computer science. The courses are engaging and interactive and they teach us things from a very first principled approach, which makes it so much
more interesting and useful than the stuff that we learn in school. My personal favorite, is the computer science
series on Brilliant and I've been working through those for the last over a year. And the nice thing about that, is that I was torn between
doing computer science and medicine when I applied to university and I ended up going to med school but it was had a part of me that was like, "oh I really want to understand
this computer science stuff the algorithms, you know, the fundamentals of programming, languages,
that sort of thing." And so Brilliant's really
been a fantastic introduction to all of that stuff. If that sounds up your street and you're interested in
lifelong learning as well, then head over to Brilliant.org/Ali and the first 200 people
to go on that link you'll get 20% off the
annual premium subscription. So thank you very much to Brilliant for sponsoring this video. And now let's talk about how this Ideal Ordinary Week exercise
can fit into our lives. And so for me, it doesn't
take very long to do. I re-did this exercise this
morning in about 10 minutes and really thought to myself, "okay what do I actually
want my Ideal Ordinary Week to look like two years from now?" And then the next question,
which always comes once you've done this
exercise is thinking, "Hmm, what is stopping
me from just having this as my Ideal Ordinary Week now? What are the barriers that
are in the way of me achieving this vision of my life?" And for me, kind of since
doing this exercise, I've actually kind of realized that I probably could get pretty
close to my Ideal Ordinary Week. Yes, there's a pandemic, so I'm not gonna hang out
with friends very often, but most of the things I actually do have control
over my own calendar. And so now having done the
exercise fairly recently, I'm now thinking about
my day to day calendar and thinking, "Hmm why is this not the vision that I
actually want for myself? What's stopping me from doing it? And why can't I just change my calendar to reflect this right now?" So those were three different techniques that I found really helpful
in trying to figure out what the hell to do with my life. I haven't got the answer but every time I do these exercises I feel I have a little bit more clarity about what I'm actually gonna do. If you liked this video and you're interested in hearing more of my philosophical ramblings
about meaning and fulfillment and happiness and stuff, you might like to check
out this video over here, which is called "Why I Left
Medicine and Why I'm Going Back" and talks about my philosophy
for meaning and fulfillment and that sort of stuff. So thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Bye-bye.
