all right so recently i've been trying to figure out very hard what i'm going to do with my life it's like you know i want to 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 want to 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 want to share with you in this video and let's get started with number one the gravestone technique alright so the gravestone technique is a little bit morbid but the idea is that we want to 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 uh good dad or words to that effect number two good husband or was 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 you know 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 um 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 like what is the sort of person i want to be to different people like if we imagine what our friends would say at our funeral it'll probably be based around our character and about how nice and warm and friendly we were and how accommodating we were and how like how much of a good friend or family member we were it wouldn't really be about our achievements or accolades and you know 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 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 like achievements and accolades and what's the impact you want to have on the world overall uh rather than just kind of the impact you want to 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 longer 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 like 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 onto 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 subscriber counts 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 and jd 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 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 ancient jade's video part of me thought i can't be bothered to do this it seems like too much effort but then i actually took the time to you know 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 over sharing about what my life would look like but essentially i realized that the path that i was on like for the next five years that was kind of depressing like it felt too easy almost i nearly you know the pathway involved becoming a part-time resident or trainee in anaesthetics 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 like 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 there was a big part of me that was just like oh is is 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 100 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 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 um 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 is 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 essentially the idea is that we fast forward our live 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 like what we would like it to look like but it's an ordinary week it's like a normal box standard week in our lives it's not a week when we're on holiday or doing something particularly novel and so again because i'm in an over sharing mood this is what my ideal ordinary week looks like two years from now so firstly i'm gonna start off by waking up every morning at eight o'clock and i'll spend an hour doing my wake-up and 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 1 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 pm thursday and sunday nights are going to be my world of warcraft gaming great nights with my guild wednesday night is going to 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 day time 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 would be my time for reading or learning something because as 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 i always 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 suns up your street and you're interested in lifelong learning as well then head over to brilliant.org forward slash ali and the first 200 people to go on that link will 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 like it doesn't take very long to do it took me you know i redid 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 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 going to 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 like 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 like 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