So what does it mean for a given person like you watching this video right now to change your life in a year?

Well, I think it mainly comes down to one simple idea, which is to go from where you are right now, point A, to where you wanna be 12 months from now, point B, as efficiently as possible, i.e. in as few steps as possible while enjoying the journey along the way.

Now, this is simple, but not very easy.

And one of the tricky things is to actually figure out where you are right now and where you actually want to be.

And that's what we figured out in the first two videos in this three-part video series.

So in part one, we figured out what's our North Star and what is the sort of destination we wanna get to.

And in part two, we tried to figure out where we are right now based on our past and present experiences.

But now we're bringing everything down to just the 12 months time horizon, changing your life in a year.

And so we need to figure out how to go from A to B as efficiently as possible and while enjoying the journey along the way.

And in this video, we're gonna go over three of my favorite methods for doing just that.

Okay, so the first method for changing your life in a year is the dreamlining method.

Now, I first came across this from Tim Ferriss' four-hour work week, but it's also an amalgamation of a couple of methods by Jim Rohn and Zig Ziglar, who were like big OG productivity guru type people in like the 20th century.

And the idea behind the dreamlining method is that you basically ask yourself the question, in the next 10 years, what are the sorts of dreams that I might like dream for myself?

And I really like this exercise because it encourages us to go outside of our usual day-to-day and actually think a little bit longer term.

And so here is the prompt that's worth thinking about.

In the next 10 years, what do you want to learn?

What do you want to have?

Who do you want to be?

What do you wanna try?

What do you want to see?

What do you want to do?

Where do you wanna go?

What do you want to create?

What do you want to contribute to?

And what do you want to overcome?

Now, what I'd really encourage you to do is pause the video right now with all of these 10 things on screen and just take 10 minutes.

Set a 10 minute timer on your phone and just like write this down.

And the goal here is to go for quantity rather than quality.

Your goal almost is to just keep the pen going as much as possible and almost like write as much as you can without even taking the pen off the page.

Yes, you can type it if you want, but I actually think there's something even more powerful about writing this stuff down.

And there is some evidence that writing things down by hand also kind of increases the pathways in our mind and all that fun stuff.

But I'd really encourage you to pause the video right now and please do this exercise.

I guarantee if you actually do this exercise, it will change something about your life.

Okay, so I hope you've done that.

But if you're struggling with this, then usually perfectionism gets in the way.

A lot of people will think, oh no, but like now I have to think so hard.

And really the point of this exercise is you don't wanna think too hard about it.

You kind of know in your core and in your heart, what are some of these things that you want.

And if you let the head get in the way, if you let the mind think, no, that's not possible, no, I can't do that, no, I couldn't possibly have that, then that's sort of defeating the point.

This is not a list you need to share with anyone.

It's not a list you're gonna post on Instagram.

It's just a personal list for yourself.

And we're just brainstorming.

We're brainstorming some ideas here.

So one way of thinking about this actually is that if there's anything in the next 10 years that you think you might want, or there's even a remote possibility that you might want it, you have to put it down on the list.

And I want you to imagine that if you don't put it down on the list, it is not going to happen.

But if you do put it down on the list, then there is at least a possibility that it might happen.

So if you think, for example, maybe in the next 10 years, I might wanna write a book, maybe I've got 0.1% certainty that I might wanna write a book, that's enough.

Put down, write a book on your 10 year dream list.

The other thing with this method is that don't worry about coming across as a materialistic twat, basically.

Like, don't worry about it.

We are taught in society that it's wrong to want things to have.

But you know, when I do this dream thing, I wanna have a nice big house, I wanna have a loving family, and also, I wanna have a nicer car, I wanna upgrade to the Tesla Model S.

It's actually totally fine to put down these sorts of materialistic things.

Again, you're not sharing the list with anyone, unless you make a YouTube video about it.

So don't allow yourself to be held back by the sphere of, no, it's wrong of me to want something that costs large amounts of money.

If you think you might want it, put it on the list, and you can work towards it.

And maybe as you get there, you'll realize you don't actually want it, but at least you're going in the direction that you've defined for yourself.

And there's a link down in the video description if you want a free Google Doc that has all these questions, along with my answers.

So for whatever it's worth, you can see what sort of things I wrote down in response to these questions.

Now, especially in that category of things that you wanna learn, one of your 10-year dreams, as mine was, might be to learn computer science.

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All right, so now that we've got our 10-year dreams vaguely pencil-sketched out, just a sort of sense of what I maybe might want in the next 10 years, let's now move on to method number two, which is bringing it down to a five-year time horizon.

And method number two is the Odyssey Plan.

Now, this is an amazing exercise from the book Designing Your Life by Dave Evans and Bill Burnett.

They are professors at Stanford Business School, and they have a class about how to apply design thinking to your actual life.

Now, the idea of the Odyssey Plan is that you have these three different prompts.

The first prompt is your current path, and the prompt is write out in detail what your life looks like five years from now if you continue down your current path.

So again, what I would really recommend you do is you pause this video, and you take action, and you actually spend five minutes just drafting out pen and paper, Apple Notes, whatever the hell you wanna use.

What does your life look like five years from now if you continue down whatever path you're already on?

And it's useful here to really imagine what does an actual day in the life look like?

What time are you waking up?

What are you doing for breakfast?

How long are you commuting to work?

Are you even working?

Like, what's going on there?

What are you doing at work?

What time is your lunch break?

What time do you get back from work?

What do you do in the evenings?

Like, what does a day in your life look like five years from now on your current path?

And obviously, you're not gonna know for certain, but you can make a pretty good guess depending on where you are in your life right now.

All right, now we come to prompt number two.

So ignore everything you've written for your current path.

You're gonna design a new path, and this is your alternative path.

Write out in detail what your life looks like five years from now if you took a completely different path.

So I took some people through this exercise when I gave a talk at Google a few months ago, and all of them were software engineers, and so their current path was continuing down the route of software engineering, whereas their alternative path, what I said to them, is like, all right, guys, you're no longer allowed to do software engineering as a career, and you also get fired from Google, and you're not allowed to apply for another job at Google.

What does your alternative path look like in that context?

So that just hopefully gives you an idea of what we're talking about with current versus alternative.

And again, I would recommend you pause the video, write it down, because I guarantee this exercise has the potential to change your life if you actually do the work.

And then once you've done that, we now have the most interesting question, which is ignore your answers to the first two prompts, the current path and the alternative path, and now write out your radical path.

Write out in detail what your life looks like five years from now if money and social obligations and what people would think were completely irrelevant.

I would recommend you pause the video, think about it, write it down, and I guarantee if you do, it really has the potential to change your life.

Now, the whole idea behind the Odyssey Plan is not that you're necessarily picking one of these or picking an amalgamation of them, but it just gives you permission to think a little bit more divergently, to think a little bit more broad, because all of us have a tendency to stick to the path that we're already on, and we fail to realize that actually, wherever you are in your life right now, even though it might not seem like it, you actually have loads of different options.

If you're sitting here watching this video right now on some kind of device, you have more options than like 90% of the world's population, however grim you think your situation individually might be.

Now, whenever I bring up this Odyssey Plan to people, there are always people in the audience that say, oh, but you know, what about these financial constraints I have?

What about these family obligations?

And you know, this sort of, I can't just abandon my kids, can I?

And yes, I'm not suggesting you abandon your kids.

The current path is the path that you're currently on with all of the financial and family and all of these social obligations that you currently have.

The alternative path is, those obligations are still intact.

It's just, you have to take a different path.

But the radical path asks us to imagine a world in which, just like imagine, what if money were no object?

What if you just had 100 million in the bank?

How would you then be spending your time?

What might that path look like?

And the whole idea behind the whole social obligation thing, it's not that you're gonna abandon your kids in this radical path.

The idea is that you're not worried about what other people will think.

Often, the fear of what others will think and the judgment they might bring on us holds us back from achieving the things that we actually want to achieve in life.

Obviously, if you have kids, you've gotta deal with the kids.

Like, I'm not suggesting you abandon your kids.

Like, that's not the goal of this.

The goal is to just break free of the limitations of what society is telling you you need to do with your life based on what you've already done up to this point.

Now, I think a lot of people might think that the value of something like the Odyssey Plan is these alternative futures that you're imagining.

But actually, for me, when I did this in 2019, the main value I got from it was recognizing what is the life I will have if I continue down my current path.

And I actually wrote about it in my weekly newsletter that I've been writing every week since 2018.

So this is what I wrote out when I was around 25.

And this was about four something years ago.

And feel free to pause the video if you wanna have a read of it.

But then this is what I wrote in my email afterwards.

When I was writing this out, I honestly felt a bit depressed.

I had a feeling of, is this really it?

I guess it's similar to the classic midlife crisis that you're supposed to have when you hit 40, when you realize that your life is basically over.

Don't get me wrong, this future vision is a pretty idyllic life.

But there's nothing particularly cool about it.

It's just a very standard result of the path I'm currently on.

And if I think about the climb, the process of getting there, it's pretty pedestrian.

I just have to do more of what I've been doing for the last few years, churn out more YouTube videos, launch a few more online courses.

And next thing I know, I'll be 30, looking back and wondering where my 20s went.

Now, this exercise was really impactful for me because it made me realize that, you know, this current path, it's not really the path I want.

There are aspects of it I like.