- 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
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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
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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.