[00:01] talk you through the think day method where in about 4 hours you can drastically change the trajectory of your life.
[00:17] Microsoft. He had this practice and he would call it a think week where once or in the woods for a whole week. He would clear his calendar. He would get a would bring him food and stuff and he would just use that week to read and to
[00:31] think. And Bill Gates actually credits quite a lot of Microsoft's most like best innovations and stuff to this think week practice where he's just sort of thinking and making decisions. Now, most of us probably don't have a whole week
[00:43] woods to to make these sorts of decisions. And so, there's a technique that I came across in my friend Sahil's Bloom's book, Five Types of Wealth, reason I want to do a think today for me today is because there are a bunch of
[00:56] business and about my life. And if I make the right kind of decision in this kind of moment, then honestly, it could be worth millions to tens of millions of dollars if we just think in terms of like monetary ROI. That's what we're
[01:09] through my personal approach to the Think a Day method. And instead of just it, we thought we'd go to a place in Hong Kong that I've never been before. journaling prompts that I have gotten incredible value out out of over the
[01:22] prompts that I'm going to share with you are things that I have used repeatedly to change my life in increasingly positive directions. Because of certain decisions that I made earlier in life, I was able to start my business and get
[01:35] and like quit the job and you know, all of that kind of stuff. Um, because of certain decisions I made, I ended up meeting a woman who then became my wife swear by having the right kind of journaling or reflection prompts and
[01:47] using those as ideally in a in a fashion that's outside of your normal context to help inform what decisions you want to make. What does it mean for your life to personally define it, it's that like currently your life is going on a
[02:01] this. Like if you change nothing else, time is still marching on. You're still and we're all just like going with life. Now, what it would mean to change your life is if you make a decision that causes you to take some actions, which
[02:15] life. It's sort of like you're going down the highway and then instead of path that you're currently on, you decide to take a turn. Now, if you decide to take that turn, that means you end up in a different destination than
[02:27] life has changed. Now, the way I think about this is that it really comes down to the decision that you make. So, for example, you could decide right now that bank, right? You could just make that decision and if you followed through on
[02:39] it then uh your life would change but the trajectory of your life would probably go in a negative direction i.e. you'd probably regret having robbed that other people to try and rob a bank cuz your life will change for the worst.
[02:52] Similarly, you could decide to quit your job or to drop out of university or to marriage or whatever. Like you could make these drastic life-changing decisions and now your life has changed because of a decision that you've made.
[03:05] quality of our decisions dictates the quality of our lives. If you make a decision that causes you to take actions that move you in a positive direction, better. If you make a decision that causes you to take actions that end up
[03:18] in a negative situation, your life has changed for the worst. So all of that is how to change your life, right? Because otherwise it sounds like a clickbait life comes down to is a decision that you've made. So, instead of doing a
[03:31] think 4 hours where you basically take half a day or a day, uh maybe like 4 hours out of your normal day-to-day routine, you go to a place where you haven't really been before to get you outside of your normal context, and you
[03:44] just use that time to think. You use that time to do some journaling, to do some reading, to do some thinking. And as a result of that, you hopefully make trajectory of your life in a positive way. Now, the reason that I like to
[03:57] generally go outside of my comfort zone when doing stuff like this is because your office environment or like your usual day-to-day situation, there's all we just find ourselves following. Our brain is kind of like a prediction
[04:11] machine that likes to conserve a lot of energy by just sort of defaulting to So, when you're at work or at school or your office or at home, you just thinking patterns that you've always been in in the past. Whereas if you want
[04:24] to actually get context is it's sort of like zooming out or like going like can get more of a bird's eye view of your life to approach decisions from a more sort of dispassionate more like zoomed out perspective. Whereas when
[04:37] of it, it's really hard to actually make life-changing decisions. And so what you're going to come along with me as we go to a new area in Hong Kong and I'm journaling problems that I'm thinking about and I'll be sharing all of those
[04:49] of watching this video and doing some of these journaling prompts and maybe doing in the trajectory of your life being changed as a result of watching this video and putting it into practice. In other exciting news, my team and I are
[05:01] different AI tools to run our business more effectively. But here's the thing, the tech is evolving at a ridiculous pace, as you know, and one thing that I the fundamentals to be able to then separate the genuinely useful stuff from
[05:15] found that really works for developing this deeper kind of learning is through partners of this video. Brilliant is an amazing online interactive learning platform that I've actually been using since 2019. So, it's been like 6 years
[05:28] keeps getting better and better. And the thing is like we are surrounded by all promises that oh, learn this thing super quickly and super easily. But if you like coding or to actually understand
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[06:22] decide to go for the annual premium subscription, you'll get 20% off that as sponsoring this video. And let's get back into it. bring along when I'm when I'm doing these sort of journaling sessions. It's
[06:35] like quite viby. The whole idea is that you draw a circle and then you split your circle up into three sections and then you split those three sections up into three more sections. So you end up with nine bits of your circle. Now the
[06:47] three big sections are we've got health and then we have a big section for work, relationships. Within health we've got three further categories. We've got spiritual health which you can define however you like. Within work we've got
[07:00] mission, money, and growth. And within relationships we've got family, friends, nine different categories. And I like to add a 10th category off on the side different categories in your little wheel of life. And the whole idea is
[07:14] that you just ask yourself if 10 out of 10 in a category was like, man, like I cannot imagine my life being any better in this particular domain. That's a 10. imagine my life being any worse in this domain. What number would you rate your
[07:30] each of these 10 different domains? You sort of fill out your little wheel of life and you get like a little sort of pi radar chart type thing which is kind although if you want you can just write it down in a notes file and you you get
[07:42] the numbers. But basically what this does is that it gives you a feel for if you were to do almost like a CT scan of like your life. What are the areas that are going well and what are the areas where you know concerted effort would
[07:54] example let's start with health. So physical health I would say is at a six. Uh mental health I would say is at a nine. Spiritual health I would say is at nine. Spiritual health I would say is at a seven. Um in the work domain mission
[08:07] is on a nine. Money is on a 9.5 and growth is currently on eight. And then I relationship with my wife I would say is on a nine. Family um we now have we
[08:19] now have a kid um I would say is on eight. And friends I would say is on six. And then joy, how much joy do I have in my life or how satisfied am I with the joy in my life? I would probably say about six. So now based on
[08:33] those numbers, I have a somewhat like intuitive sense of what are the areas we've identified that physical health needs some work. When I'm doing the rest that in mind that like, okay, cool. I should probably make some decisions that
[08:47] physical health. We've identified that on the work front, h to be honest, on the work front, I'm pretty good. Um, on the relationships front, friends could friends in a while since having a baby and stuff like we just have been quite
[09:00] which was amazing, but now we're back in Hong Kong. We haven't just we haven't with friends. So friends could do with some work. And then the joy category for me is also only a six out of 10. Um, and so I could do with a bit more fun in my
[09:13] life basically. And so having identified that as like the three core categories that are, you know, helpful to helpful to look at, I now have more of a feel journaling prompts, let me just make sure I've at least got some stuff to
[09:27] written them down in my notebook cuz by the end of this think day, I want to have at least one or two action points for each of these three kind of areas of following along with the video, please feel free to pause the video now and do
[09:40] your own wheel of life. These are the 10 different categories on screen and I would love for you to just have a think about what would your score be out of 10 feel free to write it down somewhere. It's generally useful to write it down.
[09:52] would like and feel free to share already if any action points come to in our think day is that and I generally like to do this on a separate piece of paper is that we're keeping a sort of rolling tally of our action points
[10:04] going to come up with action points and at the end of it we're going to look at to be like okay which of these do I actually want to take forward um to take you happen to be watching this before Saturday the 20th of September 2025 I'm
[10:17] actually hosting a totally free online workshop uh to help you get go through these sort of questions. There are 100 days left in 2025 and so this is our been hosting these every 3 months for about 2 years. We've got tens of
[10:30] around the world. It's completely free. There's no catch. And it basically is guiding you through a bunch of these sort of reflective journaling type testimonials and stuff from people who have like this is the best 2 hours that
[10:43] they ever spend every quarter cuz it gives you clarity on kind of where you joining us, it's completely free. There's no catch and there'll be a link in the video description for you to check out.
[10:59] which is a cute little coffee shop here in West Cowoon. Has good vibes. So this is the single most powerful journaling prompt that I know of. If you ask yourself this question and sincerely engage with the answer in terms of like
[11:11] it, but also like how you feel like intuitively. If you had to answer intuitively, the prompt would be as follows. What would I do if I knew I couldn't fail? This is a powerful, powerful prompt. It's powerful because
[11:26] one of the biggest things, possibly the single biggest thing that holds us back from living the life that we actually want is fear and in particular the fear want is fear and in particular the fear of failure. We are wired to avoid
[11:41] failure at all costs. The amygdala, the fear center of the brain, the habenula these there's like hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that has trained us to avoid failure because back in the day failure meant death. Failure meant
[11:56] reproduce and like continue your genes and all that crap. And so we feel very very very fearful about making changes to our life. It's just one of the literally everyone. And so the point of this prompt is to cut past that and
[12:10] just, you know, let's just pretend, you know, let's just pretend that you knew actually do if you knew you couldn't fail? Then you think about it and then that comes to mind? What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? For me, when
[12:24] immediately come up with things that I would do differently in my business. And there's quite a lot as it relates to the business. A lot of fear that's holding actually know I want to do. And then, you know, back when I still used to be a
[12:39] don't you just quit medicine? Like, you seem to enjoy this business stuff more. thing that stopped me. It was this fear that like, oh, but what if I try going full-time on the business thing and what if I fail? What if it doesn't work? And
[12:54] Ferrris has a fear setting exercise where whenever I have identified something that I'm doing because I'm afraid, I just go on Google and I type in Tim Ferris fear setting and then I
[13:07] open up Tim Ferrris's blog post from May 2017, the most valuable exercise I do every month. and it's basically got a bunch of questions. Also, it's a very recommend reading it. Um, here we go. Define your nightmare. The absolute
[13:21] you're considering. What doubts, fears, and whatifs pop up as you consider the big changes you can or need to make. Envision them in painstaking detail. would be the permanent impact, if any, on a scale of 1 to 10? Are these things
[13:34] think it is that they would actually take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing even if temporarily? imagine. How could you get things back under control? And I'll put the other
[13:48] to the blog post in the video description. So if you are interested in to pause the video right now. So what the fear setting exercise does is like couldn't fail? And then the follow-up question is like okay, why am I not
[14:01] doing it? And then the answer to that question is always fear. Like I'm afraid to quit my job because I'm afraid. I'm afraid to break up my relationship that business because I'm afraid. You know, I'm not starting posting on social
[14:13] media because I'm afraid. I have fear around showing my face. What if people laugh at me? What if HR recognizes me one day like on my Instagram profile and one day like on my Instagram profile and like h uh it's all fear. And the thing
[14:25] with fear is that fear looms really really really large in our minds and in our hearts. And so what the fear setting exercise does is it basically forces us to write it down on paper. Like let's say you do start that business. What's
[14:39] the absolute worst case scenario? Okay. Well, the worst case scenario is I invest all my life savings into it and I lose all my life savings. Cool. Would probably not, but like it would be really bad. What would be the permanent
[14:53] it really permanent? How likely do you think that it would actually happen? How likely am I actually to invest all of my life savings into my business? Is it requiring any invest any investments? Well, yes, 100%. There's loads of
[15:07] businesses. It's a whole category of business. So, it's like by like taking realize that, oh, wait a minute. Because when it's in your brain, it's just like it's like a dark monster that's in your brain, but when it's on paper, it
[15:22] let's say you were designing a bridge. thing. Would you do it in your head? No, you absolutely wouldn't do it in your your head. You would write it down. You would get out a whiteboard. You would
[15:34] paper, you'd write it down. You work with a team to write down the design of bridge. And so similarly with complex issues in our life, especially the things that we know we want to do intuitively, but we are afraid, fear is
[15:47] fairly complex thing. It's not simple. And so trying to solve that in your head that pattern. At least that's what I found and that's what a lot of people I when you put it down on paper by asking yourself these kinds of questions, what
[16:00] And then, okay, well, if it's fear that's holding me back, uh, what might I go about it? Like, if I had a gun to my head, what might I do to scenario? You start writing the stuff down, and you realize, wait a minute,
[16:13] actually, it's not too bad. The worst case scenario usually isn't as bad as like, I'm going to die. And usually, you're not going to die. In your brain, forever. And usually, it's not going to be forever. Usually, it's not that
[16:26] like, there's nothing I can do about it. You realize that like the road to ruin there's a series of things that you start doing that that you do. Like yes, invest all of your business, all of your life savings in starting your first
[16:40] business. But could you invest $100 and see what happens, then another 300, then another 500 just to see what happens and get data along the path and then iterate experiments? Yeah, 100% you could do that. But the brain doesn't come up with
[16:52] god, we could lose everything. We've been told starting a business is risky. homeless and broke and alone and we're going to die. And that's what the brain you realize that that's actually not true. So that's why this is the key
[17:05] couldn't fail? So if you'd like to follow along with the video, please feel yourself, what would I do if I knew I couldn't fail? Yeah, I guarantee you've something. It's probably something that your heart initially came up with. You
[17:19] mind is like, "No, no, no. We couldn't do that because ABCD EFG." And so feel exercise questions on screen again. So feel free to pause the video. And for that thing that you're afraid of doing, feel free to ask yourself these
[17:33] you don't want to do this following along the video, we will put a link to my think day guide that has all of these prompts and templates and like that just like access it on your phone if you're going if you're doing your own
[17:46] the video description if you want to check it out. Okay, so having said all exercise myself. What would I do if I knew I could fail? knew I could fail? [Music]
[18:02] come up with my list of stuff. A lot of it is like business things. Like I feel like I'm on the verge of making a bunch of decisions in the business and back from just like not doing them. But if I knew I couldn't fail, I would just
[18:14] like make all the decisions in one go. And so that is interesting. That is next time stamp if you don't care. But I'm just going to tell you about one of just had is that I I've been toying with the idea for the last like couple of
[18:28] months of building this um thing lifestyle business academy where I really like the idea of building like an online school for entrepreneurs in person stuff. And I've what I've got in my head is as like a tagline is like
[18:44] entrepreneurs where you know a traditional MBA teaches you how to run corporate. If you do like a startup like a venture capitalist funded startup and become a zillionaire or whatever.
[18:57] But there's not actually that many there's not that much stuff out there. And certainly I don't know of any good online schools for people who want to know you're building a business that does you know six figures in revenue
[19:11] like it's not that sexy. No one's going to write about you in a magazine. You're of Time magazine and stuff but you have a business that gives you fun fulfillment and freedom and you're making good money and you have a small
[19:25] team. Maybe it's just you. Maybe it's a small team. It would be really, really, really cool to build like an online business school like that. And really exciting. And what's holding me back from like going all in on it is
[19:39] doesn't work? What if people think I'm some sort of get-richqu scamming whatever? Uh what if we try and then we end up hiring like faculty and like, you know, the whole shebang. And uh what if we don't get enough students to actually
[19:54] make money from it? What if it's unprofitable? I also really want to have an in-person office um where we can like hold workshops and stuff um for working in person. The other thing you know the fear around that is like ah but
[20:09] Kong real estate is expensive what if we don't make enough money to make it like ROI positive and all that kind of stuff. And so this is just my sort of specific situation with the business right now which is basically like what if we don't
[20:23] I want to do because these things will be expensive. So what if we just don't profitable but then if I think worst case scenario worst case scenario we just like shut it down easy. Yeah.
[20:36] Um yeah in the mind it's very easy to think that like it's a binary thing. But actually there are all sorts of shades of gray in between. What does it getting enough students and they're paying us enough money and they're
[20:49] are the three variables. If we know we're not getting enough students, there's lots of stuff we could do to get more students. If the unit economics are so that they are profitable. If they don't have a good enough experience,
[21:01] bad experience and really work on nailing the student experience. Like, there's all sorts of things we could do to make this really good. But when the what if it doesn't work? What if it loses money? What if we end up broke?
[21:13] that and really write down like, okay, what would have to happen for that to be points of intervention where I could I could do something about it? There's intervention and a and like 100 different things that have to happen in
[21:26] order for it to be broken, unprofitable, and stuff. And it's just very easy. Like exercise that I was thinking in the past, I was just sort of without really allowing the general fear of like, oh, what if it doesn't work to sort of hold
[21:40] that I really want to do. So, that's good to know. Cool. All right, I think we're done for uh this little segment. Let's move locations and then we will do Let's move locations and then we will do our next little our next little prompt.
[21:54] one, which was the wheel of life exercise to do a little bit of a life points that resulted from that. Part two is that we really seriously took the question, what would I do if I knew I wouldn't fail? In part three, what I
[22:07] these collections of journaling prompts and I generally just like to scroll through them on my phone and I decide like which one feels like it's calling like really think about the question and generally try and write my answers down
[22:20] in a physical notebook or like dictate my answers into voice pel which is our like AI writing app thing. So here are some of the journaling prompts. What would you do if money were no object? Was kind of interesting. If you didn't
[22:33] care about making money, how would you use your talents and skills to serve other people? What would I like people to say at my funeral? And to what extent am I currently living aligned with that future? If I repeat this week's actions
[22:47] for the next 10 years, where does it lead? And is that where I want to be? What activities in the last month have energized me? And what activities in the last month have drained me? How can I do more of what energizes me and less of
[23:00] what has drained me? When it comes to my work or my life, what is the goal and what is the primary bottleneck? This is a fun one for entrepreneurs. Do I work for my business or does my
[23:12] business work for me? If I knew I was going to die 2 years from now, how would I spend my time? I always like asking that one. I I ask myself this question always arrive on is that I probably play more video games. And then I have like a
[23:25] burst of playing video games for like a week and then I sort of sort of get out more video games." Oh, this is another nice bottleneck one that I got from my friend Dicky Bush. What's the biggest bottleneck to achieving my next goal and
[23:38] why aren't I working on it? It's always always an interesting one. How much do my current goals reflect my own desires versus someone else's? What are some areas in which I could invest more money to make life smoother
[23:52] and easier for myself? What could I do to make my life more meaningful? What do I wish I could do more quickly and what do I wish I could do more slowly? And finally, what backpack am I carrying that no longer
[24:07] serves me? This is a question from Keith Cunningham's book, The Road Less Stupid. all walk around um imagine like walking around with like a heavy backpack on your back. And it's sort of like we all have these things that we're carrying
[24:19] around that at one point served us like an identity or a fear or a concern or like a grudge or whatever. And by asking the question of like what backpack am I lugging around that no longer serves me, it's worth yeah just taking a little bit
[24:32] answer to that question. I always get some good insights whenever I do questions are in our little think day guide. And so what I'd recommend is you your phone next time you're doing a think day and you just go through and
[24:45] will take absolutely ages to do all of them. Usually I just like, you know, I much time I want to deote to the think day, and then I pick like, I don't know, with me. And then I'll usually do some writing about them on the thing or uh
[24:59] I'll, you know, go on Voice Pal and just sort of walk around and speak out my of these journaling prompts are also built into Voice Pal, but you can't access them by default. So, if you open up VoicePal and you go on your profile
[25:12] settings and then you hit offer codes, if you enter the code think day, then added to the brainstorming frameworks part of your app. Um, so you can find all of those there if you want to actually do this kind of just like voice
[25:26] can do as many of these different journaling prompts as you like. And then we move on to the final part of think day where we are going to weave everything together into some specific tangible action items.
[25:41] Okay. So final order of business for the day is basically to document decisions and actions. So my favorite way of documenting decisions is as follows. So basically write in my notebook before today I was dot dot dot. So I might say
[25:57] before today I was unsure about whether to get an in-person office for my team or something like that for example. And then we say but as of today I have decided that dot dot dot as of today I've decided that I will in fact get an
[26:10] thing might be and therefore my action items are 1 2 and or three. And so we're documenting decisions and we are with the office therefore my action items are delegate the finding of the
[26:22] office to someone on the team. um look through all of the offices that I've depending on what the thing is. And then finally, I will review this in whatever time frame to check in on myself. And so
[26:34] seriously, I will create a calendar event like a week from now to sort of review action points from think day just to make sure that I've got like a very easy to do this stuff, document action points, and then not actually do
[26:48] the thing. But if you have a documented meeting with yourself in your calendar a week from now, that generally gives enough time for the thing to like you know, at least make a start on them.
[27:00] like, okay, now that I've slept on this, now that I've had a week to think about decision and therefore continue on that you've gotten to this point in the video, I would love to see a comment
[27:12] down below. What is one decision and or action that you've maybe maybe these different journaling promps or these different like reflection exercises? In my case, I have a handful. Uh in terms of the business, we've got
[27:24] lifestyle business academy thing that I want to build. There is a one or two that I was a bit unsure about previously that now having done this journaling and make those hires. I've also decided that I'm going to experiment with going to
[27:38] the gym first thing in the morning before starting work um as a way of sort things. One of the general hacks in life is that if there's anything you want to do, make sure it's the first thing of the day and then it's going to get done.
[27:51] something, it's generally a lot easier to work on it before you go to work after you come home from work, you're like dealing with low energy levels and happens. But like very rarely does social stuff happen early in the
[28:05] mornings. It tends to happen more in the evenings. Anyway, I haven't actually is going to be to get more joy in my life. But to be honest, I feel like I have enough joy in my personal life and I will get more joy in my work life by
[28:17] having, you know, more kind of inerson team vibes, which which always vibes front, because I realized that I haven't seen friends in a while, I'm going to going to sort of get a standing order social event like a weekly brunch or a
[28:30] thing in the calendar because generally when action points get converted into calendar events, that is when, at least for me and my wife, that's when they enjoyed this video and you haven't yet got a good system for time management in
[28:43] breaks down the triage method that I learned in my time working as a doctor management to help actually make these action points become a reality. So, lovely day and we'll see you hopefully in the next video. Oh.