How To Figure Out What The Heck You Want In Life:

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What the heck do you want in life?

If you don’t know - you need to figure it out.

Because if you don’t know what you want in life, everything you do is pointless.

There’s no meaning behind what you do because nothing you do adds up to anything that you’re purposefully aiming for, because you’re not purposefully aiming for anything.

And if you don’t have a purposeful aim, you’ll feel lost and you’ll not have conviction in anything you do or say.

You’ll feel as if you’re wasting your life away, well, because you are.

Once your basic human needs are met for survival and you don’t have to worry about them, you start craving something more, something deeper, something meaningful.

And meaningful is no different from purposeful.

If you want something to be meaningful, like your life, you need to have a purposeful direction to go in, you need to have something you want to achieve - whether that’s starting a family or achieving some business goal or whatever else.

Humans thrive on having a direction because without a direction, you don’t know if anything is worthwhile. You don’t know how anything will influence your position relative to where you want to go - because you don’t know where you want to go.

So you feel lost. You feel anxious. You feel depressed.

You need to figure out what the heck it is you want in life, otherwise, there’s always going to be a part of you craving more, craving a purposeful aim and a meaningful goal, and maybe you mask it, maybe you hide it, but it’s still there. It’s in the back of your mind behind some door you’ve tried to lock and it’s knocking.

And it’ll continue to knock until it’s kicking.

And it’ll continue to kick until it breaks the damn door of its hinges.

This is a concept I talk about a lot. The importance of knowing what it is you want in life, especially if you’re a person who doesn’t want to settle for mediocrity, or average, or less than your damn best, can’t be understated.

And it’s one of my rules for life, you have to set your damn sights.

So here is exactly how you figure out what the heck it is you want in life so that you have a purposeful direction to head in and a meaningful vision to chase.

Set Your Damn Sights:

Step 1: Block off time dedicated to doing this

This is step 1. 

This process requires commitment. It requires you to etch out and dedicate a specific part of your life, whether it’s 1 hour or 4 hours, to sit down and figure this out.

Otherwise, you’ll continue to put it off and life will get in the way and 1 year will pass and you’ll realise “fuck, I never did sit down to figure out what I want in life.”

So take out your schedule - whether it’s on a calendar app or in a notebook and block off 1 hour for the sole purpose of this.

Get into a room alone. Lock the damn door. Turn off your phone. Get out a notebook and a pen. 

And follow step 2:

Step 2: Craft an anti-vision 

Strictly speaking, this step isn’t essential, but a lot of people find it helpful to figure out the opposite of what they want first (as this is often more clear to them) and then use that anti-vision to figure out their vision.

When creating your anti-vision, you can go down 2 paths, which path you choose depends on what your life currently looks like.

Path 1: The Worst Version Of Your Life

This path is for those whose life, on the surface, looks great - but they know it’s not, they know they’re missing this greater direction and they feel lost.

With this, write about every area of your life and what you would hate for it to look like.

• What job you would hate to be working

• What type of boss you would hate to have

• What type of relationship with your partner you would hate to have

• What type of house you would hate to have

• What type of car you would hate to drive

• What type of work you would hate to be doing

• What habits you would hate to have

• What you would hate to look like

• What mindsets related to money, happiness, fulfillment and success you would hate to have

These are some examples.

You can and should write about all these areas but also more, write about anything that comes to mind when you think of how you would hate to live.

The more detailed you can be the better. Maybe, when writing about the job you would hate to have, you write about how you would hate to have a job that makes you work 80 hours a week in a clammy office with no sunlight or responsibilities.

Maybe when writing about the habits you would hate to have you write about going out and getting hammered every weekend and the ripple effects it creates throughout your entire week.

Path 2: Where You Will End Up In 5 Years Time

This path is for those whose life is in the damn gutter, or at least, they feel like it is.

You don’t have a big swanky office job, you struggle to pay the bills and it’s all slowly falling apart.

With this path, write about what your life will look like in 5 years time if you keep going down the path you’re on now.

Maybe you end up homeless.

Maybe you end up depressed.

Maybe you end up divorced.

Maybe you end up obese and unable to get out of bed.

Maybe you end up in all of these places, or none of them (these are all obviously extreme examples)

Again, go through every area of your life - career, relationships, financials, habits, mindsets and whatever else - and write about what they’ll look like in 5 years time.

The more detailed the better.

Now both types of people can write about both paths - it’s up to you, and in all honesty, I would recommend writing about both.

Maybe you’ll realise how close the place you’re going to end up in 5 years is to the worst version of your life you can imagine.

And with that, understand that regardless of how your anti-vision looks, you will head closer and closer to that life unless you consciously create a purposeful direction to chase head on - because if you’re not improving, you’re regressing.

Step 3: Ask yourself; if your life was perfect what would it look like? 

If you follow step 2 and craft your anti-vision, this should be intuitive.

If your life was perfect, what would it look like?

• What career do you have? Or what business do you run?

• What relationship do you have with your partner?

• Do you have kids? How many?

• What type of house do you have?

• What habits do you have?

• What mindsets do you have related to money, happiness, fulfillment and success?

• What work do you do?

• What hobbies do you have?

Again, be detailed here.

Write about the exact way you view money in a perfect world - how it’s everywhere, that it flows to you easily and you never have to worry about it.

Write about the exact house you live in - an Italian villa in the rolling hills of Tuscany with a newly renovated marble kitchen 

You get the picture.

The beauty of this is that often, if you ask someone “what do you want in life”, they’ve no clue.

But by first writing about what you don’t want and then reframing “what do you want in life” to “if your life was perfect, what would would it look like” - this becomes easy.

The answers should flow with some conscious thought and you’ll craft a vision, a picture of your dream life.

Step 4: Ask yourself; if how you spent your day was entirely up to you, how would you spend it?

With this step, write about your entire day from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep.

You wake up at 5.45AM in your 4-poster bed, you roll over to the sun shining on your face through the balcony window. You get up, head down the marble staircase to your office, sit down at your oak wood table, and do 4 hours of work on x project.

And repeat, writing about your day until you go to sleep.

The important thing to note here with your day is that this isn’t some special day on vacation you’re writing about, this is a normal Monday.

If your life was perfect, what would your schedule look like? How would you spend your day?

Again, since you’ve crafted an anti-vision and a significant part of your vision already in steps 2 and 3, this should be pretty intuitive, and as always, the more detailed you can be here, the better.

Step 5: Review your vision 

With the way these questions are framed and with the foundation of an anti-vision in place, these should be true to what you want.

But still, review the vision you crafted and ask yourself, “is this what I really want or is this what I think I should want?”.

With this question in mind, read through every line of your dream life and dream schedule.

Is it what you actually want or is it what you think you should want?

For example, don’t just say you want to drive a Bugatti because you’ve seen a guy driving one online - do you actually want to drive a Bugatti or would you rather drive an Aston Martin or a G-wagon?

Do you actually want to run a copywriting business or would rather run a clothing brand?

Question everything because your vision won’t work if it’s not true.

Because you can run and hide from a lot of things in life, but you can’t run from yourself.

So if you’re answering these questions with what you think is the right answer, you’re already wrong.

Your vision needs to be true to you, it needs to be what you want in life and how you want to live - otherwise, it’s not meaningful and therefore, even with your vision, you’ll still feel lost and aimless.

So be true to yourself and review your damn vision.

Step 6: Set a goal

Often the problem with a life vision is that it’s abstract and seems so far away from where you are now that you feel slightly disconnected from it (this will be alleviated if you do step 5 properly), but this can be overcome by setting something a bit closer to home, something that’s almost within reach, but not quite.

You need to set a goal that will push you toward that vision.

I recommend setting a 1 year goal - it’s far enough away to force you to aim big and outside of your current grasps - forcing you to level up to achieve it - but close enough to keep the spark alive.

The goal obviously doesn’t have to be that you’re living your dream life in 1 years time, but it should be something that pushes you toward it.

Maybe your life vision can’t be achieved working a job and will require you to have a business with a lot of time and location freedom, then you could set a goal to scale a specific business to $20k / month.

With your goal, make sure that it’s;

• Reasonably unreasonable

• Specific and with a deadline

And then break it down into 1-3 daily tasks that you’ll need to do to achieve it.

Eg. 1 year goal -> Quarterly goal - > Monthly goal -> Weekly goal -> Daily goal -> 1-3 daily actions

Now you have something to strive toward, a purposeful aim in life, something that creates meaning in the macro and you also have work to do each day to achieve it, creating meaning and purposeful aim in the micro.

Go set your damn sights.

- Ross.

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