167. 5 steps to build a life you love

episode as we dive into the psychology of our twenties. Today, we're going to talk about something a little bit different. I think Normally on this show we love to take a specific topic and dive into all of the studies, dive into all of the of course science behind it.

But we're going to step back for today's episode and just look at the lives that we are creating from a holistic point of view, and the ways in which we can actually design a life that we truly love based on of course, like some of those core propositions and core theories to do with what makes us happy, what makes us satisfied, what it actually means to enjoy life from a psychological perspective, I think a big worry for a lot of us in our twenties and me.

Included is this kind of lingering question of how do I get the most out of my life. How do I ensure that when the time comes and I'm on my deathbed, there's nothing left to do, there's nothing left to say that I can look back and be like, well, you know, wow, I had a really great life, not just that I had a life that I really loved. I think that very existential questioning of feeling like we have to make a lot of decisions right now to set ourselves up for future happiness can keep us up

at night. You know, we want to feel in control. We want to feel like we have some say in choosing what we want from these you know, seventy to eighty odd years that we get if we're lucky. And I think more than that general just sense of purpose and general sense of satisfaction, we also want that daily enjoyment. We want to wake up and be excited by the lives that we are creating, but also the lives that

we are currently living. I think it's one of the best feelings in the world when you go to sleep at night and just feel grateful. You feel grateful for your friends, you feel grateful for where you're at in your career. You feel grateful for all the joy and the happiness that you're experiencing and bringing. So how do

we make that a reality. I think it's, you know, one of those big conundrums where at some stage you're going to reach a turning point and realize that what you've been doing so far might not actually create a future that you're really excited about, especially during this decade when we feel like we are on the cusp of a lot of huge life decisions, but also kind of at a crosswords where we're trying to make the best choice for us that's going to set us up for

long term happiness. I want to take some of the pressure off. I want to take some of the pressure off from feeling like there is a singular decision that is going to make you happy in the future, a singular decision that is going to allow you to build a life that you love and focus on those core principles and five kind of practical things that you can do that regardless regardless of what's going on around you, regardless of what the world throws at you, regardless of

your choices, you can still be happy. You can still feel contentment, and I don't think it's going to be necessarily easy. I'm not going to sit here and be like, oh, you know, just follow these five simple steps, you'll be done in thirty minutes. Like obviously, not anything worth having. I think comes with hard work, it comes with self reflection, it comes with dedication. But the person that you are

investing in is yourself. That's what I really want to remind you, Like, this is your best investment, best investment ever, is to set yourself up for a beautiful life. To set yourself up for a life that you love. So let's talk through it today. I'm super excited for this episode, and I think if you're listening, hopefully you're excited as well. When we begin this process of essentially designing our lives and designing our futures, we cannot go into this transformation

from a place of blindness. You know. We actually need to identify those crucial points where we are dissatisfied, where we are perhaps getting ourselves into a rut, Like what is actually the problem here that is causing us to want to take action? I think we tend to get stuck in the life that is easiest for us, the life that is convenient and comfortable, even though it's maybe not what we truly want. I think this is because as humans, we naturally crave our creature comforts and you know,

what seems familiar. We are innately scared of situations, events, choices that are going to disrupt the norm. It also might be that we don't necessarily feel like we have the tools that are necessary to redesign our life because we have become so stagnant and stuck in our patterns and stuck in our daily routine. We've kind of reached this point where we've stopped believing in our agency and in our self efficacy, which is essentially our sense of

feeling in control of our decisions and our future. That is a really hard pattern to break out of, and before we can build a life we love, I think we actually have to deconstruct the one that we have. And even if you are at like a seven or an eight, or even a nine out of ten on like life satisfaction, it's still possible to really raise that

ceiling for what you want and what you expect. So this first tip, this entire approach of deconstructing the life you have, really relies on choosing courage over comfort, and challenging what you have come to expect from life by identifying where maybe certain events and experiences are not contributing to your expectations and shaping your life around that potential, that potential for improvement. So what we need to look at in general is kind of the four biggest areas

of life where we feel the most dissatisfaction. We have money and career, of course, we have our relationships. We have our health, which includes mental health. And then this final one which I think we don't often discuss, which is values and spirituality. And I'm including that last one because I think it is a facet of our mental

and psychological well being that we often neglect. It's very hard, though, to feel like you are building this life that you love when you don't actually believe in anything, when you have nothing to put your faith in, and that doesn't necessarily have to do with religion. I think values are equally as important, but more than that, a sense that

you have a mission and a purpose in life. That could be a mission to improve the lives of others, a mission to create something beautiful, to solve some problem that we see. I think we all need something that we're passionate about and something that drives us. It is very hard to even feel like you want to change your life if there's no direction for that. You know,

the other areas are pretty self explanatory. I think we all know what it means to be dissatisfied in it in a job or in a relationship, or dissatisfied with our health. You know who doesn't worry about those things at least once a week or even daily, You know, because they are truly a foundation for a happy life. The easiest way, though, to identify what your main source of dissatisfaction is is to actually follow the stress, to

notice where you carry the most stress. What do you think about the most when your thoughts are wondering, or when you're falling asleep and all the busyness of the day has kind of ceased. What are you left thinking about in those moments? Is it? You know? I wish I didn't have to go to work tomorrow. I wish that I was doing something I was genuinely excited to do. I wish I had more friends. I wish I felt

more like myself in my own skin. Our anxiety and worries might seem really scary and really frustrating, and we might choose to avoid them because of the discomfort that they bring. However, I think that is the biggest mistake we make is and that the reason why is because these worries, these fears. Firstly, when we ignore them, we know that suppression inevitably will lead to these fears just gaining more power over us because we are avoiding them.

But when it comes to building a life we love, those worries are your best friend because they are shining a bright neon flashing light exactly where you should be starting where there is the most room for improvement. So maybe you're at this point where I going to use that example of like you're super dissatisfied with your career. That's a really big one for a lot of us. It's not fulfilling, you're bored, you're annoyed at your coworkers.

Sometimes the reason why we continue to stay in those situations in a life we don't love is because we don't know what it means to pursue a different kind of future, and we are scared of what that future might look like, that it might be worse if the life you have found yourself in is not the life that you love. You really have a duty to question not only what needs to change and in what area, but what the potential outcome of a change might be.

So I'm gonna explain this a little bit further. There is an incredible book actually on this topic, and it is literally called Designing Your Life. It's written by two Stanford professors. There's also a Ted talk about it that I really recommend, and they talk about this exercise called

the Odyssey plan. So the time between like our twenties and our thirties is what they call our odyssey years, like our years of exploration, where we are in this strange vacuum between childhood and what we see is real adulthood. And during this time it is absolutely necessary to test in your mind different life paths or ideas about your future. A lot of the time, though, the way we are

told to approach this is super limiting, you know. So we're always told to think about our five year plan, or what do you want to be when you grow up? Or what are you going to do next? What are you going to do after graduation, after high school? After this job contract ends That way of approaching the future doesn't actually allow us to be creative because it suggests

that there is one answer. But the idea behind this Odyssey plan exercise is to think a bit broader and to come up with three different plans or versions of your future life by asking yourself three questions. If your life was to continue the way it was, what would a day in five years time look like? Go into as much detail as possible. We've talked about this before. But what are you eating for breakfast? Who are you living with, where are you living? What does your day

look like? What do you do for fun? Imagine that situation five years from now. Nothing changes now, think about what happens if this plan that you're currently living out doesn't work. What would you want from your life instead? And what would a day in your life in five years time look like? Then? If this plan a of this current routine doesn't work out, what would you choose instead? Would it be any different? Are you maybe picturing yourself

happier or more fulfilled? And finally, what would a day in your life look like in five years time? If money, time, and social expectations did not matter, if you could do exactly what you wanted, how do you feel then, So I think the last question always gets people in a bit of a tizzy because they're like, well, you know, money and time and social expectations do matter. Of course they do, of course they matter. They are so limiting, very limiting. And it's not to say that you need

to picture this ideal life and live it out. It's more so being like, if if you take away all of these external factors that control our happiness, what is the core of your idea of a happy life when none of these things matter. And it's really interesting to see how this exercise changes the older you get. So for example, when I first did this exercise a few years back, I was twenty and I was, oh, my gosh, I think I was still working in hospitality. I must

have been. I was still working in hospitality. And you know what, if I was still working in hospitality now, I think I would be miserable my year, you know, day in a life five years from back then would not be a life that I necessarily want. Now. My backup plan was I'm going to go into consulting, which I did actually end up doing. And you know what,

that life was really amazing for some time. But when I really thought about it, and I started contemplating that fine idea of a life where you are not constrained by money, time, social expectations. I got a better idea of what I really wanted to do, and that was to do something where I was creative, where I was my own boss, and where I lived according to that

mission that we were talking about before. So this multiverse exercise, I think the real power and significance in it is that it allows you to recognize what life has to offer, and it allows you to not be scared when things don't go according to plan and embrace the courage of

change and practical change things that you are going to change. So, after deconstructing your life and identifying where you aren't dissatisfied and how that might need to change in the next five years, what it could look like, you need to start prototyping and testing those different versions of the future to start with, choose one area that you can improve

where you will se the most growth. So, for example, we've talked about the career one quite a bit, but health is another really big element of this, and often it is a huge source of dissatisfaction for us. We don't like how we feel in our bodies. We don't like how we're treating ourselves. We don't like X, Y and z. That is holding you back from a happy life and is your duty to change it. So instead of going in and being like, oh or nothing, I'm

going to become like the fittest version of myself. I'm going to be so healthy. I'm never going to have

a depressed or anxious thought ever. Instead, what you want to do is spend just fifteen minutes a day working on that area of your life in a positive direction, whether it is exercising for fifteen minutes, building your resume for fifteen minutes, or finding a passion project that you do every day fifteen minutes that contributes to future career opportunities, fifteen minutes of texting back all your friends or giving them a call, building that community. That little change is

going to go a long way. I think the reason why is twofold. Firstly, when we think about like creating our dream life, often we do think about this big future right that's like twenty years down the line, and that is so daunting, And when we just think about the outcome, it is so big in our minds and we want to get there so fast. We're such impatient creatures that we forget that we actually have to be acting on our dreams and goals. Your dream life might

involve a really nice terrorist in a big city. Sadly, that's not going to happen overnight, but it will happen if you take fifteen minutes a day to educate yourself on investing or to go over your spending. If you want to one day write a book that you get a hold in your hands and say, you know, I wrote this book. I wrote every word. That doesn't happen from wishful thinking. It happens from writing for just fifteen

minutes every day. And the fifteen minute rule really helps us overcome our all or nothing thinking that keeps us in a place where we are scared of even starting. I think this fear of starting comes from a few things. The biggest one to me is perfectionism. I talk about this quite a bit, this idea of perfectionism procrastination. If we aren't completely sure that our plan is going to work, that our future is going to be perfect, why start?

Why even begin? Because we are so held back by this sense that if it's not exactly what I want Why should I put in the effort. Why should I face the possibility of failing, the possibility of setting my sights really high and not be able to reach them and being disappointed. So that's one of the first reasons is when we want to create our dream life, when we want to change something really significant, it's very daunting because there's a lot of room for failure. And the

other thing is to do with analysis paralysis. Something that I really like to talk about is choice overload. This idea that there is a lot of different choices for people like you and I in our twenties, and often we think that having a lot of choice brings about a lot of freedom, brings about a lot of options. It actually does the opposite. It creates this thing called analysis paralysis, where because there are so many paths that we can take into our future lives, because there are

so many different things that we want to do. We want to travel, we want the career, we want to settle down, we want to go and pursue acting or whatever it is. Because there are so many different dreams that we hold at one time, it is so hard to choose one. So we don't choose any of them at all that means that not only do we not create, we just don't end up creating any life that we love because it's so much easier, like I said, to just stay in the place where we're comfortable. We don't

have to challenge ourselves. We don't have to potentially go through mentally and emotionally unco comfortable experiences such as failure. But I think the fifteen minute rule allows us to get comfortable with the risk, and get comfortable with some of the discipline that we need, and slowly see improvements such that when the time comes that we might have to make a big change, we already feel prepared. And my mom used to always have this saying, shout out

to my mum, she's amazing, very wise woman. And you know what, it probably isn't even her saying, but I'm going to give her credit for it, but she is to always say the easiest things aren't always worth having because if everyone could have it, they would. And when you think about fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes to devote to just something that you really want in your life that's really going to improve your life, the majority of people

don't take that time at all. You also discover that with each of these these days, that you continue to do something that you love and do something that's good for you, what you're actually going to find is what you really want in life. So I'm going to explain

that a little bit. When we set our sides and me saying Okay, I want to do this thing for fifteen minutes, say for example, that's writing, When we begin to notice that that fifteen minute starts turning into an hour or even more, you realize that you're doing it because it's something that you love and it's become part

of your lifestyle. Creating the life you love is not about huge, massive decisions that are going to completely like move you to a whole new spectrum of life, and they're not going to completely change your path in the moment. It's also about building up good habits towards the practices and the future that you want to build over time.

So we've spoken a lot about the planning phase and what we can contribute to our lives through those small moments, and you know that is really amazing to have vision, But we equally need to identify the things that don't make us happy. I think improving your life isn't always about addition. Sometimes it's about subtraction as well, and I think that's something that the self help space sometimes misses.

You know, it's always a new lifestyle plan or a new trending exercise, or a book or a product, or more relationships or more healthy foods or more whatever. But sometimes we actually need to be in the space and the mindset of removal. We kind of need to, you know, Marie Condor our lives and the habits that are holding

us back. It's hard to fully love the life that you are creating when you are beholden to a nasty friendship, or you are eating food that makes you feel unwell all the time, or you have a routine that leaves you bored and miserable and unable to wake up in the morning, or a job that is completely draining you. There is nothing that you can continue to add to your life that is ever going to replace the things

that continue to drain your energy. And there's a quote I saw the other day that I think really puts this quite well, which is your new life is going to cost to your old one, and that includes those habits that hold us back that we might might make us happy in the moment, or which are too difficult to address, but in the long term end up acting as almost a form of self sabotage. I have an

example of this for you. It's around drinking. And if you listen to an episode I did a while back around Should You Quit Drinking in your twenties, you'll know a bit about this story. But for the longest time, I had a really bad relationship with alcohol. I think that I grew up really wanting to be cool and really wanting to fit in, and also being kind of

socially anxious and alcohol. When I entered UNI, and even like post grad life, alcohol is like the most amazing social lubricant, and it makes everything feel more fun and more free, and it's just such an easy way to socialize with people. I began to realize though, that actually alcohol was the one of the big things that was almost acting to undermine the life that I wanted. Every time I would drink, I would always I didn't really

know when to stop, if that makes sense. I didn't really know what it was like to not drink every day, and I would always kind of find a way to kind of do that. And what ended up happening. Was I was always completely you know, physically drained. I didn't feel healthy. I didn't always have a hangover, but when I did, it really like wasn't great. I couldn't be productive.

And I think that that's a great example of almost like addition by subtraction, your life improving by removing things that you might feel completely reliant on but which are actually causing you a lot of long term suffering. And it's about identifying what's a driving you to keep those things in your life even when they're at the expense of your future self. Is it peer pressure, is loneliness,

is it dependence? Those things all take away our ability to control our lives and kind of be the director, you know, like we want to be the writer, the producer, the director of our lives. We want to be in control, not our impulses, not our cravings, not our fixations, not our bad relationships. So I think cutting things out obviously

takes a lot of focus. The thing that a lot of us make, I think the biggest mistake a lot of us make is that we just want to try and transform every domain of our life at once, and we want to just do a whole big cleanse. Instead, I want you to think about the one thing that is holding you back right now, only one, and focus on that put your energy into removing that from your life.

I always like to imagine the kind of final hero story, if that makes sense, what it will feel like to tell someone one in six months, in a year, and five years what that journey was like for me, Like, Wow, that was a really hard decision, but I'm glad that I did it. I can tell you that I did this from the point of hindsight, being in a space where that thing is no longer in my life. You know, I'm so glad that I quit vaping when I was twenty five, and not at forty. I'm so glad I

decided to stop drinking every night. I'm so glad that I realized at twenty three that that person was not good for me, and not at thirty when I had seven years to act. And all along these things were actually keeping me from being truly fulfilled by a life that is my own. So we're going to take a quick break now, but when we return, I want to talk about a few more kind of joyous habits and practices that I think we all need to apply when designing a life that we don't just love but we

absolutely and truly adore. So will we be back after this short break? I don't know who needs a reminder of But life is meant to be really, really fun, and there are meant to be really amazing moments, And it's okay and totally amazing to be excited by things and to be pursuing happiness and pursuing joy and pursuing nostalgia and like ecstasy and like all the good and

happy feelings. Sometimes I think we forget that in kind of the structures of daily living, and particularly in a world that really focuses on material possessions and material wealth. But if you've listened to this podcast for a while, you will know that joy is such an important emotion and such an important emotion for creating a life that you love is putting joy at the center of what

you choose to do. We overlook this feeling in so many conversations, and sometimes we overlook it for things like love, and we are look for things like happiness. But joy is so much more delicate and beautiful and easy to kind of cure and easy to find. I think it's also something that is so immaterial and yet such a

key ingredient to happiness and life satisfaction. I've actually been looking into this a lot recently, and we're seeing so much evidence for the power of joy coming out of a bunch of really huge research institutions like Harvard and Stanford, all of them saying that more than money, more than fame, more than success, more than even good genes, joy is one of the most powerful factors in what determines a

good life. One of the longest longitudinal studies ever conducted in the history of modern psychology and modern medicine focused on what made a good life. They recruited two hundred and sixty eight sophomores from Harvard back in the nineteen thirties, and they followed them for eighty years, and then they also followed their children, and these days only nineteen of the origine n two hundred and sixty eight are alive.

But by tracking these individuals for essentially their whole lives, so you're able to see exactly what determined longevity and happiness and health into those later decades. And what they found was amazing. They showed how protective healthy relationships are for our health. How important empathy is, and also optimism, and how things like joy and looking for good things in your life even when they're not there and hard to find, keeps you mentally sharp. It keeps you curious,

it keeps you excited. We are often really hard at work designing our dream life that it means that we sacrifice daily enjoyment. We get really focused on being productive and working hard, and that negates a lot of the significant beauty that we'll find in small, silent moments. So I want you to create joy for yourself and every day, I want you to find three things that make you think, oh my god, it's really amazing that I get to be alive. Is just so beautiful and special and human

and whatever. It is. The example i'd love to give is this time that really sticks in my memory when I was coming home from back when I worked my nine to five when I was a consultant, and it was really late at night. I was so exhausted. I'd

been working so hard those few months. And there was this little girl on the train and she had this big brown leaf and she was just twirling it and patting it and petting it, and I was like, that is the most joyous, beautiful thing is looking as like observing someone else's acknowledgment of like beauty and observing someone

else's curiosity. And when I started looking for that joy more often, my life did get better because in that joy is also opportunity, right there's opportunity for adventure, There's opportunity to just have a better outlook about the state of the world, as hard as that is right now, and especially when it seems hard to find. Search for those joyful moments, search for those three things during every day that make you be like, okay, like this is

truly a blessing. I'm really happy to be here, and I'm going to make the most out of this, and I'm going to just actually enjoy my life because that's what I'm here to do, I think, or up to my fourth tip now, yeah, my fourth tip, and that is to take time to actually be an interesting person and not just about being interests, not just about being

interesting to other people, but being interesting to yourself. I think we all know the experience of talking to someone and feeling like our life is one dimensional in comparison to theirs, and I think, especially in this generation, we spend a lot of time doing things that don't necessarily contribute to long term happiness or really anything that good.

The one that I always think about is like scrolling on our phones and just like spending hours and hours on TikTok or Instagram or I don't know, do people use Facebook. I don't use Facebook, but Facebook, there you go, Twitter x whatever it is. Those kind of activities have begun to surpass a lot of the activities that previous generations were involved in, you know, reading and being outdoors.

And not to say that there is like some form of elitism there, but I do think that when you are getting lost in your phone constantly and getting pulled in by that dopamine, it is not going to last, and it is not going to contribute to making you

someone who was interested in the world or interesting. One way that I really put this into perspective for myself was thinking about if I could remember the last five Instagram posts or tiktoks that I watched, or the last five or at least tell myself five things that I saw on one of those apps in the past twenty four hours, and I could never remember a single one

of them. I could not remember it. And I realized that every part of my brain that I wanted for myself, that I really wanted to keep active, that I wanted to be healthy, was getting absolutely consumed during those periods, and there were no memories being made. There was nothing really going on behind my eyes. Sometimes that's great, you know, it's really good for like relaxing and decompressing and turning on our lizard brain. But is that really a sustainable

and healthy source of dopamine? And in this kind of short amount of time that we have on earth, is that making us someone who is interested and interesting. I think that that's not necessarily a question that I can answer for you. It's a question that you have to answer for yourself. Is the time that you spend online detracting from the brilliant memories and experiences you could be

making offline. So I think the reason that this has a place in this whole episode around building a life that you love is that you kind of want to end things and be at the end of your life and have stories and have moments that you can look back on and say, like, I did those things, I did that memories and moments that contribute to kind of like the fabric of a lovely, beautiful, spectacular, interesting life.

Part of that involves really pursuing hobbies. And I know that people kind of throw out hobbies as like a this is just kind of like all healing antidote of like just get a hobby, just do this, just do that. But no, I seriously do believe that some of the best people and happiest people in this world are people who have something beyond themselves that they really enjoy doing. They have something that they are working towards being better at.

Not because it's going to really get them anything material, not because it's going to be impressive or anything like that, but just because they're really tapped into what it means to do the things that they love and do the things that can true to not just a healthy life, but a vibrant one. My final tip, and I know I said five, but my final tip is to engage in positive future planning. I hope for everyone listening to this that you have a very long and beautiful life.

Part of enjoying that long and beautiful life is actually giving yourself things to look forward to and planning for a future, happy version of yourself and what they need to be happy. So there's this idea called dopamine scheduling, where we deliberately not deprive ourselves of dopamine, but deliberately put ourselves through hard periods where we're working hard, where we're pursuing our dreams, with the knowledge that at the

end of that there will be some incredible outcome. It doesn't necessarily mean that you need to have that kind of rollercoaster of you know, head down, bum up, really hard over working, and then you can go on a holiday. It's more about making sure that you take time during your life to schedule activities and memories and moments that are going to make you happy. You don't have to wait until you retire to travel. You don't have to be rich to have rich experiences. You don't need someone

to go with you to enjoy an experience. I think that's the big thing that comes down to creating a good life is that so often we are waiting for the conditions to be perfect before we take action. We are waiting for some kind of marker of success or some kind of event that's going to give us permission

to do the things that we want to do. I have a really sad story for you about this, about a family friend of mine who's grandparents were married for quite a while, and they were around sixty five and sixty seven, and the grandfather kept saying, you know, I'm going to retire next year. I'm going to retire next year, and we're going to go on this big cruise. We're going to do all the travel that we never got to do while we were working. Next year will be

the year. Next year will be the year. Let me just get a little bit more money so that we're more comfortable. And she actually ended up passing away before they ever got to do any of those things. So I think, don't wait, don't wait. That story has always stuck with me. And you know, I didn't know this

person quite well. I can't say I'm sure she had a beautiful life, but I think just treating it as like a bit of a folk story is important and thinking about the fact that there are people out there who really do wait their entire lives to cram me in everything they wanted to do in the last ten fifteen years. And I don't think that that's the way to go. I don't think that that's the way to go.

I think that there is so much beauty in giving yourself the experiences when you can, whilst you can, and as much as you can. It also just contributes to more optimism about the future. And if we think back to that Harvard study we were talking about, people who have positive past experiences like kind of have more expectation about future positive experiences. They have this sense of like,

there are still good things coming. There are good things in the future, and I want to be there for them, and I want to stay optimistic for what that life will look like, even when maybe my youth is passed, even when my bones ache, like, there are still good things in my future because I am planning on them, I'm rooting on them. So I think that is all that we have for today. My five practical tips to build a life that you love, I'm going to quickly

go back and remind you of what they are. Firstly, before we can build the life you love, you have to deconstruct your old life. Next is the fifteen minutes rule. Start prototyping and testing what a different version of your future could look like, and start implementing ways to bring that future you into your current and present self. Next, it's not all about addition. It's also about subtraction, what are the things in your life that are not bringing

you happiness that you can realistically remove. Number four is to pursue daily joy and of course take time to be an interesting person and to be interested in yourself and finally engage in that positive future planning. I really hope that this episode brought you in your perspective, gave

you something to think about. It's something that I think about a lot, in the sense of one of my biggest fears is living with regret, and I really worry that I'll get to a certain age and realize that the things that I always wanted to do are no longer available to me. That I won't have the money, I won't have the time, I won't have the freedom, I won't have the physical ability to do them. And it's a really scary kind of idea to me. It's a really scary worry that I might regret my life

and that maybe one day I won't. I will look back and realize that I didn't take the chances that I needed to. However, this perspective, I think allows for that allows for the fact that there is not a single thing in your life that is going to make you the happiest person alive or is going to bring

you complete, utter fulfillment and satisfaction. It's a mindset. It's a mindset of doing things every day that put you on a path for happiness and that proved to you day in and day out that you're investing in that future version of you and that you are dedicated to this current version of you and giving them the best kinds of experiences, giving them all the joy they could ask for, but also inserting that discipline to make sure that you keep doors open, you have opportunities, and that

you get to really design a brilliant, brilliant future. So thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please feel free to share it with a friend who you think may need to hear this advice. Make sure you leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening. I know everyone says this, but I truly do read them more I read them, or probably at at my expense. Sometimes when I see like a one star review, it really gets

in my head. But there's always so much love and positivity there that makes me feel better. So thank you. If you have already done that. Make sure you are following us so you know when new episodes come out, and of course if you have an episode's suggestion, feedback, comments, thoughts, feelings, whatever it may be. Make sure you are following us at that psychology podcast on Instagram and you can shoot us a DM over there. Happy listening, We will see you back again later this week