Designing The Life You Want: 4 Exercises for Clarity and Motivation

Four exercises, one workbook, twenty-one minutes

Designing The Life You Want is built around a downloadable workbook and four short videos, each walking through one reflective exercise: an anti-vision, an 80/20 analysis, a values inventory, and a perfect day narrative. The teacher, a YouTube content creator focused on goal-setting and habit change, presents these as exercises she personally revisits every six months, not as an original framework she invented for the class. That honesty sets the right expectation. This is a guided journaling session with a teacher narrating alongside you, not a course teaching a new methodology.

The anti-vision exercise is the strongest of the four. Instead of asking what bad things could happen to you in five years, it asks what you could do to make your own life miserable, which quietly shifts the exercise from fear of circumstance to ownership of choice. The teacher's own example, no friends in her niche because she never put herself out there, sore joints from a sedentary routine, days lost to admin instead of creative work, gives the abstraction enough texture that a viewer can see the shape of their own answer. The follow-up step, turning each unhappy outcome into a prevention action, is what makes the exercise land rather than just wallow.

The 80/20 exercise asks you to scroll through six to twelve months of calendars, journals, or camera rolls and sort experiences into positive and negative columns, then look for patterns. It is a genuinely useful audit technique, borrowed loosely from Tim Ferriss's advice to schedule the positive rather than just remove the negative, but it is also the most time-consuming exercise in the workbook and the video undersells how long it actually takes to do properly.

The values and perfect day exercises are more familiar territory. Mining your own highs and lows for recurring values, then narrowing to roughly five and attaching a concrete action to each, is solid but not new; anyone who has done a values card sort or read a goal-setting book has likely seen a version of it. The perfect day narrative, credited loosely to figures like Lewis Howes and Barbara Sher, asks for a future-you story anchored in feeling rather than props, which is a useful nudge against copying other people's Instagram-shaped goals, but it is also the vaguest of the four exercises and offers the least concrete guidance on execution.

Where the course falls short is depth. Each video is a short monologue with a handful of personal examples, no data, no client case studies, no science beyond a passing Tim Ferriss reference, and no exercises beyond what fits in a one-page workbook column. At 21 minutes total, it cannot be anything but an overview. For someone who has never sat down and done values or vision work, that overview is a genuinely useful nudge, especially the anti-vision framing. For anyone who already journals regularly or has worked through a coach's values exercise before, there is little new material here.

What you will learn

• ·How to write an anti-vision: the deliberately unhappy five-years-from-now version of your life, framed around choices you make rather than events that happen to you
• ·How to run an 80/20 analysis of your calendar, photos, and journals to find which 20 percent of experiences drive most of your happiness or unhappiness
• ·How to extract personal values by mining the highs and lows of your own memory for repeating patterns, then narrowing to about five
• ·How to attach a concrete, tangible action to each value so it isn't just a nice word on a list
• ·How to write a Perfect Day narrative, a future-you story focused on feelings and texture rather than props like money or houses
• ·How to build a rhythm of revisiting these exercises every six months as your priorities shift