Make 2026 the best year of your life (evidence-based)

If your 2025 sucked, congrats, join the club. That's a lot of us. But how do you make sure 2026 does not suck? And that's the powerful question of the day here. There's actually a strategy to making each year very, very good. So in this video, let's share my particular strategy that I use to make each year incredibly, incredibly successful. What's up, guys? I'm Alex Hine over at Modern Health Monk, author of the book, Milk the Pigeon, a field guide for anyone lost in their 20s or 30s or 40s. Let's jump in. All right, guys, so how did I go from my life sucks, I'm lost and directionless, to living out more of that holy ---- life? Over the last, let's say, seven to 10 years, my life has changed very dramatically. I went from being someone who just moved back from China, was living like this incredibly epic year where I quit my job, I took a year sabbatical to become like a monk and a kung fu master and had a really incredible year, and I really just filled it with all of these bucket list experiences. And I came back and I got extremely depressed because I went from like this dopamine, massive dopamine rush of just everything is so amazing, I'm doing what I feel born to do, and then coming home to now I have to pay my bills again, I moved back in with my parents, I don't know what to do with my career, I have no friends. And that is where I sort of got the fire to study and read all of these books and study all these people who had massively reinvented themselves. What I found was that there's a specific and repeatable process to do that. Now, how has my life changed in the intervening time? Because the proof's really in the pudding. I've written multiple books that have been bestsellers on Amazon, I've sold more than 98% of the books you see in the bookstore Barnes & Noble self-published, I have multiple YouTube channels, almost 600,000 subscribers, I have a doctorate now, I have a private integrative clinic here in Los Angeles, I've moved all across the world, and really my life has just gotten so much bigger and so much better, and I'm so more inspired about creating something that's 10 times even bigger than what I've already built. Doesn't mean there are years that suck, right? There are years that have definitely sucked. But the overall arc, despite the bumpiness and despite the ---- and despite all the junk, has been up and to the right, and that's what I want for you. The process that I went through, though, has become refined and sort of crystallized over time. And what I typically think about is what is the most strategic way to make sure that your life can get better every year? Because you can't control everything that happens in life, you can't control your mom getting sick or one of your parents dying, you can't control being hit by a drunk driver or your best friend being hit by a drunk driver. There's lots that will happen to you, but all you can control is the strategy you have for constantly reinventing yourself and evolving to that next level 2.0 version of you. Now, it was in these difficult years where I started to come up with an actual strategy, and I started to repeat this strategy every single year, and I started to document it here on this channel. And the strategy is what I call the 3-3-1 method, and here's what that is in a nutshell. So let's talk about this 3-3-1 method that I do pretty much every single year, because this is, to me, the essence of how many goals do I set, what goals do I set, what do I do, what's the process to make those things happen? And effectively, what we're gonna do is we talked about basically three big rocks, three rituals, one notebook, all right? So three rocks, for example, are gonna be what are your three big goals? Let's draw them out here. Rock one, rock two, rock three. So let's say rock one is love, and you're trying to basically find a relationship. Rock two is you're trying to, let's say, save 200 bucks a month, because you know that will get you the trip to Spain at the end of the year. And then rock number three, you wanna pivot careers. And then we talked about rituals. And for the rituals, what I usually find is more than three habits per rock is not sustainable for people. And the closer you can get is just one or two, the better. So I just want you to list them out. One, two, three. For me finding the dream girl, what could that process look like? It could look like picking up a new hobby. If I'm single for a while, I'm just not meeting enough people, could pick up a new hobby that's around people. A new ritual could be ask out one person a week. If you're the guy, you're taking the lead, ask out one woman a week. The third one could be get therapy, yay! Everyone loves that. To work on mommy and daddy issues, because we've all got fun stuff to work with. So these become your rituals. If we're trying to save 200, one could be automated savings transfers. Just set up an automated savings in capital one 360 going into your bank account. Well, maybe let's say you don't have extra money to earn. So maybe we apply for jobs, like side hustles, like work at a cafe, like four hours one weekend, you'll have the extra money, right? So let's say those are our two rituals that are most likely gonna make this work. And our third one, our rock, is pivot careers. So what does it look like in terms of daily habits? Number one, let's research which job roles I like. Like if I'm in a new company, what do I actually want to be doing? Like what are the things I actually wanna be doing on a daily basis? Figuring out roles. And then maybe one weekly networking meeting, weekly networking. Like if you're in New York City trying to get a job, despite so many goddamn people and so many jobs, it's actually really hard for people to get jobs. The best way is to go to weekly networking events and try to meet people and get drinks where you guys can help each other career-wise. So you have three rocks, limit it to three big goals. Three rituals or three habits for each goal. Keep it in one notebook. I would have this as the first page of my notebook and every week I'm just flipping through, flipping through, right? Writing down all the things, what's going on. See, here's another example of that. And every single week, review this. These are the three things I want. Find love, save 200, pivot careers. These are the rituals most likely to make that happen. And this will make a dramatic difference in your quality of life and your ability to reach those goals to make this year the best year ever. Now ultimately, whether you are someone like in your 20s or 30s or 40s, going through a quarter or a midlife crisis, feeling lost and you're sort of like, is this all there is? Then you need to find a strategic plan to reinvent yourself just like we're using for this kind of video here. I've put together a link below this video which is for a free guide, my 12-step process to reinvent your life. This is specifically if you're in a quarter or midlife crisis, you're sort of directionless and lost and you want to get unlost, find clarity and direction and really reinvent yourself and design that next chapter of your life that's the most exciting and the most aligned version of your life. So check it out, it's linked up below in the comments here and you can just go to modernhealthmonk.com forward slash reinvent. Now there are two meta high principles that I found that are the most effective for reinventing yourself and especially making sure this year is incredible. Inevitably, having coached thousands of people, I see two main buckets that apply. One is, there's a part of your life that sucks because you're afraid of it and you're ignoring it. Usually this is like, it's your weight and you're afraid to step on a scale, it's your finances and you're scared to look at your debt or it's your personal life and your relationships. You're afraid to do healing work that would make you a more healthy and attractive person in the dating marketplace. The other bucket is, there's something you're really excited about that you're dilly dallying and messing around and you're not taking massive action to make happen. What I find is that these two are almost opposing energies, right? It's like, I'm out of shape, I'm overweight, so I avoid the thing that causes pain. The other one is, I've always thought about, wouldn't it be cool just to go to Spain this summer and just do a language class for like a month and quit my job? There's the fear of like, what if it doesn't work out? Or what will my friends and my family think? Like, you have a good accounting job, Jimmy, why would you quit that to go to Spain and take language lessons? The two buckets I find that are really helpful are pick one domain of life that really sucks and is draining energy, and then pick another domain of life that is really a dream that inspires you, writing the book, taking the trip, picking up a new hobby, whatever it is, and actually allocating time every single day for that, like an hour a day. And one final thought here, if there's anything I've found that overall should guide you through living an incredible life, an incredible year, it's what I call the resonance radar. Resonance radar is in the most depressed and unhappy phases of my life. What I found is that if I just kept a journal of all the little things that excited me and made me happy in my life, and I just tried to increase the percentage of my days doing those things, I found that I radically went from lost, depressed, confused to way happier in a very short period of time. So I would carry around the little pocket notebook just from Moleskine, and I would just write down, okay, like Saturday. Saturday was okay. I have no friends. I'm single, blah, blah, blah. But I went to a cafe for three hours, and I just journaled about goals. Maybe I watched a YouTube video like this, and I did a little bit of research around changing my career. And actually, I had a little bit more levity. I felt a little bit more lightness during those three hours. And then what I would do is, in my bathroom, I would have one of those erasable Sharpies, and on the mirror, I would write down resonant activities. And it was like, Saturday, be home alone doing jack ----, or spend at least three hours in a cafe. And then I would try to aim for a higher percentage of resonance every single day. So then it was like, well, my Saturdays suck because I moved to this new city alone. I hate my life. Okay, I'll go to the cafe in the morning. Then I found out the gym gives me a good mood boost. And then I'm gonna take up a tennis class every Saturday at like three to five. So at least I have like nine to five in this tough seasons of life with no friends and no girlfriend, and I don't like my life, but at least I found a way to make my nine to five happy. If you do that for 90 days, your life will become so incredibly aligned and so happy, you'll forget all about how crappy the last year was. So I think chasing resonance is incredibly powerful for making each year better than the last. Now, the 3-3-1 process we talked in this video talked about you can use this at any point in your life, at any point of your year. But I've actually gone through an even more advanced journaling process that I use to design my dream life by designing my best year ever. And I've actually done a whole video on it right up here.