I woke up feeling lost and not knowing what to focus on. The only things that come to mind are:

• Wanting to live with my girlfriend in 2 years
• Wanting to fully retire my parents
• Having $100,000 in the bank
• Being able to comfortably work from home

And out of that list, the most important one to me is to live with my girlfriend and to start building a life with her. She already knows this but I’m planning to propose to her sometime in 2025. The only problem is, I’m broke.

I live in NYC where making $10,000 per month puts you in the lower middle class. And at the moment, I’m reliant on my 9 to 5 and my family tutoring business. I decided to stop my consulting business because it just didn’t feel right and instead I want to focus on what matters to me the most right now.

And as selfish and surface level as it sounds, that is to look fucking amazing for my wedding in the next 2 to 3 years. Growing up, I was always labeled as that skinny and scrawny Asian kid from my family members and friends. It never really bothered me, and I even made it a part of my Identity.

One thing you need to know about me is that I educate people on the topic of Identity Shifting. If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically learning how to change your identity to achieve your long term goals. In other words, an actual logical and strategic way of changing who you are to reach the vision you set for yourself.

So now for the next 3 years, I’m working on changing my identity to that of someone who has the physique of a DC Comics superhero. To have that outlined chest, six pack abs, and nice arms. I already picked who I wanted to be like, and it was Night wing. Super aesthetic to aim for, but I know I’d feel much better knowing that on my wedding day, I’d look fucking amazing.

So for today, I wanted to share with you how I plan on actually doing this through Identity Shifting.

Just like every failed New Years Resolution attempt that everyone tries to go for, you need to set a goal properly. But not even a goal, you want to create the entire vision for yourself in order for it to work. And to quickly summarize, you’re going to want to review the vision every single day to reprogram your mind.

It might not sound like it’ll work, but you need to think of this on the long term scale. It’s definitely not an overnight thing, but you’ll start feeling pretty amazing about yourself after a day of reviewing it.

Here’s the whole purpose behind Vision Creation:

• Setting a clear target: You ever play COD, PUBG, or Counter Strike and pick up a sniper? Imagine if you had to go for the last kill but every time you scoped in, it was just blurry. Hip firing obviously isn’t going to work either. And that’s why if you want to get that kill, you better make sure you can clearly identify what you’re aiming for.
• Working with Intention: This is a huge reason why people can’t stay committed to their business, to the gym, or even to their relationships. We unconsciously remember why we’re hitting the gym or doing the deed, but we need a surface level reminder. We need that impulsive feeling to drive us to take the action. Think of setting the initial spark to tinder that eventually bursts into a huge bonfire. You don’t directly try lighting the wood logs, you start with the small dry pieces. It’s the same thing here.
• Emotional Anchor: We have days where we feel super motivated to go to the gym, do more sales, start the business, or ask the girl out, but we don’t have that daily. I wanna share a quote, forgot from where but,
  • “We’re only as good as we are on our bad days, not our good days”
  • When we review our vision, you get those “feel good” feelings, that dopamine hit. You get pumped and excited to start working again, even on your worst days. Think of it like this. When you play sports, you’re playing like shit, but your boys come up to you to dap you up, hype you up and talk shit with you. You feel fucking amazing. It’s the same thing here, except that you get to do it to yourself.

As for me, without getting to deep into the whole work out routine, diet, regimen, and structure of hitting the gym, this is more about the Mindset and Identity shifting aspect. If you want to see the whole bro science behind it, there’s tons of YouTube videos out there about this.

Like I said earlier, I’ll be doing Vision Creation. And here’s how this’ll work for me. I need to answer the following questions:

1. What does success look like, 365 days from now?
2. How did you get there?
3. Who do you imagine to be by your side?
4. Where are you right now?
5. What are you doing right now?
6. How do you feel about yourself?
7. What emotions did you feel?
8. Why do you want to be successful?
9. Why does that matter to you so much?

After answering this, I’m going to go even further by adding pictures to every single question. I often find it that people tend to remember things easier when there’s pictures involved and that’s why we have Vision Boards.

In terms of the questions, I’m going to be extremely detailed because I know for a fact that I’m not going to wake up every day, feeling amazing (even though most of the time I do), so I need a backup plan.

This is going to be like a backup generator, a bulletproof vest that’ll protect me whenever I feel like shit because sometimes Life happens and it can get the best of us, but more importantly that’s why we need to build a System to help us back on our feet. Sort of like an emergency defibrillator to jump start our engines (you get the point).

When it comes to adding pictures to each question, I’m putting the ones that spark the most emotion within myself.

It’s human nature for us to want to take action when our minds are emotionally charged whether it be through anger, excitement, love or anything else. You ever see those big powerlifters in the gym ready to deadlift the weight of a small car? You usually see their coaches or their boys behind them talking shit and smacking their backs super hard?

There’s a reason for that besides the adrenaline. It’s the emotional aspect. We want to take action immediately when we’re in an emotional state compared to being in a state of neutrality.

Also, a vision board with pictures is easier to review compared to a “vision questionnaire”.

So after I have my vision board created, there’s only 2 more things that I have left to do. I need a shopping list of resources and materials I’m gonna need to reach my vision and also a step-by-step plan on what to do to get there.

I call it a shopping list, but it’s more so like a prerequisite checklist. So in my vision, if I want to get bigger and look fantastic for my wedding, I’ll need to write down a list of things I’d need to do to get there. At the moment, I’d write down weights and a bench. Then I need a schedule and a workout routine. I’m also going to write down the food that I need to eat. Maybe a way to track calories. If I had the vision of financial freedom, I’d write down a list of books, courses, mentorships and even skills that I need to develop. It’s all going to be the same no matter what vision you create for yourself.

So literally writing out that list makes it easier for me to know what to aim for. Even if i don’t have the materials on hand, I can figure out a way to get those materials.

So as an example, if you ever buy a closet or a bookshelf from Ikea, you’re given all the materials, screws, nuts and bolts included with a blueprint. The thing is for us, the bookshelf is our vision and the screws, wooden boards, and bolts are the books and courses we need. Unfortunately for us, we need to go shopping for the individual pieces depending on what your vision is. But good thing we have YouTube, Google and AI for free information.

Once I’ve written down everything the checklist, I just need to focus on finding out where to get everything and once I do have it, it’s literally just as simple as taking action.

In terms of the correct order, I already have experience with identity shifting, but there’s a topic that’s rarely spoken about. It’s called Reverse Engineering.

If you try searching it up, you’ll find that phrase to be very commonly used when it comes to manufacturing, architecture or even software programming. When it comes to just self development, goal setting or even identity shifting, it’s about working towards your goal with the end in mind.

The end here is our vision that we created.

It’s often harder for us to figure out what our next step should be when it comes to doing something we’ve never done before, but we can easily fix this by working backwards. It’s a bit hard to explain, but you can think of it this way.

Let’s use a simple example, let’s imagine for some reason you ordered a chair from Ikea, but they forgot to put the instruction manual on how to build it. Not only that, the world is an apocalypse so there’s not technology, and you live alone.

Assuming that Ikea didn’t mess up your order completely, and you have all the materials you need, the first thing you’d do is try to figure out where to start right?

But what if you started backwards. You imagined that the chair is already completely built. What step did you just complete before the chair was completely built? Did you just finish screwing in the last leg? What about the step before that one? What happened before you screwed in the last leg? Did you have to create the leg individually? What about the step before that one? Did you have to connect the segments of the legs together?

So you keep doing this until you end up with square 1, which is where you are today. It’s pretty difficult to teach people how to think, and it’s more so of a “do it to learn it” kinda thing.

But as for my vision of looking beautiful in a wedding suit, I think it’s time for me to get started on creating the vision and just getting started.

To whoever reads this, I hope that it helps you at least get a head start in reaching your dreams and visions.