I remember it was a Sunday morning. I woke up to the phone ringing and it was my mom. She dropped the news on me that my grandfather had passed away in El Salvador. This was her father in law, my dad’s father.

At first I didn’t know how to handle the news, you see up to this point I had all of my grandparents still alive on both sides. He was the first to go. As I delivered the news to my wife, she hugged me and that’s when I broke down and cried.

When I was young I was pretty close to my grandfather. He was a pretty funny and witty character, always had jokes and liked making people laugh. But as I got older I grew further apart from him and we just weren’t as close. So when this news hit, I felt a large hit of regret for not taking the time to get to know him more.

I wish I would’ve sat with him more and learned more about what he went through growing up. His struggles as a husband and father and the lessons he learned. I wish I would’ve learned more about what my own dad was like when he was young. What was it like to raise my dad?

I yearned for some sort of connection to my grandfather that could bring forth a wealth of knowledge and wisdom to me so that I can do right by my family. As I thought deeper about this I started to wonder how great it would have been if my grandfather would have written all of these things down. His stories, his lessons, his experience, ultimately his legacy in a book for me to read and learn from.

This sparked my curiosity into Journaling. You see, this made me think of my kids and the lessons and stories I could leave them. At the end of the day, we can all agree that living is a whole lot better than dying. But because we are physical beings, we will all meet our end at some point, it’s inevitable.

However, there is a way to live forever. A way to become “immortal” in a sense and live on through the legacy you leave behind to your family. I want my great great great grandchildren to know who I was and to learn something from my life.

This is why I created this unique way of documenting your life. It’s called the Alpha Dad Legacy or ADL for short. And in this week’s episode, I’m gonna show you how to create one of these so that it can make an impact in your life and in the lives of your family.

This week, we are talking about how to create an effective journal that has the potential of making an eternal impact on you and your family. I call this the Alpha Dad Legacy, which is a unique method of journaling with purpose. And I’m going to break down every element of this ADL so that you can create one for yourself and take advantage of the benefits.

Before we get started, I do wanna preface that this is not a Diary where you go to write about all your woes every day. This is also not a planner where you write down a to do list. This is something completely different.

The first thing you wanna do if it isn’t already obvious, you gotta get yourself a Journal type book with blank pages on it. I tend to prefer journals with no lines, so sometimes I order sketchbooks because I like the freedom to write everywhere I want on that page. If you’re a little more OCD than me, then go ahead and get one with lined pages.

So once you have your journal with blank pages, this is how you wanna start setting it up.

On the 1st page, once you open the book, you’re gonna wanna write down your name, the year you’re starting this, and your days to 90 counter.
This counter is something I picked up from a guy named Clark Kegley, he’s a pretty popular YouTuber and has some good techniques when it comes to journaling. This trick in particular and a few other elements of this journal were heavily influenced by his style of journaling.

So what you do for this days to 90 counter, is you take your age, for example I’m 34 and you multiply that by 365, the amount of days in a year.
With me so far? Now you take that number and subtract it from 32,850.

32,850 is the amount of days you are alive on this earth from the day you are born to the day you turn 90.

Now I don’t know about you, but this is not a large number, which is crazy to think about. Think about how many days we waste away sometimes doing nothing or complaining about the day, not realizing that this number keeps getting smaller with each passing day. Doing this little math equation to get your number gives you a realistic view of how many days you have left until you get to 90 years of age.

My current number is 20,440 and every time I open up my ADL to write in it, that number stairs back at me and gives me the kick in the ass that I need to be purposeful with my time. Whatever your number is, put it on this page and circle it so it stands out.

Next, either on this page or the next, put down a Table of Contents title and underline it. You’re now gonna put down the 7 Chapters you will need to provide direction and purpose to this book. Remember this is a Legacy you’re writing for yourself and your family. You want it to have some sort of order to it so that parts of your life can be easily referenced at later times.

These are the chapters you will need.

Chapter 1 will be titled “Quotes”

This is simple, dedicate a few pages to write down powerful quotes you come across throughout the year. Don’t just put anything in here, make it quotes that actually inspire you to take action on something. Whether that’s a quote related to your family or business, no big deal, the area of life that it inspires doesn’t matter, only that it actually inspires you.

Chapter 2 is called “Learning”

If you want to succeed to the fullest in any area of your life, it will require you to learn something today that you didn’t know yesterday. That is how you advance and that is also how you continue to grow and not remain stagnant. Your mind is the most powerful asset you have to get you to where you wanna go, but if you don’t feed it properly or train it through continual learning, you will never reach your full potential.

So anytime you learn something new, whether you are reading a book, listening to an informative podcast, or watching a training, write down what you learned in this chapter. Put the lessons in your own words and leverage this chapter throughout your life to provide you with applicable knowledge. A lot of learning I did a few years ago that made it to this chapter in past journals, have literally become YouTube videos or podcast episodes.

If you don’t put yourself in a state where you’re hungry for growth and knowledge, it will largely increase your chance of depression. Look at a lot of men that retire early and don’t continue learning or producing something. Most of the time, they don’t live too long or if they do, they seem very depressed and unhappy with their lives.

Chapter 3 is your “Freeflow” section

The purpose of this chapter is for you to have an outlet to do what’s called a “brain dump”. Any thoughts that you have, whether they’re negative or positive, jot them down in this section. If something significant happens in your life, put it in here. Talk about how you felt when that happened and what you were thinking. There aren’t really any rules for this chapter, it’s just where you go to put down your thoughts.

The only rule I would have that I started doing, is just dating every excerpt whenever you write in it. I find it kind of interesting to read my past excerpts and see how I thought about something, then witness my transformation as the year went on. It’s almost like your past self is talking to your present self when you read this stuff. Until you do this for a couple of years, you won’t realize how beneficial it is to look back at your growth.

It brings forth a deeper sense of gratitude for where you are now that you don’t otherwise get.

Chapter 4 is titled “Create”

And that is exactly what you wanna do here. Create! You know those business ideas you have, stop just talking about them, but actually jot them down and plan them out. Even if you think it’s stupid, just put it on paper. I’m sure someone out there thought that a smartphone was a stupid idea that would never work, they must be eating their words now.

Don’t judge yourself here, just put it down. I use this chapter to not only write down business ideas, but to come up with content ideas for this podcast. Product and services ideas for the business that I think would be beneficial to my clients. I believe that God made us in His image and He in essence was the Ultimate Creator. We were meant to create things. We thrive on it. For some of us, we like building things with our hands, for others maybe more on the tech side of things a program or an app, for others we want to create a business, we want to create wealth, we want to create a family, the point is we are driven to create.

Use this chapter to leverage that drive and give it direction, you never know where your creations might take you.

Chapter 5 is called “Stories”

Throughout your life you will encounter moments that make for a great story. Write those down as they can be used to your advantage later on. You can use a story to teach your children a lesson or to illustrate a point.

I’ve used stories in my content in order to drive a point home or offer a different perspective on something. I’ve used stories at job interviews to demonstrate a skill set or capability that the employer would find appealing and improve my chances of getting the job. I use stories in conversation with others.

Use this section to store good stories and they don’t all have to be about your life. I jot stories of other people in this chapter as well if I think that they’ll be useful to me in any way. Don’t underestimate the power of stories. If you have a catalogue of good stories and you become really good at telling them, it sets you up for success as someone that can influence others.

As a leader in your home, the power of influence is an absolute necessity. If you can’t influence nor inspire those that you’re called to lead, no one will wanna follow you.

Chapter 6 is for “Family”

I use this chapter to write to my kids. My son, who is the oldest is only 3 years old and my daughter is only 9 months old at the time of shooting this video. There are a lot of lessons that I wanna teach them as they get older, but we truly never know if we’ll get the chance.

So I write to them in this chapter as if I was writing to them after I’m gone. When they hit certain milestones in their childhood years, I jot down what those are and express how proud I am of their progress.

Most importantly, I’m honest and open with them. If I mess up and make a mistake, I tell them about it. I want them to understand that I’m human as well and that I’m also learning as I raise them.

My hope is that this will aid them at some point in the future. They will have a reference of my growth as their father and ultimately they will know that I truly love them. I mainly focus on my kids in this chapter, but write to whomever you want to communicate with.

Maybe for you it’s your wife or you’ve had a child that has passed away at an early age. Leverage this chapter however you need to, but use it as a means to communicate with those that mean the most to you.

Chapter 7 is your “Weekly Tracker”

This chapter is meant to literally track your weeks by writing down key moments or achievements throughout every week. I’ll usually put down the month and then put Week 1 and list out things that happened, then I do week 2, week 3, week 4 and so forth.

To give you an example of the kinds of things I put down here, it could be the book I’m reading for the week, the podcast episode I’m releasing, a big project I completed, some key moment that happened with my family like a birthday or anniversary. It’s really just a place for you to log what you consider important for that week.

Again this is not a planner, it’s a tracker, meaning you log something after it has taken place. The benefit here is that this allows you to look back at your weeks for any given month and very quickly get a history of what went down in your life.

This is important because it shows you your progress in life. You see, every single one of us in this day and age claim that we’re so busy. Due to that belief, we very rarely stop to appreciate how far you’ve come in life. Even if things aren’t perfect right now, or even if you’re not where you ultimately wanna be in life, regardless you’ve probably accomplished a lot. You’re just not seeing it. This chapter changes that.

One last thing you can do is on the very back of the journal. Jot down one big goal for each one of the following categories.

1. Mental
2. Physical
3. Spiritual
4. Emotional
5. Financial

This should be a goal for the year that you wanna accomplish. My biggest recommendation here is make it realistic and specific.

For example, your physical goal may be to lose weight, but be specific about how much weight you wanna lose? Your financial goal may be to make more money, but be specific, how much more money?

So that’s it, that’s how you set up your ADL, your Alpha Dad Legacy. It comes in the form of a journal that you create in this unique way in order to document your life.

Now the question I always get asked is how often should I be writing in this journal? Well the answer is as often as you want. I don’t write in my journal every day, but I do at least once a week, even if it’s just to track significant moments throughout the week. Mostly I write in it when I feel compelled to. When something falls into one of my chapters, I write it down.

Oh and depending on the amount of total pages your journal has, divide that number by 6 and that should give you how many pages your chapters should be. The quotes chapter only needs about 2 pages tops and the weekly tracker chapter only needs 24 pages in total. So the rest you can kinda play with, depending on which chapters you want to have more pages to write on.

The last thing I’ll mention is start a new ADL every year. Even if you don’t write in every page. It’s just a good way to build a collection of your writings and have everything separated by the year.

Trust me when I tell you that this method of journaling has been one of the biggest keys to my success over the years. It has given me focus, gratitude, a sense of real growth, and confidence in my abilities.

Build this out for yourself and I guarantee your life will change. If you need assistance or guidance, or you’re looking for more advanced help. Then I wanna offer you a chance to get on a FREE strategy session with me or my team. Just by going to alphadadconsulting.com/calendar you can book your free call.

If you’re looking to make some real changes in your life and you wanna become a more effective leader in your home, then I would encourage you to take advantage of this now. Let us see if we can help.

Until next time my fellow alpha dad,
- G. Vidal