3 Ways You Can Train Yourself To Achieve Whatever You Want in Life

Nothing that matters to you in life can be left to chance — training your mind is an invaluable skill.

It’s a mistake to think that it will happen one day if you don’t prepare yourself with those skills training.

You can stumble into short-term success or achievement in life, but if you want longevity, consistency, and discipline, you have to create them consciously.

In 2014, I quit my comfortable IT job to become a filmmaker. But before I could enter the film industry, I wanted to test myself with two things:

• Do I really want to do this?
• Will I get bored with this work in some time?
• Why do I want to become a storyteller, and what’s the meaning/ point of this work?

It’s so important to answer these questions when you’re making a decision about what you want to do with your life. And here’s the secret — you can change what you want to do in your life at any point; it’s not a marriage decision.

And the decisions that you make when you’re in momentum when your brain is engaged in a state of flow — you’ll notice you’re making better decisions.

The reason is that negativity hates momentum. And by engaging in flow states, you’re training your intuition to be healthy.

But there are more aspects that you should be looking to train in your life if you want to dream more, do more, and achieve more.

1/ Train Your Craft

Honing your craft comes when you have the curiosity of a 7-year-old kid towards your work.

You can’t afford to consider yourself an expert and learn any work.

To train yourself in any new skill, the most important learning is to learn how to be a beginner at something.

We’re all storytellers.

I believed I was when I entered the film school, but my perceptions of storytelling that I already had in my mind were blocking the new perspectives that were being pushed my way by teachers, trainers, and filmmakers who had been dabbling with this craft for decades.

What did I do?

I surrendered myself to whatever new lesson I was taught every day. Why did I do that?

I had read the book by James Clear, “Atomic Habits,” and the idea was to understand and internalize a new identity.

To be trainable in any craft, you need to accept a learner's identity. If I’m a learner, nothing can break my identity — every setback, every failure, and almost every obstacle that comes my way eventually turns into a lesson.

That’s the real learning — these lessons around the lessons that are taught in the form of subjects.

When I directed my first film — sure, I learned about the craft, but what I learned about human management and people’s criticism was way more important than the technical aspects that take time to internalize completely.

“The most robust identity in the world = Learner’s Identity”

Being a good learner is the most valuable identity you can internalize while training yourself to improve your craft.

2/ Train Your Body

A healthy mind resides in a healthy body.

What you feel inside your body is expressed by your body in the outside world.

And what you experience externally is absorbed into your inner world.

In the film school, I met a lot of people who were into smoking marijuana. They said, if you smoke this, you become more creative (*laughing at the moment).

I didn’t know any better. But the point is, I was spending a lot of time with this retards and in no time, I ended up becoming like them.

It’s ridiculous how I took just a week to forget that my ideals are people like Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, and Steven Speilberg — and I’ve never noticed them smoking weed to make the films they made.

The bigger issue was yet to be experienced — my body became addicted to these substances, and now I was anxious all the time because I started to believe that I needed weed to write that script — honestly, I finished no script (not even a scene) when I was under the influence.

My mind was not in a healthy space because my body was far from it.

Cut to six years later, I run every morning, work out for at least 20 minutes, and feel great as a creative.

And this feeling is what I was craving for with those substances.

My learning? You can’t hack your way into the feelings that matter. You have to earn them.

If you cheat your body, one day, your body will cheat you. Remember the term — “Your body is keeping a count.”

You have nothing else in this world that will always be with you — it doesn’t matter what you’re going through except your body.

How you treat your body is how you treat your “self.”

Your self-respect and self-esteem are dependent on how you treat yourself. In fact, other people in your life take clues of how you want to be treated by how you treat yourself.

3/ Train Your Mind

Last but not least, every fight, every war, and every skill is first learned in your mind and then transformed into a tangible execution.

If you pause and reflect, you’ll realize that every single time you have lost a game or were defeated by a challenge — you lost the battle first in your mind and then in reality.

Here’s the secret: If you don’t accept the defeat in your mind, you never lose — the game is always on.

Forget about what the world says. There’s a world outside, and there’s a world inside us. And the one inside us matters as much because it defines how we appear in the outside world.

When I started to realize that smoking weed was becoming an addiction, I resorted to meditation. It was the secret weapon I used to train my mind. I started off by trying to control and then eventually learned to surrender.

If we talk about words like war, fight, challenges, etc., you might feel surrender is synonymous with defeat — but I found it to be exactly the opposite. Surrender to the process, and you will never lose (at least not in the long game).

Rather than controlling my thoughts, I trained myself to be okay with my thoughts conflicting with each other and allowed them to finish their fights. If I interrupted, I would have only fueled the fight more.

Becoming a spectator and stopping myself from being a reactionary participant with my thoughts gave me better control over my mind.

As Jay Shah points out in his book, “Think Like a Monk,” there are two kinds of minds we have within us — a monk mind and a monkey mind; which is similar to a higher self and a lower self; which is similar to delayed gratification and instant gratification; which is similar to hacked dopamine that we get from smoking, drinking, eating sugary foods, and earned dopamine that we get from running, workout, being consistent and disciplined with a skill.

Your mind has to experience the rush of delayed gratification once — believe me, there’s no better high than this. Suddenly, you’ll realize how I even lived my life any other way. I know I did.

Last

If there’s anything you take from this article, I insist on internalizing the concept of identity.

Identity can make or break a person.

What you believe about yourself is who you are.

For many years, I kept thinking that I wanted to be a writer — and that’s exactly who I became — “a person who wants to be a writer.”

It was not until I started believing that I was a writer that I was able to successfully execute the behaviour of a writer.

Whatever you want to become in life, the first thing you want to crack is your identity (why) and then reverse engineer your way towards the process (how) and behaviours (what).

Most people do exactly the opposite and focus way more on the behaviours and processes, but if your identity is not in sync with them — those behaviours and processes won’t last long, or you’ll end up sabotaging them.

“A simple one-liner that I used to follow was — Do. Be. A simple one-liner that I follow now is — Be. Do.”

I hope you crack it.

Until next time,

Ciao!

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