This Is How You Build Mental Muscle and Progress to the Next Stage of Life
#1 — Chase experiences that involve enormous rejection with a smile.
Strengthen your mind and you will improve your life, drastically.
Your mind dies with years of comfort and is reborn in small moments of extreme discomfort. That doesn’t mean you need to act like Rocky Balboa after slamming down egg whites and a bulletproof coffee. You can take yourself less seriously than that — and still crush it.
Here are the benefits of developing your mental muscle:
- You are more confident.
- Small stuff doesn’t define you.
- You end up doing things that others label “impossible.”
- You become more focused on your goals.
- The noise of the online world becomes irrelevant.
- Negative emotions don’t rule your life. You simply sleep them off and wake up the next day a new person.
Stage 1 of Life: A messy mind that reacts to everything.
Stage 2 of Life: A mind that is mentally tough and therefore, selective, calm, calculated, gorgeous, and less prone to penetration.
Here’s how to build mental muscle.
Chase Experiences That Involve Rejection
People think I’m nuts. And I am.
Over the last five years I’ve built mental muscle on purpose. Why? Because I had to. I used to suffer from extreme mental illness. That illness of the mind caused me to feel sick, throw up after eating, avoid social situations, hide in my bedroom with a full bottle of scotch and drink myself to sleep, and to stuff up every goal I ever had.
Becoming mentally strong was nothing more than survival.
So, I chased experiences that involved enormous, guaranteed rejection. Some athletes chase flow states/ecstasis (stepping outside yourself) through extreme sports like climbing giant mountains without any safety equipment. I did it through experiences involving rejection. Here are a few:
- Writing for publications — I want to write for many major publications, not because I need their help, but because they will almost certainly skip reading my story pitch or mistakenly miss it in their busy email inboxes. When an editor — whose been in the game less than three years and has never written anything themselves — tells you to “F-OFF, mate,” politely, your mind is tested. It has to bend and stretch to control the rage.
- Job interviews — I call job interviews an invitation to be discriminated against for reasons you’ll never be told. If you show up to job interviews then you will learn what it’s like to be given every excuse under the sun about why you suck. None of it is based on fact. It’s just a mental test to see if you can pick yourself off the floor and go home to your cat in one piece.
- Public speaking — Before you’ve said a word, half the room will already hate you. It’s the most attention you’ll have on you at any moment in your life. Seeing a room full of people in silence, with their phones in their pocket, waiting to hear what you have to say is powerful. If that speech involves immediate feedback, then the rejection will be verbalized. That’s why I compete in public speaking contests.
- Dating — Jump on a dating app if you are single. Watch how hard you will be rejected. You can be better looking than Margot Robbie at the Met Gala and still get rejected. Random people you’ve never met will say horrible things to you. I went on more than fifty dates a few years back so I could fall in love with rejection, rather than a woman.
Proactively Talking to People You Don’t Know
Strangers expand your mind.
Your natural state is to say nothing when you are alone in an elevator with someone. But what if you didn’t? What if every stranger was a gateway to expanding your mind?
Getting good at talking to strangers can subtly change your life. The Humans of New York founder, Brandon Stanton, built one of the largest humanitarian projects in the world using this strategy.
He was tired, lonely, and unemployed. Talking to strangers expanded his mind and made him rethink what was possible. Now he never has to work another day in his life ever again.
Places you can talk to strangers include the subway, the elevator, a cafe, platforms like LinkedIn, while waiting for the doctor, or at the grocery store. Look at what someone has in their hands and ask them about it.
“Where did you get that handbag from?”
“Does your dog like that flavor of biscuits?”
“In a hurry? Me too.”
“Is that book as crazy as the cover looks?”
Random conversations expand your mind through overcoming natural social nervousness.
Resist the Urge to Abuse Your Critics
If you don’t ever want to have critics, succeed at nothing. That’s the harsh truth.
The moment I had one article that reached a million people, I met a crowd of critics. Initially, your natural reaction is to prove yourself right by proving them wrong. You attempt to dual your critics in the battlegrounds of the comments section.
Now, every day, it’s a mental challenge to say nothing to critics. Thank god social media doesn’t have an eloquently colored red rage button. I’d have pushed it already and started a nuclear war.
Being disliked and accepting it builds your mental muscle. The view you have of yourself in your mind warps to create an image of love, not hate.
Freezing Cold Environments
Here’s some cold shower sh*t for you hardcore folks. Joking.
My home has heating and I don’t use it. One: I am a utility bill tight ass. Two: it forces my mind, in the cold Melbourne mornings, to get a fresh dose of reality. I set a painfully loud alarm with chiming bells that forces me to wake up and walk to the other side of the bedroom to turn it off. By this point, I’m freezing my balls off.
I walk calmly to the study to put some clothes on. The cold hurts. My teeth chatter like a kid with tourettes.
I get dressed and slowly my body temperature reaches an acceptable level that won’t cause hypothermia. This routine is a daily ritual.
The cold wakes your mind up.
It tells you to get started. It shows you how harsh your environment can be and how your mind can eloquently change the picture and bend it towards the light, in your favor.
The cold is a powerful Jedi mind trick. Try it.
Early Mornings
Unless you were born into the 4 AM club, you probably don’t love waking up early on the weekend.
I build mental muscle by challenging myself to wake up relatively early each day. If I didn’t, these words I type wouldn’t have time to be written. Waking up early is a test of your mind. Take the test often and see how you do.
Repeat a Habit over and over for 5+ Years
This one’s a little mad. Sorry.
One reason I have written for six years straight without missing a week is to build mental muscle.
An incredible way to experience change in your life is to pick a task and repeat it. It’s easy for your brain to fall in love with a habit for a week, a month or even a year. The real test of mental muscle is to keep repeating a habit for 5+ years. How many people do you know who decided to join the gym and are stilling going five years later? I can’t think of many in my life.
Not giving up creates mental muscle.
Building your mental muscle looks like this:
Find an activity. Design a process around that activity. Tweak that process. And find a reason bigger than yourself to keep going.
If you want enormous mental muscles you can flex to help other people, find a task in your life that you can complete for the next five years. The process will not only change your mind, but how you think.
There will be many mental games you’ll discover that will shape your mind in weird and wacky ways. The outcome doesn’t matter so much. It’s what it does to your brain that will shock you.
Your mind is a muscle. Do some heavy sets of mental reps with the way you think.
Shape your mind, and everything in your life changes forever.
