How I Completely Changed Myself in 3 Simple Steps

This might sound a bit more arrogant than I'd like it to, but I’ll say it anyway:

The other day, I was so proud and excited about where my life is and where it’s going, that I gave myself chills.

Life’s been unimaginably beautiful lately, and I’m so excited about where everything is going that I can’t hold my excitement back anymore. I’m surrounded by awesome people, I make money doing what I love, and I’m mentally stable.

Dare I say… I’m happy.

My life seems like one grand adventure, but it hasn’t always been like that. In 2017, I was diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. I’ve spent the last 4 years on antidepressants, going to therapy, and desperately trying to “improve myself” mentally.

While I’m not entirely free from mental illness (I’m not sure my symptoms will ever be gone forever), where I am today is night and day from where I was when I was desperately writing cries for help to myself at 3 am in my journal that I knew no one would ever read.

Here’s how I changed myself from a depressed 18-year-old to an irrationally optimistic 24-year-old:

First, I stopped making excuses.

Some people will read this advice and say that I’m propagating a toxic hustle culture, but the truth is that if you want to do anything extraordinary, you’re going to have to work your way past your limiting beliefs.

I realized that my excuses were just verbal expressions of my limiting beliefs that had been hammered into my head by a lifetime of mental illness, bullying, and verbal abuse.

With a lot of hard work on myself, I trained myself to stop making excuses. When I feel an excuse coming now, I don’t deny its existence, I work my way through it. Every excuse is a problem for you to solve.

If you can’t solve the problem, you’ve reached a limit, not an excuse.

Then, I dove headfirst into something I loved.

I don’t really know how to make you or anyone else “successful”, but I can tell you what I did.

At 18, I decided that I was going to either become a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu world champion or die trying. In the end, I achieved my goal, and I almost did die trying due to burnout, mental illness, and overtraining.

Again, it might seem like I’m telling you to work yourself to the brink of death. Don’t work yourself to the brink of death. What going “all-in” on my passion taught me is that passion cannot make you indestructible. If you want to be happy, you also need longevity.

The only way I was able to learn this lesson was by diving headfirst into my passion and finding out what I was really capable of.

Lastly, I processed all the shit I went through.

This is the most important step because if you don’t take the time to reflect on what you’ve seen or experienced, it does not make you stronger. Mental strength comes through reflection, not pain.

If you don’t journal, think, go to therapy, write, or find some other way to reflect on your experiences, what doesn’t kill you will actually make you weaker.

In the gym, strength is built in the time spent away from the gym. It’s built through recovery. The same is true in life.

Closing thoughts

For the first time in my life, I’m wildly excited about where my life is going and all of the opportunities that I have coming. Everything that I’ve worked for for the last 5 and a half years (not including the 5 years of unconscious work before that) is starting to pay off.

My life looks everything and nothing like how I envisioned it, and it’s pretty freaking wild.