TL;DR: Your brain is a muscle—use it or lose it. Limit mindless screen time to under one hour daily. Read inspirational books for 30+ minutes every day—all successful people do this. The answers to your problems already exist online—the question is whether you’re curious enough to search. Feed your brain variety: diverse books, challenging music, off-topic hobbies. Mental growth requires mental challenge.
Read time: 4 min 35 sec
Mental
Look, I’m not going to tell you to throw your TV out the window and go live in a cabin. That’s not realistic, and frankly, some shows are actually good.
But here’s the thing—most of what we consume is mental junk food. It feels good going down, but it doesn’t nourish anything. If you’re doomscrolling or binge-watching reality TV for six hours straight, you’re not stimulating your brain. You’re numbing it.
Keep the mindless stuff under an hour a day. And yes, they call it mindless for a reason.
Feed your idea machine
I can’t think of anything that will get your idea machine cranking faster than reading great books. Pick your area of interest and dive in. Read to find out what you don’t know.
Sometimes you don’t even know what you don’t know until you start reading. That’s the beautiful part.
Also, read books that seem tangentially related to your interests. You might have a great idea or want to make a great product, but you’re going to have to eventually market that product. So books on marketing become essential, even if you never thought you’d care about marketing.
The 30-minute rule
Read inspirational and uplifting books for at least thirty minutes each day. This is the best way I know to switch your brain to transformative thinking. All successful people do this. It’s not coincidence.
But don’t stop there. Read off-topic books too. Foster a hobby that has nothing to do with your career. Read poetry. Listen to music that challenges you. Dive into podcasts that make you think differently.
Your brain craves variety. Feed it.
Psychologist Viktor Frankl on choosing your mental state: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” Source: Man’s Search for Meaning
The tools are already in your pocket
You can’t fix something or create anything without the necessary tools. And here’s the crazy part—you probably already have the most powerful tools ever created sitting right in your pocket.
I can’t tell you how many people complain about problems they can’t solve, but when I ask what research they’ve done, I get a blank stare or “Nothing.”
Good grief.
We have the world at our fingertips. Virtually any problem you might face has already been addressed by someone else whose answer is posted online. There’s more information available than you could review in a hundred lifetimes, most of it free.
The question isn’t whether the answer exists. The question is whether you’re curious enough to look for it.
Your brain wants to grow. It wants to be challenged. It wants to make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas.
Give it what it wants.
A question for you
What problem are you facing right now that you haven’t researched yet?
Before you say “it’s complicated” or “no one understands my situation,” spend 30 minutes searching online. You might be surprised by what you find. Your brain grows through curiosity, not through avoiding the search.
Final Note (From the Future You):
You will survive the things you think will break you.
You will outgrow some of your own beliefs.
You will look back one day and thank yourself for walking through the fog anyway.
But here’s the warning label nobody puts on the brochure:
If you have to suppress any part of yourself to “succeed,” it’s not success. It’s sacrifice. And eventually, it’ll cost you everything that matters.
True success isn’t a trophy on a shelf.
It’s not a job title. Not a number in a bank account.
True success is spherical.
It touches every part of your life—your physical realm, your financial realm, your emotional realm, your relational realm, and your spiritual realm.
And the beautiful thing about your life’s journey?
You get to start walking again—any day, any hour, any moment.
You just have to choose the road that lets you bring your whole self along for the ride.
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