how to create a mindset to achieve anything you want

Your mindset is your greatest asset -- it can change the course of your entire life and put you on a path to success. I trained by myself for an entire year before signing my first professional contract. Here is a proven framework to overcome adversity and achieve anything you set your mind to - this can be applied to anything you do in life.

my story

Back when I was a freshman in high school, I was always the athlete who carried a relentless mentality to improve myself. As a player growing up, I can remember taking extra sport-related classes just to improve myself physically during school hours, and surround myself with other like-minded individuals that would help me to progress forward. During my high school years, one thing stayed consistent throughout any and all adversity and struggle that I went through -- my day-by-day improvement mentality. No matter what happened, my focus was to get better every single day.

As the days, weeks, and months went by, I began to transform into a different player and person -- driven by my mentality to improve. I was always looking for ways to improve little by little in every area I could think of. When I was a senior in high school, the covid-19 pandemic shut everything down, but I continued to forge my mentality around day-to-day progression, and kept showing up to train by myself to build habits that would support this continuous growth. I started training harder than ever, and my desire to improve became so invigorating that I began to show all of my training across social media to share that hunger and inner desire to succeed with everyone that I could. I soon noticed thousands and thousands of athletes tapping into my platform as a way to improve themselves as well. It was at that point that I not only had my internal motivation to keep going, but I had external motivation too. This is when, for an entire year, I trained by myself and just focused on building my mentality and abilities. I was doing everything I possibly could to get any opportunity available, but despite cold calling, cold emailing, and exhausting every resource and connection I had, I found myself continuing to train by myself. But I just kept going. I kept training using the training methods I had built, in the Nonstop Performance Program, and just continued to never give up and never accept failure. I created connections, built my network, and just kept training. Towards the end of the year training by myself, I started taking every opportunity I could get, and trying to execute on it. After almost an entire 12 months, I achieved what I set my mind to: signing a professional contract. If it wasn't for the long days, hard sessions, commitment, and relentless pursuit for success, all of this would've never happened.

the power of progress

A key concept that played a big role in helping me do what I did is known as the "aggregation of marginal gains". This concept, developed by Dave Brailsford of the Great Britain Cycling Team, was this idea of breaking down a skill into as many components as you could think of, improving all of those components by just 1%, and then adding them all back together again -- resulting in huge improvement.

Dave Brailsford did this by improving every area that you could think of for his team -- the pillow that would offer the best night of sleep, the best way to wash your hands to prevent infection, and they even painted the entire team bus white to spot and get rid of dust that could potentially affect the performance of the cyclists bikes. They repeated this process for a ton of different things with the goal of simply improving a bunch of different areas by just 1%.

The results of these compounded improvements were massive. The British Cycling Team won multiple Tour de France competitions, and dominated the competition at the Olympics by winning roughly 70% of the gold medals available.

The common theme of improving day-by-day has been proven on not only a personal scale, but on a global one too.

the nonstop mentality

The nonstop mentality is really one that focuses on the art of continuing, never stopping, constantly improving, progressing, growing, learning, and being curious to find new solutions to problems. This mentality satisfies the three psychological needs we all have -- mastery, or the itch to improve at something, autonomy, or the need to be in control of our life and our decisions, and purpose, or the bigger meaning for why you do what you do.

When your goal is improving each day, you always have a reason to stay hungry and motivated. The secret is then to stay consistent, just like I did over that entire year of individual training, to turn that improvement-oriented lifestyle into a set of habits that become a part of who you are.

Perhaps the most useful way to make this shift is to start by changing the way you want to identify yourself. It's kind of like the saying -- "dress for the job you want, and not for the job you have." By putting in the work, staying consistent, and focusing on the things that progress you toward your goals, you are actively shifting your identity towards being that person that has accomplished the goal that you are after.