How I Tricked My Brain Into Doing Hard Things

You don’t need discipline.

“Do the hard work, especially when you don’t feel like it.”

“Discipline, fuck your feelings”

All this sigma male motivation that you hear is bs, when you can actually make the hard stuff fun. When you wake up excited to go work out, to go study, to go write, whatever.

This is the higher ambition. This is how you can enjoy the destination, and the journey. Instant and delayed gratification. At the same time.

So you might be thinking, “well, Yvan, obviously this sounds great, but it’s impossible, right?”

Wrong.

I used to be a lazy shit. I would lay in bed until 10 or 11, straight away grab my phone. And I’d know that I should do some exercise, I should go for a run, I should do my homework, but it just seemed sooo boring.

So I’d procrastinate, push it off, and feel the pain of regret and embarrassment when I saw that I had wasted the whole day again.

Ironically, when I was doing all the “easy” and “fun” stuff, I was actually having less fun than I am now.

I wake up early, at 6 or 7, even when I don’t have school. I spend hours writing, recording, editing, reading, working out, exercising, all of this. I am addicted. But I am addicted to the good habits, that actually give me real-world results.

Do you know how sick that is?

I am doing all the productive things, I’m getting all the rewards for it, and I’m having even more fun in the process than the guy who’s playing video games and going out all day?

I’m going to show you exactly how you can do the same.

Here are the 3 steps that I took to trick my mind into enjoying the hard things. This is how I got addicted to hard work.

And if I missed out even just one of these steps, the whole thing wouldn’t have worked.

1. Have A Why

Why are you doing the good habits?

Why do you want to work out?

Why do you want to study?

Why?

The reason why you have never been able to stay consistent with any good habits, why in your mind it still seems like such a horrible, boring, painful task that should be avoided if possible - is because you don’t have a strong enough reason for doing it.

Why do you want to study?

Is it because “it would probably be a good thing to do?” Not good enough.

Is it because “my teacher might yell at me if I don’t?” Not good enough.

Is it because if I study consistently every day, I can go and achieve good results in my exams, making my parents proud? So that then I can go and get my dream job, so I can help out or even retire my parents, paying them back for all the sacrifices they ever made for me? Now we’re talking.

Go into detail. The more specific, the better. The more detail there is in your description, in your why, in your vision for the future, the more effective it will be.

Get out a piece of paper, and for every difficult task you know you should be doing, go through this process. Write down in intricate detail, why you are doing it, how your life will change if you do this.

Then the next time you feel that resistance, you feel like you don’t want to go do that task that you know you should, just bring that detailed vision of the future to the forefront of your mind.

I go into a lot more detail about creating this future vision, this “why” in my Ultimate Beginner’s Self-improvement Blueprint.

I put you through my very specific protocol to create this vision, and make it as effective as possible. (plus it’s 100% FREE!)

2. Gamify It

Video games are so fucking fun.

Almost to the point where they’re too fun. You get drawn in, and end up spending hours playing, instead of doing something that’s going to better your life. You get addicted.

But what happens if we take these strategies that the video game creators use to make them so addictive, and apply them to the productive, difficult tasks? You get addicted to them instead.

The main reason that video games are so addicting, is they give us a sense of progress. Everything in video games is tracked - your hp, your xp level, your fifa rating, all your attributes - everything.

This is how they get you. You start seeing progress, you see yourself leveling up - and you want more.

More.

More.

Until you’re stuck in this loop of “oh, just one more game…” until it’s 1am and you’ve wasted 5 hours of your life on FIFA. (speaking from personal experience here :)

But then in real life, you don’t have that. A lot of the time, you can’t see your progress. You can’t see that you’re levelling up. You can’t see how what you are doing is getting you closer to your goals.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Track everything. Literally everything you can. Try and gamify everything you do, and you will get addicted to it.

For your workouts, download an app like Hevy or Strong to track every set and rep of every exercise, and every time try and “level up” how many you can do.

For runs, get an app like Nike Run Club, and try and beat your time, your stats, your distance, whatever.

You can even do this for studying. Literally on a piece of paper, draw out like an xp bar, and every time you do 1 good hour of focussed studying, fill the bar in by 1cm.

When you can see your progress, you become addicted to that feeling. This is how you turn anything into a video game.

3. Detox Your Mind

So the strategies that I’ve just told you are very powerful.

They can make doing the hard work a lot more fun and easy.

But the problem is - you will always go back. Video games, social media, all of these modern addictions have been so meticulously designed by teams of scientists, that they’ve sent our little monkey brains crazy.

Everything on social media has been so hypersexualised, all these things are so stimulating for our brains.

So in comparison, the hard work, the normal stuff, is always going to seem boring.

No matter how many different tactics and tricks you try - your brain will always pick the more stimulating option. So you back to your phone. The Xbox. Whatever it is.

Why do you think the number of people with ADHD has increased by 123% in the US in the last few years?

It’s because our brains get so used to all this stimulation, to the point where if it is removed, we are just itching for it. We start twitching around, looking for anything to stimulate us.

Most people have mild ADHD symptoms these day. Including you.

This is why you have to detox your mind. You have to remove as many of these hyper-stimulating activities from your life as you can.

Cut out Instagram, TikTok, video games, porn.

Because once you do this, once you remove all this stuff that stimulates your brain so much, then the most stimulating part of your day becomes the hard work.

It’s the workout. The study session. The run.

That becomes the most stimulating, fun and addicting part of your day.

This is how it was supposed to be. This is how it was a few hundred years ago.

Detox your mind, and all the small and ordinary things become just that much more colourful.

(If you need help quitting your social media addiction, I have a full step-by-step guide on this on my channel - just click this link.)

Hope this letter gave you some value.

Until next time,

Yvan