Your Mind Is A Muscle, Here’s How To Build It (Become Mentally Jacked)

Your mind is like a muscle. You must build it through the pursuit of meaningful goals, acquisition of knowledge, and time to do nothing.

I used to be fully engrossed in the hustle culture world.

A world that promotes working 24/7 and optimising every area of your life to get stuff done.

That used to be me.

16-hour days, every waking second must be optimised for productivity and all the rest.

And still, to this day, as much as I’m “out” of the hustle culture world, a part of me is and always will be drawn to it.

I love hard work.

I love it.

And even though I don’t work as long as I used to, when I work, I WORK.

The idea of working all day, devoting myself to achieving a goal with no second spent on anything else feels a tad romantic to me.

I don’t know what it is, but I will always love that idea.

But I’ve found it doesn’t actually work like that in real life.

For context, I now work less than 4 hours a day and make more progress and earn more money than I ever did working 12-16 hours a day.

It all changed about 3 years ago, I stumbled across a book called “Deep Work” by Dr Cal Newport.

In it, he discusses his theory of high-quality work - 4 hours of deep work per day, split into 60-120 minute blocks of fully focused work on an important task with 0 distractions.

It sounded too good to be true.

But it lines up with the science.

Your best work will be done in a state of flow and focus.

When all of your cognitive attention is on a specific task that is right on the edge of the challenge-skill balance.

This state of flow and focus is facilitated by a combination of neurotransmitters - dopamine, acetylcholine and norepinephrine to name a few.

Your body only has a limited supply of these neurotransmitters and a rate at which it can replenish the supply.

And this is the problem.

Flow and focus are expensive.

They use a tonne of your supply and at a rate faster than they can be replenished, so after around 4 hours of deep focused work, you’ve ran dry.

You can no longer enter a state of deep focus.

Which means any work you do will be at a standard less than your best, simply because you’re not able to fully dedicate all of your cognitive abilities to the task.

And for any hustle bros out there, this is bad news.

It means only 4 of your 12 hours of work are done to a decent standard that will generate the results you both want and need in order to achieve your goals.

Of course, the fact that you only have 4 hours of deep focused work each day doesn’t mean you can’t work more than 4 hours.

But what it does mean is that all of your important tasks that move the needle toward your goals should be done within a 4-hour window (which can be split up throughout the day, so long as it’s not interrupted by other tasks that may steal your focus).

After that 4 hours of focus is up, you shouldn’t be doing any of your important, lever moving tasks - that is, if you care about the quality of your work and the achievement of your goal.

You can work till your heart’s content on tasks that don’t move the needle.

But still, that doesn’t mean you should fall into the hustle culture trap of working all day.

Your mind is like a muscle, and you have to treat it like one.

Treat Your Mind Like A Muscle

In the gym, you lift weights to stress your muscles and break them down.

Outside the gym, you then sleep and eat enough protein and calories to let your muscles recover.

But if you didn’t sleep enough or eat enough of the right fuel, what would happen?

Your muscles wouldn’t recover, they wouldn’t grow and you wouldn’t improve.

Your mind is the same.

You have to provide it stimulus to give it a reason to improve and then you have to let it recover so that it can improve.

You stress and challenge your mind by pursuing meaningful goals in the form of daily focused work on tasks that over time add up to those meaningful goals.

If you’ve consciously chosen your goals and you’ve made sure they’re both meaningful and big, the work that you need to do to achieve them each day will be hard.

It will be challenging.

And by completing the tasks you’re increasing your skill exposure and demanding effort from your mind.

When your goals are both big enough and meaningful enough, the tasks will be too, so the completion of them is a stimulus for your mind like lifting weights for your muscles.

You push your mind to its limits to produce your highest quality work and complete a cognitively demanding task - giving it a reason to improve.

It’s also a great way to move toward Self-Mastery.

Cognitively demanding tasks that are meaningful have a tonne of friction to doing them.

The simple act of doing them, even when you don’t want to, shows your mind you are in control and that you are the boss.

PS: if you want to learn more about achieving Self-Mastery, click here

You stress and challenge the mind by acquiring specific knowledge aligned with your goals and your curiosities. 

In the gym, you train multiple muscles.

Your mind is no different.

You have to train the action muscle but also the knowledge muscle.

This requires you to increase your knowledge base through research, asking questions, taking courses, hiring mentors and even taking action.

When you, for example, read a difficult book, it’s cognitively demanding to read.

It’s hard. It’s challenging.

It’s a stimulus for your mind and gives it a reason to improve.

Without training the knowledge muscle, you’re left wondering in circles, never actually taking the right actions, hence any improvement you make for the action muscle of your brain is practically pointless (at least in the context of achieving your specific goals).

You recover from the mental stimulus and improve by scheduling time to do nothing

This is the part most people forget and hustle culture has gotten so damn wrong.

You would never hit the gym, ignore recovery, and expect to make gains or even train to your best abilities in the gym.

The same goes for mental work.

If you don’t do nothing, if you don’t prioritise recovery, your mind won’t recover from the stimulus.

Your cognitive capabilities, first off, won’t improve over time, but secondly, will be diminished the next time you try to do focused work.

Hence, the quality of your work will decrease.

Your results will be worse.

And your progress will be slower, and likely non-existent.

This has never been more important than now.

We live in a world glamorising 24/7 work, whilst always being connected and stimulated.

I can guarantee you, that if you’re not scheduling time to do nothing, you’re only working at a % of your potential.

The Mental Bodybuilding Split:

If you go to the gym, you follow what’s called a split.

It’s how you split up the muscle groups you’re training.

You could do push, pull, legs or upper, lower, or full body, or any other countless number of alternatives.

With getting mentally jacked, you need to do the same thing - you need to follow a split.

Luckily though, your mind recovers fast.

It means you can follow a 7-day split where you do this every single day.

You don’t have to.

You can follow this 5 days a week or 6 or whatever, but I recommend doing it daily, largely due to the compounding effects this type of split produces over time.

1-4 hours of meaningful work 

What I mean by meaningful work is focused, deep work on the tasks that will move you toward your goals.

If you’ve consciously chosen your goals correctly and made sure they’re big and meaningful, the work you do toward them will be meaningful.

This work should be done as early in the day as possible, in a distraction-free room with no phones and no other people.

Your sole goal when doing this is to do the task.

Ideally, for the best results, you would do 4 hours of this a day.

But you might not be able to for whatever reason - work, family etc.

So at the very least, you need to be doing 1 hour and preferably 2 hours of this a day.

It’ll move you toward your goals whilst also stimulating your mind enough to give it a reason to improve.

1 hour of knowledge acquisition

You need to improve your knowledge base.

It’ll allow you to make better decisions, take better actions, and get better results.

So every day, spend 1 hour reading, taking courses, googling questions, watching Youtube videos, whatever - just learn.

Ideally what you’re learning is relevant to your goals so that you can apply what you learn in your work blocks.

Again, 1 hour is ideal.

Any more and you’re wasting time - taking action is always more valuable.

If you really can’t spend 1 hour a day learning, spend 30 minutes.

1 hour of nothing 

This is crucial and where most people go wrong.

They don’t do this.

Or they say they do it but in reality spend their time scrolling, watching TV, talking to people, reading and consuming.

That’s not how this works.

Your mind needs time and space to think - IN SILENCE.

Either sit in a room alone, go on a walk, meditate or journal.

That’s it.

In this 1 hour, you’ve no other options.

You must be in silence and you must give your mind the time and space to relax, think and breathe.

You must remove all stimulation not generated by your own mind.

This 1 hour doesn’t have to be at once, you can split it up over the day but I would say you need to at least do it in 10-minute blocks for it to have any sort of effect.

If you value both your creativity and productivity, you need to dedicate time to doing nothing.

Treat your mind like a muscle.

You challenge and stress your mind with deep work, deliberate practice, and research.

You let it grow and recover by scheduling time to do nothing.

- Ross

And when you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:

• Achieve Self-Mastery, unlock your true potential, and smash every goal you set with MasteryOS

• Join the waitlist for cohort 2 of Done In 4

• Learn how to build a multi-6-figure audience and business with Personal BrandBldr