Release Your Mind

Once I changed my perspective on life, I started straining my brain every single day. I started reading two hours a day and taking extensive notes of the things I learned. I also started writing articles to share the ideas I learned. In the beginning, I felt like a new world opened up to me. I couldn’t get enough of learning more.

I bought new books every week and devoured every piece of new knowledge I could get my hands on. But after a few weeks, I had a mental breakdown. All of a sudden, my mind froze up. I felt blocked. I couldn’t think, read, or write. My head hurt all day long. That went on for a few days, almost a week. I felt ill and I didn’t understand why. I couldn’t even think about why. And when I felt better, I just picked up where I left off.

This time, I went on for longer, about two months before I hit another wall. But this time it was different again. No matter what I tried, I didn’t feel like I was improving or learning new things. But I kept going and pushing through the difficulty.

After this pattern occurred a few times, I finally understood what was going on. Training your mind happens in stages—and before you can move on to the next phase of your learning development, you have to get through a wall. I believe that both learning skills and developing yourself happen in stages.

At the beginning of a new stage, things are easy to learn because everything is new. But the closer you get to the end of a stage, things get more difficult.

In my case, I got headaches. But I wasn’t near the end yet because, after a short setback, I got back at it again. At some point, you hit a big wall. That’s the mental breakdown. It’s also a point at which you want to give up whatever you’re trying to achieve Writing a book, starting a business, changing your career or leading a group of people. When you hit a wall, everything stops.

The book all of a sudden seems useless, the business seems to fail, the career you want seems unreachable, and the people have stopped taking you seriously. All is lost.

I’ve learned to train my brain to take this as a positive moment. When I reach a wall, I know I’m close to the next stage of my development. Instead of giving up, I’m happy. All I need to do, is to take a break, rejuvenate, and let my mind recover. I hang out with my friends.

Play some table tennis with my brother at our office. Listen to my favorite artist like Don Moen, Watch movies (a lot of them). I just take some time to relax and let my brain get stronger while I’m not thinking or working on anything. And then, I get back to where I left off. I use my energy to break through the wall. And it always works.

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