You’re not blessed with resilience; you build it.

The world of self-help YouTube self improvement mindset habits routines it's a very strange place.

We like to focus on the things that we can control and certainly there is a huge power in this, but it's not foundational to think of the great ambition that 2020 started with the great hope, the great promise that so many people had and the immense challenge that it's turned into.

Imagine, if you will, a young man working away studying for his exams while his  parents live thousands of miles away suddenly he receives a call that his mother has developed cancer, in fact it's late stage and they don't have money for treatment. Suddenly all of his productivity, ambitions and his great mindset is all for naught, his goals are completely reprioritized.

It's not about productivity anymore, it's about being the rock to his family and so in this regard, paying attention to your mental toughness and trying to cultivate it further, I think becomes very important and the works of the person the words of the person that I want to use for this video perhaps one of the Paragons of mental toughness in the modern world is David Goggins: he was a man who went from depression, poverty, obesity to someone who took on the disgusting monster that has been and is racism in America. He took those obstacles and refined them into becoming the toughest man alive.

As he himself says at the close of his book Can't Hurt Me: "peering into the abyss sent my mind reeling back to the days, weeks, years like fingers flipping through old files". I found all the best parts and tackled them together into a highlight live streamed on repeat.

I grew up beat down and abused, filtered, uneducated through a system that rejected me at every turn, until I took ownership and started to change.

I was the sum total of the obstacles I'd overcome.

Goggins argues that it was rage that built him, but I would actually say it's something else: it's this notion of cultivating an ideal for self.

Hypothetically this is a version of you, perhaps in the great multiverse that is the ideal you.

You, not necessarily with better prospects, a better life background, more resources or time or better looks, but just a version of you who lives up to the best of what he or she is capable of doing and the only way to close that gap between this hypothetical ideal and who you are right now, is to clarify what this ideal is and then to look upon this ideal with emotion regularly.

As Joe Rogan once put it: "the real way to do it is you've got to write down with the you want and go after it."

• Write down things you want to improve;
• Write down things you won't tolerate from yourself;
• write down things you never want to see yourself do again

Essentially this isn't a principle about taking action but rather just getting immense clarity, get immense clarity on who you would like to be ideally:

• if self-discipline wasn't the problem;
• if the temptations of the world weren't a problem;
• if you could be who you wanted to be;
• if you could program yourself as your own ideal

what would that ideal look like?

Once you know what it is, all you have to do, is to look upon it regularly, to feel it with emotion.

A strange thing happens when you continuously immerse yourself in your ideal, even if you don't want to change, you start to.

The thoughts that are forcefully cultivated in the mind begin to take root, they cultivate, they eventually harvest.

As such when your mind is rooted with the ideals that you really believe in you develop the capacity to practice those ideals in all circumstances, even if those circumstances are positive or when things fall apart when your bank balance falls low when someone swindles you when, you don't know what to do with your career next or god forbid when a loved one gets cancer.

That ideal propels you through all facets of life, it carries you, it's your North Star.

These ideals demonstrate themselves in all circumstances you take on the persona of your ideal and it defines you.