How I Completely Changed Myself in 3 Simple Steps

Simple, not easy.

Photo provided by the author.

This might sound a bit arrogant, but I’ll say it anyway:

The other day, I was so proud and excited about where my life is and where it’s going, that I gave myself chills.

Life’s been unimaginably beautiful lately, and I’m so excited about where everything is going that I can’t hold my excitement back anymore. I’m surrounded by awesome people, I make money doing what I love, and I’m mentally stable.

Dare I say… I’m happy.

My life seems like one grand adventure, but it hasn’t always been like that. In 2017, I was diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. I’ve spent the last 4 years on antidepressants, going to therapy, and desperately trying to “improve myself” mentally.

While I’m not entirely free from mental illness (I’m not sure my symptoms will ever be gone forever), where I am today is night and day from where I was when I was desperately writing cries for help to myself at 3 am in my journal that I knew no one would ever read.

Here’s how I changed myself from a depressed 18-year-old to an irrationally optimistic 24-year-old:

First, I stopped making excuses.

Some people will read this advice and say that I’m propagating a toxic hustle culture, but the truth is that if you want to do anything extraordinary, you’re going to have to work your way past your limiting beliefs.

I realized that my excuses were just verbal expressions of my limiting beliefs that had been hammered into my head by a lifetime of mental illness, bullying, and verbal abuse.

With a lot of hard work on myself, I trained myself to stop making excuses. When I feel an excuse coming now, I don’t deny its existence, I work my way through it. Every excuse is a problem for you to solve.

If you can’t solve the problem, you’ve reached a limit, not an excuse.

Then, I dove headfirst into something I loved.

I don’t really know how to make you or anyone else “successful”, but I can tell you what I did.