Name: how I studied for 12 hours a day for over a year
Uploaded: 2025-09-10T15:46:36.000Z
Duration: 19 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Future simple

Today we have an important video, probably the most important one I'm ever gonna make.

Past simple

My most asked question, how did you do it?

How did you study for 12 hours a day for over a year?

So yeah, let's just go ahead and talk motivation, discipline, drive, mindset.

So yeah, this is just what worked for me, how I did it, and kind of where I came from.

And yeah, let's just go ahead and get right into it.

So what finally caused that 180 to the point where you're here now?

And definitely the first step that I took was in physics.

Our professor assigned us a TED talk to watch and it was about this thing called the growth mindset.

And in the video they introduced two mindsets.

The first one is the fixed mindset and the second one is the growth mindset.

And in the fixed mindset it's kind of like, alright here is my ceiling and anything outside of that ceiling I'm just not gonna do.

I'm born with a limit and I don't want to push myself.

I'm not smart enough to do this assignment and my boy Greg has got me.

And that's definitely the mindset that I had up until that point in my life, was the fixed mindset.

You know, in high school I did really well without studying.

Why would I study when I can get A's just fine?

But you see when college finally rolled around and it was actually difficult, I didn't think that it was my studying that was a problem, right?

And that was just kind of how I was raised, you know.

That kid's a priority over there, so he's probably not very hard-working and he just is born with all that talent and he can just do it out of the bat.

I really thought that my mindset was the issue and I knew that I had like wanted to do well in university and in life in general.

So the other mindset they introduced is the growth and pushing yourself and breaking yourself down so that you can come back stronger.

It's about not waning in the face of aversion, you know.

And it's not, it's definitely a paradigm shift to what I had before.

And it's the very first step that I took was adopting and understanding the mindset in its entirety.

So if you're not familiar with the growth mindset I highly recommend you check it out and yep that was the first step that I took.

Alright second topic that I want to talk about which is drive, motivation, and the desire to succeed, alright.

I don't know how quickly I could summarize my entire life's experience in these short two minutes or so, but motivation and drive.

The key part that I want you to take out of this following segment is that I don't rely on motivation to do the things that I do.

I think that if you just rely on motivation you're just setting yourself up for failure, right.

You know what, it's raining outside, I don't feel like running, I'm just not gonna go train for the marathon today.

No, it might get you there for like two weeks, but in the long run, no, motivation does not work at all.

So I think when people ask me all the time, how are you so motivated?

The thing is I'm not motivated to do any of this.

I'm driven to do this and that's a very big difference, right.

The fundamental change between the two is that drive continues.

Drive can get you from point A to point B without stopping and it doesn't care about the rain outside when you're trying to go running.

It doesn't care about how cold the water is when you go shower, you know.

And that sounds pretty intense, but you ought to understand that motivation is volatile, you know.

It's easy to be motivated to do hard things when you're comfortable in life, when everything is going just a-okay.

But when you finally face challenges that actually push your buttons, motivation is not gonna work.

I have a difficult time defining it in words, but my desire to succeed kind of does infance a flame inside my heart to get me driven to do the things that I want to achieve.

My goals, my aspirations, those are your drive.

And if you rely on motivation to get them, it won't work.

I think like I hadn't met truly driven people in my life before, you know.

I've met people who are brilliant but also driven.

They wanted to get life's full experience.

That's actually why I started this channel, was to share my drive online.

I don't want to say I read a book, but the book Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins was really important in understanding why I wanted to do the things that I did.

I had this really massive chip on my shoulders all in high school because I was always like the weird kid who wasn't socially successful, wasn't particularly liked by other people.

And I just really remember like hating that feeling, people just looking down on me, you know.

Like I'm just another person that they're gonna meet.

But I just remember being like, I'm just gonna be so driven that you won't forget me.

Yeah, I just always had that chip on my shoulder because I was always just like the weird kid and I just always wanted to do better.

Also will say about the whole drive thing that it's not about showing off how driven you are or anything.

It's not about doing it for other people.

I would say that it was definitely for me.

Like if you watch videos from when I was a little kid or in high school, middle school, you could see how unconfident I was, you know.

Anything that knocked me down, I'll just kind of roll over and lay there.

And understanding why I wanted to do better really took me a long time to figure out.

And I think the book Can't Hurt Me explains the reason for his drive.

And I could see a lot of myself in that person.

And I also wanted to share that with you guys.

I wouldn't say that I did it for other people, you know.

I did it for me because I wanted to become the best person that I could be.

And things like sitting there on Instagram all day, watching pointless YouTube videos all day, running away, don't get me there.

And I really want to connect with people.

And I just wasn't putting the two and two together.

I didn't know what I really wanted until I just been pushed so hard.

The COVID and school, my family, no family, not having a family.

And I realized that I couldn't just stop and care about small things together.