It's September, and I'm entering what I call a grind season. For the next few months, I'm locking in.

Maybe you're grinding towards a goal too. So I want to share what has worked for me, and how I'm able to work 12 hours a day without stopping.

First, be completely clear on the goal.

If you're trying to land a DevOps job, the goal is to land a job.

Learning as much technology as possible and building as many projects as possible only count when they get you there.

I wasted two years in the gym on hypertrophy, thinking about bodybuilding, which is basically a beauty contest. I was making progress, but I wasn't really sure what I was progressing towards.

Then I realized that what I want is strength. I'm already in the top 10% of the strongest guys in my gym. I want to be in the top 1%.

When you are clear on the goal, you eliminate.

When I was working as a nurse and trying to land a DevOps job, I was still playing video games, I was on Tinder, and I was meeting friends all the time.

Then I did a time audit. I was telling myself my goal was to land a job, but 80% of my time was going towards all of this other stuff, and 20% was going to the thing I said was most important in my life.

It's completely fine to enter a season where you just say no to everything else.

Take a year. If you take that year to get in shape and to get the job you want, the rest of your life is going to completely change.

And it's the time, but it's also the mental energy.

If you're trying to study while you're on Tinder (or whatever people use these days), you sit down and your mind goes: I was texting this girl this morning, she said this, what am I going to say next? All of a sudden you find yourself with your phone in your hand, texting again.

When I'm building a course or working on KubeCraft AI, like right now, all of my attention goes towards it.

I wake up at 6, put in a four-hour focus block, and go train. Then on a long walk in the afternoon, my mind is still working on it in the background.

I'll be thinking about something mundane, like what I'm going to get at the grocery store, and all of a sudden, poof.

The solution to a problem I'd been working on suddenly appears.

That can only happen if you limit the number of things you're focusing on. If you're walking around thinking about how to level up the crafting skill on your RPG character, your mind does not have the energy to work on your goal.

Limit your options, and your mind keeps working on your goal while you clean the kitchen or fold the laundry.

It's the ultimate AI agent, and you don't even have to prompt it.

The last thing is sleep.

I used to sleep five hours a night and think that was fine. Now my baseline is seven. I go to bed at 9 and wake up at 5 or 6, no alarm clock.

What got my sleep in order was regularity. I used to stay up until 3 in the morning on weekends, gaming or going out, and that messed up my entire week.

The first month I went to bed at 9 every single day with no exceptions, I started to get tired at the right time and wake up at the right time. Fix that before you take any supplements.

Are you going to enter a season of no? What are you grinding on? Hit reply and tell me.

If you're trying to land a DevOps job, me and my team are there to help you. We specialize in helping support engineers, sys admins and software engineers upskill into DevOps roles. We've built all the systems for you and coach you along the way.