In August 2015, I boldly proclaimed that I would become a "deadlifting badarse". In my own world, that meant being able to deadlift 136kg. I struggled with 93kg at the time, so 136kg felt like a dream goal, the kind a four-year-old might blurt out. Then, last week I finally deadlifted 125kg for the first time!

Positive thinking has a ton of benefits, from expanding your creativity to boosting your health, but if you're prone to a more negative outlook, it can be hard to see the glass as half full. Here's how you can retrain your brain to become a more positive thinker.

Rock climbing is one hell of a strength-building workout. Not just for your upper body, but for everything. I recently joined a rock climbing gym in Los Angeles, paying $US79 ($103) each month for something I actually love to hate. And yet I keep going because, in addition to training my body, I am really training to get over my fear of failure.

The other day at the gym, I found this bag of peanut butter "protein cookies" and was utterly fascinated by it. The packaging proudly displays "18 grams of protein per bag", along with every healthy-sounding buzzword there is: Non-GMO, gluten-free and high protein. Let's not put on airs, bag of cookies, you're still junk food.

I often imagine the leaning tower of Pisa to be a physical manifestation of my ebook queue. I want to finish more books, but can't seem to get through them quickly enough. As Harvard Business Review (HBR) explains, it's not about reading speed, but about creating concerted efforts to read. Here are tips to do just that.

What you believe has a strong impact on how you perceive bad events. If you build your life around your job, losing it can hurt you a lot more than if you believe you can switch jobs and still be happy. Changing those beliefs can help make the inevitable bad events easier to deal with.

Shyness isn't a lifelong personality trait. Learning to talk to strangers is a skill you can acquire. Want to know how Conan O'Brien and Will Ferrell got over their shyness? Using a technique called "radical implosion".

There's something to learn from an Olympic athlete's work ethic, even when the games are over. Sure, they spend most waking hours training, but the part where they set epic goals and grind it out, day in and day out, even when it sucks, even if you never get there? That's what's important.

Doubt is essential to your health goals, says Mark Sisson. If you're too sure and get stuck on your beliefs, you end up ignoring the other possibilities that can lead to the real ah-ha moments that help you break through plateaus and reach your goals. So, have a little doubt.

When stress is high and anxiety has taken over, the hardest thing anyone can do is "calm down". What if, instead, you capitalised on this negative, heightened emotion and turned it into a more positive one, like excitement. Start by telling yourself, "I am excited."

Before you even finish high school, you were probably bombarded with people telling you how to achieve "success". Without your own definition, though, that advice is meaningless.

Everyone has heard the old adage, "practise makes perfect." Practice isn't just for building skills, though. It's also for maintaining the ones you've already built.

It's important to learn the basics of personal finance, but the way you think about money is perhaps more important. A lot of personal finance experts have said this in one way or another, but I like the way Mr Money Mustache says it best: "Getting rich is more mental than it is tactical."

Every year on the first day of April, everyone puts on their thinking cap and knowingly views much of what they hear or see with a healthy dose of scepticism. Instead of doing this only on April Fool's, treat every new piece of information as if it's April 1 to think more critically every day.

You ever wonder how people who never give up get the strength to do it? How do they keep going when everything is against them? Turns out, it the people they surround themselves with might be a big part of their resilience.

Developing discipline is all about doing the little things right. Small wins can set the tone of your day, including the very first moment when your alarm clock goes off.

Confidence can be an enviable quality. Being completely assured of yourself and your abilities gives you the courage to take risks and accomplish great things. But confidence doesn't always come easy, and it can come and go depending on your mood. The good news: you can fake it pretty easily.

It's easy to get hung up on someone else's mistakes. From the outside, you can see all the ways they could've done something differently. It's so obvious! Instead of wasting that energy on choices you can't control, examine your own.

Breaking out of your daily routines can be a powerful way to unlock great new ideas, both personally and professionally. Jazz musicians and improv comedians are often masters at this idea of breaking from routine and taking a novel approach.