Akshath Sharma: You Are One Step Away, The Story of Becoming Your Best Self [YouTuber, 59.3k Subscribers, India]

Akshath Sharma Interview

A Simple yet powerful philosophy “Success is built through showing up everyday even when motivation fades” this belief has inspired around 59,000+ subscribers, and garnered 6 million views across his channel where he advocates discipline, consistency and perseverance. In this conversation with Eat my news, he shares his journey and reflects on how he continues to unlock his fullest potential.

Q. Could you please introduce yourself to the audience?

Hi, I’m Akshath Sharma a 21-year-old full time Self Improvement creator, and part time Media Science Student. I found very early on in life that Self Improvement is the ultimate answer to all of my desires in life, so far, I’ve been able to achieve almost everything I’ve wanted with the help of constantly improving myself, whether that’s improving my looks, health, charisma, social skills, confidence or my mindset. 

When I graduated from high school, I realized there’s a huge discrepancy, I saw that there were millions of people like me in India that were hyper conscious of the world and saw it as it was with no sense of victimization. Instead, they wanted to mold themselves to take advantage to the system but couldn’t find an Indian face to lead them, to be able to relate to, that’s when I decided I’m going to take the responsibility and become their “bade bhaiya” and guide them. Fast forward 2 years now, I’ve posted more than 450 videos on my YouTube channel and have gathered a very engaged audience of 59k subscribers and 6 million views across my channel over this period.

 

Q. You have built massive community around the idea that discipline alone can bring the best out of you and holds more importance than luck, talent or motivation. Looking back at your early days before the gym and the videos, what was the personal breaking point that made you stop relying on "feeling motivated" and switch to a lifestyle of strict, unyielding structure?

I would say it was the undying feeling of, uncertainty and confusion, every single day I felt like I’m getting nowhere, I remembered reading this amazing book called “the secret” and, it’s basically a whole book talking about manifestation and I’m a very firm believer in manifestation, in fact a lot of the life that I’m living right now is majorly manifested. I remember reading that, in order to make something come true, bring something that merely exists in your subconscious onto the real world, you need to have absolute faith, almost delusional faith. 

This, for me, was the turning point, it’s when I thought, forget about everything, from this point forward, everything that happens, everything I feel, everything I do, is just part of the process, it was supposed to happen. Once I decided that I can’t make any wrong decisions, suddenly everything started to play out exactly how I wanted it to. I learnt a lot, and I made a plan, I did a lot of research, I started to read a lot of books, and through that phase I learnt, through trial and error, that I needed Discipline in life, because only discipline is constant, and consistency compounds. 

Q. In your famous "90-Day Hybrid Challenge," you are chasing two athletic extremes that most people avoid combining: hitting heavy numbers on the power racks while training for a 10km run. Psychologically, how do you train your mind to handle the contrast between the explosive, aggressive energy needed for lifting and the calm, enduring patience required for long-distance running? 

First of all, I feel like I should point this out, that I wasn’t able to do the 10km run, because I realized early on that I didn’t want it badly enough, but I was able to tick every other box from my challenge, which were a 100kg bench press, a 100kg row, and 200kg leg press. Back then, my max were around 80kg on bench press, 85-90kgs on rows, and 160kg on the leg press, so the jump was quite extreme, but I always give myself bigger goals than what I “think” I can accomplish, just so I learn from the process and also push myself out of my comfort zone, this also itches my competitive itch, being someone who’s hyper competitive. 

Psychologically? It was definitely one of the hardest things I have done, not because of the amount of things I had to accomplish, or even the severity of the whole challenge, simply because when you’re challenging yourself to push your body to its limits, it takes a lot time, and I’ve noticed that I can be impatient sometimes, and I’m the kind of person who wants to do everything at the same time, and get really busy, early. But when you’re training for strength and long-distance running? You really need to take care of your recovery, because one bad recovery day can push your progress back a week, and if at all you get injured, you’re down for months. That for me, was the hardest part, holding myself back, saying no to myself when I wanted to do more. 

Q. You openly tell your audience to "watch me win or watch me fail, but either way, I’ll show up." In a digital landscape where creators usually only show their perfect days, how difficult was it to uncouple your self-worth from public expectations and give yourself permission to post raw, unedited struggles online? 

Very honestly speaking, I’ve always been a werido, I don’t know if that’s because of how my father raised me, because he’d always tell me things that I feel like no other father would say, since he’s served in the Air Force, even as a child I respected his world view, because I felt there’s a certain level of competence you need to have if you’re enlisted in any defense sector. 

He would actively tell me things like, “It’s okay if you don’t score good marks in your exams, but you must always study to score 90%+, if you score 70% but you worked extremely hard and your goal was 90%, I’m happy”. I remember this one time, I suddenly had gotten very weird about studies suddenly in 7th standard, I think it’s because I had infiltrated the “popular over-achievers” friend group somehow, even though I wasn’t popular or good in sports or good in studies. 

I remember studying really hard that summer and in the end semester I only scored 72% when I was sure I’d do somewhere around 85%, my father went to the PTA meeting with me, and the teacher was shocked as well, she said something like, he always hangs out with the best students, he’s active and participates in call, he never makes any trouble, I thought he’d score way more than this, she was clearly disappointed and that made me sad, but as soon as we were walking out of the school and we sat in the car, my father noticed I was a bit too quite, he didn’t say anything, he drove us to a Ice-cream shop, and we ate Ice-cream and he told me, he doesn’t care how I do in school, he doesn’t care if I had even gotten 60%. I felt very relieved, and that liberated me, I realized that, I don’t need anyone’s approval, I was sad not because my teacher was disappointed in me, it was because I had assumed that my father would be too. 

To me, only my parent’s opinion of me matters, second to only my own. As long as I am proud of who i am, and my parents are, I know I’ll do well. So, it wasn’t that difficult, because I started off thinking, this is work, I was never putting myself in a vulnerable position because I wasn’t faking anything, everything I’ve ever said has been my honest opinion or experience, that’s why I’m proud of it. 

Q. Fitness and self-improvement spaces online are flooded with unrealistic aesthetics and toxic comparisons. For a teenager or young creator looking at your journey, what practical mental boundary should they set to prevent internet content from making them feel inadequate about their own physical progress?

For me personally, toxic comparisons have been a fuel, not a negative thing honestly, Sure if you’re at level 2 of your self-Improvement/fitness journey, seeing someone at their level 87 can feel really demotivating, but that’s the thing about comparison as a whole, you admire people above you, you get inspired from the people above you, but always compare yourself to your past self. 

You can’t know what unfair advantages they had, if their elder brother is a bodybuilder, if they have access to steroids, if their mother is a nutritionist, you don’t know. These things are genuinely like having cheat codes in real life, don’t get me wrong, they still would’ve had to put in the work, I’m not denying that, but they didn’t have to start from absolute 0 like a lot of us had to. 

So, before you compare yourself to others and you feel like you could have a little more muscle or a little less fat, stop for a moment and think, what would the 17-year-old version of you think? For me? at 17 I never would’ve imagined I’d look like this in just 4 years, back then I just wanted abs, now whenever I take my shirt off, I get compliments, not just on social media, in real life too. 

Always remember, that growth is silent, every single time you show up to the gym and nobody saw it? it counts, every time you felt lonely and wanted to cry but grinded harder and you think nobody saw it so it didn’t matter, it 100% did, that’s because those are the moments you grow in, and as long as you’re growing, it matters. 

Q. When you spend hours planning, filming, and editing content based around your lifestyle and physique, the digital identity can start to consume the personal one. Where do you draw the line between "Akshath the Content Creator" and "Akshath the Person" to protect your inner peace when the camera is turned off? 

Well, there are things that I do for fun that I’ll never use as a means to make content, for example, nostalgia for me is a very strong emotion, it’s very powerful and it fires me up. Whenever I’m feeling down, I watch cartoons like, ShinChan or Doraemon because these are things that I grew up with, they remind me of a simpler time, and it fires me up because everything I’m doing, I’m doing it to someday be able to replicate that same feeling of calm and simplicity. 

When all this is over, I want to move to the countryside of Japan and Spend my 40s living calmly with my family, raising good children and enjoying peace and quite like I did when I was a boy. There are aspects of my life that I keep sacred that I won’t share, I’ll never share my girlfriend on YouTube, I’ll never be a “vlogger”, because even though you get views, your entire life, just ends up becoming content.

I batch my videos, I record multiple videos on the same day, this was I’m not spending hours every day, just a couple hours a week, so I still have a life outside of content. With that said, I 100% believe that there is for sure a time where you make content or whatever work you do, your entire life, because when you’re building something, it’s like raising a child, it requires your absolute attention, I’ve reached a point on my channel where if I don’t do anything new or make a drastic change, I’ll still hit 100k by the end of this year, that’s because I’ve “raised” my channel well, I gave it time and attention and effort when it needed it. 

Q. A lot of people start a self-improvement journey but quit the moment life gets stressful or results slow down. From your experience pushing through exhaustion, what is the single most effective psychological shield someone can activate on the days their mind is screaming at them to take a shortcut? 

For me personally, I always think of this visual of a miner digging for diamonds, and just as he’s about to hit diamonds and if inches away from it, he gives up. That has been the most powerful visual for me. I have another story to take this point home; it’s a story about a Millionaire and a blind beggar. There’s a park where a Millionaire baller comes every single day for a jog, because he owns it, and every single day he sees this beggar sitting outside his park begging for money. Let me describe the park, it’s a perfect circle and it’s got a weird artistic design with fountains and criss-cross pathways in the middle, but the boundary of the park is just made of gates, the entire boundary of the park is made up of 100 individual gates, that are individually opened and closed every morning and night.

One day the Millionaire had just closed a really big deal and was in a very good mood, he went for his morning jog, he saw the beggar sitting outside his park, took little notice of him and went, when he had completed his jog he saw the beggar on his way back and for some reason he took pity to the poor guy, he gently touched the beggar’s shoulder and told him, if he wants to get his eye sight back, to meet him at the park in the evening, just before it closes. That’s exactly what he did, when they met, the Millionaire guy said, I’ll pay for your eye operation if tomorrow you meet me outside this park (obviously there’s a catch), but I’m going to lock you inside this park today, I’ll lock all the gates but leave 1 open, and it’s task to find that 1 gate and get out, the beggar agreed, and he spent the whole night, individually touching the border of the park, he thought this must be a cruel prank, because he just kept going and going and couldn’t feel an opening, he got tired and fell asleep out of frustration. 

The next morning when the Millionaire found him, he was sitting on the closed gate which was just before the one that was open. I often think of these visuals and stories because you have no way of knowing when you will get your lucky break, I think that god tests you, whether you have the competence for what he’s about to gift you with. I think this is why people say “you don’t always get what you want” it’s because they give up. 

I’ve never, “not gotten” what I want, because I refuse to give up, especially when it gets difficult. Even in my content creation journey, I would much much rather go from 10k-50k than go from 5k-10k because it was infinitely more stressful and difficult of a jump. I had to go to a very dark place, and keep my head down and I prayed, and I worked, and nothing seemed to work, until….it did.

Q. If you were suddenly granted a magical "zero-calorie, maximum-protein" pass for exactly one hour, what is the ultimate, most chaotic cheat meal or street food combination you are putting away? 

Oh my god, what I wouldn’t do for this wish. There are the obvious ones- 8 pieces of popeye’s fried chicken, with 2 Tandoori Zingers from KFC (KFC does burgers better) Meat lovers pizza (cheese burst), Tandoori chicken momo and Malai chicken momo (from Darjeeling in Delhi), Large Pepsi and Fanta. I’ll also have Amritsari Kulche with chole, very obviously (being from Delhi),I’ll have Carbonara plus Quattro cheese 2x spicy ramen mixed together from Buldak. 

I’ll have Oreo Ice cream sandwiches from Baskin Robbins, an Oreo Cornetto cone, and also have a full tray of this cheese cake that I make every Christmas (or whenever I want). That’s all, you’ll notice a lot of these things are not going together that’s because I’ve moved to Darjeeling from Delhi and I’m Hyper fixated over Delhi food because that’s the best food all over India, plus I’m currently on a cut so all I’m doing is fanaticizing about food and not eating it, so thank you for this wonderfully gluttonous reminding. 

Bio:

Akshath is a New Delhi-based digital content creator and YouTuber who focuses on self-improvement, cognitive performance, and lifestyle productivity. With a dedicated and fast-growing community on Youtube, his channel operates under the core mantra to "Influence, Inspire, Educate, and Entertain". Today, he produces long-form conceptual deep-dives, short-form motivational content, and specialized webinars, breaking down the practical sciences of discipline, consistency, and digital self-mastery to help young individuals unlock their highest potential.

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Interviewed By: Anwesha Rai