As of at least the last few weeks, things have been pretty good for the 32-year-old. At the top of the month, he fortified his catalog with Bravado + Intimo, a new album that sees him flaunt the introspection, dynamic songwriting talents and all-around creativity that have made him a multi-hyphenate with a lot to say and even more ambition.

But no matter how much success he gets, a lot of positive outcomes will flow from a healthy mindset. Speaking with Okayplayer for the latest edition of Pursuit of Happiness, IDK explains how he got there.

IDK: There’s no escaping online negativity. I just tweeted something earlier today that’s going viral. People probably mostly like it, but I’m sure there’s people saying whatever they feel about what I said about Kendrick’s album, but I can tune that shit out. Honestly, there’s been times I’ve gone viral on Twitter and I would’ve never known. That’s the crazy part. It doesn’t really affect you the way you think. A lot of people who say negative things most of the time are actually fans and are very happy when you do actually reach out to them.

I’m in one of the most difficult careers you could possibly ever have or choose that’s extremely volatile and doesn’t have any guarantees, and you have to be very relentless to even get an ounce of what you can out of this. So it’s like every day is a fight. When I actually make things happen and every day’s a fight and there are negative things happening and you hear a lot of no’s before you hear any yes’s, that to me is already priming me for whatever life is and whatever life could hand me. The career that I have and the role that I play within my career is how I’m able to go through all of this stuff.

I don’t have bad days. At the most, I have a couple of bad hours, if that. I can’t dedicate a whole day to negativity. I just power through it. And the thing is, for every bad thing that’s happening, there’s two or three good things happening. There’s probably 10 to 20 things that I can look at and show gratitude for. So to be honest, it’s impossible for me to have a whole bad day.

It’s just gratitude. There’s always something good. You just gotta look for it. There’s always something good happening in everybody’s life. Some people have trouble seeing it, and that’s the problem. You have to be able to not have trouble seeing it.

The ways I dealt with my problems in the past were probably not the most healthy. When I was younger, I focused a lot of my energy on things I could not control and tried to figure out how I could shift those things. And I realized that most of life is not a battle. It’s a perception of what you want your reality to be. And you can often shift what that is based off of circumstances. A lot of what makes you happy or sad is in the way that you view things. So I stopped viewing things as negative and look for the positives in each situation.

Controlled is the way I’d describe my current mental health. I focus on the things that I can control in order to control how I feel emotionally and mentally. So whenever things happen and are in my life that I don’t control, I try to relinquish the power of those things and shift my focus to what I do control.