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A Willingness to Endure Pain

Byjack

It is extremely hard to be yourself all the time. There will always be things that you want to avoid, that you are afraid of. Specifically, things that you don’t like about yourself.

Control gives the illusion of happiness. The fear of loss of control is like all fear and uncomfortable feelings. It is not something that needs a solution or be avoided. You don’t solve the lack of control by being more controlling. You don’t solve fear by avoiding your fear.

Emotions are meant to be reacted to, and the solution is meant to come to you, not something to be forced into existence. The most healthy way to process painful emotions is through physicality, expression and meditation:

  • Physicality – punching, running, yelling, screaming, crying and sort of physical release
  • Expression – writing, talking, recording a video diary
  • Meditation – letting the emotions come and go

I used to write that you should follow what you feel. Sometimes, you don’t KNOW how you feel. That’s ok. Clarity is about patience. The patience to wait for the answers to come, to be able to sit in the pain for long enough to see the truth.

And at the end of the day, clarity will bring an understanding of not just how we feel, why we feel it, but what we truly want. That is truly being ourselves, following what we want in the moment. Embracing that is the key to true happiness, confidence, and feeling truly alive.

The Perfect Job

Byjack

For the longest time, I’ve thought that my job was pretty much perfect. It wasn’t the highest paying job, or the one that I loved the most, but I think it has many many good elements such as:

  • Good enough pay to never have to worry about money
  • Good work/life balance, lots of work sometimes, little work others
  • Lots of traveling
  • Get to practice speaking and work on fun projects

Obviously, I could find a job even better in every area, but this is quite good already.

I realized recently why I still feel tired and think that it is too much work so often. THE WORK LIFE BALANCE IS HORRIBLE.

Ok, I understand I just contradicted myself there, but the reason why I think the work life balance is good is because on paper, there are lots of downtime where I can do whatever I want. However, because of the amount of emotional pressure that I put on myself, I’m actually always thinking about work which means that there is actually no worklife balance at all.

I worry if I kick back and ignore work for a while:

  • I will not be able to focus when I really need to so I need to get all the work done that I can
  • I will not be able to have enough time to get my work done when I really need to so I need to be working all the time
  • Someone will ask me what I’ve been working on and I will be outed as someone who is not contributing anything

Some of the anxieties I have around actually working:

  • I worry I will create ugly applications and I will come off as bad and incompetent
  • I worry I will not build enough for my application and I will come off as lazy or incompetent
  • I worry that when I go into meetings I will look unprepared and stupid

If I am able to deal with the emotional burden of this job and turn work into something soothing and relaxing for me, I will actually be so happy in this job. This will be the easiest money I will ever make and it will free me up to make money in other ways as well.

I’m going to do this in a couple of ways:

  1. Practice acceptance of where I am. Give myself permission to be bad
  2. Reprogram the idea that I will be rejected if I am not perfect
  3. Look for ways to make my job extremely easy
  4. Find ways to meet my needs through my jobs

So Step 1:

I am lazy, incompetent, unproductive and stupid. I accept myself for it. I give myself permission to be this way as much as I want to be.

Step 2:

The Bossy Man

In the meeting

Which I spent

Almost no time preparing for

He asked me to show

Something

I didn’t want to show

I said no

The meeting

Was under my

Control

 

The Finicky Architect

I created something

That I didn’t think

Was good enough

To stop him from asking question

Yet I showed up not to impress

But to help

And we were both happy

By the end

Step 3:

Where are the hardest parts of my job?

1 – Learning about new technology

  • Takes a long time
  • Hard to know what to focus on
  • Hard to remember

Ideas on how to make it easier:

  • Create materials for myself to make my life easier (cheat sheets, presentations)
  • Look for a way to make my life easier
  • Timebox an attempt to learn quickly
  • Focus on one area that has impact

2 – Building mockups

  • Takes time to understand the customer’s process
  • Hard to formulate what I need
  • Hard to understand how to design it
  • Hard to work out the technical parts of building out a process

Ideas on how to make it easier:

  • Clearly articulate what I need
    • The interfaces
      • What the style is
    • The processes
    • The data structures
    • The priority
  • Get help on the UI
  • Get help on the build itself

3 – Presenting the product

  • Never know what they will ask me to explain or click on
  • Hard to boil down the flow to a few steps
  • People may want to test you on areas that they don’t understand or may be hard to show

Ideas on how to make it easier:

  • Get the clarity I need:
    • Why they are asking the question?
    • What are they testing me on? What is the thing I need to prove?
    • What do they already know or understand?
  • Pause
    • Think about my gameplan
    • Use metaphors to bridge understanding gaps
    • Walk through what I’m about to do in my head before I do it on the screen

Step 4:

The most annoying things at work and how I will meet my needs through it:

  • Building mockups
    • Contribution: Who am I helping with this?
    • Growth: What will I do better with this demo?
    • Significance: What special signature will be mine?
    • Uncertainty: What is it that interests me the most about this demo?
    • Certainty: What do I want to copy? Who can make my life easier? How long do I need realistically?
  • Filing expense reports, doing training and filing quarterly reviews
    • Love and Connection: Who can I have a working/hangout session with?
    • Uncertainty: What time challenge should I give myself?
  • Boring meetings/trainings
    • Certainty: Why am I joining? What questions do I need to ask? If none, make a note of what I need from the meeting and watch the recording.
    • Love and Connection: Reach out to the presenter and tell them what you liked
  • Giving demos and presentations
    • Contribution: How can I be the most helpful?
    • Significance: Why am I showing this? 
    • Uncertainty: Don’t prepare
    • Certainty: What am I afraid of?

Ok, that’s it for now. I will say that writing this blog post has been tremendously helpful. I will be referencing this over and over again it is just so useful. Hopefully after using it many many times, it will be ingrained within me and I won’t need to look at it anymore.

Feeling Awful Waking Up

Byjack

Yesterday, I went to bed late. I didn’t want to wake up the next day.

Today was the next day. And it sucked. Just like I had feared. I was tired. I was stressed. I was an hour late to a meeting that was at 8AM.

Today I wanted to find a new solution. I want to find a different way to look at things. And I think I found it.

Here are the key parts of my new mindset:

  1. Think about how much money I want to make today from 0 to about $500. Think about what projects I want to work on that will be worth that much.
  2. Think about how I want to increase the value of the company I am contracted to – so I can have a success story and be paid more.
  3. Take care of myself. Make tea, go for a walk.
  4. Go to a nice place to work, go through my to do list. Create my workpost for the day.

If work is demanded early without having time to prepare, compensate myself an hour. Then bring blankets and other comfy things to my chair to make myself comfy and allow myself to wake up slowly.

How to Face Things Head On

Byjack

So something that I’ve been sort of obsessed with recently is how to face your problems head-on. In so many areas of my life, I struggle to do that. In my professional career, tasks that stress me out send me to my couch with my phone. When I don’t know what to say to my mom and my dad, I immediately turn on my audiobook, eager to dull the pain in my chest. When I am feeling stressed about a fight in Valorant, I rush and try to ignore the mounting feelings of anxiety.

I would really like to find a way to flip the script because it is so rewarding. When I do a task that I worry about, I feel energized, and not tired from work. When I focus on my feelings of anxiety in Valorant, I become much more aware of what my intuition is telling me, that I need to slow down and play the situation very carefully.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SgkiR5tSmo&ab_channel=TheOutcome

I think this is a really interesting concept. I want to make a bit of an amendment. In the video they talk about trying to get better problems, that being able to have money problems when you are rich vs money problems when you are poor is much better (where you invest, vs how to survive). But I kind of disagree. The problem of survival is ultimately a much more rewarding problem for me than where to invest.

I do think that this is a powerful idea, and a way to reframe problems. My thoughts are as follows:

  • Avoiding problems comes from the fear of failure
  • We can address this by embracing failure
  • But we don’t want to just fail at anything…this is where choosing your problems come in
  • Instead of failing at a random problem, embrace failing and learning from a meaningful problem
  • Ex: I am afraid I don’t know how to respond to my parents
    • The meaningful problem here is to learn to create a bond with my parents while standing strong in my own life and boundaries
    • Accept failure and believe in my ability to learn from a failure at this problem
  • Essentially, turn every problem into a challenge
  • Another example: I don’t know what to do next in my demo build and it’s overwhelming and a lot of work
    • The meaningful problem here is finding how to be efficient at my job, and to work as a team without people pleasing to my own detriment (creating boundaries)
    • Accept failure at this and my ability to learn from that failure

Practicing Courage

Byjack

Today I felt overwhelmed. Work felt like a huge heavy complicated mess.

Making a smoothie felt like it would be hard and painful (to walk around).

I played games to avoid the feelings…for hours.

I was so desperate for a solution I spend time with AI to work through the emotions.

First, the therapy led me to the wisdom that I needed to spend some time to feel the fears I was feeling:

  1. The fear of death – the great unknown of my injuries and with work
  2. The fear of inadequacy – letting my carefully maintained image of myself as successful and smart and talented crumble before me
  3. The fear of abandonment – feeling that if I let others know how bad of a place I am in, that they would know how defective I am

The fear of abandonment and being defective was so strong I felt I needed to remember a time when I felt safe and whole. And that led me back to New York, many years ago, approaching women on the street with a dating coach.

I felt free. It wasn’t until I thought about it more that I realized why. daygaming gave me a glimpse of ultimate self love. A time when you bare your soul on the street and allow people to reject you is the most freeing emotions of all time.

I will say though that daygaming also traumatized me. Majorly. After mulling it over some more I concluded the main difference was that when I was alone, I was scared. And instead of seeking support, I beat myself up and criticized myself.

I’ve been seeking the daygaming formula for freedom for so long I feel excited I figured out a part of it:

  1. Courage is the currency of self love. Ask yourself what the courageous thing to do is and make a decision to do it. If possible involve someone in on this decision (can be yourself).
  2. Let the energy carry the action. Instead of being spurred forward by pressure, feel the moment, let the tension of the moment stand your hair on your arm. Let the noisy energy of fear and anxiety make you feel alive, spur your action.
  3. If the fear becomes too great, seek comfort, reassurance from someone else, someone you trust (this can be yourself)

Follow what you feel.

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Valorant 19: The True Warmup

Byjack

In my Valorant journey right now, I’m very interested in perfecting strafe shooting and proper clearing. 

I heard that one of the elements of getting really good is about focusing on fewer things. What I’m really working on right now is getting something out of my warmups.

I usually play deathmatch until I feel like I’m hitting my shots and then jump into a match. But, now I’m thinking I need to let go of trying to push off from the confidence in a good deathmatch and instead working on making the mechanics more intuitive…meaning I need to deathmatch until I can hit shots even if I’m not match mvp, my clears, peeks and jiggles feel COMFORTABLE. Even if that means going into some deathmatches where it is really hard and everyone on taps me. The point of warmup should be when I feel like I’m not having trouble hitting shot anymore.