In The Wreckage

I feel pretty awful. I’ve lost focus in work. I feel overwhelmed and unhappy. Every day I stay up late at night. The only solace I find is in games. Everything that I wanted to do now feels like things I have to do.

I struggle to regain the mentality that I use for these workposts.

I guess I feel extremely tired and depressed.

There are a couple of things that filter through the haze that I’m feeling:

1. I want to find a way to post on LinkedIn again. That is the one thing I want to work on achieving.
2. This new idea in taichi, and breathwork. To receive what is coming instead of taking. To allow things to come to me. To receive breath instead of taking it. To receive emotions, purpose, and understanding, instead of creating it. I feel this is the essence of patience.
3. To be curious. I want to do more IFS therapy, but I feel overwhelmed by it. Too much thinking about thinking that is too cerebral, non-intuitive, and downright frustrating. However, we can take the core concept of IFS – the concept of creativity. Ask how do I feel? What do I need? Why do I feel that way.

It’s not been all lost I suppose. There was something I worked through recently – two people that I am jealous of. One who went to Harvard and ended up starting a successful youtube channel, and another who worked on my software company before leaving and getting big on youtube for his music, and is now a famous musician.

In speaking with my friend Edgar about this I came up with the following concepts to remind myself in times of jealousy:

1. How do I want to succeed my way? The issue with a lot of these people is that they got successful in things that I want to succeed in, but not in the way that I want to succeed. There is great value in succeed in the way I want to succeed.
2. Hardship creates growth. Success isn’t the end goal, success just leads to creating more challenges for yourself to work through. The ones who go down the harder path to begin with will still succeed but will be more complete when they do.
3. Is my goal to succeed a little in the short term? Or is the goal much bigger? This is the concept that if I want to gain one rank in Valorant, the outcome of a match matters (because my elo will be impacted directly). If my goal is to get to radiant (the highest rank), one loss in the scale of a huge journey is not significant.

Finally, I’ve put off doing a LinkedIn post for far too long.

Let’s tackle the steps:

1. Answer a list of questions in a letter to my girlfriend.
2. Come up with a research plan and timebox it.
3. Timebox getting everything “on the canvas”, move very fast, get messy, take big risks, keep going until it coalesces into what the art wants to be
4. Break to do other things, view work from different angles
5. Put on strategic hat to finish

Questions to ask myself (step 1):

1. What my vision for the ideal post?
2. What am I worried about and feel uncomfortable by?
3. What do I want to learn when creating this post?

Strategic Hat

• See the work as something in itself, not just as a manifestation of my ideas
• Put on creative hat, check: is there some feeling here, is there some beauty, fun?
• Put on producer hat, check: if this was a work created by one of my clients, how would I promote it? If it was done by my brother?

*One Big Thing I Noticed*

It’s a lot easier for me to be motivated to workout than to work. Plan workout sessions for the entire day and bring work to do during those times. If no work gets done, I am still being productive and will be healthier, guaranteeing better work in the future.

So I’m pretty frustrated because this is the second time I am writing this blog post. The first time I wrote this blog post, the post was bugging out and didn’t save properly.

Not too happy about that.

In the spirit of growth, I am going to let go of that blog post and focus on creating an entirely new one without losing the essence of what I wanted to say in the first one I wrote.

This morning I was feeling really stressed out and I was really enjoying my walk. I feel like this whole questions meditations thing has really worked out. I really like journaling at night, and walking during the day. Before when I was forcing myself to go outside because I felt like I had to, I kinda hated it. It was nice once I got outside, but before then it was pretty awful.

Now, since I know I’m going use the time to meditate on some of the questions I have in my heart, I feel really excited and motivated to go outside in the morning.

Here are the main things I was stressed out about this morning:

1. My career, didn’t know where I was going next
2. My medical bills, spent 8k on a new medical device, hundreds more for my GI doctor
3. My financial issues, I spent 700 more than I made yesterday
4. My coaching career, still not anywhere close to making enough money to be self sufficient
5. I could move back home, but then I’m worried about having a place for my girlfriend to visit me

And through my amazing short 20 minute walk, here are the answers I got:

1. Acknowledge that you are taking a huge risk by paying 1,700 per month on rent with very little income and building coaching business from 0
2. Risk is not a bad thing, it is an incredible catalyst for growth
3. Risk means, now is the time to shine. Focus on the few things that matter most
   • Building an really strong foundation of health, a very strong structure for getting stuff done
   • Changing the lives of my current coaching clients
   • Work slowly towards my career in AI
4. It’s ok to invest money in the medical bills because they directly help with my foundational health goal. Double down on the investment by focusing a lot on sleep and digestion.
5. Let go of all other goals and distractions because now is go time. Just work on small projects or really gradual work.