This is a recap of an exercise I did a few weeks ago. I was watching a ThinkMedia youtube video about how to succeed at youtube. He went through and exercise looking at 3 things in this order: passion, proficiency, and profit.
Basically, he said to make a list of all the things that you are passionate about, either things you like or things you hate, and things you do even if you weren’t getting paid to do it.
My list was:
Then, he said to take that list of things and think about what we have at least 1 year of proficiency in, where we have been doing that thing semi-successfully. So I narrowed down my list to:
Then, he said to narrow down that further into things that we could build an audience around, something people need or would want to buy. Here was my list:
I don’t know if I have any interest pursuing youtube in this way, but it was an interesting exercise to reflect on.
UNIT ONE: Sova Model Studies | Day 1 – Portrait
Since this unit was all about model studies, I went into a custom game and used the model as a reference for drawing sova portraits.
I started with this side view of Sova.
Then I did colors:
New rough sketch of Sova:
Followed by a more refined outline:
Then by a painting attempt:
Something wasn’t clicking. I still didn’t like the painting job. I decided to try again and learn from another tutorial on shading.
I tried to color again.
This time I felt something clicked with using large soft brushes and the lasso tool. I used the soft brushes to create nice gradients and the lasso tool for the clean edges. Looking closely at the painter I see that he also uses the smudge tool a lot.
I’ve been thinking more about confidence in Valorant and it actually made me think a lot more about what makes confidence. I originally was interested in how to multitask because I thought that was what would make me stronger in Valorant, but I wasn’t able to find any useful information on it.
I ended up searching multitasking in sports, and I was specifically in interested in the basketball videos when they talked about confidence.
The first video was this:
Ideas:
Ideas:
So as they say in the video to do, I am writing down the things I use for confidence in Valorant:
What I admire in other players:
I’ll take each of these a step further to draft out my code. I’m going to see if I can break down what I make each of these things mean:
For the second list:
To think about it further my code might need to address:
I don’t really know what my code can be but one aspect that keeps coming up for all of these things are valuing feelings and focusing on radical permission.
Those are two things that I feel make me unique, I value myself and are a way to find freedom and give myself love and admiration.
I suppose I can also focus on the challenge in life, the idea of courage or challenge over success is something else that I admire about value about myself. Deep thinking, letting the answer of hard questions come to me as well.
The ways that I could act out this code in Valorant:
My sister and I have this joke about the empress. According to a tarrot reading, my sister needs to rely more on her “inner empress”. What does this mean? Well apparently the emperor card stands for searching out and controlling the world, while the empress waits for the world to come to her.
This actually is in line with a thought process I had myself about being yourself.
Feeling free to be yourself = happiness. Feeling like you cannot be yourself is the root of ALL unhappiness. But how to be yourself is another very difficult story.
One way is a method I like to call, “Letting the empress take the wheel”.
So I just changed Airbnbs in France and it made a massive mental difference.
The first Airbnb was fine. It looked nice and modern and was in the heart of the city. But the bed was uncomfortable and it was small and everything felt dark and closed.
The outside felt dirty and dark and the “main attraction” was the Carrefour (a french grocery that was extremely close by).
The second Airbnb was very different. It was over twice as large (55 m2 vs 20 m2), filled with natural light and greenery and was near a park (Jardin des Arenes de Cimiez) and a museum (Musee Matisse).Â
The difference in mentality was so massive I was floored. In the first Airbnb I felt:
While in the new Airbnb I felt:
The interesting thing was, that my girlfriend told me that the new Airbnb was in a much much nicer and richer neighborhood and this got me thinking. This is the definition of privilege – the ability to grow up in an environment that nurtures you and gives you energy instead of sucking it away.
I’ve never believed in leveling the playing field for the sake of fairness because fairness is both a subjective and impossible standard to meet. Instead, I’ve been interested in creating a more productive society as a whole and I think that by creating better spaces for all of society people would feel more energetic and productive. I only experienced the change in physical space, in greenery and natural light and calm and quiet. What would happen if you were able to get a better mental environment, with more supportive loving people? This is why children in single-family homes and substance abuse have it so hard in getting ahead. They don’t have the mental environment to live up to their full potential.
This has a couple of implications for me:
Rank got reset yesterday. I am sliding back into gold 1.
I thought about a few things today:
Lessons I’ve learned about myself so far:
UNIT 1: VOD Review
UNIT 2: Map Understanding
UNIT 3: Mechanical Breakdown