Takeaways:
Lessons overall:
Some ideas:
I’ve been thinking about focus for some time now. I think about focus when I procrastinate. I think about focus when I mindlessly watch youtube videos while feeling anxious about upcoming work or projects. I’ve come up with theories about focus being about limiting the number of input (sensory deprivation and tidiness being great focus techniques) and how focus is different from concentration (when you use willpower to keep your mind constrained to one goal).
My thoughts on focus have recently coalesced on a different approach to focus. I first experienced this feeling with working out in my knee challenge. I realized that when I was feeling uncomfortable with exercise or just simply bored, I would start feeling really antsy and found it difficult to focus on the workout.
The solution was to tell myself that I would be doing this workout not for 10, 20 minutes. Not for 60 minutes. I told myself, I would be working on this workout forever. This mindset shift changed my outlook completely. Instead of rushing or feeling anxious and annoyed, I felt suddenly calm, and totally focused on what I was doing and what I was feeling.
I tested this mindset out recently when I was meditating and it seemed to be a shortcut to the meditative mindset. Instead of trying to escape painful or uncomfortable feelings, I assumed that these feelings would last forever. I would find myself slipping into a deep meditative state much much faster.
Paired with the taoist emptiness technique or mindset, I think this could be very useful in addressing the challenges I face a lot of these days with being overwhelmed and stressed.
I wonder if this is a big difference between kids and adults and why when we get older, we also seem to be less in the moment. When we are counting the minutes and seconds, constantly looking over our shoulder for the next task, instead of focusing on the one in front of us, we can lose the focus we are looking for in our lives.
It has finally happened. I’ve hit plat in Valorant. A journey that was supposed to take 2-3 months, but instead took a year and two months (14 months).
Blood sweat and tears went into this challenge, and I learned something interesting at each rank.
Iron was an interesting rank because it was the rank when I was first learning how to use my mouse and keyboard in a game. I had never played a shooter game on the pc, and haven’t played many serious games at all on the PC.
Getting out of iron was simply learning how not to make extremely basic mistakes such as reloading out in the open, not getting stuck on walls, planting and defusing the bomb.
Bronze was also an interesting rank. I started actually enjoying the game more here since I had a better idea of what was going on. Bronze rank was still stressful because I would get killed out of nowhere all the time.
I don’t really remember what I did to get out of bronze rank, but I think it had something to do with playing off of my util and learning how to check corners where people hide.
I was stuck in silver for a long time. Silver was where I learned a lot about aiming and movement and got quite good at it.
What eventually got me out of silver was learning how to preaim angles.
Gold is not a very interesting rank, everyone is pretty much like silver but with slightly better util and aim.
However, perhaps the most interesting thing in the whole challenge is how I got out of gold. I got out of gold primarily by getting more confident.
I did this in two ways:
I hear lots of things that people say about confidence:
“Stay positive”
“Imagine you are the best”
I always thought these ideas were bogus since I always thought confidence was about one thing: Feeling comfortable in your own skin.
But I started to doubt myself when I say professional Valorant coaching advocating (SEN Zellsis) for the “cocky confidence” mentality and I was stuck in silver.
But I think in the end, I was right. In order to be confident, you need to feel safe and at peace. The real question, is HOW?
Here are the main ideas:
My limiting beliefs were:
Simply by saying those things in my head, made me feel clarity every time I started to stress out and I suddenly felt calm. I gave myself permission to continue to berate myself (or not) but simply welcoming these parts in instead of avoiding them (and having them show up as unresolved stress), made me have a clear mentality that made my rise to plat.
I learned I have a huge amount of power, intelligence and creativity that are locked up by stress and fear. Slowing down, focusing on a few things at a time, and embracing my fears allows me to operate at my fullest potential.
What I thought confidence was:
What confidence actually is:
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.
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:
I’ve been meditating on productivity and I was curious as to a more taoist approach. I’ve come up with a couple of ideas:
Today in the King’s council, part men’s group, part coaching session, we talked about setting goals.
I didn’t have an idea of what my goals are but a couple of visions came to mind:
I need to choose three main ones for the intention of the Kings Council.
I will choose the following goals:
I’ve always wanted to find a way to sing relaxed no matter what position I’m in, standing, sitting, playing the piano.
I figured it out finally.
It’s actually quite simple.
Relax everything, specifically the jaw, shoulders, and stomach.
Put all the tension right above the stomach (at the diaphragm).
