Today is not the first day working on the Profit in Peace challenge, but it does FEEL like the first day I am living it.
Today is the first day when I dedicated my morning to finding my magical life. For some context of what that means:
Something that I still don’t really understand or feel comfortable with applying is the values that I believe in every day.
I think that writing honestly and focusing on myself in this blog every morning might actually hit all of these points:
Honesty – well, this blog isn’t called unfiltered for no reason! I do remind myself all the time of the “if they don’t like me please leave” mentality.
Imagination – for me, this blog is dedicated to all my imaginative parts: art, YouTube, philosophy, poetry etc.
Intuition – this is the place where doing things “my” way is celebrated and I tap into what is the best way to do something (according to my intuition) rather than how everyone else does it.
Empathy – this blog is a lot for my feelings where I process feelings through words, video, and images. It is a part of honesty too, honest emotion where this is my place to express everything imperfect.
I also like using the blog as my way of living out all my values and being the person I want to be because it really feels like I am sacrificing something to do this…in a good way.
JT Franco talks about if you aren’t willing to sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice. In the end, I had no idea whether I would sacrifice time talking to my girlfriend, going on YouTube, working, playing games, or making YouTube videos. Those are the things I spend most of my day doing anyway. But none of those things seemed right. It was too blunt on an idea, how could you sacrifice all of YouTube? How could I sacrifice all of work?
But by sacrificing my mornings, in a way, I am also sacrificing all of those things. I resist the urge to listen to audiobooks, watch YouTube videos, check messages, or work in the morning. I dedicate all my time to working on my blog and all my challenges, thoughts, ideas, and philosophies.
I also feel a deep unease and anxiety keeping pace with me this morning:
I’m Afraid I My Boss Will Check
I’m afraid my boss will check
See I’m not working
It won’t matter that I have bigger dreams
it won’t matter if I did a bunch of planning
On the weekend
Feverishly, desperately trying to
Make my workday
Productive, efficient enough
To make up
To make it easy
For me to balance
I remember the look on his face
When I told him
I like to meditate
Skeptical
And
I also wonder
If finding my magic
Will make me feel sad and lonely
Like I did yesterday
I feel tired as I
Let go of trying to change the feeling
And accept it instead
Another anxiety that I have about this challenge or this “morning commitment” is just the sense of lack of clarity. I don’t know what I should be working on, or what I can work on. I think is the pressure of time. Or maybe its because I completed all the prework for the challenge and I don’t exactly have something to work on right now. I’m afraid every action is not “right”.
Is it the right thing to:
Work on challenge videos?
Work on editing videos?
Work on reaching out?
To focus on my body?
Wow there is so much here and I feel that I may be stalling. Scared to make a decision so I’m just rambling on a super long blog post that doesn’t really say anything in particular.
Well all I know right now is I feel like doing a bit of freewriting, fantasy writing or something of that nature. So I’ll go do that.
Ok, I decided something weird that I’m not sure is going to work yet.
I decided that I’m going to keep this challenge going on forever and we will have different objective driving it constantly. It will be a sort of daily journal where I get to focus on Profit in Peace, finding my ikigai, tapping into my coaching energy, feeling into my body, working on my challenges, and discovering that the world is a magical place.
It will continue to be labeled like the other challenges, but it is different in the sense that it doesn’t have a specific end date. The end date might be just when this mentality, thinking of this as a Profit in Peace no longer serves me. Which might be never.
You know in a way this should be called Blog Post. Because it is the most blog post of blog posts. The sole purpose of these posts is literally to work on my life through my blog. But “Blog Post” just doesn’t evoke what I need for it to evoke, so we ain’t doing it.
So what is the focus for today?
Today we have a similar bent to yesterday but a little more focused on gaming. In no particular order, I want to:
Play lots of valorant and create poems about how I feel about dropping to gold 1 and STILL losing
Cook lots of food, be creative and have fun eating
Watching another 20 minutes of the VOD review
Work on my knee challenge
Go for a run
Yesterday, I went for a short run.
Here is a poem about it:
Tingling in My Back
That’s the feeling when I push myself
My knees not ready for the impact
I want to massage my stomach and back
I’m aware of others watching
I wonder if Alice would be embarrassed of me
I want people to like me
Especially the girls
I think about how I learned to control what other’s thought of me
And that’s when everything went to a place
Shaky and scary
I remind myself
What others feel
Is out of my control
I’m proud of my innovative knee exercises
They make my prickly knees
Feel warm and supple again
I just came back from my most recent run. Today I focused on processing the anxiety being surrounded by everyone’s opinions of me. I realized a couple of things.
Dr Bea Mackay
She told me an exercise
The same one
Every session
Breath in breath out
I realized
It isn’t about other people
They never mattered
Neither did their opinions
I’m them
As a trigger for my pain
The sharp inhale
To take the pain
The release of the exhale
Filling me with warmth
From head to toe
The point was never to win their approval
It was to feel my pain
It is so interesting how Dr. Bea Mackay’s exercises are so similar to Wim Hoff’s. And Wim Hoff’s exercises are about enduring and thriving in pain too, just his are about cold and her’s are about emotions. No wonder so many people talk about the Wim Hoff method bringing them relief from chronic anxiety.
So today, my girlfriend and I were discussing how to make better decisions in Valorant and it made me think that we are playing low level blunder chess. Blunder chess at 200-800 elo is simply playing chess with these main ideas:
Check for blunders (hanging queen, bishop, knight or rook)
Check for checks on king
Look only one move ahead
If no clear threats, work on positioning
The idea behind blunder chess is simply that people at low elo will make a lot of mistakes and you can simple wait for them to make a mistake.
I strongly believe my elo (below diamond) that “blunder chess” is highly effective since a lot of simple mistakes are made.
I wonder if I can do the same simple ideas in Valorant where I don’t strategize too much, but check for very simple positioning and big mistakes:
Today I didn’t have the time or the pc to play competitively. I played a couple of spike rush games as cypher.
Impressions:
Hot damn it’s hard to play cypher. So much to put down in so little time. The cages are HARD to use as well.
I don’t know if playing different agents will help me play. Maybe I should just refine my mains.
I think agents like cypher play around their utility (they almost never peek unless they have to). I wonder if I should do that more with all agents (play around flash and grenades, shockdarts and mollys)
Makes me think flashes are waay worse at getting info. It’s all or nothing. The timing needs to be right and you need to be able to push with your team to gain ground rather than flashing randomly.
To counter a cypher I need to guess where the camera is and shoot it out. Requires knowledge of common cam spots. Dunno how I will get that knowledge without watching tons of videos. Poopers.
Cage + wires can be OP since wires reveal and cage block their vision.
You need to be f*cking fast on the camera or they will shoot it out.
Crouch and shoot wires head level to get wires you cannot jump or crouch over or under.
I feel like my posture was pretty terrible after the practice. My left shoulder blade was hurting and my stomach was clenched.
I need to work on processing the emotions better and feeling my body more (using the sensual feeling technique I will discuss later). I will also need to work on posture exercises way more. After working my body for about 20 minutes with shaking, stretching, and posture exercises, my should mostly doesn’t hurt anymore and my digestion feels much better.
Ok, so I no longer have an ongoing jiujitsu challenge, and I don’t really know if I have a knee challenge or not.
However, I really want to start that now. I feel really good about my progression.
It all started with 10 round Tuesday.
I went 3 rounds (2 days ago on the 21st). I absolutely died. I didn’t recover from feeling dizzy and like I was going to throw up for an hour after that.
I ate food when I got home, and slept like a baby after.
Ever since, I went to jiujitsu everyday.
On wednesday I was feeling super undermotivated, but I found an old training buddy and it was actually a good time.
Today I had even more fun.
My stamina seems to be increasing fast. I’m sore everyday and I still feel fine.
My knee feels good. It doesn’t hurt every day.
It feels strong. I feel like I can push myself more now.
My knee therapy and techniques around walking backwards, shifting my knee to be more balanced, stretching the hips and pointing the knee in the direction of the knee. AND IT’S BEEN WORKING.
I learned a lot from live rolls:
Don’t let someone get a completely dominant position, interrupt their attacks, move to the side
Don’t let your arms separate too much, too easy to armbar
Don’t let both arms get trapped above your head, too easy to armbar
I’m learning some basic attacks, armbars, leg locks, chokes.
A new mentality that I’ve been working with is the idea of chaining kills.
Come up with a play that I want to go for (util, direction, etc.)
Go for not a single kill, but a multikill
Expect more than one
Have a gameplan for getting not one, but 5 kills
It is interesting that taking the offensive makes you much better at being confident. Also, expecting multiple attackers and working on killing as many as possible makes it a lot harder for people to catch you with a trade.
