Life is pretty challenging:
The challenge is simple: survive, adapt and thrive
I decided today that I need to close out the Valorant challenge for a couple of reasons:
Firstly, most importantly, the challenge is over! I think it is important to have specific success/end criteria for every challenge because then it gives a distinct goal to focus on and allows for new challenges to take its place. My original goal for Valorant was to get to Plat in a month. It instead took maybe over a year, but there is no doubt that I completed the challenge. I have been solidly in Plat 1 for months now and just recently solo-queued up to Plat 2. Before there was a reason to keep the challenge going because I kept dropping back down to Gold, but now I think this challenge is well and truly finished.
Secondly, I noticed that I started posting shorter and less thought-out posts about Valorant. Since the challenge is essentially over and my goal has been achieved, it has completely lost focus…which is why it is important for old challenges to end and new challenges to start. Since my posts about Valorant have evolved into less focused thoughts along my journey in Valorant, I can remove the label of “challenge” and continue making posts of observations and thoughts in my overall Valorant journey. I will always challenge myself in Valorant and it will continue to be a long-term goal to learn from the game and grow as a player and as a person. I don’t need a challenge to denote that ambition because this entire blog is that ambitious. Challenges are meant to be smaller focused time and goal bound tools and structures.
Finally, I have new challenges I want to focus on. I have my art and creative challenge coming up, my jiujitsu challenge, and my sleep challenge. All of those challenges require time and effort and the less distractions and pressure I have, the easier it will be to complete those challenges. I will almost certainly start a new Valorant challenge in the future and I need to set a precedent for that now by closing out old and dead/completed challenges like cobwebs in the mental attic.
P.S. For old times sake, here are my latest strategies in Valorant that got me to Plat 2.
To expand on number 3, the main mindsets I like to use:
So it is goodbye for now for the Valorant challenge, but we will probably be back at some point to compile data about this whole challenge and do a couple of retrospectives.
Today is all about recovery.
Strength seems to be half pressure/work and half recovery and growth. And today is a recovery day.
I’m quite pleased that I have a recovery day because I really need to comfort and soothe my knee a lot and I like exploring ways to do that.
It’s also interesting that my exercises are completely different from the knees over toes guy. Maybe at some point, they will converge when my knees get stronger.
Recovery Exercises:
I’ve been feeling pretty lost as of late. I am thinking about my youtube channel, about my job, about coaching, about my health and about my challenges with youtube and fitness. I’ve been stressed out about all these different things and I don’t really know how to tackle all of them at the same time. I don’t know what to focus on, which ones makes sense to put energy into, and how I will go about focusing on any of these things.
I’ve been feeling depressed, overwhelmed and depleted, constantly self medicating with youtube videos and games.
Recently, I’ve been inspired by this video:
Health is everything. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you don’t have to choose between that and health. You will be a better entrepreneur with better health.
I want to drop all of my other challenges and focus on this for a while.
I want to focus on my health.
I thought about what this meant for quite a while because health is such a nebulous topic. I feel that Brian Johnson in project Blueprint is taking a very scientific approach to health, but I want to take a more personal approach.
Here are the areas that I care about:
Some ideas of times that I can measure these things:
I’ve tried these type of challenges before, but I feel that I sort of neglected the mental part of health, feeling healthier physically but mentally trapped and unhappy. I want to really commit to doing video journaling this entire time in order to make sure that I can express myself and work through mental challenges.
What would mean success to me is not just feeling much more happy, passionate, energetic, in flow and attractive, but also to create a lifestyle, mindset and routine that will maintain and grow that over time.
I’ve been unofficially focusing on posture for some time now, including mewing, building muscles and strength, and ultimately for more a more aesthetic, healthy, and functional body.
A really helpful video is this:
I always have a lot of tightness in my chest and would like to have more of a wider back and more shoulder mobility.
Unit 1: Mobility | Day 1 – Surface Tissues
Because I was traveling and these exercises relaxed me immensely, I fell asleep very quickly after this. I ended up doing more of these exercises in the morning after. Myofascial release seems to target ligaments, muscles, and fascial which kinda makes sense, but today (13th). Today I will switch over to increasing mobility in the tendons and ligaments, so I wonder what will happen today that will be different.
I’ve since taken a different approach to Valorant. I think I had a lot of good ideas in the past but I realized the value of simplicity.
Having too many things to worry about in Valorant makes it hard to focus on the game.
So I narrowed things down to just three:
An example of staying clean is Curry:
Watching his gameplay makes me realize how much I panic and do so much extraneous movement.
After applying these three tactics, I started doing very well in my games.
