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:
Piano hands: Keep your arm at a 90 degree angle, let gravity pull your arm down and use the force of gravity in all arm and wrist movements. This allows for the most relaxed posture.
Imagine success: The most simple and straightforward way to have a good mental is just to visualize yourself killing everyone and winning the round.
Stay clean: Instead of wildly aiming and shooting, stay calm, precise, and efficient. Peek cleanly using just the A and D keys.
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.
I saw an ad on Facebook. It was talking about making money as an introvert and making money without giving up your inner peace.
I immediately signed up. It was about 20 dollars.
Now I have done a bunch of the exercises for the prework of the challenge and here are my reflections.
Some major questions that I have right now:
What am I willing to give up and how will I go about giving it up?
How do I live my values every day in a way that is in flow and not forced or mechanical?
I have some initial ideas.
First, I was thinking originally about what I wanted to give up in terms of things like YouTube, or socializing. But recently it made a lot more sense for me to think about time. Specifically, I wanted to dedicate my entire morning to succeeding at these goals.
From the time I wake up, I usually am doing what JT Franco calls “buffalo brain” (the idea of being one of the herd that moves without thinking). I listen to audiobooks, and watch YouTube videos. I don’t eat breakfast or drink water. I keep the blinds closed. I feel awful and I don’t feel the feelings.
Someone once said (might be Melinda Gates) that the first few hours of the day are the most important because they set the stage for the entire day to come. If I want to give up anything, I want to give up my mornings to getting up, drinking water, feeling my body, and going downstairs into the lounge to write on my blog and work on achieving my dreams.
Middle of the day has to be reserved for work and for talking to my girlfriend. End of the day has to be reserved for me time. Being alone, taking time, creating art, and letting the magic of nighttime take over.
This is what I’m thinking roughly:
7/8 AM – 9/10 AM: Dedicated to living the magical life
9/10 AM – 12 PM: Dedicated to doing the impossible at work
12 PM – 1/2 PM: Lunch, meditation
1/2 PM – 5 PM: Work, performing at the highest levels
5 PM – 7 PM: Misc time
7 PM – 11 PM: Alone time, creativity, play
During the weekend, work will be removed, leaving more time for dedication to my magical life. I think it will look something like this:
7/8 AM – 12 PM: Dedicated to living the magical life
12pm – 7 PM: Misc time
7 PM – 11 PM: Alone time, creativity, play
With this balance, it seems that my breakdown is this:
Weekday
1-3 hours per day on living magical life
5-7 hours of work
4 hours of alone-time/play
2 hours of miscellaneous time
Weekend
4-5 hours per day on living magical life
4 hours of alone-time/play
7 hours of miscellaneous time
I suspect, I will have to do careful planning during the weekend, in order to perform at the absolute highest levels of work and potentially spend less time there.
In terms of living out my beliefs of empathy, intuition/following feelings, creativity/imagination, and honesty. I’m not entirely sure what actions I need to take to feel that I am in congruence with my values.
My main thought right now is about taking risks, breathing through difficult emotions and sensations, and following connection theory.
This might fall into my Valorant challenge but it goes much deeper.
I started trying to find a way to multitask in Valorant, which led me to thinking about confidence. This led me down a whole path where I was trying to understand how to focus on the game and get into the game, and get into flow.
I finally arrived at a technique that looks something like this:
See the enemy
Imagine their head getting shot
Aim
Shoot
This works for drills, deathmatch anything. The point is that you visualize the outcome first, then take some action (aiming). You don’t immediately aim, you don’t shoot as soon as you visualize.
This does a couple of things:
Visualizing hitting the headshot removes anxiety because in my head I can hit the shot
Visualization makes me focus on one target and give it my full attention
Aiming makes sure I actually hit the shot
On top of this, I can do anything to aim, I can use my movement to aim, I can center my screen, I can do literally anything, the important part is to visualize the headshot before it happens.
In a very interesting turn of events, I’ve actually found this super helpful in music too.
Oftentimes my singing is muddy and unclear. I’ve done something similiar:
Chop the notes into shorter more enunciated syllables
Savor and taste each note
Imagine how I want the note to taste
This does something similar where I am more aware of each note and can sing it with more intention and emotion. I don’t skip ahead too fast, I focus on each word as it comes.
It seems that a combination of a focus on a small step, and visualization helps bring me into the present moment.
Today is the first day in the profit in peace challenge live sessions.
Questions/thoughts:
Asking me to empty my cup
Isn’t this a question about time? What if I can’t quit my job or scared of doing it?
Hmm he means a few goals – fuzzy targets don’t get hit
The three Ps
Power – gain skills needed to maximize your natural strengths
Purpose – do something you love
Profit – products that sells themselves
Peace – at the center
I wonder if it is just because I’m so isolated but meeting with others becomes more important to me as soon as I get my alone time
But I do feel like I have charisma, I just burn out the more I work on things I don’t believe in
The lever is your why
But what if I don’t want to sell a physical product or do drop shipping
Trying to apply to what I want
Should I try this out? Or focus on what I want?
I’m guessing you somehow figure out what is a popular search, but aren’t there people already doing that?
Helium 10
At least 20k total searches
Rich buy time
The way that we see money and treat money comes from our parents
I can probably invest 5 to 10 thousand in my business
I can invest 10 to 15 thousand if I make 5000 in my coaching business
I actually got really stressed when attending this session.
I got stressed because I have my work and my coaching business and this challenge and I don’t want to do anything half-assed, but that’s what it felt like I was doing because I felt so scattered.
I decided to completely give up working on coaching for this week so I can fully focus on learning about e-commerce, then kind of work on coaching again afterwards.
Some really interesting ideas I saw when watching this video about aim training:
My main takeaways:
Aim training is not the main practice but rather isolates specific techniques such as hitting A D targets (people strafing from left to right) or flicking.
Sens and muscle memory doesn’t matter.
Sensitivity just changes what muscle groups you use and to be a good aimer you need to be able to use all muscle groups. Low sens is using the arm and wrist, high sens is using the wrist and fingers. When you know how to use all muscles groups by changing your sens around, when you stick to one sens you will have superior mouse control to use that sens in all situations.
Muscle memory doesn’t exist since you cannot memorize a specific shot, it is always changing depending on the game you are in.
Keep warmups really short. 5-10 minutes max for strictly a warmup and 10-15 minutes for a warmup + some longterm aim group/training.
If you warmup for an hour its a training session not a warmup. It causes you to be tired out and overthink the aiming.
Higher DPI mean lower input delay. 800-1600 is desired but it isn’t that important.
Raw reaction time doesn’t matter as much as awareness. If you don’t expect something, raw reaction time matters much more. 190-180 milliseconds is normal.
Higher sens is technically better because it is faster, but it is harder to be consistent and be in control
I had quite a stressful workday as I expected but I wanted to jot down a couple of reflections today:
Reminding myself of my boundaries (time, respect, honesty, empathy, and possibility) really helped
It also helped to note down what I cannot control before every major meeting (usually something related to how someone felt about me)
I noticed that keeping pace with my todo list was helpful:
Keep all tasks that come to mind in my todo list (use it as a mental trashcan to throw all my worries)
Reorder todo list to whatever I am working on right now (move something to the top if I am currently working on it)
Do tasks immediately if they are low-effort
Do sweeps (try to do everything on the todo list)
Focus also helped
Close as many tabs as possible
Focus on one thing at a time
I was thinking about how to transition from work to Valorant more effectively since I usually start to feel dead and I end up watching youtube and ordering food and that kind of makes it hard for me to stay sharp when gaming and I end up feeling even more stressed and awful.
I think cleaning is a really good transition point. Cleaning reduces stress and is a great way to transition slowly…if I’m worried that there will still be a call coming in and I might have to go back to work, cleaning makes it easy to go back to work without feeling like I am not ready to transition to the next thing. In fact, if I clean, even if I go back to work, I will still be more ready to game after the work is done because my space is now clean.
I also like the idea of a mental dump to write down everything you are thinking about at the end of the day so that you can pick it up at any point today or tomorrow or the day after.
Finally, I like to look at the schedule for the next day and mentally prepare for it to know what you can do today to give you a lot of spaciousness tomorrow.
I’m exhausted – fell asleep for a long time after watching and imitating for a short period of time
Knife to gun transition – keeping knife out until dangerous angles, then switch to gun or do a jump peak while switching if no room
Hold for peeks – clear where they might peek, not where they might be, continue to hold it or switch to another angle they can push you from
Set graphics to low
Don’t push smokes unless with flashes or off of someone else’s contact
Spray with good spray control – pulling down
Fall after spraying to reload
Jiggle if holding close to an angle
Warm up at the start of each round by flicking onto teammate heads
In game what I did very successfully:
Spamming through smokes – I got many headshots through the smoke
Holding peekable angles – I felt I got a lot more intentional to where I was staring
Holding off angles when watching for the flank (specifically I utilized the place Tenz hid on Pearl in the first round to get kills
Being more intentional of when the knife is out, I rarely got caught out with my knife. I figured out how much time it takes to pull out the gun, and I always timed it so that I pulled out my gun before peeking anything.
What I can improve on:
Pulling out the knife more often when I know no one is close
Spam more boxes
Utilizing jump peeking more
Making sure my peeks are still tight and clean and fast
Being much more focused on holding specific peeks when slowly scaling up
