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.
I’ve had knee problems for my half of my life. I wanted to get the motivation to heal the knee. It started with the Knee Mobility Challenge, which by the way wasn’t even my first knee challenge. Then I started to work on my overall fitness and knee motivation with the JiuJitsu challenge.
This is sort of a continuation of that.
My current goals:
Lift up my knee and bend it feeling stable, comfortable and strong
Stand for 5 minutes while feeling comfortable
Lay on either side feeling comfortable and relaxed
Sit on my heels while feeling comfortable and relaxed
Be able to jump feeling stable, comfortable, and strong
Able to kick a roundhouse while feel stable, comfortable and strong
So before I even started using the syllabus method for challenges, I drew a bunch of drawings:
Professor Sova concept
Perspective, standing above
Second perspective, standing above
Sova portrait study
I want to focus on the Sova portrait study first as I feel it is quite close to a finished product. I can post it on reddit as my sort of test.
The main issue I’m contending with, is how to make it an awesome poster. I feel that it requires some sort of lettering. So I found the Valorant font here: Valorant Font | dafont.com
Here are my main steps. (45 min recommendation)
Unit One: Find the design
Unit Two: Complete the painting
Unit Three: Liquify any strangeness
The steps I actually ended up following:
Make everything grayscale
Add font and play with scale until everything felt right
I started this challenge on October 8th. Now it is November 21st. And I can say with honesty that I really followed the challenge very very well.
A couple of notes:
I was forced to go to bed later on two separate occasions, once for work, when I finished a production deployment at 11:30 and went to bed at maybe 12:30
Another time when I was helping my girlfriend with her project and I was up until 12, I cheated by “sleeping” on the coach by the computer at 11 but since I didn’t actually go to bed until much later, it wasn’t that good
After these cheat days it got really hard to stick to my schedule for a few days, but now it is easy again. There were a few times that I went to bed at 1 or 3 am because I didn’t go to sleep and I often go to sleep at 12 or 1, but I get to my bedroom by 11:30 usually and almost always start washing up by 11:10.
Overall this is a smashing success. I have genuinely changed for the better and I think this time the change might actually last.
I do want to still apply some of my earlier ideas and focus on different needs and try to meet them better every day.
I can also work on turning off screens earlier and stopping eating so close to bedtime. But the eating has definitely gotten better and the screens are just hard since I like to play Valorant with my friends at night.
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.
This is definitely one of the most difficult challenges I’ve undergone in a while.
I’ve tried a couple of things and I feel frustrated.
The Reaching for the Untouchable
The frustration
The reaching in my heart
Is getting to me
Reaching for the untouchable
I wonder if I will ever know
The doubt creeps
I seek to know
And when I rush there
There is still nothing
Frustration in my chest
Like a roar that wants to escape
But is trapped behind bars
I have created multiple messages to my girlfriend in French, multiple times I’ve tried to imitate. I feel like imitation is the key, but I grow tired of seeing no results. I feel tired and frustrated.
I feel angry and unhappy.
I suspect failure is such a hard thing for me to grasp. It is such a tough pill to swallow.
I saw a video with a lot of potential:
It is about learning jiujitsu really fast. But really it is about learning. He talks about many ideas in the video, ideas that I’ve myself considered. Ideas that I think are pretty profound and helpful:
Performance vs. growth
Train in the gym to fail – growth
Compete to win – performance
Form to leave form
Repetition until it is second nature
Turn something thought into something intuitive
Smaller circles
Reduce something from intuition to a conscious idea
Look for different ways to apply it
He mentions some really interesting sounding books:
The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin
The Will to Keep Winning by Daigo Umehara
Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment by George Leonard
Anyway, I feel if I were to embrace my fear of failure, I need to meditate on it, but also come up with a plan.
I first want to come up with the plan to train From to Leave Form…and be repetitive about the most common words in French, say them until they are second nature.
So what are the top most common 10 words in French:
Oui: Yes
Non: No
Merci: Thank you
Je: I
Tu/vous: You
Le/la/les: The
Un, une des: A, an, and some
Le/la/les: It, them
Et: And
Mais: But
Bonjour: A general greeting meaning “hello” or “good morning”
Au revoir: Goodbye
Salut: Hello
Amour: Love
Bonheur: Happiness
Chat: Cat
Chien: Dog
But these words are too basic. What about the top 10 most common phrases?
Bonjour: Means “hello” or “good morning”.
Merci: Means “thank you”.
S’il vous plaît: Means “please”.
Ça va?: Means “how are you?” .
Je ne sais pas: Means “I don’t know”.
Parlez-vous anglais?: Means “Do you speak English?” .
Bienvenue: Means “welcome”.
Madame/Monsieur/Mademoiselle: Means “Mrs.”, “Mr.”, or “Miss”.
Anchante enchante: Means “nice to meet you”.
Sava: Means “how are you”.
C’est simple comme bonjour: Means “it’s simple as hello”.
Et patati et patata: Means “and so on”.
En avoir ras-le-bol: Means “to have had enough”.
Tu m’étonnes: Means “tell me something I don’t know”.
Ok that is a little better, but what about the most common French verbs?
Aller Means “to go” and is also used to describe the near future tense. Avoir Means “to have” and is used to express possession, relationships, physical and mental states, and many other contexts. Être Means “to be” and indicates the action or state of being. Pouvoir Means “can” or “to be able to”. It’s an irregular verb like prendre or faire, belonging to the third group. Savoir Used to indicate knowledge or understanding. It can also be used in many idiomatic expressions, such as “savoir-faire” (know-how). Mettre Means “to put” but can also be used for dropping someone off somewhere, laying the table, taking time to do something, laying a carpet. Prendre Means “to take”, including “to travel” on particular forms of transport. It is also used for having meals. Venir Means “to come”, and it can be easily used to conjugate the recent past or convey the idea that you have just done something recently. Vouloir Often translated as to want and to wish in English, as its main usage is to express desires and wishes.
I want to read more about verbs in French but it is too late and I need to go to bed.
I’m stressed out because even though I feel like I’m making progress, I feel that I’m not getting results until I learn specific words
I am doing unorthodox way of learning language but expecting orthodox results
The orthodox was of learning is memorizing words – thus your results will be on how many words you memorize
I feel like I want those results when my methods are completely unorthodox, it makes sense that my results are not going to be the same, at first at least
I worry about forgetting everything after French practice, but nothing in the subconscious is forgotten, my goal is to harness and bring out the subconscious knowledge
If I were to state my goal another way, it could be to learn French subconsciously…which means that forgetting actually makes sense, since I am not consciously learning anything (that would be memorization)
Since I am forging my own path, I want to capture everything I experience and feel because I want to know how this new process works (what should I expect from subconscious learning?)
Overall I feel much more encouraged. This is the right path for me. I feel confident in my methods. I’m forging a path that no one has ever forged before. The point is not to get orthodox results, the point is to capture my progress, my feelings, and my experience. I will continue to use connection theory on French in order to learn more intuitively and use connection theory on myself in order to deal with my feelings of uncertainty and being overwhelmed.
