I just had a realization. I was thinking about what I “should” be doing in the mornings with this new blog commitment. But I think that EXACTLY what I “should” be doing.
I want to spend my time asking questions. And if an action speaks to me, I will do it.
In fact, this was a major technique in Connection Theory that I forgot about. Connection Theory is about understanding is the pathway to change.
One technique for understanding is to ask many many questions. Very good, specific questions. Questions that beget more questions.
Through questioning, we begin to understand.
Another technique I used to do was to ask myself questions. Imagine myself older and wiser, and come up with questions to ask my current day self, and then answer those questions.
Anyway, I have to transition to work, so this will have to wait for now.
This morning I feel damn tired. And I feel stressed.
I know I have to pack my bags for home, check into my flight, and cook all the raw food in the fridge.
I also want to play more Valorant since I never have time for more than 2 or 3 games without interrupting my bedtime. I finally placed an alt account in Silver 1 and I’m loving it, not having to think very hard, just play for the fun of it.
I would also love to work on my French challenge and spend some time with the mimic technique. I was thinking last night about using connection theory to understand what it would take to think in French, instead of just being really good at translating in my head from English to French and the answer that came to me is that I just need to mimic a lot of French speakers, and not just mimic what they say, but how they say it.
Also, for today, right after my morning run, I would like to continue and finish my next section of my VOD review and perhaps plan out some posts for my art coach Instagram.
Just came back from my run and I have to say, I want to be out there more. A walk out in the world is a wonderful way to think through stuff.
A Sacred Thing
The biggest disservice that they did me
Was getting me onto the ideal of controlling
How others feel about me
Because controlling how others feel
Puts ME into a cage as well
The mask of their surface wants
Is forced upon my face
And I would trade my freedom
For their approval any day
I think, as I walk past people
That how someone feels about you
Is a sacred thing
There is no need to change how they feel about us
Just as much as we can seek to understand not control our own feelings
I was thinking today about boundaries and needs, and how I’m starting to work on recognizing them. I’ll add a new one to the list:
Honesty – truth is important
Empathy – emotions are important
Respect – it is important to be valued and value others
Time – control over your time and space
Possibility – belief anything is possible
Health – lifestyle is important
Needs are interesting, because I think boundaries are used to protect needs. I’m not entirely sure whether or not these are needs or boundaries. I also don’t know if they are values. In doing a little more research it seems that some people would consider these values, not needs. Maybe I should switch up my terminology.
In any case, health is a value that I recently added to incorporate my dedication to sleep, digestion, and exercise all in the service of feeling happy, strong, and energetic (for the long run).
I also recently thought about possibility. The most often neglected of all my values/needs but I feel equally important. I realized recently that possibility is what drives solutions. Boundaries are important, but communicating them, enforcing them, often requires compromise and communication. And what helps with that is the feeling of possibility.
Recently, I was feeling resentful of my parents not wanting me to go to a social gathering with friends. I felt it was violating my boundary around health (mental health), empathy (where they would value my emotions) and honesty (I did not feel like I could be honest about any of this).
However, I didn’t know what to do because I respect their boundaries around health might be a bit different from mine. Being older and frailer, they were more worried about my health and their own. I know that I cannot protect them from getting sick, but I felt increasingly stressed.
The possibility value came into play when I thought about how anything is possible. I started to think about how I could meet my need for emotional health in different ways, for example, talking more to my friends and meeting more of them (in a more one on one setting) that would potentially reduce and control the risk to my parents. At the same time I still see possibilities in meeting up with my friends working out as possibility is always there.
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.
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
For the longest time, I’ve thought that my job was pretty much perfect. It wasn’t the highest paying job, or the one that I loved the most, but I think it has many many good elements such as:
Good enough pay to never have to worry about money
Good work/life balance, lots of work sometimes, little work others
Lots of traveling
Get to practice speaking and work on fun projects
Obviously, I could find a job even better in every area, but this is quite good already.
I realized recently why I still feel tired and think that it is too much work so often. THE WORK LIFE BALANCE IS HORRIBLE.
Ok, I understand I just contradicted myself there, but the reason why I think the work life balance is good is because on paper, there are lots of downtime where I can do whatever I want. However, because of the amount of emotional pressure that I put on myself, I’m actually always thinking about work which means that there is actually no worklife balance at all.
I worry if I kick back and ignore work for a while:
I will not be able to focus when I really need to so I need to get all the work done that I can
I will not be able to have enough time to get my work done when I really need to so I need to be working all the time
Someone will ask me what I’ve been working on and I will be outed as someone who is not contributing anything
Some of the anxieties I have around actually working:
I worry I will create ugly applications and I will come off as bad and incompetent
I worry I will not build enough for my application and I will come off as lazy or incompetent
I worry that when I go into meetings I will look unprepared and stupid
If I am able to deal with the emotional burden of this job and turn work into something soothing and relaxing for me, I will actually be so happy in this job. This will be the easiest money I will ever make and it will free me up to make money in other ways as well.
I’m going to do this in a couple of ways:
Practice acceptance of where I am. Give myself permission to be bad
Reprogram the idea that I will be rejected if I am not perfect
Look for ways to make my job extremely easy
Find ways to meet my needs through my jobs
So Step 1:
I am lazy, incompetent, unproductive and stupid. I accept myself for it. I give myself permission to be this way as much as I want to be.
Step 2:
The Bossy Man
In the meeting
Which I spent
Almost no time preparing for
He asked me to show
Something
I didn’t want to show
I said no
The meeting
Was under my
Control
The Finicky Architect
I created something
That I didn’t think
Was good enough
To stop him from asking question
Yet I showed up not to impress
But to help
And we were both happy
By the end
Step 3:
Where are the hardest parts of my job?
1 – Learning about new technology
Takes a long time
Hard to know what to focus on
Hard to remember
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Create materials for myself to make my life easier (cheat sheets, presentations)
Look for a way to make my life easier
Timebox an attempt to learn quickly
Focus on one area that has impact
2 – Building mockups
Takes time to understand the customer’s process
Hard to formulate what I need
Hard to understand how to design it
Hard to work out the technical parts of building out a process
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Clearly articulate what I need
The interfaces
What the style is
The processes
The data structures
The priority
Get help on the UI
Get help on the build itself
3 – Presenting the product
Never know what they will ask me to explain or click on
Hard to boil down the flow to a few steps
People may want to test you on areas that they don’t understand or may be hard to show
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Get the clarity I need:
Why they are asking the question?
What are they testing me on? What is the thing I need to prove?
What do they already know or understand?
Pause
Think about my gameplan
Use metaphors to bridge understanding gaps
Walk through what I’m about to do in my head before I do it on the screen
Step 4:
The most annoying things at work and how I will meet my needs through it:
Building mockups
Contribution: Who am I helping with this?
Growth: What will I do better with this demo?
Significance: What special signature will be mine?
Uncertainty: What is it that interests me the most about this demo?
Certainty: What do I want to copy? Who can make my life easier? How long do I need realistically?
Filing expense reports, doing training and filing quarterly reviews
Love and Connection: Who can I have a working/hangout session with?
Uncertainty: What time challenge should I give myself?
Boring meetings/trainings
Certainty: Why am I joining? What questions do I need to ask? If none, make a note of what I need from the meeting and watch the recording.
Love and Connection: Reach out to the presenter and tell them what you liked
Giving demos and presentations
Contribution: How can I be the most helpful?
Significance: Why am I showing this?
Uncertainty: Don’t prepare
Certainty: What am I afraid of?
Ok, that’s it for now. I will say that writing this blog post has been tremendously helpful. I will be referencing this over and over again it is just so useful. Hopefully after using it many many times, it will be ingrained within me and I won’t need to look at it anymore.
This morning I feel damn tired. And I feel stressed.
I know I have to pack my bags for home, check into my flight, and cook all the raw food in the fridge.
I also want to play more Valorant since I never have time for more than 2 or 3 games without interrupting my bedtime. I finally placed an alt account in Silver 1 and I’m loving it, not having to think very hard, just play for the fun of it.
I would also love to work on my French challenge and spend some time with the mimic technique. I was thinking last night about using connection theory to understand what it would take to think in French, instead of just being really good at translating in my head from English to French and the answer that came to me is that I just need to mimic a lot of French speakers, and not just mimic what they say, but how they say it.
Also, for today, right after my morning run, I would like to continue and finish my next section of my VOD review and perhaps plan out some posts for my art coach Instagram.
Just came back from my run and I have to say, I want to be out there more. A walk out in the world is a wonderful way to think through stuff.
A Sacred Thing
The biggest disservice that they did me
Was getting me onto the ideal of controlling
How others feel about me
Because controlling how others feel
Puts ME into a cage as well
The mask of their surface wants
Is forced upon my face
And I would trade my freedom
For their approval any day
I think, as I walk past people
That how someone feels about you
Is a sacred thing
There is no need to change how they feel about us
Just as much as we can seek to understand not control our own feelings
I was thinking today about boundaries and needs, and how I’m starting to work on recognizing them. I’ll add a new one to the list:
Honesty – truth is important
Empathy – emotions are important
Respect – it is important to be valued and value others
Time – control over your time and space
Possibility – belief anything is possible
Health – lifestyle is important
Needs are interesting, because I think boundaries are used to protect needs. I’m not entirely sure whether or not these are needs or boundaries. I also don’t know if they are values. In doing a little more research it seems that some people would consider these values, not needs. Maybe I should switch up my terminology.
In any case, health is a value that I recently added to incorporate my dedication to sleep, digestion, and exercise all in the service of feeling happy, strong, and energetic (for the long run).
I also recently thought about possibility. The most often neglected of all my values/needs but I feel equally important. I realized recently that possibility is what drives solutions. Boundaries are important, but communicating them, enforcing them, often requires compromise and communication. And what helps with that is the feeling of possibility.
Recently, I was feeling resentful of my parents not wanting me to go to a social gathering with friends. I felt it was violating my boundary around health (mental health), empathy (where they would value my emotions) and honesty (I did not feel like I could be honest about any of this).
However, I didn’t know what to do because I respect their boundaries around health might be a bit different from mine. Being older and frailer, they were more worried about my health and their own. I know that I cannot protect them from getting sick, but I felt increasingly stressed.
The possibility value came into play when I thought about how anything is possible. I started to think about how I could meet my need for emotional health in different ways, for example, talking more to my friends and meeting more of them (in a more one on one setting) that would potentially reduce and control the risk to my parents. At the same time I still see possibilities in meeting up with my friends working out as possibility is always there.
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.
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
For the longest time, I’ve thought that my job was pretty much perfect. It wasn’t the highest paying job, or the one that I loved the most, but I think it has many many good elements such as:
Good enough pay to never have to worry about money
Good work/life balance, lots of work sometimes, little work others
Lots of traveling
Get to practice speaking and work on fun projects
Obviously, I could find a job even better in every area, but this is quite good already.
I realized recently why I still feel tired and think that it is too much work so often. THE WORK LIFE BALANCE IS HORRIBLE.
Ok, I understand I just contradicted myself there, but the reason why I think the work life balance is good is because on paper, there are lots of downtime where I can do whatever I want. However, because of the amount of emotional pressure that I put on myself, I’m actually always thinking about work which means that there is actually no worklife balance at all.
I worry if I kick back and ignore work for a while:
I will not be able to focus when I really need to so I need to get all the work done that I can
I will not be able to have enough time to get my work done when I really need to so I need to be working all the time
Someone will ask me what I’ve been working on and I will be outed as someone who is not contributing anything
Some of the anxieties I have around actually working:
I worry I will create ugly applications and I will come off as bad and incompetent
I worry I will not build enough for my application and I will come off as lazy or incompetent
I worry that when I go into meetings I will look unprepared and stupid
If I am able to deal with the emotional burden of this job and turn work into something soothing and relaxing for me, I will actually be so happy in this job. This will be the easiest money I will ever make and it will free me up to make money in other ways as well.
I’m going to do this in a couple of ways:
Practice acceptance of where I am. Give myself permission to be bad
Reprogram the idea that I will be rejected if I am not perfect
Look for ways to make my job extremely easy
Find ways to meet my needs through my jobs
So Step 1:
I am lazy, incompetent, unproductive and stupid. I accept myself for it. I give myself permission to be this way as much as I want to be.
Step 2:
The Bossy Man
In the meeting
Which I spent
Almost no time preparing for
He asked me to show
Something
I didn’t want to show
I said no
The meeting
Was under my
Control
The Finicky Architect
I created something
That I didn’t think
Was good enough
To stop him from asking question
Yet I showed up not to impress
But to help
And we were both happy
By the end
Step 3:
Where are the hardest parts of my job?
1 – Learning about new technology
Takes a long time
Hard to know what to focus on
Hard to remember
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Create materials for myself to make my life easier (cheat sheets, presentations)
Look for a way to make my life easier
Timebox an attempt to learn quickly
Focus on one area that has impact
2 – Building mockups
Takes time to understand the customer’s process
Hard to formulate what I need
Hard to understand how to design it
Hard to work out the technical parts of building out a process
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Clearly articulate what I need
The interfaces
What the style is
The processes
The data structures
The priority
Get help on the UI
Get help on the build itself
3 – Presenting the product
Never know what they will ask me to explain or click on
Hard to boil down the flow to a few steps
People may want to test you on areas that they don’t understand or may be hard to show
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Get the clarity I need:
Why they are asking the question?
What are they testing me on? What is the thing I need to prove?
What do they already know or understand?
Pause
Think about my gameplan
Use metaphors to bridge understanding gaps
Walk through what I’m about to do in my head before I do it on the screen
Step 4:
The most annoying things at work and how I will meet my needs through it:
Building mockups
Contribution: Who am I helping with this?
Growth: What will I do better with this demo?
Significance: What special signature will be mine?
Uncertainty: What is it that interests me the most about this demo?
Certainty: What do I want to copy? Who can make my life easier? How long do I need realistically?
Filing expense reports, doing training and filing quarterly reviews
Love and Connection: Who can I have a working/hangout session with?
Uncertainty: What time challenge should I give myself?
Boring meetings/trainings
Certainty: Why am I joining? What questions do I need to ask? If none, make a note of what I need from the meeting and watch the recording.
Love and Connection: Reach out to the presenter and tell them what you liked
Giving demos and presentations
Contribution: How can I be the most helpful?
Significance: Why am I showing this?
Uncertainty: Don’t prepare
Certainty: What am I afraid of?
Ok, that’s it for now. I will say that writing this blog post has been tremendously helpful. I will be referencing this over and over again it is just so useful. Hopefully after using it many many times, it will be ingrained within me and I won’t need to look at it anymore.
This morning I feel damn tired. And I feel stressed.
I know I have to pack my bags for home, check into my flight, and cook all the raw food in the fridge.
I also want to play more Valorant since I never have time for more than 2 or 3 games without interrupting my bedtime. I finally placed an alt account in Silver 1 and I’m loving it, not having to think very hard, just play for the fun of it.
I would also love to work on my French challenge and spend some time with the mimic technique. I was thinking last night about using connection theory to understand what it would take to think in French, instead of just being really good at translating in my head from English to French and the answer that came to me is that I just need to mimic a lot of French speakers, and not just mimic what they say, but how they say it.
Also, for today, right after my morning run, I would like to continue and finish my next section of my VOD review and perhaps plan out some posts for my art coach Instagram.
Just came back from my run and I have to say, I want to be out there more. A walk out in the world is a wonderful way to think through stuff.
A Sacred Thing
The biggest disservice that they did me
Was getting me onto the ideal of controlling
How others feel about me
Because controlling how others feel
Puts ME into a cage as well
The mask of their surface wants
Is forced upon my face
And I would trade my freedom
For their approval any day
I think, as I walk past people
That how someone feels about you
Is a sacred thing
There is no need to change how they feel about us
Just as much as we can seek to understand not control our own feelings
I was thinking today about boundaries and needs, and how I’m starting to work on recognizing them. I’ll add a new one to the list:
Honesty – truth is important
Empathy – emotions are important
Respect – it is important to be valued and value others
Time – control over your time and space
Possibility – belief anything is possible
Health – lifestyle is important
Needs are interesting, because I think boundaries are used to protect needs. I’m not entirely sure whether or not these are needs or boundaries. I also don’t know if they are values. In doing a little more research it seems that some people would consider these values, not needs. Maybe I should switch up my terminology.
In any case, health is a value that I recently added to incorporate my dedication to sleep, digestion, and exercise all in the service of feeling happy, strong, and energetic (for the long run).
I also recently thought about possibility. The most often neglected of all my values/needs but I feel equally important. I realized recently that possibility is what drives solutions. Boundaries are important, but communicating them, enforcing them, often requires compromise and communication. And what helps with that is the feeling of possibility.
Recently, I was feeling resentful of my parents not wanting me to go to a social gathering with friends. I felt it was violating my boundary around health (mental health), empathy (where they would value my emotions) and honesty (I did not feel like I could be honest about any of this).
However, I didn’t know what to do because I respect their boundaries around health might be a bit different from mine. Being older and frailer, they were more worried about my health and their own. I know that I cannot protect them from getting sick, but I felt increasingly stressed.
The possibility value came into play when I thought about how anything is possible. I started to think about how I could meet my need for emotional health in different ways, for example, talking more to my friends and meeting more of them (in a more one on one setting) that would potentially reduce and control the risk to my parents. At the same time I still see possibilities in meeting up with my friends working out as possibility is always there.
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.
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
For the longest time, I’ve thought that my job was pretty much perfect. It wasn’t the highest paying job, or the one that I loved the most, but I think it has many many good elements such as:
Good enough pay to never have to worry about money
Good work/life balance, lots of work sometimes, little work others
Lots of traveling
Get to practice speaking and work on fun projects
Obviously, I could find a job even better in every area, but this is quite good already.
I realized recently why I still feel tired and think that it is too much work so often. THE WORK LIFE BALANCE IS HORRIBLE.
Ok, I understand I just contradicted myself there, but the reason why I think the work life balance is good is because on paper, there are lots of downtime where I can do whatever I want. However, because of the amount of emotional pressure that I put on myself, I’m actually always thinking about work which means that there is actually no worklife balance at all.
I worry if I kick back and ignore work for a while:
I will not be able to focus when I really need to so I need to get all the work done that I can
I will not be able to have enough time to get my work done when I really need to so I need to be working all the time
Someone will ask me what I’ve been working on and I will be outed as someone who is not contributing anything
Some of the anxieties I have around actually working:
I worry I will create ugly applications and I will come off as bad and incompetent
I worry I will not build enough for my application and I will come off as lazy or incompetent
I worry that when I go into meetings I will look unprepared and stupid
If I am able to deal with the emotional burden of this job and turn work into something soothing and relaxing for me, I will actually be so happy in this job. This will be the easiest money I will ever make and it will free me up to make money in other ways as well.
I’m going to do this in a couple of ways:
Practice acceptance of where I am. Give myself permission to be bad
Reprogram the idea that I will be rejected if I am not perfect
Look for ways to make my job extremely easy
Find ways to meet my needs through my jobs
So Step 1:
I am lazy, incompetent, unproductive and stupid. I accept myself for it. I give myself permission to be this way as much as I want to be.
Step 2:
The Bossy Man
In the meeting
Which I spent
Almost no time preparing for
He asked me to show
Something
I didn’t want to show
I said no
The meeting
Was under my
Control
The Finicky Architect
I created something
That I didn’t think
Was good enough
To stop him from asking question
Yet I showed up not to impress
But to help
And we were both happy
By the end
Step 3:
Where are the hardest parts of my job?
1 – Learning about new technology
Takes a long time
Hard to know what to focus on
Hard to remember
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Create materials for myself to make my life easier (cheat sheets, presentations)
Look for a way to make my life easier
Timebox an attempt to learn quickly
Focus on one area that has impact
2 – Building mockups
Takes time to understand the customer’s process
Hard to formulate what I need
Hard to understand how to design it
Hard to work out the technical parts of building out a process
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Clearly articulate what I need
The interfaces
What the style is
The processes
The data structures
The priority
Get help on the UI
Get help on the build itself
3 – Presenting the product
Never know what they will ask me to explain or click on
Hard to boil down the flow to a few steps
People may want to test you on areas that they don’t understand or may be hard to show
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Get the clarity I need:
Why they are asking the question?
What are they testing me on? What is the thing I need to prove?
What do they already know or understand?
Pause
Think about my gameplan
Use metaphors to bridge understanding gaps
Walk through what I’m about to do in my head before I do it on the screen
Step 4:
The most annoying things at work and how I will meet my needs through it:
Building mockups
Contribution: Who am I helping with this?
Growth: What will I do better with this demo?
Significance: What special signature will be mine?
Uncertainty: What is it that interests me the most about this demo?
Certainty: What do I want to copy? Who can make my life easier? How long do I need realistically?
Filing expense reports, doing training and filing quarterly reviews
Love and Connection: Who can I have a working/hangout session with?
Uncertainty: What time challenge should I give myself?
Boring meetings/trainings
Certainty: Why am I joining? What questions do I need to ask? If none, make a note of what I need from the meeting and watch the recording.
Love and Connection: Reach out to the presenter and tell them what you liked
Giving demos and presentations
Contribution: How can I be the most helpful?
Significance: Why am I showing this?
Uncertainty: Don’t prepare
Certainty: What am I afraid of?
Ok, that’s it for now. I will say that writing this blog post has been tremendously helpful. I will be referencing this over and over again it is just so useful. Hopefully after using it many many times, it will be ingrained within me and I won’t need to look at it anymore.