I was struggling really hard on making videos recently and struggling even harder to figure out what I’m doing with my life.
I know this is in large part to the enormous pressure that I put on myself in order to do well and it makes me very angry that my parents brought me up in such a way, a way in which I feel constantly paralyzed with the fear of anything less than perfection.
There are a few things that I found relief with:
MENTALITY 1: The focused mindset
Let everything else fall away but the feeling of what you are aiming at (whether it is to walk, to move, to express) and the sensations within your body. Feel the right time to strike, to act.
MENTALITY 2: The meditative mindset
Let everything fall away, most of all, your identity. Feel the universe around you and wait patiently for something to surface, let all conscious thoughts and solutioning to dissolve like sugar in water. Only sensations remain, and the vastness of space.
MENTALITY 3: The unchained mindset
Give yourself permission to do and think about everything and anything. Accept yourself for everything. Give yourself permission to do anything. Imagine that you’ve already done it and give yourself permission to do it.
In the end of the day, I realized that it’s not about what you do with you life. You can do anything. You can always change your mind. It’s more of a question of what you want to do right now if you can do anything that you want.
UNIT TWO: Dynamic Figure Drawing | Day 1 – Explore figure sketching techniques/simplification
I’ve been actively avoiding working on this challenge all day. I feel like it is because it is so damn overwhelming. It took so much for me to even just sit down and start working on this.
But now that I have sat down and am working on this, I want to create a mini lesson plan for today.
Since today is about exploring figure sketching techniques and simplification, I shall design a lesson plan to make it impossible not to get good at those things. As I’ve said before, lesson plans let me connect to the present moment, on one task at a time. This in turn helps me work through the feeling of being overwhelmed.
Mini syllabus for: explore figure sketching techniques/simplification
Total time: 90 minutes (est 30 min per unit, 10 min per part)
Circle head, half for nose line, half of that for mouth line
line for neck
line for spine
line for hips perpendicular to spine
line for shoulders perpendicular to spine
Head shapes
circle with lopped side for skull
cut cube for face
Sketchy woodwork for finding pose
Keep scratching until a form emerges
Erase or lighten then refine
Advanced shapes
triangle tricep
triangle forearm
teardrop thighs
diamond calf
box pecs
triangle delts
pen tip torso
Mini unit 2: Experiment
Part 1: School of thought 1
I practiced basic armature and it looked pretty bad. I think I started to improve when I moved the hips a little higher.
Part 2: School of thought 2
Things started to improve a little here. I really like the method of simple shapes for the head. I felt like I understood the geometry much better.
Part 3: School of thought 3
This is when I used the sketchy woodwork carving out a pose and when I refined it, I used the advanced shaped coupled with everything else I learned. I really really like this method. Gives me dynamic poses without losing the anatomy.
I didn’t get to Unit 3 because I feel complete and it is 2AM and I want to go to bed.
Very happy with today’s progress. I feel like I killed it at the figure drawings and I feel much more confident drawing figures.
I realized that I have made every single video type that I said in the last blog post (Video Poem, How To Video, Challenge Video, Conversation Video) except the How To Video.
I think the reason why, is that I tend to restrict myself with only shooting myself, when in How To Videos I would actually have a lot more fun shooting it with many more elements such as animation, and stop motion.
Going on that theme, I’m going through every video type and breaking down the types of video I’m going to try in each.
Video Poem
Lots of beautiful b-roll (mostly from traveling)
Some b-roll from video personal diary entries
Voice over from a written script
Collage of elements, textures, images, text and footage
How-to Video
Less is more
Animation
Stop motion
B-roll
Talking head (straight on face shot)
Text on screen
Focus on simplicity and directly to the point
Challenge Video
Broll of challenge
Diary entries from during the challenge
Voice overs
Broll for explanations
Focus on the journey and try to convey how it felt for real
It has finally happened. I’ve hit plat in Valorant. A journey that was supposed to take 2-3 months, but instead took a year and two months (14 months).
Blood sweat and tears went into this challenge, and I learned something interesting at each rank.
IRON
Iron was an interesting rank because it was the rank when I was first learning how to use my mouse and keyboard in a game. I had never played a shooter game on the pc, and haven’t played many serious games at all on the PC.
Getting out of iron was simply learning how not to make extremely basic mistakes such as reloading out in the open, not getting stuck on walls, planting and defusing the bomb.
BRONZE
Bronze was also an interesting rank. I started actually enjoying the game more here since I had a better idea of what was going on. Bronze rank was still stressful because I would get killed out of nowhere all the time.
I don’t really remember what I did to get out of bronze rank, but I think it had something to do with playing off of my util and learning how to check corners where people hide.
SILVER
I was stuck in silver for a long time. Silver was where I learned a lot about aiming and movement and got quite good at it.
What eventually got me out of silver was learning how to preaim angles.
GOLD
Gold is not a very interesting rank, everyone is pretty much like silver but with slightly better util and aim.
However, perhaps the most interesting thing in the whole challenge is how I got out of gold. I got out of gold primarily by getting more confident.
I did this in two ways:
I focused on a few agents and learned how to get reliable value out of their util (Chamber tp locations, Brim lineups, Sova lineups).
I dealt with some of my underlying negative self talk
I hear lots of things that people say about confidence:
“Stay positive”
“Imagine you are the best”
I always thought these ideas were bogus since I always thought confidence was about one thing: Feeling comfortable in your own skin.
But I started to doubt myself when I say professional Valorant coaching advocating (SEN Zellsis) for the “cocky confidence” mentality and I was stuck in silver.
But I think in the end, I was right. In order to be confident, you need to feel safe and at peace. The real question, is HOW?
Here are the main ideas:
In order to be confident, you need to be ok with not being great (not being smart, successful, attractive, etc.)
In order to be ok with those things, you need to process your traumas and limiting beliefs.
In order to process, you must welcome in your limiting beliefs and incorporate it into yourself.
My limiting beliefs were:
“If I don’t succeed, I don’t think I’m worth anything”
“I need to beat myself up for every mistake and always think I’m worse in order to not mess up”
Simply by saying those things in my head, made me feel clarity every time I started to stress out and I suddenly felt calm. I gave myself permission to continue to berate myself (or not) but simply welcoming these parts in instead of avoiding them (and having them show up as unresolved stress), made me have a clear mentality that made my rise to plat.
I learned I have a huge amount of power, intelligence and creativity that are locked up by stress and fear. Slowing down, focusing on a few things at a time, and embracing my fears allows me to operate at my fullest potential.
I’ve been doing pretty well on the social front of the Sales conference, keeping in touch with myself and keeping my boundaries. But the same problems that plague me at home, plague me here.
Specifically, sleep, or lack thereof. I’ve been exploring the feelings that keep me distracting myself with games, videos, and other things. I’m trying to understand this desire, this hunger for stimulation that I have within myself.
It feels like a hunger, and hunger comes from emptiness. I wonder what I am missing in my life. I feel that it might be blood flow. I want to feel like this amazing warmth and flow to my body where my mind and body is open and stimulated.
Meditation has been a great boon to me, I’ve used it to calm down, to get answers and to reduce the inflammation I feel from lack of sleep.
I’ve also explored other physical avenues such as stretching, warmups and self massage.
My feeling is that self-massage comes first, then, mobility exercises and finally stretching.
Here are some of the videos I did today that were pretty good:
But my journey in this has just begun.
I really feel the need to understand what is the appeal of gaming and watching interesting videos internally. Perhaps that isn’t even the key. Perhaps the key is to give myself more freedom and permission. Perhaps this is a trigger for caging myself in and shaming myself so I’m not fully in touch with myself.
I’ll at least give it a shot. I realize there is a big fear in me that if I let myself do what I want, my life will go off the rails. I am going to face that fear and feel it and see where it leads me.
