Today I feel tired. My kidneys ache. They feel bloated and stagnated. My stomach feels slow. My head iches on the top. My eyes are dry. I feel burning inflammation up my back and spine. My skin is flaking on my face.
These past few days have felt exhausting, extremely stressful, and demoralizing. Last night, I asked myself the question, how do I get out of this.
I didn’t know the answer then, but my answer today during my walk was to take my stress seriously.
And just now, I had a realization that I have the systems developed to do extraordinary things. I just need to utilize them and follow their principals.
Systems in place:
Daily walk to ponder questions I am stressed about
Daily workpost to grow myself, plan for greatness
Clean space to deal with stress, clean place = clean mind
Meal prep strategy for healthy cheap meals with little stress – fridge containers, tacos, lettuce wraps
Whiteboards to write strategies
Off computer working systems (working while walking, running errands, working out, eating out)
Todo list strategy – focus on one thing at a time, prioritize
Clean after working hours to transition, decompress
Crawling to get cardio in small space
Walking backwards and tibialus for knee
Hanging for shoulders and posture
Working out after and before meals for better absorption, muscle growth, and recovery
Journaling to ask myself questions at night
Walking with no effort
I have absolutely everything I need to build a life where I can do almost anything I want, achieve anything I want.
Right now, I want to focus on two things: recovery and priming
Priming are stuff like cleaning, wiping off my whiteboards, clearing out tabs, filling markers, mealprep, todo list grooming
Recovery means lots of sleep, rest, hydration, and exercise. Specifically paying attention to anytime I want to game to see if I feel stressed or uncomfortable, taking a break when that happens.
To top off this post, I want to attach something that I want to erase from my whiteboard, but want to save forever:
Reasons Why I’m Ready
I’ve developed very deep and powerful life theories (flow, connection) → these theories can give anyone direction in darkness, I forget them but they come back when I need them
When faced with pain I’ve always come out stronger (ACL) → pain is the greatest teacher
I’ve proven that I can complete hard challenges (knee, sova) → I can achieve the challenges I set my mind to
I can solve problems few people can solve (triage, nikola) → normal rules don’t apply
I’m deeply attuned to emotions (coaching, art, philosophy) → makes it much easier to connect with people
I used to walk up to girls on the street → Nothing is something I can’t handle. There is nothing that I can’t ask for
No matter how badly I fail there are people who still love me
The point is not to get there, be productive or succeed, the point is to find a meaningful problem, problems we want to solve → we will never have no problems but we can choose which problems we want to contend with
Happiness doesn’t come from acing the past but seizing the now → its never too late to be happyIt’s near too late to fix it with a degree in engineering and parents who don’t mess with me
I have lots of assets and saving and a degree in engineering and parents and a sister all with money saved
I’ve been putting off making this post for the longest time because I just didn’t know what I wanted my goal and focus for this challenge to be.
I knew generally a couple of things:
I knew I wanted to be more dangerous
I wanted to get stronger
I wanted to learn technique that could be a basis for MMA and grappling
I wanted to feel motivated to work out again
But I had no idea of specifically what I wanted and how I wanted to get there.
But then it hit me. I don’t need to know. This is an experiment. I’m not setting a goal and see how close I get to it. I’m trying jiujitsu for a month and seeing how it will affect me. Along the lines of my goals:
I want to see how it affects my fighting ability and mindset
I want to see how it affects my body
I want to see what concepts and techniques I grasped
I want to see how it affects my relationship to exercise
Let’s go on a journey! That is why I renamed it Jiujitsu journey instead of jiujitsu challenge.
So I’m pretty frustrated because this is the second time I am writing this blog post. The first time I wrote this blog post, the post was bugging out and didn’t save properly.
Not too happy about that.
In the spirit of growth, I am going to let go of that blog post and focus on creating an entirely new one without losing the essence of what I wanted to say in the first one I wrote.
This morning I was feeling really stressed out and I was really enjoying my walk. I feel like this whole questions meditations thing has really worked out. I really like journaling at night, and walking during the day. Before when I was forcing myself to go outside because I felt like I had to, I kinda hated it. It was nice once I got outside, but before then it was pretty awful.
Now, since I know I’m going use the time to meditate on some of the questions I have in my heart, I feel really excited and motivated to go outside in the morning.
Here are the main things I was stressed out about this morning:
My career, didn’t know where I was going next
My medical bills, spent 8k on a new medical device, hundreds more for my GI doctor
My financial issues, I spent 700 more than I made yesterday
My coaching career, still not anywhere close to making enough money to be self sufficient
I could move back home, but then I’m worried about having a place for my girlfriend to visit me
And through my amazing short 20 minute walk, here are the answers I got:
Acknowledge that you are taking a huge risk by paying 1,700 per month on rent with very little income and building coaching business from 0
Risk is not a bad thing, it is an incredible catalyst for growth
Risk means, now is the time to shine. Focus on the few things that matter most
Building an really strong foundation of health, a very strong structure for getting stuff done
Changing the lives of my current coaching clients
Work slowly towards my career in AI
It’s ok to invest money in the medical bills because they directly help with my foundational health goal. Double down on the investment by focusing a lot on sleep and digestion.
Let go of all other goals and distractions because now is go time. Just work on small projects or really gradual work.
A excellent video of someone reaching radiant from silver
A video of how to aim well by Scream a team liquid professional valorant player
What I realized is that there are many ways to improve and win valorant games and climb to plat. There are somethings that will make it easier but you don’t need to do all of them.
Valorant, like life, is a game with specific rules, but how you play it is up to you.
A few different examples:
You can play only solo queue (deciding to team up with random people)
You can play only with people you know
You can play the game to gain rank
You can play the game to try out the different agents
You can play the game for the high reaction time and mechanical skill like aiming
You can play the game for the strategy required
I decided to make a list of how I want to play Valorant in the context of this challenge.
I want to play with people who are fun to hang out with
I want to make the entire game comfortable to play for me
I want to focus on the actual objective, killing all the enemies and winning each round
Step 1: Finding people to play with
The most efficient way is just to focus on playing with people I already like playing with and try to meet new people by adding new people from games I play. I should also focus on unadding people I don’t like playing with.
Step 2: Making the game comfortable for me
The areas I need to focus on being more comfortable:
Minimap
Being able to visualize where everyone is just looking at the map
Aiming
Being able to comfortably get the physical mechanics of aim and crosshair placement down
Movement
Knowing the different ways and distances to peek comfortably
Abilities
Knowing lineups and ability planning
Clearing
Knowing how to path through a site properly
Switching weapons
Knowing the physical coordination of switching knife, pistol and main weapon
Step 3: Focusing on winning rounds
Usually, I am laser-focused on two things:
Abilities
Killing people and not getting killed
I want to reframe Valorant for me.
Generally, you want to either play for a plant/defuse or try to kill every member of the enemy team.
As a result, I want to think about Valorant in the following plays:
Brute force brawl with team, if team is pushing site together
Try to get the enemy to trip up and make a mistake by confusing them and holding weird angles or lurking
Try to set myself up for an ace by having my abilites and pathing planned out
Overall I think Valorant meets the following needs for me:
Growth: Getting better over time
Significance: The chance to practice my learning techniques in a measurable area
Love and connection: Playing with people who I like hanging out with
Here is what I think my routine should generally be:
Warmup physically, and stretch, get pumped up with music
Warmup in deathmatch, get a feeling for the mouse
Warmup in the range and spike rush and defuse
Meditate
Play a game, focus on winning rounds
Vod review, focus on the minimap awareness
Practice in custom game lineup and setups to win next time or win by more
