The French Challenge: The Plan

Byjack

So I have a new challenge I’m working on.

To summarize my goals in order of how much they resonate with me:

  1. Be able to communicate and connect on a deeper level with my girlfriend, her friends and family
  2. Discover a whole new undiscovered world, the French world
  3. Understand and empathize with others better, understand and empathize with myself better
  4. Challenge myself to do the impossible
  5. Maybe win some cool points in learning French written language
  6. Learn more about French food

Timeline: 31 days (not counting today) from December 15th to January 15th

I’ve always wanted to learn French in a way that isn’t conventional. Not the Duolingo or the Rosetta Stone or Pimsleur way. None of those programs really worked for me. Maybe on the surface level they work…like if I spent enough time learning and studying those programs it would work but the way they were structured was all wrong for me. It just felt so dry and boring and something alive about the language was lost. I love how personal language can be. I want it to be personal for me.

But in order to do so, I’m going to have to rely a huge amount on connection theory because learning a language is incredibly difficult and I will need to really come up with something next level to learn a language without following one of these programs.

So let’s think about it. While I would love to plan out all 31 days of this, I simply cannot. That is too damn hard. Because I don’t have enough experience in learning languages, I need to try to learn it in different ways and understand and feel the feelings.

Some things I want to try:

  1. Write a story in French. Get help from a large language model in doing it.
  2. Write a comic in French, and also get help from AI.
  3. Learn through mimicry. Watch a YouTube video or movie in pure French. No subtitles, no explanation. Just imitate and copy the entire language. Don’t even try to understand what is being said.
    1. This is how babies learn and how large language models learn
    2. This might be my entire strategy in the challenge
    3. What I train on might be important, for example, if I watch a lot of comedy, I might end up being a very jokey person in French
    4. This is probably by far the hardest but most profound way to learn a language, need to be extremely comfortable with feeling the feeling of confusion (one of the most painful feelings for humans)
  4. Leave a message to my girlfriend in French every day. Let go of pronunciation or grammar. Focus only on trying to communicate as much as possible without looking any French up. When I need to look something up, don’t try to memorize it. The point is to communicate a lot, not memorize or get things perfectly right.
    1. This makes a lot of sense because my primary goal is to connect with my girlfriend.
    2. It makes sense to let go of anything that would prevent me from wanting to leave a message, namely
      1. Being afraid to pronounce something wrong
      2. Annoyed at having to look something up
      3. Annoyed at having to memorize words I look up
    3. By talking a lot, expressing a lot every day, and potentially looking up the same words over and over, I will start to absorb them

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Valorant 37: Back on the Grind

Byjack

Thoughts:

  • Make the transitions smoother, add in more wide swings
  • Focus on micro adjusting more before shooting
  • Overall very strong stuff, great positioning
  • Not having much luck with the micro adjust
  • Try to shoot twice and crouch
  • Use the difference between head and crosshair as new micro adjust method
  • I hate DM
  • I don’t really know what to do
  • Maybe need to watch some pro vods

I really want to work on my mindset when I get upset, miss my shots or get frustrated with my teammates.

Some ideas:

  • Pumping myself up
    • Judging based on “clipable” moments rather than kills
    • Use music to pump up
  • Self-talk strategies
    • I believe in myself
    • I’ve done it before, I can do it again
    • This is a small part of my long journey to being the best
  • When feeling physically/mentally unwell and need a reset
    • Exercise
    • Watch videos of my vlogs and reflections
    • Tumeric tea
    • Playing music

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Valorant 42: Chaining Kills

Byjack

A new mentality that I’ve been working with is the idea of chaining kills.

  1. Come up with a play that I want to go for (util, direction, etc.)
  2. Go for not a single kill, but a multikill
    1. Expect more than one
    2. 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.

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Profit in Peace 2: First Day

Byjack

Today is not the first day working on the Profit in Peace challenge, but it does FEEL like the first day I am living it.

Today is the first day when I dedicated my morning to finding my magical life. For some context of what that means:

Something that I still don’t really understand or feel comfortable with applying is the values that I believe in every day.

I think that writing honestly and focusing on myself in this blog every morning might actually hit all of these points:

  1. Honesty – well, this blog isn’t called unfiltered for no reason! I do remind myself all the time of the “if they don’t like me please leave” mentality.
  2. Imagination – for me, this blog is dedicated to all my imaginative parts: art, YouTube, philosophy, poetry etc.
  3. Intuition – this is the place where doing things “my” way is celebrated and I tap into what is the best way to do something (according to my intuition) rather than how everyone else does it.
  4. Empathy – this blog is a lot for my feelings where I process feelings through words, video, and images. It is a part of honesty too, honest emotion where this is my place to express everything imperfect.

I also like using the blog as my way of living out all my values and being the person I want to be because it really feels like I am sacrificing something to do this…in a good way.

JT Franco talks about if you aren’t willing to sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice. In the end, I had no idea whether I would sacrifice time talking to my girlfriend, going on YouTube, working, playing games, or making YouTube videos. Those are the things I spend most of my day doing anyway. But none of those things seemed right. It was too blunt on an idea, how could you sacrifice all of YouTube? How could I sacrifice all of work?

But by sacrificing my mornings, in a way, I am also sacrificing all of those things. I resist the urge to listen to audiobooks, watch YouTube videos, check messages, or work in the morning. I dedicate all my time to working on my blog and all my challenges, thoughts, ideas, and philosophies.

I also feel a deep unease and anxiety keeping pace with me this morning:

I’m Afraid I My Boss Will Check

I’m afraid my boss will check

See I’m not working

It won’t matter that I have bigger dreams

it won’t matter if I did a bunch of planning

On the weekend

Feverishly, desperately trying to

Make my workday

Productive, efficient enough

To make up

To make it easy

For me to balance

I remember the look on his face

When I told him

I like to meditate

Skeptical

And

I also wonder

If finding my magic

Will make me feel sad and lonely

Like I did yesterday

I feel tired as I

Let go of trying to change the feeling

And accept it instead

Another anxiety that I have about this challenge or this “morning commitment” is just the sense of lack of clarity. I don’t know what I should be working on, or what I can work on. I think is the pressure of time. Or maybe its because I completed all the prework for the challenge and I don’t exactly have something to work on right now. I’m afraid every action is not “right”.

Is it the right thing to:

  1. Work on challenge videos?
  2. Work on editing videos?
  3. Work on reaching out?
  4. To focus on my body?

Wow there is so much here and I feel that I may be stalling. Scared to make a decision so I’m just rambling on a super long blog post that doesn’t really say anything in particular.

Well all I know right now is I feel like doing a bit of freewriting, fantasy writing or something of that nature. So I’ll go do that.

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Profit in Peace 3: Asking Questions

Byjack

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.

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Valorant 12: The Movement Gun

Byjack

I realized recently that having really insane movement is better for certain types of guns. Specifically the phantom.

I tested this theory today, by playing phantom and I think the results speak for themselves.

A couple of notes:

  • The Vandal will require a different mindset to play (the catch them on the crosshair, holding angles type of mindest)
  • Movement is really good but need to peek tighter angles still

Overall, I need to pick the weapon best suiting my mood and the map. Vandal for slower smoother headshots, phantom for more energetic aggressive plays.