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Workpost 39: Making the Most of It
Byjack
This morning I had a very slow start. Seems to be the same for a lot of days.
I really really focused on the idea that everything could be turned into an advantage. And today, I realized that the reason why I have slow starts is because my stomach burns, aches, and has gnawing empty pain. It is so bad, it is hard to focus and feel motivated to work.
The opportunity this morning is to devise some techniques to help with my stomach and be able to test it with the worst possible conditions. In other words, if the techniques work now, they will work anytime.
I tried this video first, and it was pretty helpful.
Then I tried this video which was helpful, but too boring to finish:
Finally, I tried drinking hot tea, which seemed to help some as well.’
And then, even though my stomach starting feeling better, I ran into another problem with avengance.
This problem was simple. Absolutely no motivation to do anything, being that I still felt tired and overwhelmed. Instead, I wanted to play games and watch tv shows.
I’m going to take the same approach here: use this as an opportunity to test out some new ideas with productivity.
So I have many many techniques in this area already, but I want to innovate further today in a different direction instead of meditation, letting go, focus, etc.
I want to look at why, even in my overwhelmed state, do I want to play Valorant and Fallout Shelter, and how I can fundamentally apply the same things to the things I want to do.
Things I Want To Do
- Consulting work
- Linkedin posts
- Coaching work
- Working out
Before I forget, here are some additional mindsets I can add the useful pile:
- Walking to vent stress, find peace, ask tough questions, get answers
- Workpost is to innovate something
Main Reasons Why I Want to Play Valorant
- Can work on a specific skill like aim, movement, gamesense
- Want to level up really quick and be a top player
- Inspired by demon1, tenz, oxy, and aspas – want to be the best as well
- Like working with a team, getting clutch plays off, good vibes
Main Reasons Why I Want to Play Fallout Shelter
- Get control of my vault
- Satisfaction in optimizing my vault
- Satisfaction in leveling people up, and getting new weapons
Why It Is difficult to get the same feeling with work?
- There is no specific simple skill to work on
- Nothing I want to level up in
- No one to inspire me
- No team to work with
- Don’t feel in complete ownership of the project
- In a hurry to get it done
What skills am I excited want to work on in terms of work?
- Faster problem solving skills
- Intuition + precise logic for accurate but rapid decision making
- Ability to think deeper with less effort
- Memory and recall with less energy
What do I want to level up in terms of rank?
- Money
- Intellect
- Thought leadership
- Communication and charisma
Who do I draw inspiration from?
- Elon Musk
- Alex Hormozi
- Khalid Sharara
How might I work off my team more?
- Showing off the results of my work
How might I feel more in control of my work?
- Understand that charisma, leadership are part of what I need to own and protect my work, just because there are other players involved doesn’t mean I don’t own it
Using all this information, I want to develop a unit of work, called a “game” or “match” to simulate what I do in Valorant. In Valorant you play a match with a clear objective, and you warm up before the game, and take breaks after the game.
Game Structure
Warmup: 15 minutes
Use to do list, practice one skill at a time:
- Faster problem solving/solution creation skills
- Intuition + precise logic for accurate but rapid decision making
- Ability to think deeper with less effort
- Memory and recall with less energy
Main game: 45 minutes
Fights:
Capture questions and answers.
Level up in:
- Money
- Intellect
- Thought leadership
- Communication and charisma
Result Calculation:
- How much do I think this work is worth?
- How difficult intellectually was this work from 1-10?
- What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation?
- Gains in communication and charisma?
Workpost 43: Resilience (17 Questions)
Byjack
My questions:
- How to find a good business partner?
- How to live an entrepreneur/unemployed life?
- How to approach taxes as an entrepreneur?
- How to approach risk?
- How to build a support system?
- How to handle rejection?
- How to approach financial risk in a smart way?
- How to rebuild from nothing?
- How to deal with people looking down on you?
- How to get hired/search for a job?
- How to turn off work?
- How to minimize work effort/stress/inefficiency?
- How to process awkwardness?
- What are different selling methods?
- How to sell in a way that I feel myself?
- How to gain from/work with/ benefit from the American system?
- How can I be more resilient?
My intuitive answers to the questions:
How to find a good business partner?
- Write down what the ideal business is like
- Imagine all your favorite parts
- Imagine all the parts you need help with
- Write down your values
- Think about where a person like this (values + good in the areas you are weak + interest in your business area) would like to do/hangs out
- Ask close friends if they know someone like this
How to live an entrepreneur/unemployed life?
- They are different questions
- For the entrepreneur
- Without a company, you need to build a company around you
- Need to hire help/services to help automate different parts of life
- For the unemployed
- Now is the time to look for help
- Look into government assistance, help from family and friends
- To decide which one you are:
- Unemployed when you no longer have ability to make money
- If you have savings + some cashflow you are an entrepreneur
- If you have no savings and negative cashflow, you are unemployed
- You can be an entrepreneur and still work a job to increase your cashflow
How to approach taxes as an entrepreneur?
- Find a CPA that has experience working with entrepreneurs
How to approach risk?
- Risk is actually really simple
- Risk value = probability of success x value of success
- The higher the risk value, the more worth the risk, compare that with the resources the risk requires
How to build a support system?
- The easiest way are people who want to live in a similar world as you do
- People who’s goals align with yours
- The easiest way to ascertain this is just to ask people
- You can also try to go to places that are included in your vision for what type of world you want to live in
How to handle rejection?
- Repair the ways in which you rejected yourself
How to approach financial risk in a smart way?
- Get good at estimating risk value and investment
- If the risk value is $100,000, and the investment is $90,000 then the risk is likely worth it
- If the risk value is $100,000 and the investment is $10,000 then the risk is definitely worth it
How to rebuild from nothing?
- Know your strengths
- Know what people want
- Sell yourself
How to deal with people looking down on you?
- Repair the ways other people have looked down on your in the past
How to get hired/search for a job?
- Think about the jobs that will be easiest for you to get
- Based on the interviews and discussions, adjust closer to what makes you happy
How to turn off work?
- Create a viable plan for when pending work will be addressed
- Write down the plan and execute when you are ready
How to minimize work effort/stress/inefficiency?
- Focus on creating clarity at all times on what is expected and when
- Set boundaries around respect and time
- Make sure that the goals are specific and small enough to complete one at a time
How to process awkwardness?
- Find reasons why awkwardness is a good thing
What are different selling methods?
- Relationships sales – they like you
- Technical sales – they like the technology
- Pressure sales – they don’t want to say no
- Trust sales – they trust you
How to sell in a way that I feel myself?
- Trust sales + technical sales sounds most like me
How to gain from/work with/ benefit from the American system?
- Sell to the rich
- Hire people who are good at what they do
- Outsource tedious stuff to other countries or AI
How can I be more resilient?
- Spend time getting up when you fall
- Specifically focus time and effort on healing from painful experiences
Stuck
Byjack
I feel exhausted. My head feels numb. I feel hot and tired. My back aches.
My heart feels heavy. I feel angry at myself. So helpless. My mind in a fog.
My apartment is a mess. I just want to cry.
I can’t work. I just play games all day long. my eyes feel tired.
It’s 2 o’clock in the morning. All I want to do is eat and play video games. The pull is so strong in my heart like there is a strand of honey getting pulled.
I feel a numb panic deep in my chest. I’m afraid of failure. I’m scared I will disappoint myself and everyone around me. Pushing myself to make my business cards is only making me curl up even harder.
It was a long week. I’m exhausted. But the work just keeps coming.
I guess I can cancel tai chi tomorrow. Sleep in.
Tonight I can clean my apartment until I feel more peaceful.
I know I can use the gym as a way to process emotions, but I don’t use it.
I feel this pull, this overwhelm, like the honey being pulled, from my heart.
I’m capable of anything. Even rising from this challenge. This is important because as I get more successful, there will be days I feel exhausted, and in those moments, I need to find a way to find balance, to find peace.
I also want to learn to embrace failure. Failure is so scary to me. There is an image in my mind of my business cards being a complete disappointment and I feel a pit in my heart. A horrible amaturish website I’m not proud of and I can’t fix it.
Everyone starts somewhere. Everyone starts at the beginning. The people who are exceptional, who are savants are not people who started at the middle. They are people who enjoyed the beginning.
But how can I enjoy this? I feel so scared it won’t be good.
Makes me think of this video:
In this video, Jesse talks about how play allows us to feel pressure while still being able to learn.
That fun is the key to this.
But what is the key to fun? What would make this fun for me, regardless of the outcome, what would make designing and drawing fun for me?
What would make it an infinite game, not just a finite game focused on an end goal?
It’s true, the thought of designing business cards does not sound fun to me at all. It sounds like a slog. But maybe that’s because I’m worried about failing.
Ok, what if I tried to merge my painterly style with “woodcut” style prints. What if I created a new drawing technique that I could use to create cool stuff for friends and to sell as products?
That definitely sounds more like play to me.
So what about going to the gym, because I like it so much when I actually go, but I find it hard to go to begin with.
What if I saw it as supercharging myself – which it really is doing. Whether I go to lift weights or just to hang from the bar and stretch it really is building my body up to full potential. It might even solve my sleep problems.
And what about sleep, why do I not want to go to bed? Because if I go to bed, tomorrow, I wake up with tons of problems. Well maybe, that’s not a bad thing. Maybe before I go to bed, I fill my to do list with questions that I want to search out the answers to.
Here are the questions I have today, that if I knew the answers to I would rest easy:
- What am I going to do about my art coaching and AI gaming companies?
- Am I behind schedule and if so what do I do about it?
- Should I extend the schedule?
- Am I losing money?
- How do I get out of my procrastination phase and get working?
- What do I do about my art coaching website?
- How do I get everything done in such a short period of time?
- Should I start registering for fairs?
- Should I pay someone to design the website for me?
- How am I going to get the motivation to start drawing? How do I start drawing consistently?
- How do I start going to the gym and working outsite the apartment consistently?
- How will I start cooking again and cleaning up my apartment? Where will I find the time?
- How will I prepare for the next week of work? How do I balance my other businesses?
- When will I continue to work on my Javascript projects? What is the breakdown between AI work time and coaching work time.
Workpost 14: Tired
Byjack
I am worrying about a couple of things. First of all, I went to bed at 2AM again. This is becoming a pattern that I need to address ASAP.
Thinking about what I need via connection theory here is what I came up with:
- I need to be able to let go of not being productive during the day. It is hard, but I need to be able to say, I accept where I got to today.
- I need some way to process that pain and any anxiety from the day. Connection theory is telling me to yell and scream or hyperventilate.
- I need to get into bed at the proper time but again, like last time, I can intice myself with being able to use my phone while in bed.
Also, I feel linked to this is my anxiety around work.
My initial thought is to stop “trying” and pushing harder against a problem, rather everytime I hit an issue, write down all of the questions I have, then work out those problems outside my apartment, walking or going to the gym.
Connection theory is telling me drawing might help as well.
Overall, I feel like total shit and I feel the lack of sleep is taking a toll on my digestion. I hope to relax enough to take a nap and get back into working order.
Workpost 40: Refinement of the Game
Byjack
Today I made some definite progress. Even though I have the exact same feeling of lack of motivation, no interest in working. Wanting to just play games, I felt significantly better, having done spleen chi exercises both before bed and after waking up in the morning. As a result I started working 3 hours earlier than yesterday.
Today, I want to improve upon and refine on the game that I created for myself yesterday.
Firstly, in my walking meditation this morning, some wisdom came to me.
Relaxed > Easy > Fast
This was the wisdom first introduced to me in the book, Born to Run where the author talks about how you run completely relaxed first. Then you make your running more smooth, more efficient. If you are able to make it efficient and relaxed, you WILL be fast.
This is the same thing in Valorant. In your warmups you aren’t instantly trying to one tap everyone. You aren’t trying to do it fast. If you do, you probably are going too fast and the warmup won’t work.
You want to start slow (or even in the Miyagi technique, don’t even follow through with a shot, just track the target). As it becomes easy for you to hit headtaps, then you start to gradually speed up.
I want to implement this in my warmups. First, start off doing intense workout with the aim of expansion. Then focus on some brainteasers (Miyagi, completely relaxed). After a few minutes of that, work on to do list, trying to make my relaxed thinking more efficient and clean. Finally, at the tail end of the warmup, try to go fast. My thoughts are:
- 5 min physical warmup
- 2 min brainteasers
- 5 min todolist
- 3 min buffer
Then for the actual match, I would like to break it up more often with some deep breathing every 5 minutes, like I do with Valorant between rounds.
Workpost 18: Addicted
Byjack
I’ve been playing pokemon go so much recently. I’ve made a lot of progress in the game, but I really worry that I’m getting addicted because of how stressed out I am right now.
I stressed out about my relationship and about my career path moving forward. I want to make sure that work does not take over my life and that it stays aligned to what I want to do moving forward.
Every time I feel stressed, I reach for the pokemon go. Holy shit, I am addicted.
I feel very tired, but no longer sick. That is a good thing at least.
I’m going to walk around the airport. And this time, instead of catching pokemon, I am going to meditate and think.
On the plane I meditated on some of my issues and I came to a big realization. The first step to feeling or processing any pain is to notice and name the pain that exists. I spend so much time avoiding thinking about painful emotions or experiences, avoiding thinking about how things hurt me it makes it hard to face the pain at all since I’m not taking the first step,
I want to focus on doing that more now as the first step to processing more emotions.