I feel overwhelmed and exhausted today. I want to finish a lot of things today but I feel overwhelmed thinking about it. Maybe it’s time to process more fears.
I have to finish my work today.
I feel it in the pit of my stomach, my chest this numbing roaring anxiety but also exhaustion and numbness in my head.
I feel like a failure. I’m panicking about not being able to get work done.
One thing that came up for me is that working really hard can help me sleep. All I need to do is fail at creating a package. All I need to complete the deliverable, it doesn’t matter if I do it in a shitty way.
Tony Robbins said to fall in love with your customer.
I want to see my customer succeed. I want to see them happy and thriving. I can make that happen.
I’m afraid to sleep. I’m afraid the day will pass me by.
Not being able to sleep means there is extra energy I have to use. I can use that energy to help my customer and myself. You don’t need to sleep until you feel that release.
I’m afraid I will play Valorant or do something else to cope. I’m afraid the day will pass me by. I’m afraid my addictions will drain me of energy.
Wanting to play Valorant is a sign for massage and addressing some of the physical issues I am experiencing.
In order to succeed at the project I am currently working on, I need to focus on developing my business, get me into the right headspace of possibility, positivity, fun, innovation, and purpose.
I don’t need to develop anything external (website, logo) but I do need to develop tools and processes to get me into the right headspace.
Here are some original ideas:
7 whys to understand purpose
Write a science fiction story of the role of the clients company in the future, write an origin story to the company
Try to tell the science fiction with the brand, website, ads
Design thinking – how might we solve X problem
What does level 3 look like? What does level 1 and 2 look like?
What problem are we solving for humanity?
What crisis are we pushing the boundaries in?
Mindmap – fill the whiteboard
What games can we play with our employees?
How can we make it fun for our clients?
Here is the main blueprint concept I am working with:
Build the future: create home base to live in
Brand
Mission
Vision
Website
Recruit more people for that future: I need you!
Lead magnet
Work together for the future: we build it together
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.
I was doing some deep journaling in the form of questions and answers, where I would ask all the questions I have, feel deep in my heart what answer is coming to me, and then asking more questions about those answers.
For example, I will ask myself, what do I do about the anxiety with art? The answer that I feel come up intuitively is to create art which then poses the question, what do I do with art? Then I have the answer, use art to create richness in your life.
I was doing this exercise because I realized at this point in my life, I am so confused on what will happen next and what direction I want to go for my coaching, my career, and my relationship that the best way to serve myself is to get some clarity about what I am feeling and what I want. The faster you make decisions, the faster you progress. I felt that having clarity would make it much easier to make faster decisions.
I had quite a few revelations from this exercise I wanted to note down a few of the most important ones:
I will achieve what I want in the field of AI not by working with others and creating a startup but rather by involving others into my creative process. Remember the energy of anything is possible. Solve difficult problems in practical ways and help people dream again. Change the world for the better.
The long distance relationship does not meet the physical needs of closeness. I will need to dance more to keep in touch with the physical. I want to use emails and video chats to keep connected with my girlfriend on a spiritual level.
I’ve lost a bit of my focus with coaching where it has become too much about the client. Coaching is not just about helping people create amazing beautiful art, but also to create a space of my design. Aka a space where connection theory and flow theory rule.
Use your fear of not having enough money to fuel art that creates more wealth than money can buy (not about the value of the art, but the experience about having stories, music, and paintings so beautiful I may as well be rich).
One more note I wanted to make…I had a new idea with coaching a few days ago. I always wanted to create video clips of my coaching in order to show social media, but I was thinking recently, I can create clips that can be used to share something a package that can be used to motivate my clients (clips of songs created during the session, major breakthroughs etc.)
I feel pretty overwhelmed and unhappy to work because there are a lot of tedious work to do that I don’t feel is very fun. In this first match, I just want to get everything done so I can move on.
Criteria for success:
Speed (percentile)
Efficiency (percentile)
Intellect (percentile)
Energy (1-5)
Warmup: Cleaning + walk + meditation/breathwork
Gameplan
UNIT ONE: Set up api calls
UNIT TWO: modify prompts
UNIT THREE: testing
Postmatch analysis:
I definitely did not follow the plan, yet everything somehow got done anyway.
Speed – 65% I was pretty fast, knowing what I need to do and was focused. Nothing too special though.
Efficiency – 60% I was ok efficiency, could have coded my way to better efficiency though
Intellect – 60% I definitely used my intellect to speed things up but it could have been accomplished by many people.