Today I feel tired. Coming off of a early morning and a workout, watching a lot of Valorant, I’m in a position where I still feel a bit tired. I’m excited to update my blog, but I’m not so sure about the marketing call.
I really hope to make money off of my passion and find success in the AI space finally and I hope today’s session will help with that.
I feel strongly that I want to preserve boundaries with this coach because I feel he doesn’t respect boundaries for some reason.
I feel nervous and uncomfortable with the call. For some reason I feel he has a bit of a temper and is not good at listening.
But I can protect myself, I am his client and I have a bit of a temper too if it comes down to it.
I’ll take my time and be as clear and direct as possible with him.
My main issue is that I feel uncomfortable disagreeing with him. I feel unsafe. When processing it, I decided to be very clear about what he is saying and then say my views/opinions.
I’m having trouble getting work done today. I’m going to focus on the taoist productivity – work until I feel empty. Also, I want to leave the apartment to feel more productive.
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.
Why do I no longer feel any motivation to do coaching? Is it because I’m scared to propose a $20,000 product? Am I scared to start a community?
And so I went for a walk. On my walk, I determined that it was because I desire to focus more than anything. Currently, I am focusing on posting for 50 days on LinkedIn and it’s taking a lot of energy. I need to be able to have fewer things on my plate.
However, when I sat down to write this journal. I realized that I’ve lost my way in these posts. I no longer do the hard work to grow and articulate how I am feeling. When I did, my poem revealed to me that I feel extremely lost and scattered in my mind. I’ve forgotten the helpful intentions I use to set myself into the mode of preparing my day:
You are in my house
Take your time, be patient
Be ok with silence
Take risks
My house is a place where anything is possible
Connection theory + flow theory
When I immerse myself in these intentions, I feel the distinct taste of possibility coming back to me and my world is opened wide enough to do the planning that I want to do in these posts.
Today I want to continue the work of yesterday and I want to focus on three things:
Today I want to write a short post because I want to strike a better balance today between work and indulgence, between freedom and routine.
Yesterday I did have fun, but my need for productivity left me feeling stressed because I didn’t get much done. At the same time, I want to fully enjoy what I did yesterday which was play and watch a lot of Valorant.
If I’m able to do that, go outside and be more active, as well as go to sleep at a good nice, I’ll be pretty happy.
Right now, I feel like shit cuz I went to bed at 1am but that’s ok…I needed to unwind a bit!
So this is going to be a short post because I’m gonna get started with work right away. I want to get enough work done, that I can start trying out this working while walking outside and going to the gym and working on art.
I did this yesterday for a very little time and it was absolutely awesome. I drove to go get food and while I was walking I was asking chatgpt about a coding problem I had and thinking about it.
It felt really good. Productive, free, and fun! Now I need to take that code, implement it, make it work so I can be active again and solve the next piece of the puzzle.
Today I did a long breathwork meditation session after feeling extremely stressed out about three questions:
Should I sign up for jiujitsu again?
Should I do coaching again?
Should I continue therapy?
And all the worrying stressful sub questions:
What about the money for jiujitsu
Jiujitsu is so hard to get good at
People might not buy my coaching if I didn’t do something really big
Therapy costs so much money is it worth it?
And after the meditation, one thing was clear to me. The answer to everything: take everything so much less serious. Have fun!!!
If you have fun doing jiujitsu, sign up for it, go to classes when you feel like it. Have an amazing time doing work. If you love coaching, do it whether or not people believe that you are a good coach or not.
Enjoy yourself. Indulge yourself in boba while working. Take breaks to play on the piano, to draw.
P.S. I did sign up for jiujitsu, and I intend to have fun learning tons of new martial arts.
I feel pretty awful. I’ve lost focus in work. I feel overwhelmed and unhappy. Every day I stay up late at night. The only solace I find is in games. Everything that I wanted to do now feels like things I have to do.
I struggle to regain the mentality that I use for these workposts.
I guess I feel extremely tired and depressed.
There are a couple of things that filter through the haze that I’m feeling:
I want to find a way to post on LinkedIn again. That is the one thing I want to work on achieving.
This new idea in taichi, and breathwork. To receive what is coming instead of taking. To allow things to come to me. To receive breath instead of taking it. To receive emotions, purpose, and understanding, instead of creating it. I feel this is the essence of patience.
To be curious. I want to do more IFS therapy, but I feel overwhelmed by it. Too much thinking about thinking that is too cerebral, non-intuitive, and downright frustrating. However, we can take the core concept of IFS – the concept of creativity. Ask how do I feel? What do I need? Why do I feel that way.
It’s not been all lost I suppose. There was something I worked through recently – two people that I am jealous of. One who went to Harvard and ended up starting a successful youtube channel, and another who worked on my software company before leaving and getting big on youtube for his music, and is now a famous musician.
In speaking with my friend Edgar about this I came up with the following concepts to remind myself in times of jealousy:
How do I want to succeed my way? The issue with a lot of these people is that they got successful in things that I want to succeed in, but not in the way that I want to succeed. There is great value in succeed in the way I want to succeed.
Hardship creates growth. Success isn’t the end goal, success just leads to creating more challenges for yourself to work through. The ones who go down the harder path to begin with will still succeed but will be more complete when they do.
Is my goal to succeed a little in the short term? Or is the goal much bigger? This is the concept that if I want to gain one rank in Valorant, the outcome of a match matters (because my elo will be impacted directly). If my goal is to get to radiant (the highest rank), one loss in the scale of a huge journey is not significant.
Finally, I’ve put off doing a LinkedIn post for far too long.
Let’s tackle the steps:
Answer a list of questions in a letter to my girlfriend.
Come up with a research plan and timebox it.
Timebox getting everything “on the canvas”, move very fast, get messy, take big risks, keep going until it coalesces into what the art wants to be
Break to do other things, view work from different angles
Put on strategic hat to finish
Questions to ask myself (step 1):
What my vision for the ideal post?
What am I worried about and feel uncomfortable by?
What do I want to learn when creating this post?
Strategic Hat
See the work as something in itself, not just as a manifestation of my ideas
Put on creative hat, check: is there some feeling here, is there some beauty, fun?
Put on producer hat, check: if this was a work created by one of my clients, how would I promote it? If it was done by my brother?
*One Big Thing I Noticed*
It’s a lot easier for me to be motivated to workout than to work. Plan workout sessions for the entire day and bring work to do during those times. If no work gets done, I am still being productive and will be healthier, guaranteeing better work in the future.
