The Invitation From Life
A few days ago, my coach asked me a powerful question. I don’t remember what it is but I came up with this poem.
the summer sun on the blue pool
smell of chlorine, flip flops on the concrete
the late nights in your city, lights on long streets
big dreams in a small classroom on a paper on the board
paint covering the canvases, dripping off the walls
life has always been waiting
for you to be recklessly, wildly, lovingly creative
This led to me deciding the most powerful question in this whole poem is “why has life always been waiting for you”?
I felt in many ways this is true. I live in a wonderfully creative city. I have a youtube channel, a coaching practice, a well-paying job with lots of free time. Life is waiting on me to make a move.
Valorant 29: My Valorant Fears and Emotions
I wanted to do a bit of a post to understand how I am feeling right now about the Valorant challenge. I know I feel incredibly stressed, angry, and depressed because I feel like I wasted all my time on Valorant. So much time trying so hard to be good, but nothing seems to really come of it. Sometimes looking at my VODs I feel like my gameplay is the same as it was before.
I don’t really know what is going on and why it seems like I’m new to the game every time. I don’t know why I’m overthinking everything. Why is everything so hard?
I wish I could see major mistakes in my old gameplay.
I guess watching more VOD reviews will help me understand. But that takes so damn long. Maybe it means that there are still opportunities to play much much better. I feel that I maybe have gotten much better but it doesn’t seem to translate over to comp. Maybe it’s also something about understanding the maps better. I really get the sense that I got to plat last time by playing more comfortably on agents and on maps. I think I understood just how to play each map better. But I want to be a more complete player. I want to play with better movement and peeking.
Something else that I feel that I missed out on was just having more posts about the emotions I was feeling. It makes me sad that all my Valorant posts were about techniques and none of them were about emotions.
Valorant has a lot of nice emotions for me. I met my girlfriend on Valorant, I had a lot of friends on Valorant. These days I play mostly alone, but I still like the world. Cool agents and fun to get on to all these different teams. I love it when I have some really fun crazy game sense timing lurks. I guess that is one way that I got significantly better than before.
I wish I had VODs from when I was in iron. I feel that jump from iron to silver was the large one. The jump from silver to plat is weirdly small.
Ok. So I just spent a good hour or so just watching my VODs from bronze until plat then back to gold. I actually feel my overall movement is better and more consistent. The only difference in plat is that I was calmer and held an angle for longer. I also did more wide jiggles. I know for gold I held a lot more angles, and made sure to hold them wide because they would often wide swing everything.
Looking forward, I would be so happy if I kept calm and held angles for longer when moving around the map, held for the wide swing more often. Then when fighting an angle, I want to be more aggressive, swinging very fast and hard, but stopping at the edge and fighting, not leaving until I try to kill them, maybe just letting go of movement keys or crouch spraying. I would love to see my fundamentals get really really good, to a level I know they can get to.
Writing Prompt: Your Shadow
Writing Prompt: What is a pet peeve and how does that relate to your shadow?
Today I was listening to a Youtube video about the Harry Potter houses and turned off the video because I could not listen to the voice of the YouTuber any longer. The way he was talking was so affected it felt like I was drowning in discomfort.
He would have an extra lingering syllable that would stick at the end of each word. Griffindorrra instead of Griffindor and thennnnna instead of then. I felt like his proclivities were clawing marks into my heart.
I was thinking to myself. I hate him so much, but I bet all the comments are people praising him and encouraging him to continue with this horribly affected speech. And then I thought, maybe some people actually like it. He did have a nice British accent.
I wondered why I couldn’t stand him.
I just felt this cloudiness this lack of clarity in speech and I despised that. The fakeness also made me feel uncomfortable. Do I judge myself for being fake or unclear? I don’t know but I suspect I do. To me, those two traits speak to the worst fate in the world, mediocrity.
A Taoist Approach to Productivity
I’ve been meditating on productivity and I was curious as to a more taoist approach. I’ve come up with a couple of ideas:
- Make things more empty
- Pursue each task with the goal of emptiness
- Focus on one thing at a time and do work to make everything feel empty
- Look to make your to do list more empty
- Delete things off the to do list
- Schedule time sensitive things
- Clear off small tasks immediately
- Moving it to tomorrow
- Pursue each task with the goal of emptiness
- Reduce the size of mountains
- Create simple steps to kick off each task
- Seek balance
- Seek out more risk when things are stale
- Seek out more structure when things are too risky
Valorant 28: How to Get the Feeling for Something
This might fall into my Valorant challenge but it goes much deeper.
I started trying to find a way to multitask in Valorant, which led me to thinking about confidence. This led me down a whole path where I was trying to understand how to focus on the game and get into the game, and get into flow.
I finally arrived at a technique that looks something like this:
- See the enemy
- Imagine their head getting shot
- Aim
- Shoot
This works for drills, deathmatch anything. The point is that you visualize the outcome first, then take some action (aiming). You don’t immediately aim, you don’t shoot as soon as you visualize.
This does a couple of things:
- Visualizing hitting the headshot removes anxiety because in my head I can hit the shot
- Visualization makes me focus on one target and give it my full attention
- Aiming makes sure I actually hit the shot
On top of this, I can do anything to aim, I can use my movement to aim, I can center my screen, I can do literally anything, the important part is to visualize the headshot before it happens.
In a very interesting turn of events, I’ve actually found this super helpful in music too.
Oftentimes my singing is muddy and unclear. I’ve done something similiar:
- Chop the notes into shorter more enunciated syllables
- Savor and taste each note
- Imagine how I want the note to taste
This does something similar where I am more aware of each note and can sing it with more intention and emotion. I don’t skip ahead too fast, I focus on each word as it comes.
It seems that a combination of a focus on a small step, and visualization helps bring me into the present moment.
Writing Prompt: Waiting For What You Really Want
Prompt: How good are you waiting for what you really want?
I remember the psychological test where they said that they could predict the success of children in later in life, just by how much self control they have for delayed gratification, and I wonder what child I am. Am I the type of child who grabbed the marshmallow, despite being told to wait by the researchers the minute they left the room? Probably not, when I was a child I was a stickler for the rules. But what if they gave the choice to me? What if there were no rules? Well I suppose it would feel like a cruel test, to believe internally that I would get two marshmallows if I waited long enough but one would never come.
I think now that I’m not good at waiting for what I want at all. But really what I am, is not good at avoiding distractions when I feel extreme discomfort. Am I running from discomfort? Or do I really want something and are not willing to wait for it? The answer isn’t clear to me.
Valorant 27: Confidence
I’ve been thinking more about confidence in Valorant and it actually made me think a lot more about what makes confidence. I originally was interested in how to multitask because I thought that was what would make me stronger in Valorant, but I wasn’t able to find any useful information on it.
I ended up searching multitasking in sports, and I was specifically in interested in the basketball videos when they talked about confidence.
The first video was this:
Ideas:
- Confidence is not about positive or negative thinking
- There are two ways of thinking
- Logically and analytically
- Intuitively
- Confidence is about trusting the second type of thinking
- Timing cannot be thought
Ideas:
- People often rely on outside sources of confidence
- Success
- External Validation
- Comparing ourselves with others
- These outside sources of validation are not reliable
- Confidence comes from being able to trust yourself
- Trustworthiness is from people who follow a code
- Ex: Warrior code “no man left behind” (inspires confidence in your unit because other people won’t leave you behind)
- Ex: Courage over success, valuing courage over failure or success validation
- Code must be specific and have specific actions you take to fulfill it
- Mantras can be helpful
So as they say in the video to do, I am writing down the things I use for confidence in Valorant:
- Success – high KDA, increasing elo
- Comparison – high KDA compared to others, higher rank
- Knowledge and practice – learning techniques and practicing them
- Performance – being able to predict moves, hitting my shots
What I admire in other players:
- Clarity in thinking
- Creative plays
- Fast reactions
- Precise mechanics
- Boldness/confidence
I’ll take each of these a step further to draft out my code. I’m going to see if I can break down what I make each of these things mean:
- I make success mean that I’m smart that I’m special
- I make comparison mean that I’m special, that I’m a valuable or worthy person
- I make knowledge and practice mean I’m smart and that I deserve to be heard
- I make performance mean that I’m special and I’m capable
For the second list:
- I make clarity mean that someone is smart
- I make creativity mean intelligence, specialness, worthy of love and admiration
- I make fast reactions means someone is attractive
- Precise mechanics I make it mean someone is capable, valuable and worth a lot
- Boldness and confidence I make it mean someone is valuable and special
To think about it further my code might need to address:
- Inner value – what is valuable about myself
- Inner specialness – what do I think is special about myself
- Inner love and admiration – what do I love and admire about myself
- Inner capability – what makes myself capable
I don’t really know what my code can be but one aspect that keeps coming up for all of these things are valuing feelings and focusing on radical permission.
Those are two things that I feel make me unique, I value myself and are a way to find freedom and give myself love and admiration.
I suppose I can also focus on the challenge in life, the idea of courage or challenge over success is something else that I admire about value about myself. Deep thinking, letting the answer of hard questions come to me as well.
The ways that I could act out this code in Valorant:
- Check in to how I’m feeling
- Vocalize my feelings
- Check in to how others are feeling
- Let the energy carry action
- Let the plan form in my mind
- Create a challenge at the start of every round
Writing Prompt: Comfort Item
Prompt: What is a comfort item you enjoy? Why?
I love my couch. It is white but that is just a custom cover I bought for it. The cover cost me a pretty penny, about one hundred and fifty dollars. My dad said it wasn’t worth it. My couch wasn’t always mine. I bought it on Facebook Marketplace for about two hundred fifty dollars. It expands to be a queen-sized bed.
I love it because it always can give me a safe place to sleep when I’m spending late nights on my computer. It’s a nice place to meditate. I have more memories of sleeping on my couch than on my bed. The white cover is a bit scratchy but I like the feeling of it on my skin. It feels a bit like the canvases for my paintings before I put paint on them. Underneath the off-white cover is hiding a beautiful deep blue. I like thinking about how its still pristine under the cover.
Additional Thoughts on Affirmative Action and Personal Decision Making
The types of biases:
1. Cognitive Dissonance
2. Spotlight Effect
3. Anchoring Effect
4. The Halo Effect
5. Gambler’s Fallacy
6. Contrast Effect
7. Confirmation Bias
8. Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon
9. Zeigarnik Effect
10. Paradox of Choice
More biases:
11. Survivorship Bias
12. Self Serving Bias
13. Fundamental Attribution Error
14. Hindsight Bias
15. Availability Bias
16. Availability Cascade
17. Sunk Cost Fallacy
18. Framing Effect
19. Clustering Illusion
20. Exponential Growth
21. Barnum Effect
Ideas for these biases:
- Create a selection process (for college, group or job)
- Use for cold hard thinking areas (stocks)
- Use in logic games (Valorant, Chess)
- Take advantage of bias to do careful marketing