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Giving Myself Room to Take A Breath

Byjack

Yesterday I came up with a new mentality that really helped me with Valorant. I noticed that I wasn’t focused on taking fights and it was kind of hard to get kills.

So I decided to take a break, walk around and drink some water. And when I came back, I promised myself I would not peek until I felt that I was fully ready to take a fight.

Before technique
After technique

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Valorant Challenge 40: The Trifecta

Byjack

I’ve since taken a different approach to Valorant. I think I had a lot of good ideas in the past but I realized the value of simplicity.

Having too many things to worry about in Valorant makes it hard to focus on the game.

So I narrowed things down to just three:

  1. Piano hands: Keep your arm at a 90 degree angle, let gravity pull your arm down and use the force of gravity in all arm and wrist movements. This allows for the most relaxed posture.
  2. Imagine success: The most simple and straightforward way to have a good mental is just to visualize yourself killing everyone and winning the round.
  3. Stay clean: Instead of wildly aiming and shooting, stay calm, precise, and efficient. Peek cleanly using just the A and D keys.

An example of staying clean is Curry:

Watching his gameplay makes me realize how much I panic and do so much extraneous movement.

After applying these three tactics, I started doing very well in my games.

Rental Car Nightmares

Byjack

A couple of weeks ago, I rented a car at National car rental. My sister returned it for me, and I got a shock in my email a few weeks later.

I immediate assumed this had to be a scam, or some sort of mistake. But the more I read, the more that I could tell this was actually legit. They had the right time, the right place and right company. They were charging me for $1295.81 for damages to the vehicle.

Looking at this deeper I noticed that the line items were VERY extensive, replaces door parts and handles. According to them, the car was HEAVILY damaged.

Looking at the pictures, I could barely see any of the damages they were indicating. It almost felt like they were offloading the cost of wear and tear on me.

Obviously I was LIVID.

  • I knew that there were some small marks on the car when I picked it up, but I never took any pictures.
  • I knew that no damage whatsoever happened when I had the car. I didn’t think any of this damage was on the car when I picked it up, but the damage in the photos are so subtle its hard for me to be sure.
  • I had rental insurance specifically for this car, but didn’t want to file a claim for something I didn’t do.
  • My sister had someone walk around the car and CONFIRM it was ok before she returned it. They parked it, and who knows what happened after that.
  • National has a service for their “Emerald Isle” premium members where you can pick up and drop off a car without ever seeing someone.
    • This now seemed like a LIABILITY not a PERK since now I can’t get them to acknowledge damage on the car.
    • I’m a new member and if they were going to be f*cking sticklers about this whole thing, they should have EXPLAINED it to me. I would have got them to sign off on EVERY F*CKING SCRATCH BEFORE AND AFTER returning the car.

So I went to chase down this problem:

  1. I called National Support, and they told me that I needed to call their damage unit. I asked them to make a note on my case so I wouldn’t have to repeat myself.
  2. After I called their damage unit, they redirected me to someone else.
  3. After getting to another person, they redirected me to someone else.
  4. The last person seemed to know what they were talking about, but I had repeat myself because she could not access any of the notes that National Support wrote down.

The last woman who oversaw the appeals to the damages told me the following information:

  • Generally its better if you take photos beforehand, however, in situations where the “damage” is so small it is easy to miss, you can appeal and they will dismiss it. They consider it human error.
  • She told me that my “damages” were definitely small enough that someone might have missed it before (so it may not be caused by me).
  • She agreed to waive all of the fees.

So my lessons learned from this whole experience:

  1. Always get rental car insurance just in case.
  2. Take a video when you pick up the car to prove the condition of the car beforehand. (It’s gonna be me in the parking lot being like “hey this is me in the parking lot picking up this car at X time” so they have proof I didn’t take the video at some other place or time)
  3. Take a video of the car when you return it.
  4. If they try to charge you for something really small and not visible in your videos, appeal, and they will probably dismiss it.
  5. It’s good to be a mix of legitimately angry (I was furious) but polite at the same time (I apologized in advance telling them I was very upset but I knew it wasn’t their fault personally). As a result, they were helpful and resolved my issue quickly.

A day later I got an email.

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Workspace 22: Relax

Byjack

I had a slower start to the day. I started the day on my phone, waking up a bit early because my new retainer is bothering me when I sleep.

I watched some Valorant, talked to my girlfriend, and now I have a flight in about 3 hours. I want to leave in about 2 hours. I still have to take out the trash, eat up some more food and load the dishwasher.

I did a bit of a workout and I found out a couple of things that help with regaining energy, and gathering chi:

  1. Butt-clenched breathing: sounds a bit weird but it works. Lie down, clench the sphincter muscle (what you use to hold in poop) breath in. Then relax and breathe out. Repeat.
  2. Tummy circles: put the left hand over your stomach, then your right hand over that. Make circles over your stomach in the clockwise direction. Do it lightly. Then put your hands in the same area in your back and repeat.
  3. Extremity exercises: this can be any exercise that works your extremities. For example, doing a dead hang and focusing on clenching really hard with your hands but leaving everything else relaxed, or doing heel raises with the tips of your toes super engaged with everything else relaxed.
  4. Meditation: lie down close your eyes and walk down a staircase while counting to 10. Imagine the smell of wet stone, always puts me in a meditative state really quick for some reason.

Anyway goals for today. Just relax! I want to get all the chores sorted out and just spend the rest of my time relaxing.

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Additional Thoughts on Affirmative Action and Personal Decision Making

Byjack

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

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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

Preparation is 90% Doing is 10%

Byjack

So I’ve started to believe this theory after my Sales Health Challenge and worked on warming up so much. I’ve also been thinking about Matthew McConaughey’s thoughts on leaving breadcrumbs for yourself. It recently solidified for when I was trying to make it easier for me to go to bed ontime by making my sleeping and brushing my teeth area really nice and comfy. I realized that I didn’t want to cook because my kitchen was a mess.

Some ideas from this theory:

  • If you don’t want to sleep, make your bedroom the most amazing place
  • If you don’t want to brush your teeth, make your bathroom the most amazing place
  • If you don’t want to cook, make your kitchen clean, beautiful and with lots of room to work
  • Warmup, meditate 90% of time, work 10% of time
  • If working on the computer is hard, clean out all the tabs, make room and make your workspace beautiful
  • Spend 90% of the time learning how to make money, make money 10% of the time (Alex Hormzi)