How to Be Good At Anything

Byjack

There is a realization I have recently been coming to slowly and it’s transforming my life.

It is weird because I’ve known this for a long time – I used to say that in order to master something, you need to focus on what feels uncomfortable (not on what is easy).

I don’t know what the new part of the realization is, but something has changed.

My new mentality is to always focus on what is unknown. For things that are logical (like the selling process) logically figure it out. For things that are artistic, form a vision and idea and feel it out.

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Matches: First impressions of this technique

Byjack

Match 1

Reflections:

  1. Need to operate on a meditative state and trust strong intuition in order to reduce brain effort
  2. Warmup felt a bit unfocused, maybe want to try specific thinking strategies, especially involving exercise
  3. I have a bit of a headache now, but I don’t think it is because of the way I worked, I think it’s because of how tired I am, maybe need more rest + exercise, would like to try with a more exercise heavy strategy.
  4. Felt like MUCH longer than an hour, felt like I have been working for 3 hours.

Result Calculation:

  1. How much do I think this work is worth? I feel this work was worth maybe $200-$300. Rather tedious coding type work.
  2. How difficult intellectually was this work from 1-10? Maybe a 7.
  3. What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation? 30% percentile
  4. Gains in communication and charisma? A little since I am making the code more readable and clear.

Match 2

Reflections:

  1. A lot less tension, with additional movement and breathing
  2. Still trying to get my mind to cut through problems like a knife through butter, not sure how
  3. Also felt like I was working for hours

Result Calculation:

  1. How much do I think this work is worth? I feel this work was worth maybe $150-$200. Lots of grooming, project management, some architecture, some coding.
  2. How difficult intellectually was this work from 1-10? About a 7. Maybe 8. Grueling but not that difficult.
  3. What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation? 40% percentile. Not that innovative but definitely clever and requires some knowledge and experience.
  4. Gains in communication and charisma? Definitely helped make my flow much more clear. Will help with communication in the future.

Sova Fanart 3: Class Unit 1 Day 3

Byjack

It’s been a full week since I last drew for this drawing competition. I’ve been feeling a lot of dread because there are so many details in drawing Sova and I don’t feel any closer to getting better at him because it takes so long to draw a full figure.

I drew for a full hour but didn’t get very far.

Here was the reference:

Here is my rough sketch:

And here is my lineart:

The lines don’t feel that confident and don’t seem to be creating forms, more just tracing lines.

I feel that I need to slow down. I like the idea of the exercises but I feel that they need to be broken down further into smaller syllabi. Since I don’t have much time to draw every day and each task every day feels a bit daunting and overwhelming, I need to break them down further to learn at a fast rate.

I also wish I could draw from the live model, but the issue is that you can’t hold an active shot (like shooting or doing the ultimate).

At the same time, I said I would embrace failure and I did. I still believe in my overall plan and I believe when I look back, this will actually be helpful even though its painful right now.

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Valorant 23: Hitting Plat

Byjack

It has finally happened. I’ve hit plat in Valorant. A journey that was supposed to take 2-3 months, but instead took a year and two months (14 months).

Blood sweat and tears went into this challenge, and I learned something interesting at each rank.

IRON

Iron was an interesting rank because it was the rank when I was first learning how to use my mouse and keyboard in a game. I had never played a shooter game on the pc, and haven’t played many serious games at all on the PC. 

Getting out of iron was simply learning how not to make extremely basic mistakes such as reloading out in the open, not getting stuck on walls, planting and defusing the bomb.

BRONZE

Bronze was also an interesting rank. I started actually enjoying the game more here since I had a better idea of what was going on. Bronze rank was still stressful because I would get killed out of nowhere all the time.

I don’t really remember what I did to get out of bronze rank, but I think it had something to do with playing off of my util and learning how to check corners where people hide.

SILVER

I was stuck in silver for a long time. Silver was where I learned a lot about aiming and movement and got quite good at it.

What eventually got me out of silver was learning how to preaim angles.

GOLD

Gold is not a very interesting rank, everyone is pretty much like silver but with slightly better util and aim.

However, perhaps the most interesting thing in the whole challenge is how I got out of gold. I got out of gold primarily by getting more confident.

I did this in two ways:

  1. I focused on a few agents and learned how to get reliable value out of their util (Chamber tp locations, Brim lineups, Sova lineups).
  2. I dealt with some of my underlying negative self talk

I hear lots of things that people say about confidence:

“Stay positive”

“Imagine you are the best”

I always thought these ideas were bogus since I always thought confidence was about one thing: Feeling comfortable in your own skin.

But I started to doubt myself when I say professional Valorant coaching advocating (SEN Zellsis) for the “cocky confidence” mentality and I was stuck in silver.

But I think in the end, I was right. In order to be confident, you need to feel safe and at peace. The real question, is HOW?

Here are the main ideas:

  1. In order to be confident, you need to be ok with not being great (not being smart, successful, attractive, etc.)
  2. In order to be ok with those things, you need to process your traumas and limiting beliefs.
  3. In order to process, you must welcome in your limiting beliefs and incorporate it into yourself.

My limiting beliefs were:

  • “If I don’t succeed, I don’t think I’m worth anything”
  • “I need to beat myself up for every mistake and always think I’m worse in order to not mess up”

Simply by saying those things in my head, made me feel clarity every time I started to stress out and I suddenly felt calm. I gave myself permission to continue to berate myself (or not) but simply welcoming these parts in instead of avoiding them (and having them show up as unresolved stress), made me have a clear mentality that made my rise to plat.

I learned I have a huge amount of power, intelligence and creativity that are locked up by stress and fear. Slowing down, focusing on a few things at a time, and embracing my fears allows me to operate at my fullest potential.

What I thought confidence was:

  • Fake it until you make it
  • Cocky
  • Don’t care
  • Aggressive

What confidence actually is:

  • Ok with failing
  • Calm and clear-headed
  • Balanced
  • Trust yourself

The Perfect Job

Byjack

For the longest time, I’ve thought that my job was pretty much perfect. It wasn’t the highest paying job, or the one that I loved the most, but I think it has many many good elements such as:

  • Good enough pay to never have to worry about money
  • Good work/life balance, lots of work sometimes, little work others
  • Lots of traveling
  • Get to practice speaking and work on fun projects

Obviously, I could find a job even better in every area, but this is quite good already.

I realized recently why I still feel tired and think that it is too much work so often. THE WORK LIFE BALANCE IS HORRIBLE.

Ok, I understand I just contradicted myself there, but the reason why I think the work life balance is good is because on paper, there are lots of downtime where I can do whatever I want. However, because of the amount of emotional pressure that I put on myself, I’m actually always thinking about work which means that there is actually no worklife balance at all.

I worry if I kick back and ignore work for a while:

  • I will not be able to focus when I really need to so I need to get all the work done that I can
  • I will not be able to have enough time to get my work done when I really need to so I need to be working all the time
  • Someone will ask me what I’ve been working on and I will be outed as someone who is not contributing anything

Some of the anxieties I have around actually working:

  • I worry I will create ugly applications and I will come off as bad and incompetent
  • I worry I will not build enough for my application and I will come off as lazy or incompetent
  • I worry that when I go into meetings I will look unprepared and stupid

If I am able to deal with the emotional burden of this job and turn work into something soothing and relaxing for me, I will actually be so happy in this job. This will be the easiest money I will ever make and it will free me up to make money in other ways as well.

I’m going to do this in a couple of ways:

  1. Practice acceptance of where I am. Give myself permission to be bad
  2. Reprogram the idea that I will be rejected if I am not perfect
  3. Look for ways to make my job extremely easy
  4. Find ways to meet my needs through my jobs

So Step 1:

I am lazy, incompetent, unproductive and stupid. I accept myself for it. I give myself permission to be this way as much as I want to be.

Step 2:

The Bossy Man

In the meeting

Which I spent

Almost no time preparing for

He asked me to show

Something

I didn’t want to show

I said no

The meeting

Was under my

Control

 

The Finicky Architect

I created something

That I didn’t think

Was good enough

To stop him from asking question

Yet I showed up not to impress

But to help

And we were both happy

By the end

Step 3:

Where are the hardest parts of my job?

1 – Learning about new technology

  • Takes a long time
  • Hard to know what to focus on
  • Hard to remember

Ideas on how to make it easier:

  • Create materials for myself to make my life easier (cheat sheets, presentations)
  • Look for a way to make my life easier
  • Timebox an attempt to learn quickly
  • Focus on one area that has impact

2 – Building mockups

  • Takes time to understand the customer’s process
  • Hard to formulate what I need
  • Hard to understand how to design it
  • Hard to work out the technical parts of building out a process

Ideas on how to make it easier:

  • Clearly articulate what I need
    • The interfaces
      • What the style is
    • The processes
    • The data structures
    • The priority
  • Get help on the UI
  • Get help on the build itself

3 – Presenting the product

  • Never know what they will ask me to explain or click on
  • Hard to boil down the flow to a few steps
  • People may want to test you on areas that they don’t understand or may be hard to show

Ideas on how to make it easier:

  • Get the clarity I need:
    • Why they are asking the question?
    • What are they testing me on? What is the thing I need to prove?
    • What do they already know or understand?
  • Pause
    • Think about my gameplan
    • Use metaphors to bridge understanding gaps
    • Walk through what I’m about to do in my head before I do it on the screen

Step 4:

The most annoying things at work and how I will meet my needs through it:

  • Building mockups
    • Contribution: Who am I helping with this?
    • Growth: What will I do better with this demo?
    • Significance: What special signature will be mine?
    • Uncertainty: What is it that interests me the most about this demo?
    • Certainty: What do I want to copy? Who can make my life easier? How long do I need realistically?
  • Filing expense reports, doing training and filing quarterly reviews
    • Love and Connection: Who can I have a working/hangout session with?
    • Uncertainty: What time challenge should I give myself?
  • Boring meetings/trainings
    • Certainty: Why am I joining? What questions do I need to ask? If none, make a note of what I need from the meeting and watch the recording.
    • Love and Connection: Reach out to the presenter and tell them what you liked
  • Giving demos and presentations
    • Contribution: How can I be the most helpful?
    • Significance: Why am I showing this? 
    • Uncertainty: Don’t prepare
    • Certainty: What am I afraid of?

Ok, that’s it for now. I will say that writing this blog post has been tremendously helpful. I will be referencing this over and over again it is just so useful. Hopefully after using it many many times, it will be ingrained within me and I won’t need to look at it anymore.