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Tai Chi Class

Byjack

Tai chi class was very interesting. I had a thought when the instructor was answering a question by one of the students. They were asking whether or not the movement called the “whip” was supposed to have a whipping motion. The instructor told him that as a beginner you always want to go slow. She also said that she teaches with words.

I was thinking that I can apply this Tai Chi mentality to some of the things that I work really hard to do such as work or Valorant or content creation.

Some thoughts I want to try out:

  1. Do things really slow and relaxed. Speed up if its easier, but as soon as it gets hard, go slower and more relaxed.
  2. Focus on the kinks, uncomfortable parts and keep working them out (my thoughts, not usually used in tai chi)
  3. Speed up when it feels really easy
  4. Speak aloud what you are doing, in order to be more intentional
  5. Follow a predetermined routine

What I want to try for my LinkedIn 50 days of posts:

  1. Write down what I know
  2. Write down what I don’t know
  3. Do necessary research
  4. Copy photoshop template
  5. Flesh out first iteration
  6. Flesh out images
  7. More research and reflection
  8. Refinement
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Profit in Peace 3: Asking Questions

Byjack

I just had a realization. I was thinking about what I “should” be doing in the mornings with this new blog commitment. But I think that EXACTLY what I “should” be doing.

I want to spend my time asking questions. And if an action speaks to me, I will do it.

In fact, this was a major technique in Connection Theory that I forgot about. Connection Theory is about understanding is the pathway to change.

One technique for understanding is to ask many many questions. Very good, specific questions. Questions that beget more questions.

Through questioning, we begin to understand.

Another technique I used to do was to ask myself questions. Imagine myself older and wiser, and come up with questions to ask my current day self, and then answer those questions.

Anyway, I have to transition to work, so this will have to wait for now.

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.

Recommendations From My Marketing Coaching

Byjack

Thinking about social media marketing for business.

My marketing coach recommended these three fellas:

The Harmon Brothers: They create funny content for companies

Neil Patel: Marketing Guru

Seth Godin: Influential writer

One of the things that came out from our discussion is that he said there are two types of content on social media – educational and entertainment. Some realization I came to is that social media is all about being social. It’s not about looking cool or saying the right things.

In the conference I was at, there was a guy with 10 million followers, and he said to be yourself. If yourself is introverted, act introverted. If you are a geek, act like one.

I think the key is that people desire to connect socially. Even if its a virtual social thing. So if your content doesn’t feel like you are talking directly to someone, then it probably isn’t getting big.

That and consistency. The only lesson from my marketing coach and the 10 million follower guy. Post once a day he said.

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Profit in Peace 6: Day Two

Byjack

Today is the second day in the Profit in Peace Challenge live sessions. I feel really tired. I was dreading this so much.

Questions/thoughts:

  • Calling Amazon a startup sounds like a scammy thing to say
  • I’m so tired of forced enthusiasm
  • I like this analogy
    • If you and your friend start a hot dog stand, and your friend is better than you at cooking, beat him by finding a starving crowd
    • The right bait for the right fish
  • Knowing your customer is about knowing your customer like you know your loved ones when buying Christmas presents
  • Introvert advantage is knowing yourself and knowing what you want
  • Become aware of your own patterns
  • Go to your favorite room in your house, pretend you have 100,000 dollars. Do a window shopping spree.
  • Think about how to create words that describe the whole niche but not specific, hard to find results
  • Pinterest is where people look at what they want to buy, amazon is where people search for the actual item
  • Pinterest > Etsy in 6 months > Amazon 6 months
  • Pinterest extra is an extension that you can use to see the number of saves
  • We are looking for at least 40% margin
  • Six Ps checklist
    • Popularity
      • Look for search volume on amazon (at least 20 thousand)
      • Cerbro reverse product search to find searches
    • Powerplay
      • How much of a difference can we make in this niche
      • Do we have a unique product
      • Is there a dead end search?
    • Persona
      • Do we understand who is this for?
      • Pinterest and internal research
    • Profit
      • Helium10 x ray tool
      • Find supplier on alibaba
      • Look and see how much it takes to manufacture
      • Then do a profitability calculator on a product with a similar size and weight since amazon charges based on size and weight for shipping
      • Need at least a 40% margin because other costs will bring the margin down to 25-30%
    • Practicality
      • Is it practical for you to pay for the costs of sourcing and making your product
    • Powerhouse
      • What is the second and third idea and are they cohesive ideas?
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Profit in Peace 21: A Break

Byjack

Today is my first break from work in what seems like forever. I have a couple of things planned for the break, hanging out with family, spending some time gaming, and hopefully sneaking in a few calls with my girlfriend.

I also want to spend some significant time on my Instagram and business.

I’ve been thinking a lot about boundaries and how to let go of taking responsibility for other emotions, and I’ve been thinking again on this idea of believing in everyone’s power over themselves.

I feel that when you feel that people don’t have the resiliency to handle situations, or the ability to overcome situations, or at the very least, learn from them, that is when you start to take responsibility for their emotions. How could you not, if you have the ability to handle your emotions, but they are not able to handle theirs? Sometimes, you need to just trust in the process. If they need to complain, get hurt, work through their feelings, something you need to trust in their process.