Letting The Empress Take The Wheel

Byjack

My sister and I have this joke about the empress. According to a tarrot reading, my sister needs to rely more on her “inner empress”. What does this mean? Well apparently the emperor card stands for searching out and controlling the world, while the empress waits for the world to come to her.

This actually is in line with a thought process I had myself about being yourself.

Feeling free to be yourself = happiness. Feeling like you cannot be yourself is the root of ALL unhappiness. But how to be yourself is another very difficult story.

One way is a method I like to call, “Letting the empress take the wheel”.

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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.

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Two Important Questions

Byjack

I was thinking about the concept of how Alex Hormzi approaches learning. The idea that you purpose things in a way expecting to fail at first, but you pursue them in such a way that you make it hard for you to fail. That the chances that you will fail is lower than the chances of success.

I was thinking about what made emotional or spiritual success. And that brought me to a few different ideas. They all centered around one thing, the relationship with oneself. I believe that the relationship that you have with yourself dictates the freedom and happiness you have in life. Some ways in which I am not a kind or loving friend or parent to myself are:

  • Thinking my needs are not important, especially if they make it less convenient for other people
  • Shaming myself and comparing myself to other people
  • Lashing out at myself when I’m not the best or successful
  • Yelling at myself for making mistakes
  • Putting on the pressure that if I’m not stressed I will not perform
  • Being disgusted by my weakness

What if I took this idea from Alex Hormzi? What if I accepted I am going to be a shit friend and parent to myself but I am going to ask myself what I need to do to make it harder to be unkind and unloving toward myself than it is to be kind and loving?

Well, what would the most loving parent do for me?

  1. Value my emotions and encourage me to explore them
  2. Hold me close when I’m upset or feeling weak and vulnerable
  3. I am the most important person in their life, they will drop everything if I need them
  4. Be interested in hearing about new adventures and failures and lessons
  5. Does not see me as a static person but as a sum of everything I’ve been, where I’m now, and where I’m headed
  6. Guide me when I’m feeling lost or need to defend myself

I want to know how I can make it impossible for me to not do that for myself.

Some ideas come to mind:

  1. Create a meditative time to watch my own content (read my journals, watch my videos, listen to my recordings). It feels like 1,4 and especially 5. As a side effect, this can create GREAT opportunities for understanding what kinds of videos I can make.
  2. Write down and read my thoughts when I feel lost, scared, angry, ashamed or frustrated. Create a place to feel hurt. This can hit at 1,3, and 4, and maybe 6 if I write responses to things I write.
  3. Work on dance therapy especially the following elements: allowing the world to hold you, inward closing comfort, sensual movement and touch, outward releasing movement

I don’t know how to come up with a strategy on how to mix this in with my life yet but some of my ideas includes:

  • Using therapists as a safe space to practice
  • Using people who are close as a way to practice
  • Using camera off meetings as a way to practice
  • Using youtube videos and coaching as a way to practice
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Workpost 35: Naps

Byjack

I feel tired.

My body buzzing with pain in my stomach.

My eyes are sluggish.

Last night, I went to bed at 11, but fell asleep after 1AM.

I feel totally drained.

Maybe its time to go back to bed for a little.

So I wrote that at 8 in the morning. I just took a nap after cooking for the entire morning with delicious tea eggs and soup. Then I spent a few hours napping and now I feel much better.

I really think my productivity is so much worse when my health is worse.

More napping, meditation, and exercise in the future! Napping if I’m sleep deprived, meditation and exercise if I’m not.

Today, the aim I want to focus on is content creation. I want to finish my post, and workout and meditate for the rest of the day.

Sova Fanart 1: Class Unit 1 Day 1

Byjack

UNIT ONE: Sova Model Studies | Day 1 – Portrait

Since this unit was all about model studies, I went into a custom game and used the model as a reference for drawing sova portraits.

I started with this side view of Sova.

Then I did colors:

I really didn’t like the colors. So I tried looking at tutorials.

New rough sketch of Sova:

Followed by a more refined outline:

Then by a painting attempt:

Something wasn’t clicking. I still didn’t like the painting job. I decided to try again and learn from another tutorial on shading.

I tried to color again.

This time I felt something clicked with using large soft brushes and the lasso tool. I used the soft brushes to create nice gradients and the lasso tool for the clean edges. Looking closely at the painter I see that he also uses the smudge tool a lot.

Mr. Beast’s Tips For Youtube

Byjack
  • Get a good friend group
  • Have a controversial opinion – make them think “what the fuck did he put in the video”
    • Match expectations immediately
    • Then exceed them
  • Change the word algorithm to audience
    • If the algorithm didn’t like your video, your audience didn’t
  • Mr. Beast just wants to make the best video ever, period no matter how much time or money
  • If a viewer liked the last video, they will like the new one
  • It is a lot easier to make one video go viral then get lots of views on lots of videos
  • Have a payoff at the end so more people watch

Unsure of What I’m Doing in France

Byjack

* I wrote this on Jan 15th…gonna leave it as a journal entry for now.

I feel unhappy right now. I feel like I can’t work on the things I want to work on. I feel stressed out that my relationship won’t work out. I don’t know what I’m doing here in France. I actually very much dislike the country. I am worried that coaching is not the thing that I actually want to do. I find it hard to find myself and feel myself in this relationship. I wonder if that is because of me not knowing myself, coaching not being the thing I want to do, or if this is the wrong place for me.

Right now I don’t feel like working on coaching or thinking about coaching.

I want to work on something that is purely interesting to me and something that is actually fun.

I think that thing right now is making a story creation bot in python using large language models.

In order to write a halfway decent story, I believe you need a couple of things:

  1. Strong characters
  2. Strong plot
  3. Premise, moral or lesson
  4. Great dialog