Feel amazing but felt the mental work was less exceptional
Felt much more healthy and sustainable
Found that walking every 5 minutes or deep breathing was extremely nourishing and helpful
Result Calculation:
How much do I think this work is worth? I feel this work was worth less maybe $100-$175. The task for getting the test data was time consuming but straightforward. The coding required much more thinking, but I didn’t get extremely far with it.
How difficult intellectually was this work from 1-10? Maybe a 5. Someone less intelligent could achieve this, but they would of course, need to put in a lot of effort.
What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation? 35% percentile. Pretty interesting ideas about character count. Pretty clever overall.
Gains in communication and charisma? Not many gains, but will help me a lot with future work that will be very helpful in telling the story (looking at data).
I feel exhausted. My head feels numb. I feel hot and tired. My back aches.
My heart feels heavy. I feel angry at myself. So helpless. My mind in a fog.
My apartment is a mess. I just want to cry.
I can’t work. I just play games all day long. my eyes feel tired.
It’s 2 o’clock in the morning. All I want to do is eat and play video games. The pull is so strong in my heart like there is a strand of honey getting pulled.
I feel a numb panic deep in my chest. I’m afraid of failure. I’m scared I will disappoint myself and everyone around me. Pushing myself to make my business cards is only making me curl up even harder.
It was a long week. I’m exhausted. But the work just keeps coming.
I guess I can cancel tai chi tomorrow. Sleep in.
Tonight I can clean my apartment until I feel more peaceful.
I know I can use the gym as a way to process emotions, but I don’t use it.
I feel this pull, this overwhelm, like the honey being pulled, from my heart.
I’m capable of anything. Even rising from this challenge. This is important because as I get more successful, there will be days I feel exhausted, and in those moments, I need to find a way to find balance, to find peace.
I also want to learn to embrace failure. Failure is so scary to me. There is an image in my mind of my business cards being a complete disappointment and I feel a pit in my heart. A horrible amaturish website I’m not proud of and I can’t fix it.
Everyone starts somewhere. Everyone starts at the beginning. The people who are exceptional, who are savants are not people who started at the middle. They are people who enjoyed the beginning.
But how can I enjoy this? I feel so scared it won’t be good.
Makes me think of this video:
In this video, Jesse talks about how play allows us to feel pressure while still being able to learn.
That fun is the key to this.
But what is the key to fun? What would make this fun for me, regardless of the outcome, what would make designing and drawing fun for me?
What would make it an infinite game, not just a finite game focused on an end goal?
It’s true, the thought of designing business cards does not sound fun to me at all. It sounds like a slog. But maybe that’s because I’m worried about failing.
Ok, what if I tried to merge my painterly style with “woodcut” style prints. What if I created a new drawing technique that I could use to create cool stuff for friends and to sell as products?
That definitely sounds more like play to me.
So what about going to the gym, because I like it so much when I actually go, but I find it hard to go to begin with.
What if I saw it as supercharging myself – which it really is doing. Whether I go to lift weights or just to hang from the bar and stretch it really is building my body up to full potential. It might even solve my sleep problems.
And what about sleep, why do I not want to go to bed? Because if I go to bed, tomorrow, I wake up with tons of problems. Well maybe, that’s not a bad thing. Maybe before I go to bed, I fill my to do list with questions that I want to search out the answers to.
Here are the questions I have today, that if I knew the answers to I would rest easy:
What am I going to do about my art coaching and AI gaming companies?
Am I behind schedule and if so what do I do about it?
Should I extend the schedule?
Am I losing money?
How do I get out of my procrastination phase and get working?
What do I do about my art coaching website?
How do I get everything done in such a short period of time?
Should I start registering for fairs?
Should I pay someone to design the website for me?
How am I going to get the motivation to start drawing? How do I start drawing consistently?
How do I start going to the gym and working outsite the apartment consistently?
How will I start cooking again and cleaning up my apartment? Where will I find the time?
How will I prepare for the next week of work? How do I balance my other businesses?
When will I continue to work on my Javascript projects? What is the breakdown between AI work time and coaching work time.
I’ve been sick in the past two days. Not a terrible sickness thankfully. I credit that to the copious quantities of water I consumed as well as the zinc I took and the lymph node massage to clear my stuff nose. I can’t smell anything, I feel tired, and my mind feels fuzzy but other than that I’m actually doing ok.
Earlier my throat was hurting and I woke up many times in the night, but overall I slept pretty good. I’ve been self-medicating a lot by playing games, and I want to stop. I did go for a walk this morning and workout, and I feel that helps.
Last night I went to bed on time, got into my bedroom about 11PM and went to bed at midnight.
However, I woke up feeling abysmal, tired and my stomach was hurting. I feel that I ate a big dinner to close to bedtime. Also, maybe I’m just catching up on sleep.
This morning, as with many mornings, I did not want to go for a walk, but I did anyway. I realized that if I go for a walk because I “have to” then I feel undermotivated. But if I go for a walk to “meditate” and think, it actually is quite enjoyable and feels needed as I feel pretty shitty and need some time. I also makes it easy to not reach for my phone because I obviously don’t want a phone disturbing my quiet thoughtful meditation.
I also realized my morning singing and dance are part of my meditation and that I want to set an alarm so that I know when I need to look at my phone.
Today in terms of work, I don’t really know what to focus on. Perhaps I will finish up more things related to work so I can have fewer things on my plate and be able to focus on my two goals around AI and Art Coaching.
I am slowly getting back into things. After completely messing up my bedtime, getting it back, getting sick, losing my bedtime again, I am finally getting back into the swing of things.
I want to refocus on the things that I set out to focus on: Health, AI Consulting, Art Coaching.
I want to have an 11-12 PM bedtime, journaling at night, morning walking meditation, and morning todo list and blog post.
Today on my morning walk I contemplated rejection.
You know I always felt that working on yourself made you more prepared for life in general and I always felt my fear of rejection was holding me back from a lot of things in life, initially from getting a girlfriend, but later from being a life coach.
Recently I had the experience of meeting with a client for a free session for which they were super impressed by but when I sent them my rates, they did not respond. This immediately triggered the rejection wounds within me. I also just had an artist interview who was late to our conversation, did not agree to the full hour, and did not want to schedule another time to complete our conversation which triggered rejection wounds within me.
I feel scared that if I ask for things, people will reject me. I’m afraid it will be awkward to talk to them afterwards, I’m afraid how others will view me after getting rejected.
This morning I came up with a couple of nuggets to handle and process rejection:
Take up space: there is a part of me that wants to hide when people reject me. I want to take up as little space as possible. This concept is doing the opposite. I deserve to be here like everyone else. Take up space! Make the ask!
Enthusiastic yes: I don’t want people to feel pressured. I am going to follow the philosophy on the Prosperous Coach. It’s either an enthusiastic yes, or its a no. Maybe is a no. And tell them that. If they are not sure, they know where to find you.
Slow down: I realized this new revelation in Valorant has implications in life too. When I feel stressed about rejection and awkwardness, shame, and judgement, slow down. I usually try to speed up, to move past it. Slow way down, focus on what is going on before charging ahead.
Stay busy, focus on the process not the outcome: one thing that I noticed, when I’m busy doing what matters, I won’t care as much about anything else. I want to focus on health, coaching and consulting. Don’t let anyone’s rejection take away from that. It’s like what they say about cold calling. Focus on the process, not the outcomes (focus on improving your process for cold calling, not for the outcome of every call).
If I could burn their existence and wipe them from the planet I would
I’m so tired of fighting
I’m so tired of having to rely on others to do what I want to do
I’m so tired
I feel hopeless sometimes
Like there is no way out of this horrid existence
Where I am trapped
I breathed and breathed
And in the breath
I remembered
That I don’t need to let anyone control me
Only one person can live my life
No one else can touch me
They can’t hurt me and they can’t control me
I can do things my way
I did a little IFS therapy on myself and here are the parts that came up:
Black Hatred: This is a protector of some sort that prevents other people from taking me off course of what I want to do. It does this through extreme anger against people who don’t understand me and box me into what they feel my limitations are.
Mind Reader: The mind reader is always calculating what other people want in order to prevent the painful feelings around rejection and failure.
I reminded Black Hatred that I am 31 years old and he no longer needs to protect me since no one has any hold over me anymore. I can do whatever I want to do. I promised him that I will remain true to myself.
I reminded Mind Reader that I am 31 and I am fully capable with dealing with failure, and that at my age, failure helps keep the boredom away. I promised him that I will take care of myself and give myself time, space, comfort, and support.
I feel pretty overwhelmed and unhappy to work because there are a lot of tedious work to do that I don’t feel is very fun. In this first match, I just want to get everything done so I can move on.
Criteria for success:
Speed (percentile)
Efficiency (percentile)
Intellect (percentile)
Energy (1-5)
Warmup: Cleaning + walk + meditation/breathwork
Gameplan
UNIT ONE: Set up api calls
UNIT TWO: modify prompts
UNIT THREE: testing
Postmatch analysis:
I definitely did not follow the plan, yet everything somehow got done anyway.
Speed – 65% I was pretty fast, knowing what I need to do and was focused. Nothing too special though.
Efficiency – 60% I was ok efficiency, could have coded my way to better efficiency though
Intellect – 60% I definitely used my intellect to speed things up but it could have been accomplished by many people.