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).
Today I made some definite progress. Even though I have the exact same feeling of lack of motivation, no interest in working. Wanting to just play games, I felt significantly better, having done spleen chi exercises both before bed and after waking up in the morning. As a result I started working 3 hours earlier than yesterday.
Today, I want to improve upon and refine on the game that I created for myself yesterday.
Firstly, in my walking meditation this morning, some wisdom came to me.
Relaxed > Easy > Fast
This was the wisdom first introduced to me in the book, Born to Run where the author talks about how you run completely relaxed first. Then you make your running more smooth, more efficient. If you are able to make it efficient and relaxed, you WILL be fast.
This is the same thing in Valorant. In your warmups you aren’t instantly trying to one tap everyone. You aren’t trying to do it fast. If you do, you probably are going too fast and the warmup won’t work.
You want to start slow (or even in the Miyagi technique, don’t even follow through with a shot, just track the target). As it becomes easy for you to hit headtaps, then you start to gradually speed up.
I want to implement this in my warmups. First, start off doing intense workout with the aim of expansion. Then focus on some brainteasers (Miyagi, completely relaxed). After a few minutes of that, work on to do list, trying to make my relaxed thinking more efficient and clean. Finally, at the tail end of the warmup, try to go fast. My thoughts are:
5 min physical warmup
2 min brainteasers
5 min todolist
3 min buffer
Then for the actual match, I would like to break it up more often with some deep breathing every 5 minutes, like I do with Valorant between rounds.
So I’m pretty frustrated because this is the second time I am writing this blog post. The first time I wrote this blog post, the post was bugging out and didn’t save properly.
Not too happy about that.
In the spirit of growth, I am going to let go of that blog post and focus on creating an entirely new one without losing the essence of what I wanted to say in the first one I wrote.
This morning I was feeling really stressed out and I was really enjoying my walk. I feel like this whole questions meditations thing has really worked out. I really like journaling at night, and walking during the day. Before when I was forcing myself to go outside because I felt like I had to, I kinda hated it. It was nice once I got outside, but before then it was pretty awful.
Now, since I know I’m going use the time to meditate on some of the questions I have in my heart, I feel really excited and motivated to go outside in the morning.
Here are the main things I was stressed out about this morning:
My career, didn’t know where I was going next
My medical bills, spent 8k on a new medical device, hundreds more for my GI doctor
My financial issues, I spent 700 more than I made yesterday
My coaching career, still not anywhere close to making enough money to be self sufficient
I could move back home, but then I’m worried about having a place for my girlfriend to visit me
And through my amazing short 20 minute walk, here are the answers I got:
Acknowledge that you are taking a huge risk by paying 1,700 per month on rent with very little income and building coaching business from 0
Risk is not a bad thing, it is an incredible catalyst for growth
Risk means, now is the time to shine. Focus on the few things that matter most
Building an really strong foundation of health, a very strong structure for getting stuff done
Changing the lives of my current coaching clients
Work slowly towards my career in AI
It’s ok to invest money in the medical bills because they directly help with my foundational health goal. Double down on the investment by focusing a lot on sleep and digestion.
Let go of all other goals and distractions because now is go time. Just work on small projects or really gradual work.
Today I feel tired. Coming off of a early morning and a workout, watching a lot of Valorant, I’m in a position where I still feel a bit tired. I’m excited to update my blog, but I’m not so sure about the marketing call.
I really hope to make money off of my passion and find success in the AI space finally and I hope today’s session will help with that.
I feel strongly that I want to preserve boundaries with this coach because I feel he doesn’t respect boundaries for some reason.
I feel nervous and uncomfortable with the call. For some reason I feel he has a bit of a temper and is not good at listening.
But I can protect myself, I am his client and I have a bit of a temper too if it comes down to it.
I’ll take my time and be as clear and direct as possible with him.
My main issue is that I feel uncomfortable disagreeing with him. I feel unsafe. When processing it, I decided to be very clear about what he is saying and then say my views/opinions.
I’m having trouble getting work done today. I’m going to focus on the taoist productivity – work until I feel empty. Also, I want to leave the apartment to feel more productive.
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.
Today I feel a bit scattered between cooking and working on multiple things at the same time. I feel the need to create some order or at least some vision for today.