I’ve been unofficially focusing on posture for some time now, including mewing, building muscles and strength, and ultimately for more a more aesthetic, healthy, and functional body.
A really helpful video is this:
I always have a lot of tightness in my chest and would like to have more of a wider back and more shoulder mobility.
I’ve been doing my Valorant challenge for about four months now and I haven’t seen much progress.
I think there are a couple of changes that needs to happen.
I need to be kinder to myself. I don’t have much time for gaming and this is my very first FPS game. I have already improved by quite a lot in the time given.
I need to be a lot more focused on learning and make the learning less effort. I will try to play only one ranked game every day on my main and VOD review that.
I need to focus the rest of my time with having fun with Valorant. Creating more motivation is important.
I am going to get more outside help, will get more people to review my gameplay with me.
I am going to make a list of things I actually like doing on Valorant:
To summarize my goals in order of how much they resonate with me:
Be able to communicate and connect on a deeper level with my girlfriend, her friends and family
Discover a whole new undiscovered world, the French world
Understand and empathize with others better, understand and empathize with myself better
Challenge myself to do the impossible
Maybe win some cool points in learning French written language
Learn more about French food
Timeline: 31 days (not counting today) from December 15th to January 15th
I’ve always wanted to learn French in a way that isn’t conventional. Not the Duolingo or the Rosetta Stone or Pimsleur way. None of those programs really worked for me. Maybe on the surface level they work…like if I spent enough time learning and studying those programs it would work but the way they were structured was all wrong for me. It just felt so dry and boring and something alive about the language was lost. I love how personal language can be. I want it to be personal for me.
But in order to do so, I’m going to have to rely a huge amount on connection theory because learning a language is incredibly difficult and I will need to really come up with something next level to learn a language without following one of these programs.
So let’s think about it. While I would love to plan out all 31 days of this, I simply cannot. That is too damn hard. Because I don’t have enough experience in learning languages, I need to try to learn it in different ways and understand and feel the feelings.
Some things I want to try:
Write a story in French. Get help from a large language model in doing it.
Write a comic in French, and also get help from AI.
Learn through mimicry. Watch a YouTube video or movie in pure French. No subtitles, no explanation. Just imitate and copy the entire language. Don’t even try to understand what is being said.
This is how babies learn and how large language models learn
This might be my entire strategy in the challenge
What I train on might be important, for example, if I watch a lot of comedy, I might end up being a very jokey person in French
This is probably by far the hardest but most profound way to learn a language, need to be extremely comfortable with feeling the feeling of confusion (one of the most painful feelings for humans)
Leave a message to my girlfriend in French every day. Let go of pronunciation or grammar. Focus only on trying to communicate as much as possible without looking any French up. When I need to look something up, don’t try to memorize it. The point is to communicate a lot, not memorize or get things perfectly right.
This makes a lot of sense because my primary goal is to connect with my girlfriend.
It makes sense to let go of anything that would prevent me from wanting to leave a message, namely
Being afraid to pronounce something wrong
Annoyed at having to look something up
Annoyed at having to memorize words I look up
By talking a lot, expressing a lot every day, and potentially looking up the same words over and over, I will start to absorb them
I’ve been putting off making this post for the longest time because I just didn’t know what I wanted my goal and focus for this challenge to be.
I knew generally a couple of things:
I knew I wanted to be more dangerous
I wanted to get stronger
I wanted to learn technique that could be a basis for MMA and grappling
I wanted to feel motivated to work out again
But I had no idea of specifically what I wanted and how I wanted to get there.
But then it hit me. I don’t need to know. This is an experiment. I’m not setting a goal and see how close I get to it. I’m trying jiujitsu for a month and seeing how it will affect me. Along the lines of my goals:
I want to see how it affects my fighting ability and mindset
I want to see how it affects my body
I want to see what concepts and techniques I grasped
I want to see how it affects my relationship to exercise
Let’s go on a journey! That is why I renamed it Jiujitsu journey instead of jiujitsu challenge.
Yesterday I returned to Valorant and I wanted to learn a few things since being washed before I get back fully into the Valorant grind.
I want to learn how to have comfortable hand positioning
I want to have greater certainty of where all the enemies are at any point in time and a clearer understanding of the game
Class One: Hand positioning (90 minutes)
UNIT ONE: Figure out why
UNIT TWO: Explore Movements
UNIT THREE: Explore aids and relief
Class Two: Greater certainty (3 hrs)
UNIT ONE: Document VOD areas of stress and find equivalent situations in ranked
UNIT TWO: Try to predict decision making
UNIT THREE: Document another VOD
Class One: Hand positioning (90 minutes)
UNIT ONE: Figure out why
I’d say I have a little golfers elbow along with just muscle fatigue. No carpal tunnel syndrome or trigger finger syndrome thankfully.
UNIT TWO: Explore Movements
My perfect position seems to be legs balanced on the floor, chest forwards, armrest angled outwards and level with the desk and pushed backward so I can sit farther forwards.
The results on my sheriff-only account:
I feel mild soreness in my hand and forearm. My whole body feels a bit cramped as well. Overall, massive improvement.
I used a new aiming mentality, which I call the “Zoom In” Method where you pretend you are zooming into where your crosshair is and on the target, sort of getting mental blinders on. It seems to help especially with aiming for very far shots.
Then I played a rank match:
My “greater certainly” class was me looking up at how Som played vs me.
I was really helpful to see the util usage. I ended up using a lot of this information in future matches.
However, I spiraled after playing ranked because I was so frustrated with how I was performing. I ended up playing non-stop from Friday until Sunday sleeping not as much as I would like and always livid from anger that all my opponents were so hard to beat.
My peace today was disrupted by work early. It is nice to have time to talk about strategic leadership things. I usually don’t have that much time during the week.
However, it’s not the type of morning that I aim to repeat.
I intend on reclaiming as much peace as I can in this 20 minute span.
I feel that respect is a really important need for me in work, and I feel that this need was not met at my previous job, it remains to be seen whether or not it is met enough in this job. I have my doubts to be sure.
Today, I woke up feeling much better, even though I went to bed a bit late. It’s because, on top of journaling, I also did cupping on my body to unblock anything that was blocked. Turned red on my chest, I guess a lot of blockages there specifically.
I feel with the level of stress this morning with no peace and no running I’m feeling surprisingly good.
I wonder how to push back on blatant hostility and disrespect in a way that I want to. I suppose some rage journaling should help and maybe my coaching mindset.
Today I want to focus on making a video on how to handle lack of respect in the workplace.
I don’t know how that is going to go but that’s what I want to do.
Perhaps I need to meditate on it some more.
Maybe finally watching another 20 minutes of the coaching call will be nice as well.