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Bedtime Challenge 1: 44 Days In

Byjack

I started this challenge on October 8th. Now it is November 21st. And I can say with honesty that I really followed the challenge very very well.

A couple of notes:

  • I was forced to go to bed later on two separate occasions, once for work, when I finished a production deployment at 11:30 and went to bed at maybe 12:30
  • Another time when I was helping my girlfriend with her project and I was up until 12, I cheated by “sleeping” on the coach by the computer at 11 but since I didn’t actually go to bed until much later, it wasn’t that good

After these cheat days it got really hard to stick to my schedule for a few days, but now it is easy again. There were a few times that I went to bed at 1 or 3 am because I didn’t go to sleep and I often go to sleep at 12 or 1, but I get to my bedroom by 11:30 usually and almost always start washing up by 11:10.

Overall this is a smashing success. I have genuinely changed for the better and I think this time the change might actually last.

I do want to still apply some of my earlier ideas and focus on different needs and try to meet them better every day.

I can also work on turning off screens earlier and stopping eating so close to bedtime. But the eating has definitely gotten better and the screens are just hard since I like to play Valorant with my friends at night.

Overall I am very happy with the progress.

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Jiujitsu Journey Month 1: Exploration

Byjack

Ok, so I just had a revelation.

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.

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Artistic Life Challenge

Byjack

I don’t really know much about what I want from this challenge yet just so as to say that there was a part of my life when I felt really connected to visual art. I used to draw all the time, I used to think about ideas for paintings and dream of illustrating children’s books and graphic novels.

A part of me is still excited by those things but for whatever reason, maybe it was going to a school without passionate artists, maybe it was pushing myself to be more logical and working in logical STEM fields for years, or maybe it was just a part of growing up – I lost touch with art somewhere along the way.

The challenge is simple but difficult to define. I will have succeeded if I feel that I am meeting my need to be creative and finding that joy, wonder, and creativity in my life again like I did when I was younger.

I will try to express the feelings through a poem:

Anything Was Possible

Anything was possible back then

And by anything I don’t mean that I ever dreamed of anything as boring as a seven-figure salery

I felt the worlds of magic at my fingertips

The rush and pull of sorcery

A great clash between good and evil

And a bond between friends, unwavering

Of great courage and great sacrifice

I think now

In what my younger self could have only described

As old age

30 years old is practically ancient

I know that the only way I can do this challenge

Is not through an arbitrary goal or metric

But rather it has to be a portal to another world

A graphic novel

Like I always wanted

Or an illustrated book

It doesn’t matter

Because it is the world that matters

The world that I can escape to

Like the little mouse hole my six year old self would crawl into

To read frog and toad books at the library

Perhaps this has all come full circle after all

Because 30 years old is precisely the age

My younger self would expect to be the time

When people stopped being readers

And started being writers

The creators of the worlds

Like the ones I used to like to escape to

When I was young

It’s actually both fantastic and sad that it took a poem for me to understand what my focus will be for my art challenge. I think I will rename this challenge. I wanted to find myself reinspired by art, and I forget how art inspired me in the first place – by entering and creating other worlds.

This will now be known as the “The Other World” challenge and I will dedicate a year to it.

One year to develop another world that I can dive into, be comforted by, and be lost in.

That means by October 9th, 2024 I will endeavor to have created a miracle. Shaped and molded a whole new universe out of words, images, and maybe even music.

I’m excited because I thought this challenge was going to be like the rest of them, so difficult and challenging. I thought it was going to be about doing Inktober and drawing for an art competition. I realize now that those goals are meaningless to me, and using them as goals, made me feel directionless in art.

This feels more true to my love for art. I remember crying to my girlfriend today about a beautiful book I read when I was young, called the Power of Un. It was a world that I fell into, just like all the others. It was all these worlds that made me feel excited for life. And it is the absence of these worlds that have left me feeling like some part of me was lost and never quite found.

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Valorant 43: The End and More

Byjack

I decided today that I need to close out the Valorant challenge for a couple of reasons:

Firstly, most importantly, the challenge is over! I think it is important to have specific success/end criteria for every challenge because then it gives a distinct goal to focus on and allows for new challenges to take its place. My original goal for Valorant was to get to Plat in a month. It instead took maybe over a year, but there is no doubt that I completed the challenge. I have been solidly in Plat 1 for months now and just recently solo-queued up to Plat 2. Before there was a reason to keep the challenge going because I kept dropping back down to Gold, but now I think this challenge is well and truly finished.

Secondly, I noticed that I started posting shorter and less thought-out posts about Valorant. Since the challenge is essentially over and my goal has been achieved, it has completely lost focus…which is why it is important for old challenges to end and new challenges to start. Since my posts about Valorant have evolved into less focused thoughts along my journey in Valorant, I can remove the label of “challenge” and continue making posts of observations and thoughts in my overall Valorant journey. I will always challenge myself in Valorant and it will continue to be a long-term goal to learn from the game and grow as a player and as a person. I don’t need a challenge to denote that ambition because this entire blog is that ambitious. Challenges are meant to be smaller focused time and goal bound tools and structures.

Finally, I have new challenges I want to focus on. I have my art and creative challenge coming up, my jiujitsu challenge, and my sleep challenge. All of those challenges require time and effort and the less distractions and pressure I have, the easier it will be to complete those challenges. I will almost certainly start a new Valorant challenge in the future and I need to set a precedent for that now by closing out old and dead/completed challenges like cobwebs in the mental attic.

P.S. For old times sake, here are my latest strategies in Valorant that got me to Plat 2.

  1. Have a purpose/gameplan every round
  2. Look for multikills, not just killing and running – this gives you awareness even if you end up getting one kill and dipping
  3. Focus on what mindset works for you

To expand on number 3, the main mindsets I like to use:

  1. Flicking mindset (good for if you are feeling lots of energy and quite relaxed). Keep your mouse hand loose and imagine flicking on the enemies. Visualize centering all of the enemies on your screen.
  2. Cart of rails mindset (good for very careful and deliberate clean peeks). Imagine you are sitting in a cart on rails and you want to do a driveby shooting. Your railway car can move left and right but not up or down, and will stop the second your crosshair covers the head of an enemy. Anticipate to see them opposite the direction you peek (moving to the right, anticipate on the left).
  3. Adjust crosshair mindest (good if your micro adjustments are off). After seeing the enemy, focus on the space between your crosshair and their head and use intuitive movement to close that gap, whether it is strafing or moving the mouse.

So it is goodbye for now for the Valorant challenge, but we will probably be back at some point to compile data about this whole challenge and do a couple of retrospectives.

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Valorant 42: Chaining Kills

Byjack

A new mentality that I’ve been working with is the idea of chaining kills.

  1. Come up with a play that I want to go for (util, direction, etc.)
  2. Go for not a single kill, but a multikill
    1. Expect more than one
    2. Have a gameplan for getting not one, but 5 kills

It is interesting that taking the offensive makes you much better at being confident. Also, expecting multiple attackers and working on killing as many as possible makes it a lot harder for people to catch you with a trade.

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Valorant 41: Editing the Trifecta

Byjack

I still believe in the same idea of focusing on fewer things but I’ve made a few adjustments.

First, I increased my sens to .37 on 400 dpi in order to make it easier to hit flicks.

Then I focus on two things:

  1. Clearing angles like I’m attached to a dolly wheels and slide into the peek
  2. Stopping only when I am on someone’s head
  3. Crouching if I don’t hit my shot

Similar concept to: combination of crosshair placement and strafing

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Valorant Challenge 40: The Trifecta

Byjack

I’ve since taken a different approach to Valorant. I think I had a lot of good ideas in the past but I realized the value of simplicity.

Having too many things to worry about in Valorant makes it hard to focus on the game.

So I narrowed things down to just three:

  1. Piano hands: Keep your arm at a 90 degree angle, let gravity pull your arm down and use the force of gravity in all arm and wrist movements. This allows for the most relaxed posture.
  2. Imagine success: The most simple and straightforward way to have a good mental is just to visualize yourself killing everyone and winning the round.
  3. Stay clean: Instead of wildly aiming and shooting, stay calm, precise, and efficient. Peek cleanly using just the A and D keys.

An example of staying clean is Curry:

Watching his gameplay makes me realize how much I panic and do so much extraneous movement.

After applying these three tactics, I started doing very well in my games.

The Project Management Crash Challenge

Byjack

It is time for a crash course in project management!

Objectives:

  1. Understand and be able to apply major project management methodologies (PMP school, waterfall, agile project management)
  2. Review other methodologies that I already know (design thinking, OKRs, SRE, DevOps, UI/UX)
  3. Formulate resources and learning into distinct repositories of knowledge and simple shortcuts and worksheets that I can use as shorthand reminders and ways to kick off processes

Total time: 4 hours

PART ONE: Master project management (2 hrs)

  • Section one: Learn, research, and gather (1 hr)
    • Subsection one: Warm up via listening to videos and gathering resource lists (20 minutes)
    • Subsection two: Create own practice scenarios and find questions in them (20 minutes)
    • Subsection three: Consume and build resource repos off of resource lists and answer my own questions (20 minutes)
  • Section two: Create practice scenarios (30 min)
  • Section three: Question and answer (30 min)

PART TWO: Review other methodologies (1 hr)

  • Section one: write down everything from memory basic searching (20 minutes)
  • Section two: watch videos (20 minutes)
  • Section three: search for resources and worksheets (20 minutes)

PART THREE: Create and organize resources (1 hr)

  • Section one: create a structure for folders and docs (20 minutes)
  • Section two: create resources for project management (20 minutes)
  • Section three: create resources for other methodologies (20 minutes)

Here is a video that I started out with:

Project Life Cycle
Project Management Process

Links to the worksheets

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The Health Challenge

Byjack

I’ve been feeling pretty lost as of late. I am thinking about my youtube channel, about my job, about coaching, about my health and about my challenges with youtube and fitness. I’ve been stressed out about all these different things and I don’t really know how to tackle all of them at the same time. I don’t know what to focus on, which ones makes sense to put energy into, and how I will go about focusing on any of these things.

I’ve been feeling depressed, overwhelmed and depleted, constantly self medicating with youtube videos and games.

Recently, I’ve been inspired by this video:

Health is everything. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you don’t have to choose between that and health. You will be a better entrepreneur with better health.

I want to drop all of my other challenges and focus on this for a while.

I want to focus on my health.

I thought about what this meant for quite a while because health is such a nebulous topic. I feel that Brian Johnson in project Blueprint is taking a very scientific approach to health, but I want to take a more personal approach.

Here are the areas that I care about:

  1. Mood: How positive and happy I feel overall
  2. Passion for life: How motivated I feel about life, relationships and projects
  3. Energy: How energetic and strong I feel
  4. Flow: how in the moment and attuned to my body’s sensations I feel
  5. Attractiveness: how healthy I look

Some ideas of times that I can measure these things:

  1. When I wake up: great for seeing how well I slept
  2. Around 10 AM: good for checking up on my morning routine
  3. Around 3 PM: good for checking on my afternoon routine
  4. Before I go to bed: good to seeing the cumulative effect of the day and how fulfilled I feel

I’ve tried these type of challenges before, but I feel that I sort of neglected the mental part of health, feeling healthier physically but mentally trapped and unhappy. I want to really commit to doing video journaling this entire time in order to make sure that I can express myself and work through mental challenges.

What would mean success to me is not just feeling much more happy, passionate, energetic, in flow and attractive, but also to create a lifestyle, mindset and routine that will maintain and grow that over time.