Creating Excitement in Productivity

Byjack

I’ve been seeking excitement in my life for some time now. The excitement of walking up to random people to ask for them to vote for my non-profit, jumping off something high for parkour, or talking to a pretty girl on the street.

All those things felt like they had an element of risk but felt extreemly freeing and rewarding.

I wanted to know how to get more of this in my life and I stumbled upon a way to bring it into the more mundane parts of life, and if I can bring it into the mundane, perhaps I can bring it everywhere.

I realized that this can be used in any area where I have the desire to act but feel too afraid and that this could be any type of fear, not just social fear. For example, I’ve been feeling a lot of anxiety recently with feeling overwhelmed by things. For example, I feel overwhelmed at the thought of taking out the dishes, going to the gym, doing a duolingo test or playing an online chess match against a real person.

Using the formula that I developed with talking to women (but no longer use since I have a girlfriend), here are the steps:

  1. Imagine that I am going for it, and that I can imagine myself doing so within the next few seconds
  2. Imagine the fullest extent of “going for it”, how would truly committing look like, how would feeling effortless and free look like
  3. Let the fear/excitement build up in your chest as you start to breathe
  4. Let the energy carry the action – you don’t have to act if it feels wrong, but let the energy flow through your breathing and let it move you
  5. Continue to breathe through the experience to stay connected to yourself

These steps can bring a feeling of aliveness and control over life. I should know, I used it to write this very post and shoot the video below.

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How To Charge Money As A Coach

Byjack

I’ve been struggling with an idea recently, the question of how and when to charge for coaching services and when to propose coaching to someone.

The way most coaches approach this is by simply thinking about every hour they spend with someone as a billable hour. They do a “free” intro or demo sessions. I find this approach problematic for numerous reasons:

  1. I love solving problems and delivering value. The reason why I think coaching is the right career is that I would do this stuff even if it was for free.
  2. I hate thinking of every hour of my time as billable. Does every conversation that I don’t get paid for mean that I’m bleeding money everywhere?
  3. I don’t know how to propose coaching, what will the difference be from talking to them? Won’t they feel like I’m charging money for something that should be free?
  4. I don’t see why I shouldn’t prioritize my friends and help people for free? Why should I prioritize only people who pay me money?

 

I thought about it a lot and I realized that when I want to pay for a coach is because I want to be able to take it seriously. I don’t want a friend, I want someone who can help take me to the next level (emotionally, career and success-wise). 

I realized that I can help as many people as I want to for free. I can prioritize friends and spend time with them without thinking of billable hours. But coaching is different. It isn’t just about brainstorming solutions to problems or being an empathetic ear. It’s about taking professional responsibility for someone’s success. The difference between a friend who hired you as a coach from an ordinary friend is that by hiring you they are asking you to meddle with their life!

There are three questions I can ask to see if they would be a good client:

  1. Should they invest in themselves?
  2. Are they doing something that requires coaching?
  3. Do I feel confident that I will be the best coach for the job?

 

If the answer to all three is yes, I will push to sell them on coaching. If they are friends, I can tell them I will help them and give them advice for the rest of their life for free, but it wouldn’t be coaching until they invested in it.

The price of coaching is a mix of what would be an investment for the client, what would make ME invest, and what value I would be delivering.

In terms of differences in details:

  1. Much more structure (cadence for meetings, methods, note-taking etc.)
  2. Different mindset (clients’ goals are my goals, not my friend’s goals)

Regaining My Purpose In Dance

Byjack

Today I had a dance lesson that refocused things for me. See for a while, I felt stuck in dance and even singing and piano to a degree. I felt like I was doing exercises for nothing. Actually, I feel that way with French too.

But I realized recently that doing drills in dance isn’t like doing drills in Valorant (or maybe it is). It isn’t about getting the most kills or winning rounds. At the end of the day, dance is a lot more about painting. It’s about creating something.

Practicing dance is about creating a style, figuring out the kind of experience, world, and impression I want to create on the dance floor at a club, in a party, or just in my house. It is about finding my voice. 

A big part of every learning endeavor is about finding motivation because it is always really hard in the beginning, really fucking hard to keep going. When my dance teacher asked me to find inspiration for dance, I didn’t know where to look because none of it made sense to me. Now I sort of understand. I want to create a style or a set of styles that feel like me. The inspiration just helps give me clarity on what that style is. I’m thinking contemporary dance, with some popping, waving, locking and isolation.

Thinking about it now, when I started writing this blog post, I realized it goes much farther than that. It goes to learning French, which is about finding my voice and the way I want to express myself in a new language. Singing and piano is about finding the things I want to create in music. Art is about bringing to life the kinds of paintings that I want to exist in the world, paintings that feel like me (I’m imagining some quirky abstract art now cuz I love that shit).

Art is about finding the spacing in life that you love, your favorite food, your favorite movie, book and song and combining that with the joy of expressing yourself. Art is about creating a beautiful space in the world for yourself and other people.

Think about a painting. A beautiful painting that you hang on the wall, or sell to someone else to hang on their wall. Think about the way that it would transform the space, create joy and wonder. That is what art is about. I think some people get lost. They think about is about technique. Or worse, they think art is about theory and about ideas. Sure art is all those things, but it isn’t ABOUT those things. The theories, the technique is all a PART of a feeling, an aesthetic that will make the world more comfy and beautiful in your eyes.

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.

A Willingness to Endure Pain

Byjack

It is extremely hard to be yourself all the time. There will always be things that you want to avoid, that you are afraid of. Specifically, things that you don’t like about yourself.

Control gives the illusion of happiness. The fear of loss of control is like all fear and uncomfortable feelings. It is not something that needs a solution or be avoided. You don’t solve the lack of control by being more controlling. You don’t solve fear by avoiding your fear.

Emotions are meant to be reacted to, and the solution is meant to come to you, not something to be forced into existence. The most healthy way to process painful emotions is through physicality, expression and meditation:

  • Physicality – punching, running, yelling, screaming, crying and sort of physical release
  • Expression – writing, talking, recording a video diary
  • Meditation – letting the emotions come and go

I used to write that you should follow what you feel. Sometimes, you don’t KNOW how you feel. That’s ok. Clarity is about patience. The patience to wait for the answers to come, to be able to sit in the pain for long enough to see the truth.

And at the end of the day, clarity will bring an understanding of not just how we feel, why we feel it, but what we truly want. That is truly being ourselves, following what we want in the moment. Embracing that is the key to true happiness, confidence, and feeling truly alive.

How To Succeed At Really Difficult Stuff

Byjack

I was pondering today on the subject of doing anything really really difficult and I came across a realization.

People often go after really difficult stuff in the wrong way. By difficult things I mean anything that has a high degree of complexity and a steep learning curve. This might be mastering a new skill like the piano, playing a difficult game, getting big on youtube, or starting a new business.

People often try to get results too quickly. They immediately try to focus on success instead of having fun and its not productive. They move into what I call the “WORK” phase too fast. The “WORK” phase is characterized by the following:

  1. You are doing something “for real”. This can mean trying to make a business profitable or striking it out for real as a professional YouTuber.
  2. You want to execute a game plan for success. Success is a major focus, and failure is going to cost you something.

 

Instead of jumping into the “WORK” phase, with ANYTHING with a high degree of difficulty, you need to first go through a “LEARNING” phase.

This “LEARNING” phase is characterized by a couple of things:

  1. You have to be completely ok with failing and failing badly and over and over.
  2. You should focus exclusively on finding what you like about the thing you are doing (having fun).
  3. Exploring the thing, feeling out foundations should be the focus.

 

This is because success requires two things:

  1. Solid fundamentals borne from experience and mastery of the fundamentals
  2. Huge amounts of motivation due to the amount of hardship and failure you will experience.

 

The problem is, the “WORK” phase, when you have to perform and get results (make money off of your new business idea, perform on the piano, gain rank in the game) usually is not very fun. It is hard to build a good foundation or get motivation when you are so scared of failing.

The solution is clearly to not skip the “LEARNING” phase. Make sure you REALLY REALLY love the thing first, that you have tons and tons of fun, that you start to succeed without even trying before you start to TRY to perform when you switch over to the “WORK” phase. Maybe this means you start to make money off of the business you started, without even thinking about the business plan, or you start to rise in rank without even trying.

My visualization on the correct path for success.

The key part of the “LEARNING” phase is fun. Finding what you like about something is probably one of the most critical ingredients to success because motivation can pretty much overcome ANY obstacle.

Finding fun is both simple and difficult. Simple because all you need to do, is think about what makes you happy. Difficult because it is sometimes hard to pin down what makes you happy. You have to try many things. For me, letting yourself fail, is critical to having fun. With too much pressure, there is absolutely no room for play. I start every endeavor with the mantra, “I accept failure, it is ok/good to let myself fail”.

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The Beauty of Eternal Loneliness

Byjack
The Beauty of Eternal Loneliness

When I met her

I felt whole

Her love

Insistant, constant

Made me feel safe

Made me feel free

Accepted

Made me want to feel

Devoted

But when the loneliness came back

I tried to lean

On her

And I leaned instead

On a wall of toothpicks

Left behind

When I fell

The toothpicks scattered around me

I’ve never felt more alone in my life

I tried to fill something missing in me

With her

So much

I forgot

No one is forever

We are alone

From the moment we draw our first

To the last

And when I tried to desperately fill

The loneliness with her

The loneliness that was a part of me

I also lost

The one person

Who was there

Before she came

After she leaves

The only one

Who can be alone together

With me

Me

 

There is no shame in loving hard, loving deeply. All love comes with sadness and a special sort of sadness that can be so unbearable we try to cover its beauty. But don’t be afraid. Love is the most beautiful emotion we feel. 

We seeks people who can heal us, compliment us and challenge us. It is the best thing in the world to seek out such people. Finding other people can be the most rewarding experience ever.

However, when we feel lonely, it reminds us to ask ourselves the question:

  • How do I feel? Let the answer come to you.
  • What would make you happy? What if you gave yourself permission to fail?

If we worry too much about losing someone:

  • We feel the feelings
  • A reminder that we are always alone
  • We let our frustration out in a way that feels good (running, hitting something)
  • Creating art that feels good
  • Focus on the present, that is all that exists

We should never be afraid to love. But we should be afraid of trying to replace ourselves with them.

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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Water In the Basement

Byjack
Water in the Basement

There was water in the basement today

My mom handed me a garbage bag

To throw away things

That we couldn’t wash

The saddest thing

Was a cardboard sculpture of myself

Because I knew

It was sodden and sad

Paper hair plastered on the side

Like a sad version of a bad hair day

I remembered when it was new

When my art professor told us about Chris Gilmour

The sculptor who used cardboard instead of stone

Intricate cars and motorcyles

Precisely detailed in warm brown

And gave us the assignment to create a sculpture of ourselves

But my sculpture

Wasn’t like Gilmour’s at all

It was all messy cardboard

Hot glued together

It didn’t look like me

But it felt like me

When I looked into the eyes

I remembered the way I felt

My mind was all stars and night and imagination

Some part of me

Is afraid to let it go

It’s a familiar sad feeling

Like what I felt when I let go of the girl I loved

Only

This time

The person I’m letting go of

Is the person

Who made the sculpture

Years ago

When I look at this sculpture that I made in wood and mixed media class, I remember what I felt in college. So young and full of promise. That I could be anything, do anything. That I didn’t have to think about the rest of my life. Part of me always wants to go back. And it is hard to admit that that part of my life is over.

I think about this when I wait for nighttime. It is nighttime when I will see how things are going to unfold. I hope she will show me her vulnerable side, her emotional side again. The parts of her that I knew I needed in my life when I first met her. But I know, I cannot force her to be that person for me. That there is a possibility, that she won’t. That she will be closed and I’m so sad that I may have to say goodbye to the person I was when I was in love with her.