The Perfectionist’s Life

Byjack

I was struggling really hard on making videos recently and struggling even harder to figure out what I’m doing with my life.

I know this is in large part to the enormous pressure that I put on myself in order to do well and it makes me very angry that my parents brought me up in such a way, a way in which I feel constantly paralyzed with the fear of anything less than perfection.

There are a few things that I found relief with:

MENTALITY 1: The focused mindset

Let everything else fall away but the feeling of what you are aiming at (whether it is to walk, to move, to express) and the sensations within your body. Feel the right time to strike, to act.

MENTALITY 2: The meditative mindset

Let everything fall away, most of all, your identity. Feel the universe around you and wait patiently for something to surface, let all conscious thoughts and solutioning to dissolve like sugar in water. Only sensations remain, and the vastness of space.

MENTALITY 3: The unchained mindset

Give yourself permission to do and think about everything and anything. Accept yourself for everything. Give yourself permission to do anything. Imagine that you’ve already done it and give yourself permission to do it.

In the end of the day, I realized that it’s not about what you do with you life. You can do anything. You can always change your mind. It’s more of a question of what you want to do right now if you can do anything that you want.

Similar Posts

What We Owe Ourselves

Byjack

I’ve been making everything a workpost these days. Because I like it. I like feeling the pride that I’m getting work done. But today, I’m going to try something a little different.

I want to write a little different. Not as a workpost, but a journal entry or maybe an essay.

I want to try writing with more of my emotions, seeking to express and be understood rather just recording my thoughts.

Today I felt very angry with myself. I felt like a failure. It’s been days and every day feels like a repeat of the same nightmare. Wake up, work, play Valorant, go to bed.

The deadline for my entrepreneurship endeavor feels like it is creeping closer and closer, and nothing feels like it is getting done. I feel like I’m drowning under the waves of my anxiety and stress. What if three months pass, and I get nothing done, just like I’ve gotten nothing done in the last 3 months?

In times like this, I feel desperate for answers. I search and I search for some answer to hold onto, some insight that will unlock my mind and set me free from this torment.

The answers didn’t come cleanly. But they did come.

First, I thought about my worries and wins. I wrote them down.

I thought about how really big goals aren’t completed by thinking about the goals, but about who you want to become, and being that person every day.

I thought about how focus was about letting things go, being ok with certain things slipping away.

I remembered my theories: connection theory, and flow theory. I used flow theory to feel my discomfort and soothe myself. Flow theory told me to hold my arms up in the wide circle, almost as if I was giving a hug to an imaginary friend. I needed to do this when I felt the feeling of letting myself down. Like I needed to hold myself and remind myself that I really cared.

I asked myself what I was willing to give myself, what I was willing to do today in order to prove to myself that I cared. And I wrote this:

Website Copy Draft

The path to greatness doesn’t have to be a lonely one
Have you always wanted to write a book, create a comic book, or start a youtube channel?
I specialize in helping people who are retired start one their second career…a career in creative expression.
I believe that there are 3 pillars to success in creating any artistic masterpiece – structure, creativity, and emotional honesty.
Master all three and you will have a work that will feel honest, raw, playful, and beautiful.
But it’s a lonely path to seek this on your own.
That’s where I come in.

With a unique background of both art and engineering, I uniquely understand the feeling and structure, and psychology required to complete the masterpiece of a lifetime. I won multiple awards for art as a child, and got a full scholarship to college for fine art. I am versed in multiple forms of art be it painting, videography, writing, music, and dance. I also studied mechanical engineering and have won awards in the corporate setting for my dedication to the details, practicality, and results orientation.

Together, I can help you express what it is that you want to express in a beautiful, deep, and artistic way.

Tomorrow, I will ask myself the same question. What am I willing to do for myself, my future me.

From Mortal To God

Byjack

“Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

The last few weeks have been exhausting and emotionally draining. I came to Austin to find myself and focus on building myself up and I need to focus my energy on myself.

I need to focus on my physical and mental health and I intend to use my blog as a way to track my thoughts, struggles and progress.

Things I want to focus on:

  • Thais Gibson’s personal development school – to focus on healing childhood trauma
  • Self massage, gua sha and posture – to align body and remove tension
  • Dance – to regain body awareness
  • Food and nutrition – to feed the healing of my body
  • Sleep – to regain energy and heal myself

Now the next piece is to break down every bit of resistance or difficulty in every aspect.

Personal development school courses

  • Lots of long videos
  • Worksheets
  • Poorly organized

Love and connection: work with Jenny or someone else

Certainty: Timebox, skim through entire course to get understanding

Growth: Capture video blogs throughout to see progress

Massage and Posture

Certainty: Every morning and night, indulge in the sensations

Growth: Capture pictures to see progress

Dance

Certainty: Watch old lessons every morning, feel body

Uncertainty: Try to create something new

Love and connection: Share on social media or with friends

Growth: Create videos of progress

Food and nutrition

Certainty: Cook enough food in the morning to sustain throughout the day, cook food prep that will make it easy and fast, have ritual around eating food (no electronics)

Love and connection: Invite someone over for lunch, share on social media or friends

Sleep

Certainty: Start brushing teeth around 10 PM

Love and connection: write a core wound post before bed or a poem or do some art

 

I also want to focus on weekly health audits and setting up a really nice space to shoot videos and work and play games.

The Bedtime Challenge

Byjack

Sleep has always been the beast I had to conquer.

Ever since I left my house and went off to college, it has been increasingly hard to go to bed on time.

It’s killing me. I don’t recover from workouts, my mind is foggy, and my memory mists away. My moods feel erratic and neurotic. Energy during the day is a thing of the past.

And yet I cannot stop.

2 am, 3 am, 4 am, 5 am. I keep going to bed late. And sometimes later and later.

I tried so many times to go to be at a reasonable time. I try for a few days, and then I relapse. But we aren’t giving up. We are trying it one more time.

And I didn’t do it alone. My good friend Edgar gave me this kick in the butt:

So what is my gameplan this time? How am I going to succeed when I failed so many times before?

A couple of things:

  1. I will not try to control how much sleep I get
  2. I will not try to control my screen habits
  3. I will not control anything but one single factor, which is my bedtime
  4. At the same time, I will figure out what needs I am meeting by going to bed late and how to meet those needs earlier in the day
  5. I will commit to this bedtime long enough to form a habit

I made a list of reasons why I love staying up late at night:

  • Completely alone
  • Lots of time – no rush
  • Sense of accomplishment (if I feel I haven’t accomplished anything yet it gives me more time to get things done)
  • Consume art
  • Nighttime magical vibes
  • Dread of the next day
  • More time to eat and digest

I realized that not sleeping is incredibly compelling to me. It is far more challenging for me to go to sleep on time than most people. So as a result, I need to keep it simple. Bedtime at 11 PM for the next 66 days, no exceptions. The challenge will end on December 12th. I am two days into this challenge already.

What does this mean?

  • I can eat right before bed
  • I can watch videos in my bed after 11
  • I can get back up, stretch if I cannot fall asleep, then go back to bed
  • I can toss and turn at 11
  • I can get up at 6 am if I have work that needs to be done but I don’t have the time to finish it

In the meantime, in an attempt to meet all my needs before bed:

  • I will silence notifications and try to find some alone time every day
  • I will work to identify a task that is feasible to do and will give me a strong sense of accomplishment every day
    • I will try to get this done early so that I will have larger open times during the day where I don’t feel rushed
  • I will pursue more art and magical vibes
  • I will try to leave gifts for myself the next day so I have positive anticipation(ex: a clean empty sink, plans for something fun)
  • I will try to eat at 8 pm at the latest so I have time to digest before 11

In terms of how to structure the next 66 days, I have not decided yet, but perhaps I will try to focus on each of the needs and strategies every week.

Some additional strategies/thoughts:

  • Turning off all the lights
  • Melatonin gummies

So far, finding a way to feel accomplished/ready for the next day has been a game-changer in wanting to go to sleep. Also, it is easier to go to sleep when bedtime is a hard boundary that is very strict and everything else is quite relaxed (I can still get less sleep and wake up super earlier if I feel I’m not prepared for the next day, I don’t have to go to sleep as long as I’m in bed). Nothing is tempting as a valid excuse/difficult decision anymore.

So tentatively I feel this time will be different. My hope is that after 66 days, I will no longer have to try to go to bed at 11, it will just be automatic, and I will start to cherish my sleep and life in general!

Fitness Challenge 4: The Evolution of the Challenge

Byjack

It’s been officially four months since I posted about this challenge, so I think it is safe to say that this challenge is over…well not over per se, but evolved.

So what happened? First, I got very sick on the tail end of the fitness challenge. It was the sickest I’ve been in years and I lost a lot of weight.

Second, I have split this challenge into about 3 other challenges, two that I am tracking and one that I didn’t track but sort of is successfully completed.

Those challenges are:

  1. The posture challenge. I literally came up with my own posture exercises inspired by some of the most common and popular posture exercises and I’ve literally done it. My posture is much much better than it was before and I continue to improve it every day. What is the best part? I now can tell and feel uncomfortable when in a bad posture. I didn’t document anything and may never do so.
  2. The bedtime challenge. This is a version of a sleep challenge. My latest attempt involves ignoring the whole sleep side of it. Ignoring falling asleep, ignoring getting enough hours, or even habits of turning off electronics. I’m going to make it simple for myself. In the next 66 days (Dec 12, 2023) I will go to bed by 11 pm every night.
  3. The jiujitsu challenge. This challenge was a couple of things but I haven’t completely formed my goals around it so clearly yet. The main ideas I have right now are: getting comfortable and confident in moving and utilizing my body to defend myself, getting stronger and more fit, and mastering a lot of jiujitsu techniques.

So, it is a bye for now on this challenge, but there might be some future retrospective posts analyzing some of the biometric data I gleaned from this challenge.

Core Beliefs 2

Byjack

I have no idea how I’m going to do this today but I’m going to try. I feel so shitty about myself right now. Maybe I’ll add another core belief.

Core Wound 1: I’m not good enough (attractive physically and personality-wise)

Evidence to the contrary (I am good enough):

  • Sometimes when I look at myself in the mirror I think I look quite handsome
  • With online dating when I took better photos, a lot of girls liked me
  • When I was in college, I once hit on a girl who won a beauty pageant and she gave me her number, we flirted really hard for a few days but ended when her dad found out
  • When I was in art class, one of my friends told me that when he asked a bunch of girls in our class whether they would choose me or this guy called Michael, they all chose me (and said the choice was obvious) even though Michael was taller (and better looking in my opinion).
  • A really beautiful girl in college in my art class who I liked at first invited me to her apartment for dinner when we were flirting.
Core Wound 2: My emotions are not good and push people away

Evidence to the contrary (My emotions are good and bring people closer):

  • Once I was mad at my mom and I wanted to stay mad at her, but instead, I told her I was sorry and that I didn’t mean it. She told me that she knew I didn’t mean it and it was so sad and sweet. Usually, my mom is really hard and unwilling to show emotion.
  • I cried for the first time in a very long time recently and it helped me move on from a major heartbreak. It also brought all the men in my support group closer to me.
  • Being vulnerable and showing my emotions is what got me into the longest-running relationship I have ever been in. Even if it has issues, the emotions really made us close.
  • When I complained about being upset to my friend in my art class, she seemed to feel closer to me when she comforted me
  • Another friend in art class told me I was able to read her emotions very strongly. I felt so much sadness from her, I changed the subject before I would start to cry.
  • A co-worker from work once started crying when she opened up to me about how she didn’t seem to be able to get it right with her relationships. She is usually very emotionless but I think she opened up to me because of how accepting I am of emotions.
Core Wound 3: I am a bad person (it is my fault that I hurt people)

Evidence to the contrary (I am a good person, and it’s not always my fault people get hurt):

  • I’m always looking to mentor new people at my work who seem to be having trouble
  • I found a new career path that makes sense for someone who is lost and I really care about
  • I always try to give up my seat on a bus for someone who is old or injured
  • I’m trying to make a difference with the environment at my workplace
  • I stayed around to help my grandmother get to the hospital and offered to give my parents thousands of dollars to help pay for her medical costs

The Way Star Signs Might Work (A Theory)

Byjack

One of my good friends is obsessed with star signs and by proxy, I’ve gotten pretty into them as well. However, I’ve had my doubts. While it seems possible they actually tell you about what kind of person someone is (although I find it to be far less precise than systems like Myers Briggs and the Enneagram) one thing has always bothered me. Star signs make no logical sense.

How can the position of the sun and the moon determine your personality? Do all people who are born at the same time and place have the same personality? Where did they even come up with the correlations? Isn’t this based on mythology?

The first thing you should know about star signs is that everyone has multiple signs. The sign that most people focus on is the “sun” sign (basically the positioning of the sun when you are born) as it is supposed to be the dominant sign. However, there are signs for the positions of all the planets and the moon.

The three most “important” signs according to astrologers at the Sun, Moon, and Ascendant signs (in that order), and actually gave me this idea of why star signs are not completely bogus.

The Sun, for example, is dependant on the month of the year you are born, the moon the time of the month, and the Ascendant the time of day and location of your birth.

What first got me thinking was that it occurred to me that the personality attributed to each sun sign seemed to match the general climate and weather of the months the signs were connected to. For example, Capricorns are people born between December 22nd and January 20th the coldest times of the year for many places. Capricorns are incidentally known for being cold, calculating, and driven by a need to succeed. Taurus, known to be easygoing and mild are born April 20 – May 20 the most warm and mild times of the year. Leos are known for their fiery passion and confidence are born between July 23 – August 22, the hottest times of the year. 

I asked before how everyone born at the same time in the same place had the same personality – perhaps they DO in some small part. Perhaps the climate and the time of day and month, the location on the planet have a profound effect on who we become and what we like because it determines the environment we are born in.

It is not inconceivable to me, for example, that babies born in winter may grow up to be harder colder, and more driven people (as a large generalization). And it’s not inconceivable that people born with the same Ascendant sign (with the same time and place of birth) might share a thing or two in common.

Even more beautiful is the thought that just as the position of the sun affects us with our seasons, perhaps the position of ALL the stars and planets affect us in some way – even if the effects are unseen and mysterious. Perhaps we are more a people of the stars than we know. I know I’d love to believe that.