I felt that I nailed aiming mechanics for so many times, I realized that I need to combine a whole bunch of hard skills together.
Firstly, I need to imagine enemies where they might peek out from, until I push ( then imagine where they are holding) and face my body in that direction. This is the baseline mentality (plus some crosshair placement). I talk about it here.
In situations when I am afraid of being out in the open for very long, I will try the strafe clearing for a very tight peek window. I talked about it here.
If I am holding an angle, I should employ the “catching people on my crosshair” mentality that I talk about here.
When flicking close range, I need to go back to trying to face my body towards them.
In long fights, I need to focus on strafing my crosshair to their head, but I don’t know if I have a video showing that.
I suppose one thing I haven’t figure out is crouch spraying, but I’m willing to bet facing them is good too.
Finally, overall, I need to learn to accept death as I talk about here.
I think there are two mindsets in Valorant, aggressive and passive. I still haven’t figured out the right balance between the two, but part of what helps me with that is using the “letting the energy carry the action” mentality I talk about here.
I’ve been thinking about what small exercise I can do right now to level up my gameplay and progress in Valorant since I haven’t had much time to play or practice recently.
After meditating on it a little bit, I settled on something that I know has held me back in Valorant since I first started playing the game – the fear of death.
The fear of dying in the game:
Makes me stressed out, and not think clearly
Makes me shoot too fast without aiming
Makes me frustrated when I lose
Makes me exhausted after playing for a few games
I’ve decided to learn how to accept death in the game, and to understand it better overall.
For example, understanding the “time to death” from an intuitive sense (and knowing how to extend that time) could be a GAMECHANGER.
It will intuitively let me know:
When to peek
If I whiff, whether I should peek back, crouch down, or keep spraying
How much time do I have to aim before I get killed by the enemy
Stay focused even after dying a frustrating number of times
So I hopped into a couple of deathmatches and gave it a shot!
I started out just trying to predict when I would die, but dying stresses me out too much to tap into my intuition (you need to be relatively clear-headed to feel things intuitively). I focused then on saying “die” aloud every time I died or predicting when I died. This is taken from a sports exercise of intentionality (you vocalize what will happen, for example, if you are playing badminton, you say “hit” when you hit the birdie, and “miss” if you miss). This exercise is supposed to train your intuition and powers of prediction and anticipation.
Some takeaways:
Crouching can make most people miss if they are shooting at you.
The direction you run and bunny hop is very important, need to figure out the most evasive ways. Sometimes running directly at them has zero chance of success. I need to work on sometimes facing the side not just forward to be more evasive.
The timing of peeking is important, how they have been spraying bullets is important.
When you are running behind a wall, before you peek, you don’t need to bunnyhop, just run normally, feel out intuitively, the moment you should peek out
I should start just by shouting out dead, every time I actually die, then try to predict
I need to aim higher to knife to the head, I keep knifing the body.
What I should try next is to stay alive for as long as I can.
I should also focus on letting the shock and frustration from dying play out before going again so quickly.
My intuition also tells me that I should focus on what I’m missing or losing when I’m dying and focus on those feelings right after dying.
Today is not the first day working on the Profit in Peace challenge, but it does FEEL like the first day I am living it.
Today is the first day when I dedicated my morning to finding my magical life. For some context of what that means:
Something that I still don’t really understand or feel comfortable with applying is the values that I believe in every day.
I think that writing honestly and focusing on myself in this blog every morning might actually hit all of these points:
Honesty – well, this blog isn’t called unfiltered for no reason! I do remind myself all the time of the “if they don’t like me please leave” mentality.
Imagination – for me, this blog is dedicated to all my imaginative parts: art, YouTube, philosophy, poetry etc.
Intuition – this is the place where doing things “my” way is celebrated and I tap into what is the best way to do something (according to my intuition) rather than how everyone else does it.
Empathy – this blog is a lot for my feelings where I process feelings through words, video, and images. It is a part of honesty too, honest emotion where this is my place to express everything imperfect.
I also like using the blog as my way of living out all my values and being the person I want to be because it really feels like I am sacrificing something to do this…in a good way.
JT Franco talks about if you aren’t willing to sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice. In the end, I had no idea whether I would sacrifice time talking to my girlfriend, going on YouTube, working, playing games, or making YouTube videos. Those are the things I spend most of my day doing anyway. But none of those things seemed right. It was too blunt on an idea, how could you sacrifice all of YouTube? How could I sacrifice all of work?
But by sacrificing my mornings, in a way, I am also sacrificing all of those things. I resist the urge to listen to audiobooks, watch YouTube videos, check messages, or work in the morning. I dedicate all my time to working on my blog and all my challenges, thoughts, ideas, and philosophies.
I also feel a deep unease and anxiety keeping pace with me this morning:
I’m Afraid I My Boss Will Check
I’m afraid my boss will check
See I’m not working
It won’t matter that I have bigger dreams
it won’t matter if I did a bunch of planning
On the weekend
Feverishly, desperately trying to
Make my workday
Productive, efficient enough
To make up
To make it easy
For me to balance
I remember the look on his face
When I told him
I like to meditate
Skeptical
And
I also wonder
If finding my magic
Will make me feel sad and lonely
Like I did yesterday
I feel tired as I
Let go of trying to change the feeling
And accept it instead
Another anxiety that I have about this challenge or this “morning commitment” is just the sense of lack of clarity. I don’t know what I should be working on, or what I can work on. I think is the pressure of time. Or maybe its because I completed all the prework for the challenge and I don’t exactly have something to work on right now. I’m afraid every action is not “right”.
Is it the right thing to:
Work on challenge videos?
Work on editing videos?
Work on reaching out?
To focus on my body?
Wow there is so much here and I feel that I may be stalling. Scared to make a decision so I’m just rambling on a super long blog post that doesn’t really say anything in particular.
Well all I know right now is I feel like doing a bit of freewriting, fantasy writing or something of that nature. So I’ll go do that.
I just had a realization. I was thinking about what I “should” be doing in the mornings with this new blog commitment. But I think that EXACTLY what I “should” be doing.
I want to spend my time asking questions. And if an action speaks to me, I will do it.
In fact, this was a major technique in Connection Theory that I forgot about. Connection Theory is about understanding is the pathway to change.
One technique for understanding is to ask many many questions. Very good, specific questions. Questions that beget more questions.
Through questioning, we begin to understand.
Another technique I used to do was to ask myself questions. Imagine myself older and wiser, and come up with questions to ask my current day self, and then answer those questions.
Anyway, I have to transition to work, so this will have to wait for now.
Today is the first day in the profit in peace challenge live sessions.
Questions/thoughts:
Asking me to empty my cup
Isn’t this a question about time? What if I can’t quit my job or scared of doing it?
Hmm he means a few goals – fuzzy targets don’t get hit
The three Ps
Power – gain skills needed to maximize your natural strengths
Purpose – do something you love
Profit – products that sells themselves
Peace – at the center
I wonder if it is just because I’m so isolated but meeting with others becomes more important to me as soon as I get my alone time
But I do feel like I have charisma, I just burn out the more I work on things I don’t believe in
The lever is your why
But what if I don’t want to sell a physical product or do drop shipping
Trying to apply to what I want
Should I try this out? Or focus on what I want?
I’m guessing you somehow figure out what is a popular search, but aren’t there people already doing that?
Helium 10
At least 20k total searches
Rich buy time
The way that we see money and treat money comes from our parents
I can probably invest 5 to 10 thousand in my business
I can invest 10 to 15 thousand if I make 5000 in my coaching business
I actually got really stressed when attending this session.
I got stressed because I have my work and my coaching business and this challenge and I don’t want to do anything half-assed, but that’s what it felt like I was doing because I felt so scattered.
I decided to completely give up working on coaching for this week so I can fully focus on learning about e-commerce, then kind of work on coaching again afterwards.
Strength seems to be half pressure/work and half recovery and growth. And today is a recovery day.
I’m quite pleased that I have a recovery day because I really need to comfort and soothe my knee a lot and I like exploring ways to do that.
It’s also interesting that my exercises are completely different from the knees over toes guy. Maybe at some point, they will converge when my knees get stronger.
Recovery Exercises:
Gentle knee spacer
One leg is straight and extended
The other leg is lifted up gently to the side and slowly relaxed so there is space created in the joint
Foot scrape
One leg straight, the other leg lifted up
Relax and let the lifted leg gently fall and scrape on the ground
So I’ve fallen off the weight challenge a little bit due to losing my phone and having some serious trouble with routines.
But here are some updates.
In terms of appetite, I realized that stuffing yourself with food simply doesn’t work with me. I tend to feel stressed and bloated, and end up somehow losing weight as my digestion falls apart. A major tip for me that seems to work is eating enzymes. They always seems to help me a lot when breaking down food and I definitely seem to gain weight after that.
In terms of routine, I started implementing daily walks morning walks with a cup of tea and that has been working great. What hasn’t been working great is getting enough sleep and going to bed on time.
The main blocked appears to be Valorant. Today I thought about how I always focus on the problem itself as the issue but I was wondering whether or not the issue actually manifests earlier.
For example, I know in Valorant, I always blame my aim for losing gun fights, but I never think about what led up to the gunfight and how that might have put me in a unwinnable situation, or at least, a very difficult to win situation.
In terms of going to bed on time, I always blame gaming late at night. But thinking about it more deeply, I theorized that the issue actually occurs much earlier in the day, specifically during noon and afternoon. This is when I start to feel discomfort and turn to Valorant to start numbing out the pain.
Fix noon and I fix bedtime.
Today I tried taking a nap at noon and it seems to work. It’s 11 PM and while I feel pretty shitty from playing Valorant, I actually feel like it was easier for me to stop, and I may go to bed around midnight instead of 2 or 3 AM.
Today is actually the end of unit one (Baseline health: strong enough to exercise bulk and be normal health). The next unit starts tomorrow (Bulking and buildup: Gain 3 pounds of muscle).
I’m excited to see how I can start to use the rhythms I’m starting to build up, with the energy exercises and increasing diet to greater effects.
