I feel the warmth in my skin
As if she is with me
Safe and soft
I love her
Because yesterday
She made me feel safe
She made me feel close
She made feel like she belonged to me
There are so many worries
So many challenges
Some caused by me
Some caused by her
And some caused by no one
Just by our circumstances
But when I feel her close
My heart feels like it wants to fly
And I feel
Warm
I feel tired. And yet I feel so inspired.
I ran with the ideas last night, of dance and music and I can say I feel extremely sad. Something about how much I miss this part of me. I feel sad about the weight I’ve been carrying around for so long. I feel sad because sadness acknowledges the pain in the world without shying away from it.
I watched this video last night:
I remember in art there is no right or wrong way to go about something. Just like in life. I feel we forget that a lot.
For some reason, I feel the desire to write stories. Here is a space for some freewriting:
A shark was washed onto the shore. That was the day when I asked my next door neighbor Amy to marry me. We were both 12 at the time. Amy was a quiet sort of girl, not shy, just took a while to think about things before she talked. When she did, she didn’t say much.
She looked at me up and down as if she was trying to size me up.
“So what do you say Amy?”
I wonder if this is how the shark felt. He was already dead when he was on shore, but his eyes seemed to look at you as if to say…well? What’s up?
“I don’t know,” Amy finally responded. Her fingers figeting.
“You don’t know?”
“Yea.”
“That’s ok!” I said. I was 12 and I felt invincible…
I feel sad because of how much of this I repressed within my self.
In terms of work, I feel I’ve done the experiment and I can officially say to myself, working on too many things at the same time does not work towards my strengths. I think I need to focus on one focus every day. If I get to a second one, then that’s good. Also, I can have many low effort progress toward every goal, but it can’t be the main focus.
In doing one main thing, I might be able to go to bed much sooner which is something of great concern to me.
I realized something about my structure today. I stopped making these posts. I lost my progress with going to sleep on time. I started feeling really overwhelmed and like I never had enough time to do anything, even though I have more time than ever.
What I realized that I love working. Intentional, driven, honest work. I don’t like the work where you have to ignore your feelings, your values, your morals, or your intelligence. But I love the work that is driven at improving yourself, being present, and making enough money to set you free.
I did an experiment when I stopped calling these posts “Profit in Peace” because that name comes from a program that isn’t mine, a program that had a similar premise to what I’m describing (making profit while being at peace emotionally), but it wasn’t actually about profit in peace, it was about selling things on Amazon.
So I’m trying out a new name for these posts. Workpost is my new name for my daily posts that use my blog as a working space for my ideas, businesses, personal development, and creative process.
Tired
Right now I feel tired
My stomach aches like the sour candy left on your teeth for too long
The bleariness drenching my head
Yet I seek
I seek for more
I dream of great profits
And when I wrote
Why I wanted them
“Life can be a magical place”
“And I want to live that life”
It is starting to make so much sense why I often write poems because they are such a good way to express where I am without resorting to logic.
Today I want to focus a bit on two things, AI Consulting and my art research and my art program.
For AI consulting, I want to tackle the first step of my plan which is to make a name for myself in AI.
My focus is primarily Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter because those are probably the three main areas I will pull clients.
The aim of step one is to build up credibility amongst people that I may contact. It can be credibility with people who aren’t particularly savvy in technology so the content needs to be directed at my potential audience.
In a way, I would like the content to be a preview of what consulting will look like.
I have 10 days to do this step. Counting today that would be until the 27th of February.
Lets break it down further.
Goal: Be known, give preview of consulting
UNIT ONE (3 days): Bootstrap trial and error
UNIT TWO (3 days): Harden process
UNIT THREE (3 days): Pump out content like a machine
BONUS (1 day): Look for automation/outsourcing, try to make as low effort as possible
Switching gears to Art/Creative Coaching, the point of the first 4 months is to change the lives of my clients, and sort of start my group coaching program. I want to use this to increase my rates drastically. The end of this part will be June 18th.
Goal: Change the lives of my clients via one on one, group coaching and any other methods available to me
UNIT ONE (1 month): Take risks, experiment
UNIT TWO (1 month): Reflect on coaching sessions, meditate, innovate
UNIT THREE (1 month): Take big risks with group coaching
BONUS (1 month): Document journeys, testimonials
I haven’t quite figured out the structure for advancing in coaching. It was extremely difficult to come up with things for UNIT ONE and those aren’t even steps and subunits, they are just ideas I can try. I think it is because coaching is such an intuitive thing for me. It is hard to structure it. What I feel I almost need is another coach. Maybe I will build my bot for that and utilize Dan.
Today I feel mentally and physically drained. I went to bed at 3 AM last night. I feel defeated, anxious, and sad about my relationship. I keep asking myself what it means to own a startup, what it means to be in charge. I think what it means is to be able to take a day off if you need to.
Let’s take a look at some of the different areas of my life right now:
STARTUP
What might be the next steps?
LIFE
What might be my next steps?
COACHING
What might be my next steps?
RELATIONSHIP
What might be next steps?
She told me she got used to it
Being gone
But I don’t ever want her to be used to it
I want her to feel a pain deep in her chest
Like a part of her is missing
When I’m gone
That all she wants
Is to be whole again
I’d do anything to feel that love again
But I realize, that in order to make room for her love
I forgot some of my own
I forget the world where everyone tries to be kind
Where people push themselves to learn and succeed
Where facing your fears is exciting
Where nothing is impossible
And I wonder
If she has anything else to give me
But her love
And when that love is faint
I feel
Bored
It is sometimes a difficult thing to be in love. All you want is to be together all of the time but if you are moving at different speeds it can hurt so much. You worry if you want to move forward, you will be doing it alone. It’s hard to feel like the only way you can be with someone, is if you stay where they are. I think there is hope though. Relationships that aren’t in person will also struggle with connection. But I worry sometimes there is no hope. And that worry fills my heart with fear.
She used to message me and beg me to get on to play
I thought she needed me then
Loved spending time together
We would joke
And talk about life
Little things
These days she plays
Without me
It’s me who asks
And she reluctantly accepts
In the game, she’s all anger and frustration
She hates the game
She hates the teammates
She hates me
And she hates herself
She denied that she ever had fun with me today
Says she can’t remember the last time we played
That I annoy her
That we need to win if we play
That we just don’t work together
“I like small talk,” she says about her new friends
“We are too busy asking about favorite colors”
“For me to be mad”
I remember a time we asked each other our favorite colors
I wonder if it was less special than I thought
Or if her new friends are more special than me
Its doubt that destroys love
Not hate or anger
Doubt eating away at a foundation so strong
It promised forever
Today I worry
If I left
Would she even notice
Over the laughter
Of her new friends
This poem is about feeling like what you thought you both cherished, only you actually cherished. That there wasn’t a connection at the level that I originally thought.
If that is actually true, I don’t feel heartbroken. Only depressed. So incredibly disappointed that everything was not as special as I thought it was. It takes me back to my dark places, wondering if anyone could truly love me.
Part of me knows it’s more complicated than that. That there is still hope for us. Still hope for me.
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.