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Workpost 13: Inspired
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.
Workpost 3: Pleasant Uncertainty
Today I feel a bit like there is a lot of uncertainty. There is uncertainty with my coaching business and with my career as an AI consultant, but there are also lots of opportunities moving forward.
I want to strive to move forwards and not start to distract myself from the emotions via games and videos.
The first thing I want to tackle is sleep. That is my main priority today. I want to understand why I feel unfulfilled at night, like something wasn’t quite done.
My intuition tells me that I desire to create art. I don’t know why.
Perhaps my first step is to start working on art at 9:30 PM.
Before that I want to achieve something in Valorant, so I will need to do some gaming earlier in the day.
I also desire to work on myself more, I think it really helps to think about emotional development as work. When I think about it as vulnerability, it feels not productive. But when I think of it as emotional work, it takes on new meaning and purpose.
Ok so lets take a look at my two projects right now:
So for my AI Consulting plan, I want to stick to the plan, but the timeline has changed a bit.
I wanted this current goal (Be known, give preview of consulting) to finish by Feb 27th. That leaves 7 days to film, shoot, edit and get feedback.
UNIT ONE (ends 23rd): Shoot 3 videos
- Spend total of 3 hours per video (9 hours total)
UNIT TWO (ends 24th): Write 2 LinkedIn posts
- Spend total of 1.5 hrs per post (3 hrs total)
UNIT THREE (ends 26th): Get feedback, harden process
Looking at my goal for art coaching, I feel dissatisfied with my current structure on process for that. I feel I need to work on finding more ambitious and exciting goals at every step of the way (even if I have a lot of time to get there). I realized in order for the syllabus method to work, you need to have very ambitious exciting goal…then think about how to make it difficult to expect anything other than success.
So let’s revisit the master plan here.
Goal: Ramp up to an income of 8333 per month (100k per year) within one year
I want to choose a new goal…make 1500 per week in coaching.
I want to achieve this within the next 3 months.
UNIT ONE (1 month): Focus on my craft – become a coach I would hire for 1000 per month
- Create plans (10 days, ends March 2nd)
- Deeply understanding clients
- Creating extreme focus and presence in life and sessions
- Developing connections clients need
- Materials and exercises to create and track strategy
- Execute on plans (10 days, ends March 12th)
- Research and refinement (10 days, ends March 22nd)
- Interview other coaches
- Read books
- Further brainstorming
UNIT TWO (1 month): Build 100 hot leads – depends on having free stuff
- Random try posting (10 days, ends April 1st)
- Get feedback and do networking and outreach (10 days, ends April 11th)
- Turn warm leads into hot leads with offer (10 days, ends April 21st)
UNIT THREE (1 month): Meld and combine top level coaching with leads machine
- Talk about my clients achievements, use it to push their art (10 days, ends May 1st)
- Clients have voice on my platform to talk about concepts in my coaching (10 days, ends May 11th)
- Refine call for action to get warm leads to ask for my offer, then turn into hot leads (10 days, ends May 21st)
Okok, I finally have a good framework, but working on this framework makes me realize I really do need to work on free products in the meantime.
Goal: Create free products in 1 month
UNIT ONE (10 days, ends March 2nd): Complete research
- Transcribe and think, what is the million dollar problem or breakthrough?
- Collate results, come up with solutions
- Research competition
UNIT TWO (10 days, ends March 12th): Develop products
- Planning and gathering materials doing research
- Create products
UNIT THREE (10 days, ends March 22nd): Continue development
- Testing and creating more products
Workpost 62: Processing Frustration
“This is gonna be harsh, but you aren’t a model”
“If you’re deadset on using yourself”
“I think you’re not adding very much by being in there”
“You seem robotic”
Anger, frustration, feeling misunderstood, feeling hurt.
I feel pain and cracks in my heart like cracked glass.
I don’t think my looks matter on an ad. I don’t even think being robotic matters. I think the message is what matters the most. Also, I feel I’m plenty relaxed and attractive for the ad to work.
Processing the emotions I feel that maybe different people value looks and appearance on different levels. I value the message because I know that definitely works. Others might value looks and performance more. Some people also might be turned off by my demeanor or my appearance, but that has more to do with them than me.
I also feel the difficulty processing how I feel about myself on camera.
I don’t feel the camera captures me in the best light. I see a lot of flaws.
I feel a clenching in my heart, neck, and stomach.
I feel too skinny and small, my face too pudgy and soft looking, my nose not enough definition.
Processing it further, I understand that I’m not done growing, everyday I can work to become healthier, stronger, and more attractive. Also, I accept the way I look in the camera like I accept my art. Instead of thinking of how other people look, I want to let myself look the way I want to look. Like letting the art be what it wants to be. There is something charming and right about how I look exactly as I am, imperfect me.
I want to live a full life, and worrying about how I look on camera is not what I want. I want to spend my time and energy building my business and I KNOW I can do that with videos of myself.
The next thing I want to process is how unproductive and lethargic I feel in my apartment. I don’t even want to get out of the apartment to work.
The first thing I noticed is that the apartment is a bit hot and the oxygen feels much thinner in here. I turned up the AC, put my standing desk up to standing and drank some cold water.
There is also an emotional part of this. I feel safe here. The outside world feels unsafe with unsafe people and lots of unsafe places.
It feels like a light buzzing numbing fear in my chest and stomach.
I feel like a good cleaning of the apartment can help.
Tidying and clearing out the mental baggage.
A great thing that standing desks allow for is pacing and I’m going to take advantage of that.
It’s interesting. Being at the standing desk feels the same way as leaving the apartment feels. Less cozy and comfy. More open, free, unknown, and some low level buzz of anxiety.
It almost feels like morning vs night where night is full of comfort and imagination and mornings feel more energetic and open but devoid of magic.
It almost feels like emptiness. When emotionally processing that, I feel from space comes peace, comes inspiration.
After spending more time emotionally processing this, I have a couple idea of what I can use to reframe going outside, leaving, standing at my desk and going to the gym from empty to more meaningful:
- My coaching mindset:
- You’re in my house
- Take risks
- Be comfortable in silence
- Take your time
- Make the impossible possible
- Taoist productivity
- Focus on one thing only
- Do it until you feel empty
One more thing today, I was confused on how to work with my blog and my to do list together as they sort of fill in the same needs. They both help me get structure and work through issues.
What I decided is that I’m going to use my to do list as a mental dump and use it to organize my thoughts. If any part of those parts, I want to work through in a workspace, I will combine the necessary elements together, cross them all out and transfer to my blog to work out.
I now have 3 forms of organization:
- To do list – braindump and prioritization tool
- Blog – workspace
- Calendar – time planning tool, reminder for future tasks
Overlapping areas:
- Takeaways from prioritization or working out prioritization can be a overlap of blog and to do list
- Long terms tasks can be overlap from calendar and to do list
- Calendar event and work can be overlap between blog and calendar
- Large tasks can be overlap from to do list and blog
Current thoughts about order of operations:
- Journaling in blog
- To do list forming and prioritizaiton
- Long tasks added to calendar
- Add more to journal if needed
- Follow to do list, clumping and converting to blog as needed
Matches 3: Tired
Results from day 3 while tired and a little stressed.
Match 1
Reflections:
- My mind is kind of sluggish, but this way of working where I’m warming up, then taking breaks to walk is genuinely very relaxing. I don’t feel tired at all from the work.
Result Calculation:
- How much do I think this work is worth? I feel this work was worth less maybe $100. I feel like there were some programmer heavy tasks in here but not a huge amount was accomplished.
- How difficult intellectually was this work from 1-10? I’d say this work was middling difficulty. Maybe around a 4. It was deceptively simple in the sense that it’s very basic information added, but takes a bit of thinking.
- What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation? 5%. Not very innovative, business as usual.
- Gains in communication and charisma? Fair gains in communication and charisma, it is amazing to be able to show some of the information that I exposed in the data.
Match 2
Reflections:
- I tried to do some chess as a mental warmup, but I feel like it left me drained, perhaps next time as a mental warmup, I can try playing chess for creativity not for the win
- Overall I felt my energy draining in this match. I felt pretty tired.
- I did some extra work after the match and I feel pretty tired. I felt I needed to squeeze that extra bit out.
Result Calculation:
- How much do I think this work is worth? $120. It was pretty not special, some of the work I did programmatically could have been done by someone very cheap, but overall I ran tests that required a lot of deep level troubleshooting that is not easy.
- How difficult intellectually was this work from 1-10? 6-7. It was debugging which can be extremely difficult, especially for someone who doesn’t know my code.
- What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation? 5% I don’t know if anything got innovated here.
- Gains in communication and charisma? Good gains, gets me much closer to the final goal of presenting results.
Match 3
Reflections:
- Focused a lot on thinking smart not hard
- I noticed that taking a break is important, staying on the train of thought only makes you want to choose the easiest path, not the most intelligent
- Changed work time to 15 minutes
- Still need to let go of going fast in the warmup
- Like to dance on the breaks
Result Calculation:
- How much do I think this work is worth? $150. I was able to output results which is worth a ton, but to just hire someone to do this step, it’s probably less money. There was a lot of data and data manipulation involved as well as some troubleshooting.
- How difficult intellectually was this work from 1-10? The output file is quite complex. I give it a 7 in intellectual difficulty. Not achievable by people of lower intelligence, but easy for people of high intelligence.
- What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation? 10% Not much was innovative, the data is quite interesting though.
- Gains in communication and charisma? I laid the groundwork for much better result communication, I think it was great.
Workpost 24: Feeling Good and Business Plans
Last night I was feeling some doubts about my coaching practice and I did some IFS therapy on myself to work through some of the shame and anger I feel around people rejecting my coaching or not seeing its value.
Today, I woke up feeling really tired but now I’m feeling good.
I’m working on stuff of my choosing and I really like it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my business lately and what the starving crowd and what I want to happen.
I feel like I’ve finally cracked the code a little bit about selling high-ticket clients and expensive products.
So after listening and reading Alex Hormozi for two days here is what I learned:
- Charge an obscene amount
- Use that amount to create a crazy experience
- Solve a really big problem (to create really big value)
I think what really big value I want to create with my coaching is to help people create a masterpiece.
If I was to breakdown Alex Hormozi’s formula for value:
- The dream: create an artistic masterpiece – a breakout piece (this will make you a career in this space a breakout piece, you will feel proud of yourself, you will be able to call yourself an artist proudly, this will be the best work you’ve ever created)
- The certainty: I am an artist and engineer, I have a lot of experience coaching people through mental blocks, I will give you a guarantee.
- The time: 1 year
- The effort: without giving up your mental sanity, quitting your job, or disconnecting from family
Value of this offer: 250,000+
10-15%: 25,000 – 37,500
2,083 – 3,125 per month
Three stages:
- Explore art
- Establish your routine
- Create your masterwork
Objections/fears:
- I don’t have enough time
- I don’t know what I want to do
- I have kids
- I don’t want to quit my job
- I don’t know what other people will like, what if people don’t like it
- Too much work
- Keep switching what I want to do
Workpost 45: Showing Up
Today I feel very exhausted and tired. I still feel struggles with going to jiujitsu and going to bed on time. I feel overwhelmed with where I’m going with my business.
Here are some of the things I learned over the past few days:
- I can combine the powerful techniques of connection theory and flow theory in the following way: first use connection theory to validate and understand my feelings, then use flow theory to somatically process it. I can then use connection theory to understand deeper, better and have a more grounded explanation.
- It isn’t about what you do, it is about how you show up
- It’s ok to not know where you are going, but aim your northstar and measure everything at it
Today here are the things I want to achomplish:
- Complete the three tasks I created for myself
- Have additional time to play Valorant before jiujitsu
- Spend time after jiujitsu working on my businesses
- Take a nap during the day to recover from tireness