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Workpost 52: Exhausted
I’m so tired from being sleep-deprived for a few days now.
Today I want to focus on a couple of things:
- Completing all the hours of work I want to get done
- Focusing on my health
- Get screws from Home Depot
Stuck
I feel exhausted. My head feels numb. I feel hot and tired. My back aches.
My heart feels heavy. I feel angry at myself. So helpless. My mind in a fog.
My apartment is a mess. I just want to cry.
I can’t work. I just play games all day long. my eyes feel tired.
It’s 2 o’clock in the morning. All I want to do is eat and play video games. The pull is so strong in my heart like there is a strand of honey getting pulled.
I feel a numb panic deep in my chest. I’m afraid of failure. I’m scared I will disappoint myself and everyone around me. Pushing myself to make my business cards is only making me curl up even harder.
It was a long week. I’m exhausted. But the work just keeps coming.
I guess I can cancel tai chi tomorrow. Sleep in.
Tonight I can clean my apartment until I feel more peaceful.
I know I can use the gym as a way to process emotions, but I don’t use it.
I feel this pull, this overwhelm, like the honey being pulled, from my heart.
I’m capable of anything. Even rising from this challenge. This is important because as I get more successful, there will be days I feel exhausted, and in those moments, I need to find a way to find balance, to find peace.
I also want to learn to embrace failure. Failure is so scary to me. There is an image in my mind of my business cards being a complete disappointment and I feel a pit in my heart. A horrible amaturish website I’m not proud of and I can’t fix it.
Everyone starts somewhere. Everyone starts at the beginning. The people who are exceptional, who are savants are not people who started at the middle. They are people who enjoyed the beginning.
But how can I enjoy this? I feel so scared it won’t be good.
Makes me think of this video:
In this video, Jesse talks about how play allows us to feel pressure while still being able to learn.
That fun is the key to this.
But what is the key to fun? What would make this fun for me, regardless of the outcome, what would make designing and drawing fun for me?
What would make it an infinite game, not just a finite game focused on an end goal?
It’s true, the thought of designing business cards does not sound fun to me at all. It sounds like a slog. But maybe that’s because I’m worried about failing.
Ok, what if I tried to merge my painterly style with “woodcut” style prints. What if I created a new drawing technique that I could use to create cool stuff for friends and to sell as products?
That definitely sounds more like play to me.
So what about going to the gym, because I like it so much when I actually go, but I find it hard to go to begin with.
What if I saw it as supercharging myself – which it really is doing. Whether I go to lift weights or just to hang from the bar and stretch it really is building my body up to full potential. It might even solve my sleep problems.
And what about sleep, why do I not want to go to bed? Because if I go to bed, tomorrow, I wake up with tons of problems. Well maybe, that’s not a bad thing. Maybe before I go to bed, I fill my to do list with questions that I want to search out the answers to.
Here are the questions I have today, that if I knew the answers to I would rest easy:
- What am I going to do about my art coaching and AI gaming companies?
- Am I behind schedule and if so what do I do about it?
- Should I extend the schedule?
- Am I losing money?
- How do I get out of my procrastination phase and get working?
- What do I do about my art coaching website?
- How do I get everything done in such a short period of time?
- Should I start registering for fairs?
- Should I pay someone to design the website for me?
- How am I going to get the motivation to start drawing? How do I start drawing consistently?
- How do I start going to the gym and working outsite the apartment consistently?
- How will I start cooking again and cleaning up my apartment? Where will I find the time?
- How will I prepare for the next week of work? How do I balance my other businesses?
- When will I continue to work on my Javascript projects? What is the breakdown between AI work time and coaching work time.
Matches: Drudgery
Match 1
I feel pretty overwhelmed and unhappy to work because there are a lot of tedious work to do that I don’t feel is very fun. In this first match, I just want to get everything done so I can move on.
Criteria for success:
- Speed (percentile)
- Efficiency (percentile)
- Intellect (percentile)
- Energy (1-5)
Warmup: Cleaning + walk + meditation/breathwork
Gameplan
UNIT ONE: Set up api calls
UNIT TWO: modify prompts
UNIT THREE: testing
Postmatch analysis:
I definitely did not follow the plan, yet everything somehow got done anyway.
- Speed – 65% I was pretty fast, knowing what I need to do and was focused. Nothing too special though.
- Efficiency – 60% I was ok efficiency, could have coded my way to better efficiency though
- Intellect – 60% I definitely used my intellect to speed things up but it could have been accomplished by many people.
- Energy – 3 I feel ok, which is a win.
Matches 2: Results From Day 2
Match 1
Reflections:
- Ended up spending all the warmup time at the gym
- Feel amazing but felt the mental work was less exceptional
- Felt much more healthy and sustainable
- Found that walking every 5 minutes or deep breathing was extremely nourishing and helpful
Result Calculation:
- How much do I think this work is worth? I feel this work was worth less maybe $100-$175. The task for getting the test data was time consuming but straightforward. The coding required much more thinking, but I didn’t get extremely far with it.
- How difficult intellectually was this work from 1-10? Maybe a 5. Someone less intelligent could achieve this, but they would of course, need to put in a lot of effort.
- What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation? 35% percentile. Pretty interesting ideas about character count. Pretty clever overall.
- Gains in communication and charisma? Not many gains, but will help me a lot with future work that will be very helpful in telling the story (looking at data).
Workpost 40: Refinement of the Game
Today I made some definite progress. Even though I have the exact same feeling of lack of motivation, no interest in working. Wanting to just play games, I felt significantly better, having done spleen chi exercises both before bed and after waking up in the morning. As a result I started working 3 hours earlier than yesterday.
Today, I want to improve upon and refine on the game that I created for myself yesterday.
Firstly, in my walking meditation this morning, some wisdom came to me.
Relaxed > Easy > Fast
This was the wisdom first introduced to me in the book, Born to Run where the author talks about how you run completely relaxed first. Then you make your running more smooth, more efficient. If you are able to make it efficient and relaxed, you WILL be fast.
This is the same thing in Valorant. In your warmups you aren’t instantly trying to one tap everyone. You aren’t trying to do it fast. If you do, you probably are going too fast and the warmup won’t work.
You want to start slow (or even in the Miyagi technique, don’t even follow through with a shot, just track the target). As it becomes easy for you to hit headtaps, then you start to gradually speed up.
I want to implement this in my warmups. First, start off doing intense workout with the aim of expansion. Then focus on some brainteasers (Miyagi, completely relaxed). After a few minutes of that, work on to do list, trying to make my relaxed thinking more efficient and clean. Finally, at the tail end of the warmup, try to go fast. My thoughts are:
- 5 min physical warmup
- 2 min brainteasers
- 5 min todolist
- 3 min buffer
Then for the actual match, I would like to break it up more often with some deep breathing every 5 minutes, like I do with Valorant between rounds.
Workpost 39: Making the Most of It
This morning I had a very slow start. Seems to be the same for a lot of days.
I really really focused on the idea that everything could be turned into an advantage. And today, I realized that the reason why I have slow starts is because my stomach burns, aches, and has gnawing empty pain. It is so bad, it is hard to focus and feel motivated to work.
The opportunity this morning is to devise some techniques to help with my stomach and be able to test it with the worst possible conditions. In other words, if the techniques work now, they will work anytime.
I tried this video first, and it was pretty helpful.
Then I tried this video which was helpful, but too boring to finish:
Finally, I tried drinking hot tea, which seemed to help some as well.’
And then, even though my stomach starting feeling better, I ran into another problem with avengance.
This problem was simple. Absolutely no motivation to do anything, being that I still felt tired and overwhelmed. Instead, I wanted to play games and watch tv shows.
I’m going to take the same approach here: use this as an opportunity to test out some new ideas with productivity.
So I have many many techniques in this area already, but I want to innovate further today in a different direction instead of meditation, letting go, focus, etc.
I want to look at why, even in my overwhelmed state, do I want to play Valorant and Fallout Shelter, and how I can fundamentally apply the same things to the things I want to do.
Things I Want To Do
- Consulting work
- Linkedin posts
- Coaching work
- Working out
Before I forget, here are some additional mindsets I can add the useful pile:
- Walking to vent stress, find peace, ask tough questions, get answers
- Workpost is to innovate something
Main Reasons Why I Want to Play Valorant
- Can work on a specific skill like aim, movement, gamesense
- Want to level up really quick and be a top player
- Inspired by demon1, tenz, oxy, and aspas – want to be the best as well
- Like working with a team, getting clutch plays off, good vibes
Main Reasons Why I Want to Play Fallout Shelter
- Get control of my vault
- Satisfaction in optimizing my vault
- Satisfaction in leveling people up, and getting new weapons
Why It Is difficult to get the same feeling with work?
- There is no specific simple skill to work on
- Nothing I want to level up in
- No one to inspire me
- No team to work with
- Don’t feel in complete ownership of the project
- In a hurry to get it done
What skills am I excited want to work on in terms of work?
- Faster problem solving skills
- Intuition + precise logic for accurate but rapid decision making
- Ability to think deeper with less effort
- Memory and recall with less energy
What do I want to level up in terms of rank?
- Money
- Intellect
- Thought leadership
- Communication and charisma
Who do I draw inspiration from?
- Elon Musk
- Alex Hormozi
- Khalid Sharara
How might I work off my team more?
- Showing off the results of my work
How might I feel more in control of my work?
- Understand that charisma, leadership are part of what I need to own and protect my work, just because there are other players involved doesn’t mean I don’t own it
Using all this information, I want to develop a unit of work, called a “game” or “match” to simulate what I do in Valorant. In Valorant you play a match with a clear objective, and you warm up before the game, and take breaks after the game.
Game Structure
Warmup: 15 minutes
Use to do list, practice one skill at a time:
- Faster problem solving/solution creation skills
- Intuition + precise logic for accurate but rapid decision making
- Ability to think deeper with less effort
- Memory and recall with less energy
Main game: 45 minutes
Fights:
Capture questions and answers.
Level up in:
- Money
- Intellect
- Thought leadership
- Communication and charisma
Result Calculation:
- How much do I think this work is worth?
- How difficult intellectually was this work from 1-10?
- What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation?
- Gains in communication and charisma?