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Workpost 67: Feeling a little scattered
Byjack
Today I feel a bit scattered between cooking and working on multiple things at the same time. I feel the need to create some order or at least some vision for today.
Here are the possibilities today:
- Work on consulting work
- Work on my AI business
- Work on my art coaching business
- Watching hunger games
- Work on my relationship
- Cooking
Workpost 33: At the End of My Rope
Byjack
I feel pretty awful. I’ve lost focus in work. I feel overwhelmed and unhappy. Every day I stay up late at night. The only solace I find is in games. Everything that I wanted to do now feels like things I have to do.
I struggle to regain the mentality that I use for these workposts.
I guess I feel extremely tired and depressed.
There are a couple of things that filter through the haze that I’m feeling:
- I want to find a way to post on LinkedIn again. That is the one thing I want to work on achieving.
- This new idea in taichi, and breathwork. To receive what is coming instead of taking. To allow things to come to me. To receive breath instead of taking it. To receive emotions, purpose, and understanding, instead of creating it. I feel this is the essence of patience.
- To be curious. I want to do more IFS therapy, but I feel overwhelmed by it. Too much thinking about thinking that is too cerebral, non-intuitive, and downright frustrating. However, we can take the core concept of IFS – the concept of creativity. Ask how do I feel? What do I need? Why do I feel that way.
It’s not been all lost I suppose. There was something I worked through recently – two people that I am jealous of. One who went to Harvard and ended up starting a successful youtube channel, and another who worked on my software company before leaving and getting big on youtube for his music, and is now a famous musician.
In speaking with my friend Edgar about this I came up with the following concepts to remind myself in times of jealousy:
- How do I want to succeed my way? The issue with a lot of these people is that they got successful in things that I want to succeed in, but not in the way that I want to succeed. There is great value in succeed in the way I want to succeed.
- Hardship creates growth. Success isn’t the end goal, success just leads to creating more challenges for yourself to work through. The ones who go down the harder path to begin with will still succeed but will be more complete when they do.
- Is my goal to succeed a little in the short term? Or is the goal much bigger? This is the concept that if I want to gain one rank in Valorant, the outcome of a match matters (because my elo will be impacted directly). If my goal is to get to radiant (the highest rank), one loss in the scale of a huge journey is not significant.
Finally, I’ve put off doing a LinkedIn post for far too long.
Let’s tackle the steps:
- Answer a list of questions in a letter to my girlfriend.
- Come up with a research plan and timebox it.
- Timebox getting everything “on the canvas”, move very fast, get messy, take big risks, keep going until it coalesces into what the art wants to be
- Break to do other things, view work from different angles
- Put on strategic hat to finish
Questions to ask myself (step 1):
- What my vision for the ideal post?
- What am I worried about and feel uncomfortable by?
- What do I want to learn when creating this post?
Strategic Hat
- See the work as something in itself, not just as a manifestation of my ideas
- Put on creative hat, check: is there some feeling here, is there some beauty, fun?
- Put on producer hat, check: if this was a work created by one of my clients, how would I promote it? If it was done by my brother?
*One Big Thing I Noticed*
It’s a lot easier for me to be motivated to workout than to work. Plan workout sessions for the entire day and bring work to do during those times. If no work gets done, I am still being productive and will be healthier, guaranteeing better work in the future.
Workpost 30: Refocus
Byjack
My mind feels wild
Like a disordered pair of weeds
Blowing in the wind
They seek home
Somewhere to rest their aching knots
And yet
I cannot find any purchase
The loose threads of my mind struggle
To connect into anything cohesive
Today I was feeling confused about a question:
Why do I no longer feel any motivation to do coaching? Is it because I’m scared to propose a $20,000 product? Am I scared to start a community?
And so I went for a walk. On my walk, I determined that it was because I desire to focus more than anything. Currently, I am focusing on posting for 50 days on LinkedIn and it’s taking a lot of energy. I need to be able to have fewer things on my plate.
However, when I sat down to write this journal. I realized that I’ve lost my way in these posts. I no longer do the hard work to grow and articulate how I am feeling. When I did, my poem revealed to me that I feel extremely lost and scattered in my mind. I’ve forgotten the helpful intentions I use to set myself into the mode of preparing my day:
- You are in my house
- Take your time, be patient
- Be ok with silence
- Take risks
- My house is a place where anything is possible
- Connection theory + flow theory
When I immerse myself in these intentions, I feel the distinct taste of possibility coming back to me and my world is opened wide enough to do the planning that I want to do in these posts.
Today I want to continue the work of yesterday and I want to focus on three things:
- AI project
- Linkedin post process
- To do list
Workpost 57: Moving Forwards
Byjack
My goal today is to find balance, however that looks like…feeling like I can spend time meeting all my needs and progressing at the speed that I want to progress at.
For my AI Consulting, I want to spend some time this morning thinking through it a little more and following some of the steps I took in my project.
For my consulting project, here are the things I want to get done:
- Draft up all the major pages in the website
- Create a signup experience
- Create a plan for all lead magnet ideas
Major pages:
- What it’s like to work with us
- What your customers will experience
- Mission vision and values
Stuck
Byjack
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.
Workpost 24: Feeling Good and Business Plans
Byjack
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