Workpost 65: Work life balance

I feel like I’m stagnating in all areas of life.

I feel frustration as aching in my chest cavity and stomach.

I am helpless wound coming up. I am overwhelmed. I feel hopeless. I feel undermotivated. I am lost.

I am tired.

I discovered some things yesterday. I realized that I was obsessed about getting the brand and vision correct, but my goals for my consulting project are actually much more simple:

1. Get experience in creating funnels/pipelines that are simple, effective, easy to maintain
2. Make my client’s company cooler and inspire the people within to do more

The brand and vision just serve as a tactical basis for getting the funnel right because having no vision leads to pretty shitty, unclear websites and ads and makes decision making much harder than it needs to be.

Another thing I recognize is that mission, vision, and values are all things that need to evolve and change as what I want becomes clearer and clearer.

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:

1. Draft up all the major pages in the website
2. Create a signup experience
3. Create a plan for all lead magnet ideas

Major pages:

1. What it’s like to work with us
2. What your customers will experience
3. Mission vision and values

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:

1. 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?
2. How do I get out of my procrastination phase and get working?
3. What do I do about my art coaching website?
4. How do I get everything done in such a short period of time?
5. Should I start registering for fairs?
6. Should I pay someone to design the website for me?
7. How am I going to get the motivation to start drawing? How do I start drawing consistently?
8. How do I start going to the gym and working outsite the apartment consistently?
9. How will I start cooking again and cleaning up my apartment? Where will I find the time?
10. How will I prepare for the next week of work? How do I balance my other businesses?
11. When will I continue to work on my Javascript projects? What is the breakdown between AI work time and coaching work time.