| | |

Workspace 22: Relax

Byjack

I had a slower start to the day. I started the day on my phone, waking up a bit early because my new retainer is bothering me when I sleep.

I watched some Valorant, talked to my girlfriend, and now I have a flight in about 3 hours. I want to leave in about 2 hours. I still have to take out the trash, eat up some more food and load the dishwasher.

I did a bit of a workout and I found out a couple of things that help with regaining energy, and gathering chi:

  1. Butt-clenched breathing: sounds a bit weird but it works. Lie down, clench the sphincter muscle (what you use to hold in poop) breath in. Then relax and breathe out. Repeat.
  2. Tummy circles: put the left hand over your stomach, then your right hand over that. Make circles over your stomach in the clockwise direction. Do it lightly. Then put your hands in the same area in your back and repeat.
  3. Extremity exercises: this can be any exercise that works your extremities. For example, doing a dead hang and focusing on clenching really hard with your hands but leaving everything else relaxed, or doing heel raises with the tips of your toes super engaged with everything else relaxed.
  4. Meditation: lie down close your eyes and walk down a staircase while counting to 10. Imagine the smell of wet stone, always puts me in a meditative state really quick for some reason.

Anyway goals for today. Just relax! I want to get all the chores sorted out and just spend the rest of my time relaxing.

Similar Posts

Jiujitsu Challenge? Knee Challenge

Byjack

Ok, so I no longer have an ongoing jiujitsu challenge, and I don’t really know if I have a knee challenge or not.

However, I really want to start that now. I feel really good about my progression.

It all started with 10 round Tuesday.

I went 3 rounds (2 days ago on the 21st). I absolutely died. I didn’t recover from feeling dizzy and like I was going to throw up for an hour after that.

I ate food when I got home, and slept like a baby after.

Ever since, I went to jiujitsu everyday.

On wednesday I was feeling super undermotivated, but I found an old training buddy and it was actually a good time.

Today I had even more fun.

My stamina seems to be increasing fast. I’m sore everyday and I still feel fine.

My knee feels good. It doesn’t hurt every day.

It feels strong. I feel like I can push myself more now.

My knee therapy and techniques around walking backwards, shifting my knee to be more balanced, stretching the hips and pointing the knee in the direction of the knee. AND IT’S BEEN WORKING.

I learned a lot from live rolls:

  • Don’t let someone get a completely dominant position, interrupt their attacks, move to the side
  • Don’t let your arms separate too much, too easy to armbar
  • Don’t let both arms get trapped above your head, too easy to armbar

I’m learning some basic attacks, armbars, leg locks, chokes.

Very cool stuff.

Matches 2: Results From Day 2

Byjack

Match 1

Reflections:

  1. Ended up spending all the warmup time at the gym
  2. Feel amazing but felt the mental work was less exceptional
  3. Felt much more healthy and sustainable
  4. Found that walking every 5 minutes or deep breathing was extremely nourishing and helpful

Result Calculation:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation? 35% percentile. Pretty interesting ideas about character count. Pretty clever overall.
  4. 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).

Creating Excitement in Productivity

Byjack

I’ve been seeking excitement in my life for some time now. The excitement of walking up to random people to ask for them to vote for my non-profit, jumping off something high for parkour, or talking to a pretty girl on the street.

All those things felt like they had an element of risk but felt extreemly freeing and rewarding.

I wanted to know how to get more of this in my life and I stumbled upon a way to bring it into the more mundane parts of life, and if I can bring it into the mundane, perhaps I can bring it everywhere.

I realized that this can be used in any area where I have the desire to act but feel too afraid and that this could be any type of fear, not just social fear. For example, I’ve been feeling a lot of anxiety recently with feeling overwhelmed by things. For example, I feel overwhelmed at the thought of taking out the dishes, going to the gym, doing a duolingo test or playing an online chess match against a real person.

Using the formula that I developed with talking to women (but no longer use since I have a girlfriend), here are the steps:

  1. Imagine that I am going for it, and that I can imagine myself doing so within the next few seconds
  2. Imagine the fullest extent of “going for it”, how would truly committing look like, how would feeling effortless and free look like
  3. Let the fear/excitement build up in your chest as you start to breathe
  4. Let the energy carry the action – you don’t have to act if it feels wrong, but let the energy flow through your breathing and let it move you
  5. Continue to breathe through the experience to stay connected to yourself

These steps can bring a feeling of aliveness and control over life. I should know, I used it to write this very post and shoot the video below.

|

The Invitation From Life

Byjack

A few days ago, my coach asked me a powerful question. I don’t remember what it is but I came up with this poem.

the summer sun on the blue pool
smell of chlorine, flip flops on the concrete
the late nights in your city, lights on long streets
big dreams in a small classroom on a paper on the board
paint covering the canvases, dripping off the walls
life has always been waiting
for you to be recklessly, wildly, lovingly creative

This led to me deciding the most powerful question in this whole poem is “why has life always been waiting for you”?

I felt in many ways this is true. I live in a wonderfully creative city. I have a youtube channel, a coaching practice, a well-paying job with lots of free time. Life is waiting on me to make a move.

Core Beliefs 3

Byjack

Today I was talking to someone who thought that reprogramming your core beliefs and I’ve given this some thought.

  • It can be cringe if it isn’t genuine (forcing yourself to believe something that isn’t true)
  • It isn’t actually meant to be mindless affirmations but rather trying to get your mind to see a more balanced version of the truth. 
    • Ex: We are bad and our emotions do push other people away sometimes. But it’s not all the time. When you have a core wound, it’s something you are deeply afraid of and look for evidence for instead of looking at things clearly.
    • For example, if you believe you aren’t attractive, if ten people say you look good, and one person says you are ugly, you will believe the ten people are lying and the one person is telling the truth without being rational or logical about it. It doesn’t mean you aren’t ugly to some people, it just means it’s not as simple as you think it is.
    • If you successfully reprogram, you will take negative things less personally.
  • Reprogramming your subconscious means countering your habits of looking for evidence for the opposite of what you believe so you can see the fuller picture.
  • It can also be cringe if it is very surface level (mindlessness listing out five things)
  • Perhaps I want to take a more artistic approach and revisit different memories that contrasts against my core beliefs that takes me back to the feelings

Today I’ll do a little poem.

Zubats

It was nighttime in the art studios

Brandon’s smiling face

Shiny in the lights from above

He told me that the zubats were talking

And that he asked 

Jack or Michael

Jack of course

He told me that they said

Even though

They thought

I was a bit too arrogant

Matches 3: Tired

Byjack

Results from day 3 while tired and a little stressed.

Match 1

Reflections:

  1. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation? 5%. Not very innovative, business as usual.
  4. 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:

  1. 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
  2. Overall I felt my energy draining in this match. I felt pretty tired.
  3. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation? 5% I don’t know if anything got innovated here.
  4. Gains in communication and charisma? Good gains, gets me much closer to the final goal of presenting results.

Match 3

Reflections:

  1. Focused a lot on thinking smart not hard
  2. 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
  3. Changed work time to 15 minutes
  4. Still need to let go of going fast in the warmup
  5. Like to dance on the breaks

Result Calculation:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. What percentile do I place this work in terms of innovation? 10% Not much was innovative, the data is quite interesting though.
  4. Gains in communication and charisma? I laid the groundwork for much better result communication, I think it was great.