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Not Drinking has Changed my Self-Image and With it: Self-Confidence

It only just occurred to me recently that my self image has changed somewhat dramatically since I stopped drinking. As documented elsewhere in this blog, I think I sort of saw myself (or imagined that people saw me – which may effectively be the same thing) as sort of a clown, a loose-cannon.

While I spent most days not drinking and, of course, working and generally being responsible and productive, many people only ever saw me at parties or other events where there I would be drinking.

And I guess it formed a core part of how I saw myself, too. Not as someone that’s always responsible and knowledgeable and collected, but as someone that’s reckless an occasionally irresponsible.

But when you take away the drinking… How often am I irresponsible or reckless?

Well… Never, really.

I still like to have fun, let loose, be silly, and occasionally boisterous. But it’s always in good fun, I’m not risking anything (including my mood the following day), and there’s really no chance of hurting anyone. I’m always completely in control and basically always make good choices.

And I’ve realized now that not only am I seeing myself totally differently, it also manifests itself as confidence.

I trust myself and my instincts a lot more, and I stand up for myself more when it comes to it. I certainly don’t want to stop being pleasant and easy-going, but there are times when others are, for example, being unreasonable or lightly manipulative, and I have the confidence now to call them out.

I feel like there’s just kind of an inner-strength there and self-assuredness that didn’t exist before that allows me to approach situations with way more control.

Funny enough, right this moment it just hit me that the other blog post I wanted to write was something along the lines of “historically I’ve always looked to others to how I should behave and what’s acceptable, but that doesn’t serve me anymore”, and I’ll probably still do that. But I’m realizing that it’s… Sort of the same thing.

I think there was a sense in my life, for so long, that there are unwritten rules about the world that others understand better than me. Maybe it started way back when I was homeschooled.

But since then, I’ve approached the world – and especially social situations – with a sort of apprehensive and flexible approach, as if I were an outsider that didn’t understand and just wanted to fit in.

But for the first time, I really don’t feel like that anymore.

In fact, maybe that’s even what brought me to enjoy drinking so much. Maybe it quieted that part of me that felt like I didn’t actually belong. Or, at the very least, like I needed to go along with everyone else told me to do because I didn’t quite grasp what was happening.

But I don’t really have that sense anymore. In fact, at this point I genuinely feel like I understand most social situations better than most. I’ve spent so long carefully paying attention to how people behaved and especially trying to determine how they were feeling at any point that I think I’ve actually developed fairly robust emotional intelligence and now have no trouble navigating just about any complex social dilemma.

All of this is likely connected.

I also don’t want to be closed-minded or unopen to new ideas or understandings of the world or those around me, but I feel like I finally have a confidence in any situation that I didn’t have before.

And that feels good.

 

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I’m Anxious and Low-Energy Right Now

So lately I’ve seemed to have no mental energy or motivation at all and have been considerably more anxious than usual.

So far, my working theory is that I’m actually too lean. In addition to weight training and eating very well, I’ve added quite a bit of cardio to my routine in the form of running. Since then, I’ve gotten quite lean and may now be below 10% body fat.

I was aware that at a certain point (that’s different for everyone), you start to feel some negative side-effects of being lean. And the symptoms seem to line up with what I’m experiencing, unfortunately.

It’s also possible that I’ve just burnt myself out doing so much every day and being so productive. Maybe I just need to relax for a bit.

I’ve also had a bit of tumult in my dating life that has certainly affected me in the last week, though it’s hard for me to imagine that it is the cause.

Finally, it’s always possible I’m fighting an illness, even though I don’t seem to have any other symptoms. It could be something behind the scenes.

I might just keep going exactly as I am for a bit and see if anything changes. If not, it may be time to start eating a lot more and getting my bodyfat percentage back up.

Because I really don’t want to continue like this. In times when I need to call on some extra motivation or self-control, it’s not there. And I’m not used to that.

Half the time I feel like just collapsing and not moving at all.

The funny thing is that it’s entirely mental. My body is just fine. I can go out in the morning and run 4 and a half miles at a good pace without issue. But getting myself to start anything or cook or do one last task feels like so much work.

There’s also just a general feeling that everything is pointless. I had believed that this was a side-effect of not dating at all, because I haven’t dated since I returned from my last trip a couple months ago. But it may be unrelated.

It’s also affecting my ability to stick with new habits. I’ve gotten up past 7:30 for the first time in a long time more than once lately, and also have been slow to get out of bed. Literally everything is harder.

I also haven’t been able to make any progress on my photos site or other initiatives and it has been frustrating.

So I figure I’ll just keep an eye on it and share more if things change. Hopefully they do soon.

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I Stopped Doing Grunt Work by Making it More Taxing, but it Comes With a Cost

There was a time when I did absolutely everything in my business. Most of the work I did consisted of coding, design, and configuration of websites. I learned fairly early that this would have to change if I wanted to grow and scale my business.

And it took a while to change. Obviously nothing happened overnight. But it did work eventually.

So how did I do it?

Basically, I started associating that type of work with a lack of success. Stagnation. Over time I started to really feel that every time I engaged in those activities, I was letting my dreams (and business) slowly die.

And it worked!

Such a visceral reaction to something really does work to make you go out of your way to avoid it. While I still occasionally dabble in very small (or sometimes just complicated) tasks of this nature, I try to keep it very brief and I start to get stressed out if it goes on too long.

That’s usually my cue to just give it to a dev.

Overall, that’s a good thing and it has, in fact, allowed me to grow and scale my business. Without it, I would be stuck doing all of those things and would be limited primarily by the hours in the day.

I also tend to just be bad at being proactive with work like that, too, but that’s a different conversation.

But my thought today is: what are the downsides of this method?

Because there are some. It’s not like I just handed those tasks off and there is nothing bad to come from it.

I think that essentially I built a huge barrier for myself to doing these tasks. Every minute I do engage with them, I am having to overcome a large mental and emotional barrier that is quite draining.

Therefor, in the times when I do end up having to do some of it, it leaves me more worn-out and with less energy to do other things once I’m done.

The exact same task is now considerably more difficult for me to do, essentially by design.

Of course it works out in the end since overall I’m still way more free to focus on more important tasks, but it’s still just interesting to consider these downsides.

I think it’s particularly important to acknowledge this concept because it probably applies to many other areas in my life and business, too.

Off the top of my head, scheduled meetings and phone calls seem to have the same barrier for me. I try to avoid them as much as possible, and as a result, they are actually much more difficult for me to actually do. I’ve create barriers to doing them – which has worked in terms of decreasing their frequency – but now when I’m required to do them, it’s much more draining on me.

I think this process is something that can be performed consciously, and knowing what I know now, I need to be careful about what tasks I apply it to. Some things are inevitable, and it is probably unwise to build large barriers to accomplishing them.

On the flip side, I now know that this process does work, and it might be smart to seek out other opportunities to using it.

The low-hanging fruit would be things that are unquestionably bad for me. I think I’ve already done it with mindless social media usage, but using it for drinking, junk food, and laziness could also work quite well.

I guess I’ll consider this an important tool in my toolkit and just make sure to be very careful about when I choose to use it.

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Historically, Things like Hunger and Fear Moved us to Action, but not Anymore

During the vast majority of the time that humans were evolving, we were motivated to action by strong biological desires like hunger, fear, or sex.

But in modern society, we are generally comfortable. While sex may still be very motivating for people, hunger and fear rarely are feelings that cause us to act.

And I don’t mean: you feel hungry so you go to the refrigerator and grab something to eat.

I mean: you had concerns about your ability to secure food for yourself for the whole year, and that motivates you to work tirelessly, 365 days a year until you die, to do everything you can to secure food.

Nearly all of your actions were based around just a few basic needs.

And we simply don’t have that anymore. You barely have to do anything to survive and meet those needs.

So now we’re operating on a completely alien system of motivation. We’re forced to think about what we really want in life and make complicated decisions about how to meet long-term goals.

And, more to my original thought and point of this article: in the short term, there is almost nothing motivating you to action.

I have no intense biological needs that are in danger of not being met anytime soon.

So how exactly do I motivate myself to do… Anything?

Animals behave almost entirely on instinct and in response to their needs. Everything is very low-level and they basically do what feels right at every given moment.

But for us humans, we’ve created a world in which almost every action we take has to be guided by higher-level thinking that’s generally not tied to basic needs like food and safety.

To some degree, it’s wholly unnatural.

Sure, we do use stand-ins for our basic needs and let those motivate us. For example, sex appeal is used to sell everything from cars to vacations to kitchen appliances.

You can motivate people at a fundamental, animalistic level by tapping into their biological desire for sex. But of course you’re not giving them sex, you’re selling them a product.

Obviously money tends to be pretty motivating to people, too. And I think it tends to be a stand-in for basically all biological needs: hunger, safety, sex, shelter, everything.

It’s almost an avatar of our base needs that have guided our actions for millions of years. We’ve replaced those needs with a need for money.

While that’s motivating, I’m not sure it’s as motivating as a true need for food, for example.

And so it makes sense that for most people, once they’ve reached a level of stability and comfort in their lives, they essentially stop trying at anything.

Why would they? Our evolution hasn’t prepared us for that type of situation. Once you’re there, there is no script. You are not biologically motivated to do anything else.

And so they do nothing.

Obviously I could get deep into philosophy and psychology here, and there’s not going to be any concrete takeaways.

But I almost think that you have to somehow rewire your brain and treat your goals like needs, in the same way that food would be to a nomadic hunter-gatherer 2 million years ago.

I have noticed that compared to most people around my age, my level of motivation to improve and my general ambition and effort in accordance with that ambition is very high. And it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why that is.

If I could figure out the reason, maybe I could double-down on it and really supercharge it. Obviously I don’t want to become anxious, restless, or unsatisfied with my life, but I do want to maximize my motivation and energy which I can put towards advancing my goals.

I think I’m just going to have to keep pondering that until I come up with a satisfactory answer. Right now I’m not sure.

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I Seriously Need to Focus on just Blasting Through my To-Do List

I’ve wrote about this same thing before years ago when I really started establishing my to-do list as a cornerstone of my progress. While the to-do has served me incredibly well, I think I really need to take a step back and re-evaluate how I approach it.

The main issue is that I still treating as if I have set work hours, and that my to-do should take me exactly as long as my set work hours.

There are a few ways in which this is extremely harmful:

  • It causes me to drag things out longer than they need to be if I see that I should have plenty of time
  • It causes me to get distracted with other misc. activities for the same reason
  • I have a tendency to add new things to the to-do list if I’m ahead of schedule

One of the points of working the way that I do is that I’m focusing on output and results rather than time spent working.

The way I’ve been approaching my to-do list is completely counter-productive to that.

I need to think carefully about what I want to accomplish in the day, and then do that and only that.

And most importantly, I need to be laser-focused on finishing it. No distractions, no new tasks, nothing.

I need to just blast through it.

And if I finish super early?

Great! That’s the dream. I’ll have the whole day to do other stuff.

So I need to do that, because I’ve felt frustrated lately that I seem to not have any extra time, even on days when my to-do was supposed to be easy. I think this is exactly why.

So let’s do better.

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There is Tremendous Value in Managing Complicated but Inexpensive Tasks

I had a bit of an epiphany today that most of the recurring profit (and probably profit of any kind) generated by my company comes from the management of relatively inexpensive services.

So in our case, that’s mostly website hosting but also applies to things like ongoing services for WordPress and even domain name registration.

I just re-read one of my old blog posts and I mentioned how, when presented with the option for even faster hosting, virtually all of my clients have declined. And I found that fascinating.

Over time, I’ve realized that the technical specs of my hosting don’t matter a whole lot to any of my clients.

What they value is that I’m managing everything. They know I’m handling it all, configuring it will, and they inherently trust that what I’m offering is high-quality. Beyond that, they don’t understand and don’t care to understand how it works.

And that’s all great, and something I have already written about.

But today I thought… What other services fit a similar description? I think anything that meets the following criteria would fit the bill for a great opportunity:

  1. More or less a commodity service but with premium options available
  2. Relatively complex behind the scenes and poorly-understood by most
  3. Recurring service with minimal maintenance required once set up properly
  4. Tech or software related and possible to perform entirely online
  5. Ideally a service used by businesses and not just by consumers

Anything that meets all four of these criteria could potentially be a great opportunity for me. In addition to the website hosting and domain name registrations we’re already providing, here are some that I can think of now:

  • Cloud-based email hosting – particularly services that will not be interacting with third-party clients, such as Google Workspace
  • Cloudflare services / DNS hosting
  • Zapier Integrations
  • Managed Google Analytics and similar tools
  • Merchant services accounts/integrations, like with Authorize.net

Of these, the last one interests me the most. I could basically just resell Authorize.net services and get it set up and maintain it, and people would love it because I would handle everything for them. I could just have a form that people sign up on that gets all of the information needed to get set up and do it all for them.

I’m sure there are lots of others, but these were just the ones I thought of now.

I just definitely keep thinking about this and try to find more examples.

A possible 6th category may very well be: “is able to be managed entirely by me without the need for a client account”.

That would be a major drawback of the merchant services stuff, because they wouldn’t see the need for me if they had their own account that would keep working without me. Ideally it would all be behind the scenes.

The value is there regardless, it’s just that if they have their own account, they would be inclined to question the value without understanding the full picture.

 

 

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I Need to Adopt a Pragmatic Approach to Everything

This feels very obvious but I don’t think I’ve really been living it: I need to adopt a pragmatic approach to everything.

I’ve posted many times about my idealism in the past and how I tend to think I’m going to be able to just brute-force my way through problems and achieve a level of perfection that will solve all my problems.

And that obviously isn’t a good strategy.

The only viable strategy is pragmatism.

It’s fine to want to improve, work towards goals, and imagine a future where we are better in certain ways.

But in the present, we need to be completely honest and realistic about ourselves, our opportunities, and our weaknesses.

Because none of those things change over night. If I’m weak against something now, I’m likely to continue being weak against it in the future.

The path the leads to success will take into account all pieces of information and make decisions based on that. Because why wouldn’t it?

Idealism simply ignores some data and replaces it with what you wish things were like.

Pragmatism is iterative, too. You can try something based on what you know, and alter your approach based on how that went. As you learn more, you can improve what works.

So here’s a concrete example of this.

I’m currently not drinking at all. Productivity is way up and lots of other things are greatly improved.

This is highly pragmatic. It recognizes that there are downsides to drinking and that it has very real consequences, and also that it’s difficult to just drink a small amount.

The idealistic side of me has always said, “I can limit it to weekends and it won’t affect me in the week” or, “even if I’m low on energy I’ll just power through it and it won’t affect me”.

They are idealistic and unrealistic ideas.

Whether or not I’ll one day be able to find a happy middle ground remains to be seen, but the fact remains that I definitely AM more productive now, and it is highly pragmatic and effective to give up drinking in an effort to be more successful.

But I can think of some other things that this applies to as well. Here are some of the top of my head:

  • I’m not effective on low sleep, and it’s generally better to sleep late than to try to power through the tiredness
  • I’m not motivated to work or be productive at night
  • Looking to others for help in areas where I’m lacking is probably much more beneficial and rapid than trying to do everything myself

I need to simply give up my idealism and focus on being pragmatic in all areas.

Most importantly, this means acknowledging my own weaknesses and consistent failings and altering my approach accordingly.

My goal now is to just be more aware of times when I’m being too idealistic and take a step back to figure out what I should really be doing. And perhaps writing about it there!

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Life is What You Make of It

It’s time for a nice, trite post that will hopefully motivate me in the future.

The last week I’ve been sort of just feeling sorry for myself. The people that I know here were busy and for various reasons I wasn’t able to make any plans with them.

And so for the most part, I just stayed in my apartment and didn’t do anything social or really anything to take advantage of where I currently am.

And it was sad. I was also sad specifically about a girl I’m seeing here (or rather: not seeing in this case).

After about a week of that I finally decided: you know what? I’m done with this. I’m not just going to sit around and wait for things to happen or to go home. I’m here, I’m going to make the most of it.

And along with my attitude, things took a 180 overnight. I quickly lined up a bunch of activities which led to seeing people immediately, and I’m even planning now to go to Uruguay tomorrow morning and spend the weekend there.

It was all just a basic mindset shift.

I just needed to actually DO something to make it happen.

And you know what? It was uncomfortable. It would have been much more comfortable to just stay in like always and read or play games or something. But I would have gone home in a couple weeks feeling incredibly disappointed.

Instead, I’m not only doing things that I’ll remember for a long time, but I’m also feeling way more fulfilled and much happier overall.

I need to just remember in the future that I have control over these types of things. If there’s a problem, I can and should fix it myself.

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The Experiences I Have with Others Account for the Majority of my Opinion of a Place

I had a lot of fun with some new friends here yesterday, and I realized just how much that colors my opinion of a place.

Independently of just about anything else, the people I meet and the time I spend with them accounts for nearly my entire opinion of a place.

This may apply mostly to cities, vs. going around scenic landscapes. I may have enjoyed Ireland more with a travel companion or if I had met more people, but going alone was still fun.

But I thought about it because for the last few weeks here, for a number of reasons I won’t go into today; I have mostly been alone. And it’s been a little bit sadder as a result.

Everything is still inexpensive, the weather is nice, and people are friendly and there is theoretically plenty to do. But the fact that I wasn’t enjoying my time with others did minimize my enjoyment greatly and, with it, my opinion shifted.

It just makes you think a bit… It’s easy to think that your opinions and judgements of a location are fairly objective but they aren’t at all. Even if you’re in a wonderful place, if you’re there alone or with the wrong people you might hate it.

Likewise, if you’re in a terrible place, you might still have a great time with the right company.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I really need to prioritize frequent social activities when I’m traveling (and probably even when I’m not). Life is a whole lot more fulfilling that way.

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Failure of Empathy

One of the most puzzling parts of learning a language is the intense feeling that if you can understand somebody, so can everybody else.

So if I’m with a friend that doesn’t speak English, and somebody speaks to me in Spanish and I understand them without any trouble, it feels like the person with me should also be able to understand it.

You start to rationalize this belief, too. You think things like, “well, the vocab this person used was pretty basic so anyone who took one Spanish class would understand” or “those are common words so I’ll bet the understand”.

When you think about it, you realize it’s obviously not true. There’s no way somebody without any Spanish training is understanding as well as me, someone who has spent thousands of hours with the language.

And yet it requires conscious effort to internalize the fact that they cannot understand as well as you can. Or probably at all.

And it sort of just feels like a total failure of empathy.

If I used empathy more in this situation, I should be able to understand, on all levels, that this person cannot understand even though I can.

The experiences, abilities, and understanding of every other person on the planet are completely different than my own, and I think it’s easy to lose track of that.

But it makes me think: in similar situations, but where you can more reasonably rationalize your sentiment, wouldn’t you genuinely believe that the other person should have an experience much more similar to your own?

I find that in my work, I’m often impatient with clients who struggle to understand something related to their website that to me, is clear as day.

It’s easy for me to rationalize. “This doesn’t require any special skills,” or “there aren’t very many steps and it isn’t complicated”.

But at the same time, it’s something that’s easy to me because I’ve spent a long time doing it.

I think there are situations like this almost everywhere, and I’m confident that I’m not the only one experiencing this.

I can certainly think of countless times where a family member or friend was really impatient with me in some task where they couldn’t understand why I wasn’t doing it as well as them. Despite, often, it being a task that I was brand new to or had some other obvious disadvantage.

I think we develop ideas of the world around us and as we interact with it, we come to an understanding about how things are.

It’s easy to believe that this understanding is universal and that it applies to everyone. But it’s not. How we perceive the world and understand it may, indeed, be relevant to our own lives and selves, but it may be the complete opposite for someone else.

I think this comes up all the time when you look at groups that are often discriminated against.

If you aren’t in one of those groups, it’s so easy to dismiss their grievances and assume that they aren’t a big deal. Even if you acknowledge some of the specific forms of discrimination they face, you still cannot possibly understand what it feels like to face it day after day.

You can try, but you’ll never truly understand.

I think there are instances of this type of thing everywhere, and I know that I do it all the time.

I find myself unintentionally judging others for their choices and do not spend enough time reflecting on that and using empathy to understand that their values, experiences, and understand of the world vary wildly from my own.

They probably judge most of my choices.

The solution, I think, is to develop more empathy and really put it to work. Hopefully I can keep that in mind and do it much more going forward.