Category: Habits

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I Really Have Come a Long Way in the last 10 Years

I was just thinking recently about past events and behaviors and how far I’ve come since them. Particularly just in the time span of the last 10 years.

I think about my interactions with business contacts and clients, and I just cringe. I cannot believe that that’s who I used to be.

I would regularly do things that I now consider to be either wildly unprofessional or just… Bizarre.

The point of this post isn’t really as a list of examples, but some might be worth giving.

I remember when I first branched out on my own, I struggled to get anything done. I had one single client at one point, and the website still took months to build. I’d just procrastinate constantly and not make any progress.

For many years, basically everything I did was just a massive amount of procrastination. Any recurring task, I would push off until the last moment or later.

I remember realizing, the night before a presentation at my BNI group, that I knew nothing about the AV setup. I had just assumed the projector was always there and available and that somebody would help me with it.

I decided maybe that was a bad assumption, and emailed the chapter member in charge of it at like midnight the night before. He would later tell me that he saw my message and decided, “this isn’t my problem” and didn’t respond or worry about it.

And that was an important lesson for me. Though it did work out in the end.

When it comes down to it, I just don’t think I would see any potential in my younger self if I met him. Everything was sloppy and I had no discipline whatsoever.

I also made almost no money, and it’s no surprise why.

I feel very fortunate that I somehow improved over the years and am now doing a ton better. I’m also a person I actually like and people trust to get things done.

Sometimes it’s just so hard to see the progress, and I get frustrated. It’s also easy to just focus on one metric, like income, and not see everything else that has improved.

Even if income was the most important thing, I feel like it’s actually a lagging indicator. Developing myself pays itself off in all areas of life, in addition to also being the primary method to increase future earning potential.

But overall, it’s just nice to take a step back and see the progress. I’m actually embarrassed thinking about what I was like just 10 years ago, both personally and professionally. I’m not perfect now clearly, but I’ve come so far in so many ways.

And I think that’s a good thing. If you’re not embarrassed by what you were like in the past, are you even improving?

None of the changes came overnight. Much of it has been described in this blog, which I believe I started in mid 2018.

I think it points to the power of gradual improvement, and always taking steps in the right direction. Improving just a little bit at a time compounds into huge changes over time.

It would be fun to actually ask some of my friends if they’ve noticed any of the change. If it’s obvious to me, I wonder if it’s obvious to them.

The point is: I think I’m going in the right direction. There are setbacks, of course, and lately I’ve felt fairly discouraged, but as long as I just keep progressing, it’s all good.

The hard times will pass, and I’ll be all that much better for having strived to keep making progress even when it was really hard.

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It Appears to be Sleep

I’m now something like 5 days into my efforts to sleep at least 9 hours per night, and it would appear that it probably was, in fact, the issue that was making me feel unmotivated and generally unhappy.

And it really shouldn’t be surprising. Sleep affects so much, and obviously can impact all of the things I brought up. The only reason I didn’t think of it right away was that I was generally sleeping more than 8 hours per night, and I didn’t think it could possibly make much of a difference beyond that.

But I was wrong! It seems that it can and it did.

I only even thought of it now because I had the thought, “if I’m starting to run a lot… Should I be sleeping more as a result?”

I outlined this in a previous post I think, but the answer is: yes. You should be sleeping a lot more.

So since I had this thought, I’ve been sleeping more than 9 hours each night, and the results do seem fairly impressive. Overall, I feel a lot better and in a better mood.

Motivation and focus are way up, as is productivity.

I also had an interesting result with my running. Usually once or twice a week, I run a very similar route that comes out to about 2.41 miles. Yesterday I completed this route in 20:07, which I didn’t think much of at the time, especially since it didn’t feel particularly challenging.

It wasn’t until I reviewed my other runs that I realized that this was way faster than my other runs. The previous record (for this year, anyway) was 20:53. I shaved off 47 seconds on a relatively short run. That’s huge.

I’ve also been struggling to improve my mile time (which is my ultimate goal), and set what I thought to be an ambitious goal for my run last week of 6:40. I ended up flying past that goal and finished in 6:33.

I now believe that lack of sufficient sleep has been significantly affecting my performance. I was starting to lose hope that I’d be able to get my mile down to below 6 minutes, but now I’m once again hopeful that I’ll be able to do it.

So one final thought I had today regarding my sleep is this: if all this time, I simply haven’t been sleeping enough, how does this pertain to drinking?

You see, in the past, after drinking, the next day I often felt unmotivated, generally bad, and just didn’t perform very well. I assumed this was just 100% directly caused by the alcohol.

But the symptoms were always almost identical to what I’ve been feeling recently due to a little bit less sleep (and to be clear: I’m not drinking at all right now).

To what extent did lack of sleep play?

Most times that I drank, I’d stay up later than I should. Given that I usually had commitments, I’d generally still get up at the same time, meaning I was sleep deprived.

Additionally, alcohol greatly impairs the quality of that sleep. Even if I slept “long enough”, it likely still affected me greatly.

So what do I do with this information?

I think that when/if I go back to drinking, it’s important to be especially careful around my sleep. I need to not stay up too late, and ideally I’d be totally sober by the time I went to bed. If not, I’m killing my productivity and mood.

This is great, too, because the whole point of me taking a year off is to gather insights like this. I’ll want to figure out if alcohol needs to be eliminated entirely. If I can figure out in which situations it is really damaging, I can reduce the incidences of them.

I’ll keep posting back here with the long-term results of my “increased sleep”. Currently, I’m struggling a little bit because it’s hard/impossible to keep up with all the sleep-related habits I’ve developed and still maintain 9 hours each night. So I may have to alter what is required as I go along.

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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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“Do What You Love” Is Good Advice for Most People Because they Couldn’t Excel Elsewhere

I’ve come to the understand that the vast majority of people sort of just do what they feel like all the time. They lack self-control and discipline and lots of other things that would be required to succeed in most areas.

In most cases, I think that when things get tough, people either lose interest, tune out, or just give up.

To get great or even good at most things requires a lot of effort and experience, and lots of of hardships.

I think most people end up finding something they are good at, and more often than not, it’s something that they are passionate about and enjoy doing.

But contrary to the popular wisdom, I think that they are only good at it because they are passionate about it.

I think that passion is what keeps them going even when things get hard. It’s the only way they can keep going, because they simply don’t have the level of self-discipline or self-awareness to continue progressing if they weren’t passionate.

I think of these guys who seem like total screw-ups in most of their life, but they have one thing they love and are actually really good at. Some of the more apparent examples are many mechanics, electricians, and other people in skilled trades.

Those things are not easy to do or to get good at, yet it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that someone that was at the bottom of my high school class had succeeded in that field.

I certainly don’t want to come off as elitist, conceited, or judgmental here. This is just one piece of my broader understanding lately that advice that is designed to be broadly applied to the population does not really feel relevant to me or many others.

I’ve worked hard over decades to improve my self-discipline, habits, and overall performance. And now it seems that I’m at a level where most advice doesn’t seem to apply to me.

And “do what you love” sort of just feels like one of those things. I now think that’s its actually a pragmatic suggestion for finding economic success and providing value to society for those who would otherwise struggle to do so, rather than a deep nugget of wisdom designed to bring about happiness and fulfilment.

Those things may, indeed, be related, but the happiness may actually just be a secondary side-effect.

That’s also not to say that this advice wouldn’t help others, as well. It would be easier for anyone to continue through adversity if they were doing something they loved.

But it is limiting to only do things you love. Almost nobody has a love for management, scaling operations, HR, accounting, and many other crucial pieces of a functional business. Perhaps one or 2 of those things, but not all of them.

Yet the reward is great for those that successfully navigate all of them into a successful business. And that generally requires a great deal of self-discipline that allows one to push through even when things are really hard or they don’t feel at all passionate about the matter at hand.

I’ll keep thinking about the idea of most advice not being applicable and will probably keep writing about it in the future.

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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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Update on Yearly Goals and New Habit Relating to Sleeping

I just reviewed my post about my goals for the year and wanted to give an update on my progress for that.

I’ve made lots of meaningful progress towards many of the goals and I would say that a lot of them are very much doable still. I don’t think any are impossible and few are unlikely. It’s nice to see that they are coming along.

Here is some specific progress relating to specific goals:

  • I haven’t initiated any deals to buy other companies yet, but I’ve had some nibbles, and I’ve made incredible progress towards attracting more of them
  • I haven’t reviewed business profit so far but I suspect we are more profitable than ever
  • I am well within my goal of limiting myself to 30 hours per week of work
  • My photos site is coming along nicely, and it’s entirely possible I’ll have 10 sales by the end of the year
  • Haven’t had any alcohol since I made the goals and shouldn’t have any trouble making it to next year
  • I need to make plans to camp overnight on a river island
  • I’ve been disc golfing a lot, though I haven’t come too close to an Ace yet
  • I may or may not join a rock climbing gym, we’ll see
  • I’ve biked a bit

So overall, good progress. Especially since I wrote that at the end of April and haven’t had that much time to actually get these things done. I finished tons of major projects at home here already. They weren’t “goals” for the year but they still had to get done, and now I should have more time to put towards other things.

Finally, I’d like to formally change the habit I’m working on. I’ve done an excellent job (100% success, I believe) of waking up at 7:30am and not snoozing my alarm.

However, I’m still struggling to develop my own circadian rhythm. And I think one of the biggest parts of that is that I’m doing lots of other things in bed, including not getting up right away and instead using my phone for quite a while.

For the most part, it’s to study, but I think it’s still probably a big problem.

To start with, I’m going to try to establish a new habit of physically getting up within 5 minutes of being awake, starting the day, and not returning to bed at all.

This will require studying elsewhere, which is fine.

I’m hoping that will help quite a bit. I want to generally not use my bed for anything else until I go to bed, but I don’t want to make that a hard rule until I’ve established the morning one first. I generally read in my bed and I think it would be better if I did that somewhere else.

Either way, we’ll start here and then move on once it’s established.

Down the road I could also consider mandating that I go outside and get some light first thing, never use my bed except for sleeping, and perhaps even establish a hard bed time.

But I’ve been getting closer and closer to fixing my sleep and I just need to continue one step at a time.

 

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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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Watching Spanish Content Makes me Feel Better than Other Stuff

I’ve noticed that I feel a lot better watching content in Spanish vs. watching random, time-wasting content on YouTube.

Now, this may not really be all that deep. Watching Spanish content feels productive and challenging.

Watching YouTube… Is typically not.

But I think it’s worth noting that watching things in Spanish can also be extremely entertaining. There’s nothing stopping me from watching my favorite shows and content in Spanish.

So I think it’s really important to stick to watching things in Spanish and not get sucked into wasting time watching pointless videos on YouTube.

Not much more to my post today. I think the main lesson is just that I really need to focus, always, on productive activities. I can’t be wasting time on mindless entertainment.

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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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Any Anxiety Makes me feel Insecure and Tends to Snowball

I realized today as I was procrastinating and feeling a little insecure about women that even small increases in general anxiety tend to make me feel insecure about unrelated things, procrastinate, and then cause additional problems that lead to more anxiety.

It’s a vicious cycle.

What was I anxious about today?

I had a large to-do list that was way behind schedule due to a morning that didn’t go as I had planned. Time was passing and the prospect of completing my to-do list became less and less appealing to me.

And when that happens, I start getting anxious. And that starts to cause more problems. I procrastinate more and then just don’t get anything done.

I’ve generally been good about totally resetting each morning in that case, so it doesn’t get too out-of-hand. I restart my whole to-do and go from there, leaving the lost day in the past.

But there’s still that lost day.

In the past, I think after one of these days I would start to be super primed for a night of letting loose and drinking. This is, after all, a situation in which alcohol shines. It allows you to easily forget about your current problems and anxiety for a while and enjoy the moment.

Of course everything comes back worse once you’re sober again, but in the meantime it can be quite appealing.

But I’m not drinking now. So you know what I did instead?

I buckled down and powered through (almost) all of the to-do. And I feel much better now and can relax without that specter hanging over me.

I’d argue it’s because I’ve been sober for a while. I can much more easily control these situations and recover them without having big ups and downs.

It’s a Friday evening and I’ll now be able to relax and enjoy myself without drinking, which is nice.

I think the lessons from this are twofold: first, that not drinking leads to greatly improved productivity, resilience, and stability. And the second is that I need to always be aware of how I’m feeling and what’s going on, and if I start slipping off-track and doing things that will lead to greater anxiety, I need to make a conscious effort to get back on-track.