Probably a 6th or a 7th of my life.
Clearly, I didn’t sustain my blogging habit from 10 years ago. I want to start the journey again.
I have been doing quite a bit of logging in general. And I want to do more of it. The current theme is “Flip the Switch”, which I started in 2022. I want to take energy into 2023 and fix this shit.
10 years ago, I was at about 265. Today, I am at about 285. Not great. But I am motivated again to get back into shape. Better late than never.
To actually be successful, I think you need the general passion and confidence I described in the previous post; and focus that energy towards a goal.
Some people say you gotta fake it until you make it. Some people say you gotta be passionate about what you do.
Can you fake confidence and make it into real confidence? What about passion? Can you ‘fake’ passion?
A common theme career advisors talk about is “find what you are passionate about”. I think thats bullshit. Passion is just as fakeable as confidence. You can be the most passionate person in the room about watering your plants in your office. Or the most passionate janitor in an old age home. You are either a generally passionate person, or not! Its that simple. Holistic passion. About everything and anything. Those are the most successful people. People who can get the same passion from selling newspapers door to door as they can from writing an artful piece of code.
And from passion comes confidence. When you are passionate about something (everything), you ooze it out. You are so engrossed in it that you can talk about it all the time. And you talk with authority. Awe. Amazement. With just a *little* more work, you become someone who can influence others to agree with your POV.
I am not a *huge* Gandhi fan, but I do admire him. I certainly don’t think he was a Mahatma (maha, atma). But I do take his deepest message to heart about true courage. Violence is a cowardly thing to do. Silencing someone is also cowardly. True courage lies in going beyond this.
This spills over to self-esteem. People with low self-esteems frequently have superiority complexes. They project their insecurities through violence. Through bullying. Not necessarily through arrogance, or apathy.
What is the right question to answer? Many times people get bogged down in the rat race of life, reacting to it excessively, thus distracting them from what the actual scenario should be.
An inherent assumption about my previous claim is that the rat-race is a no-win situation. Of course, that is a tad bit melodramatic. I apologize. The rat-race though is full of distractions. It distracts humans from achieving their full potentials. Physical, mental, spiritual (or aspiritual) and social.
The kobiyashi maru scenario demonstrates Kirk’s solution which essentially changes the problem in order to win the simulation. Analogous to removing a key element of a deadlock in a computer program. I also view this as someone who is trapped in their surroundings and in their own minds. This happens with increasing frequency in todays world. The same environment induces the same scenarios among people. This is what i mean by the rat-race…. this wave. I am fascinated by the possibility of pulling off a kobiyashi maru and swimming orthogonolly to this wave/race/simulation.
I think everyone has an innate desire to be great in some regards. At least for some people, this desire forms the core motivation for waking up in the morning and getting out of bed. Acheivemment is a funny word.
When do people do their best works? This is a little hard to analyze and evaluate. the problem is that acheivement can be a very vague concept. In some cases, it is very clear, like in the case of phycisits like Einstein’s in which case, one can objectively proclaim that 1905 papers of Einstein were tangible achievements.
He was 25. People call that year Einstein’s annus mirablis. Isaac Newton’s annus mirablis is generally considered to be 1666, when he was 24. Zuckerberg was mearly 20s when he launched facebook, probably his annus mirabilis.
It seems I am approaching the age for annus mirablis. But I don’t have any content to show for it. Will this be my annus mirablis? I don’t know. Will the next year be my annus mirablis? Again, I dont know.
Is it important to have aan annus mirablis? I think it is. For tangibility. And honesty. So, with that in mind, if this is not my anus mirablis, I am going to work to make it my annus mirablis. And if not this year, we will restart next year and continue.
When I write command line interfaces, I generally go to a coffee shop or a bar, with a notebook, and write down its (future) man page. It helps me clearly define the capabilities of this tool (piggying back on the Unix Philosophy).
My body will become old. It is not old right now. But it will. Metabolism will suck in 10 years. Gaining muscle will become hard. I think the liver won’t be too affected but the heart could have an issue. Then there is the possibility of diabetes.
My goal is to maximize my time being awesome. Studies have shown that stronger men live longer. So one of my goals is to increase my strength and maybe take it into overdrive (without steroids).
I am, what I would call, and intermediate lifter. Here is a potential timeline:
Stage A: No lifting
Stage B: Beginning 5×5
Stage C: Intermediate Progress (present stage)
…
Stage D: Golden numbers –> 245 benchpress, 403 squat, 493 deadlift, 170 overhead press
Stage E: 18% bodyfat with golden numbers
Stage F: Bodybuilding show
Current stats are: 27% bodyfat, 185 bench, 265 squat, 265 deadlift, 110 overheadpress
I am fucking excited!
Is the key. It is what will help you get over the brick walls. I should probably watch pausch’s lecture again.
Seinfeld has a method in which he creates a chain of days he has worked on new jokes. The cool thing about this method is that it makes you excited about not wanting to break the chain, as opposed to writing jokes/working out/etc. Some people will say that if writing jokes doesn’t excite Seinfeld, he shouldn’t be doing it. A similar comment could be if working out doesn’t excite you, you shouldn’t do it. Both statements are very short sighted. They are in the same category as the statement “Follow your passion”.
I, personally, am a fan of Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Being passionate about something goes hand in hand with what you are good at. But passion is not enough to become better. No skill or talent improves linearly with time or with usage. The thing that separates hobbyists from professionals is the deliberate practice and persistence to shoot through the plateaux. The plateaux or the brick walls are what demotivate even the most passionate people. That is the point where many people give up. Unfortunately, passion cannot independently help you power through. This is where persistence comes in.
Another way of looking at this is that passion is the global goal of the search algorithm; and persistence is the obstacle avoidance and local goal (waypoint) generator for the search algorithm.
This is going to be embarassing. I am about to quote Dumbledore:
“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
Okay, okay … it is basically JK Rowling.
One of my favorite experiments is evaluating the effects of intoxication on my intellectual abilities. I must confess — I am a nerd. Didn’t see that coming, did ya? Sarcasm aside, here is an interesting titbit. The first time I consumed copious amounts of alcohol, I recorded each drink followed by a brief description of the state of my mind. This was a while back. I had a nokia e61 with a full qwerty keyboard. Typing was easy(ier).
I think anyone with high level of intellectualism and, essentially, IQ, is curious about the effects of brain altering substances.
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