A Promise Moving Forward to Set My Own Direction

4 minute read

Stagnant, subsistent, restless, half-assed, low-effort. A short handful of words to describe how I admittedly feel two-thirds into this year. I cannot blame this all onto the world as it is. Casting the blame onto something outside of my locus of control is too easy and does not identify what I can do to fix ultimately my problems.

What am I going on about?

Earlier this week I came across a daily routine breakdown from Lex Fridman (video). He is nothing short of a beast. First and foremost he is an AI researcher at MIT, hobbyist musician, Black belt in BJJ, hosts his own Youtube channel, podcast showcasing his work and ideas while a frequent guest in other circles that I pay attention to. Now, he did not become all these things overnight. He fostered this competency in these different aspects through consistent practice and effort, compound interest applied on a single person.

I was intrigued of his daily breakdown, his routine is a full implementation Deep Work from Cal Newport. That’s a reminder that I should be conducting how I work more in that fashion, but an even more interesting part is his morning mantra.

A list of things he repeatedly goes through:
  1. Rules and Constraints
  2. Gratitude
  3. Long-term Goals
  4. Short-term Goals
  5. Visualize the day
  6. Core Principles

Many of these items are implementation of Stoic exercises to start the day! Such as the practices of gratitude, visualizing the day and running through his personal principles. In his words gratitude is a meditation of a reminder of death to make him appreciate his life. 5, the daily planning of what needs to be achieved in the small unit of time an. 6, he reminds himself of the principles that he lives by and what makes him who he is.

Each list in his mantra are equally important, I am impressed that he zooms in and out on his goals. At the smallest increment he looks over what he wants to achieve in a day, but he will also look at a wider scope of short term and long term goals. From the span of a year to 5 years. Think of that, he meditates like this everyday.

Learning about this from him I was reminded of my longer term goals. The goals I have not yet met any of those expectations two years after I initially came with through Jordan B Peterson’s Life/Future Authoring programs. Theses are the goals and principles to which I founded this blog upon. I don’t actively reflect nearly as frequently as Lex. This is a failure on my part of following my own directions.

Why I am so hard on myself

Something resonated within me when I heard of his mantra. It was the feeling of dissatisfaction of myself. The dissatisfaction of missed opportunity, particularly centered around the lockdown that I have let all this time go to waste. Instead I was fortunate to be a comfortable situation and simply coasted for nearly 6 months.

Here is a brief excerpt from a DailyStoic email from last week:

just because you’re stuck is not an excuse for killing time

So we get it, you’re stuck. That’s not your fault. But what you do while you’re stuck? That’s on you. That’s what the Stoics meant when they said you don’t control what has happened, but you control how you respond. That’s what Marcus was talking about when he said we can turn everything that happens into fuel, and that the impediment to action can actually advance action

So I’m beating myself up over this because I am not measuring up to my principles because I am not deliberately living. In the extra time spent outside of my obligatory paid work I should be advancing towards my personal goals. It is a failure that I neglected to remind myself as to what these goals are.

So from now on I can’t allow myself to fall into complacency and be a hypocrite to the fundamental core of this blog**. I’m takings pages from Lex Fridman, Ryan Holiday and Jordan Peterson**.

Moving forward, I will make sure I turn any free time from dead time to active time as I can. Not for the sake of productivity but to move into the direction that I want to see myself as.

First thing first, the blog.

I see reflective writing and exploratory reading as a new hobby of mine but a very important thing on communicating out my ideas to the world. Lately I have been putting out low effort low quality content on not even a frequent basis. These rambles were my compromises for posts. Instead I want to focus on quality and depth of my writing and ideas over a set cadence of posting. For that I should research plan and execute better topics before I pull the trigger on publishing.

A blog is a living process, of course this is part of the learning and growing phase but I hope that months or years down the line I and my future audience sees the improvement in my writing style and ideas put forth.

If I wanted something to call, this is a start.