Welcome to Weekly Wonderings, a newsletter exploring the journey towards Digital **Self-Actualization**: > *a journey towards realizing our meaningful potential through the synthesis of digital tools, life management systems, and humanistic philosophies* Here's a quick galactic overview of this edition: - [[#Do you really have balance in your productivity system? ☯]] - [[#Reflections on content direction 🧭]] ## In My Life - I've helped the team at [[Linking Your Thinking]] launch version 1.5 of their done-for-you Obsidian vault setup! It's been fun bringing their PKM philosophy to life with my Obsidian experience — the satisfaction has inspired me to reflect on my own setup so expect that in the upcoming newsletters :) - I've been busy the past few weeks with moving so I haven't been able to create much, but once my office is completed I'll be hopefully be starting off strong with working with a new editor and executing the strategy plan my consultant gave me 🤩 ## Do you really have balance in your productivity system? ☯ My [[Wheel of life]] is the guiding compass I follow for self-actualization.  Mindful of all my core life areas and their desired levels, I use this information to determine what goals I should set throughout the year to work towards a balanced and fulfilling life. There's just one problem. For the first half of the year, virtually all of my goals and projects have been related to my personal brand 😱 As a friend pointed out, even my pursuit of learning the Blender program for 3D modeling and animation, something I mainly want to do for creative expression, is still related to the increased production quality of my videos!!! Are productivity systems only needed for capitalistic growth??? I'd like to think not. For the past few weeks I've been quite busy moving to my new place that I mentioned in my earlier post in the year, [[My story, why im grateful for all of you, and my plans for the future]]. Leaving the opportunity-filled and bustling city of Vancouver for a city that encourages a much simpler life has given me room to start up some new goals for the other core areas of my wheel of life 😁 #### A second brain for your finances To overcome the uncertainty of having an inconsistent creator income, I've been trying out budgeting with [YNAB](https://www.ynab.com/). It's a steep subscription price, but I have a generous cousin offering a spot in her plan 😁 Their methodology for budgeting gives me a sense of control and clarity just like a second brain does thanks to [[Envelope budgeting]] 😋 With your traditional bank account view, you can only see your total balance, which can distort the reality of how much of that is really free to use. Yearly subscriptions can catch you by surprise when you're thinking only on a monthly basis. Unexpected purchases can cause uncertainty on whether you'll still have enough leftover to pay bills and taxes. This is where envelope budgeting comes in — instead of seeing a total balance, your initial balance and any future income will be labeled as `Ready to Assign`. Think of it as an inbox for your money that you must empty out by moving each dollar to your chosen categories and expected expenses. These categories are based on the different bills, needs, and wants in your life. For my bills like yearly subscriptions, setting the billing date automatically divides the cost into monthly payments I must set aside money. ![[YNAB creator.png]] I still have the money, but now it's already deducted from my total cash and set aside to the category, ready to be spent when the subscription bill comes. But not all expenses are consistent and predictable — thankfully, this also works well for variable expenses like groceries or eating out. With these categories, you allocate money to it at the start of the month, like I did with eating out. Whenever you spend money, you deduct it, resulting in something like the following:  Despite these rigid numbers assigned to each category, I feel it paradoxically makes me flexible and more confident in my decision-making since I now have a higher-order overview I can use to prioritize my spending. If my friends are inviting me to eat out and catch up but my `Eating out` category is fully spent, I can quickly look at my overall budget to see if there are any categories for bills or needs I still have yet to fill. If not, then I can move any extra non-assigned money to it, knowing that I can safely indulge 😋🍽 On the other hand, if I have an unexpected necessary expense like getting an air humidifier for my room so I don't wake up with a sore throat every morning, I can consciously take away allocations from a category in my `Wants` like eating out or my trips to fund it, confident I'm still on track to pay for the essentials. To adopt this change in my greater productivity system to allow for regular reflection and maintenance, I've also updated my 2024 financial goal to reflect this financial mindfulness as my north star for the year. I've also added a weekly reminder in my [[Weekly Reviews]] to categorize all my expenses, and a prompt in my [[Monthly reviews]] to reflect on my spending and budgets:  Anyways, I'll talk about the next goal before I end up becoming a finance creator 🤮 #### Being intentional with connection I've somewhat neglected my relationships to prioritize my career and personal growth, so the connectedness from catching up with friends and family that I haven't spoken to often for the past three years has been nourishing for the soul. As a result, I've become more in tune with my core value of being my best self in the different roles in my life and helping me recover from the dehumanizing effects of [[Auto-exploitation]]. This leads me to my second goal of spending time with everyone 😎 I created a new monthly goal to plan this out, which was pretty straightforward: 1. Make a list of everyone 2. Reach out by suggesting things to do and sharing my availability 3. Making sure I don't over-deplete my social battery by spreading out my commitments 😵‍💫 On top of this, I've also been slowly writing out gratitude messages to the family I left in Vancouver, continuing to also work on being more in tune with my emotions. Despite these tasks being simple, I find it valuable to include this as a monthly goal in [[My Vision Board]] as a symbol of intention and commitment, making sure my weekly projects and time spent can make room beyond the brand-related projects I default to. If you want to learn more about this system, you can check out [[Wheel of life]] and [[My Alignment Philosophy]]. So, what are some ways you can start balancing out your own wheel of life? Are there any areas you may want to allocate more time and effort to? ## Reflections on content direction 🧭 As I'm exploring what an engaging and creative self-improvement brand could look like to build my ideal audience, I want to bounce ideas and learn from people who already have been doing so. This weekend, I had a consultation with [tessaVT](https://x.com/tessa_vt?lang=en) since she has MUCH more knowledge and experience from working with one the only other people doing something similar — virtual YouTubers giving educational advice 😎 Part of the reason I want to make this pivot is to add meaning and creativity into my content creation process. As much as copying people's videos or following trends may work for growth since they've been statistically proven to capture people's attention, as a creator, it's frustrating to have my feed flooded with them. All the videos on how to get 99% ahead of all people in life, on copying the simple stick-man style of videos like [easy, actually](https://www.youtube.com/@easyactually/videos), it's made me slowly gravitate my attention to creators who have more personality, authenticity, and creativity, who prioritize discovering and expressing their uniqueness rather than pure quantitative success. It may be a bit of recency bias from reading [[The Burnout Society]], but the idea of optimizing metrics by optimizing videos on optimizing your life feels soulless. If my goal is to make productivity and self-actualization meaningful, then how I present my videos should follow suit. I don't want to stagnate my personal growth derived from creating like Ali Abdaal where all he does is make highly similar videos on how to make money online, overcome procrastination, and be disciplined. Creating media should be a novel and a learning experience for me, whether it be solidifying my understanding or sharing my own journey. So, I've been looking for inspiration on how I could do so 🤔 The first thing that came to mind was [struthless](https://www.youtube.com/@struthless). I enjoy the creativity of his analogies like [The Sharp Axe Method](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prMuDIiFyC4) and I appreciate the creative visuals he adds to his videos that amplify his authenticity. He is also a good inspiration for keeping the tone and storytelling casual instead of authoritative, which is something I want to experiment with for this new channel. Next, recommended to me during my consultation call was this video on [the terrible terminology of American health insurance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wpHszfnJns). Upon first impression, this would be the solution for how [[People don't have a deep desire to learn and do certain things, so you have to get them to]]. It's a video about HEALTH INSURANCE, but his video structure and little skits throughout the video help give it the entertainment value of Bill Nye the science guy videos. My takeaway is that to create videos with low competition, I should try to find topics I enjoy that are traditionally heavily educational and find ways to make it more engaging for a general audience who may find knowing such information useful. This keeps the principles of `easy, actually` videos where he explains things casually, but with my own fusion of my brand identity and values. Now, what does this look like from here on out? It's further separated my two channels and the types of videos they will contain, giving me direction in their purposes. My main John Mavrick channel will continue prioritizing education about Obsidian and creating a second brain. Since there are many Obsidian topics I want to cover, the focus will be on sharing information, and the friction will be reduced thanks to the lower focus on effort. But on the other hand, I can look into creating classics as explained in [[Make Classics, Not Content]] — creating videos that nurture my soul through stories, prioritizing self-expression and personal fulfillment: > My antidote to all this is the art of storytelling, and to use it to create lasting pieces that you’ll be proud of. It’s to direct your focus to your natural curiosities, discover the narratives that connect your ideas, and to encase the result in a story that will highlight your unique voice. Because in doing so, you throw up a beacon of light that attracts people to the true essence of who you are. I don't have to worry about how [[Influencers are controlled by audience capture]] by making the videos I usually do if I am working towards longer pieces like the blender video I mentioned. ## My Free Resources Thank you for being a part of this journey :) If you want to level up your productivity or personal knowledge management, you can check out the following free resources: 🧠 [Organize your life and knowledge by building your second brain](https://free.johnmavrick.com/code-method) 📃 [Get my FREE 4-part Obsidian beginner course with 20+ templates](https://free.johnmavrick.com/obsidian-templates) 🕸️ [Set up a powerful zettelkasten in Obsidian for learning](https://free.johnmavrick.com/zettelkasten) 👩‍🏫 [3 Days to Lecture Note Taking Mastery](https://course.aidanhelfant.com/3daystolecturenotetakingmastery?ref=JohnMavrickYT): 🤖 [Get my FREE Ultimate Guide to using AI for PKM with 15+ prompts](https://free.johnmavrick.com/ai-pkm)