%% - [x] Upload MVP video for Goldfish (maybe on Neeto? will see) [15m] 🆔 1832pd 📅 2024-12-27 - [x] Clean up self-therapy piece [30m] 🆔 oazb98 📅 2024-12-27 %% Apologies for the absence in newsletters, enjoy ~2 months worth of updates and interesting things 😅 Welcome to Weekly Wonderings, a newsletter exploring the journey towards Digital **Self-Actualization**: > *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: - [[#Breaking free from the default life path 🛣️]] - [[#How I self-study using YouTube 🎓]] - [[#Yearly review in progress 🤔]] - [[#A sneak peek of my new app 👀]] - [[#Using self-therapy for digital self-actualization 🫂]] First off, I hope the holidays have been fulfilling and relaxing. I'm grateful you're taking the time out of your holidays to read what some random person online has to say 😊 Virtually every memorable experience and event I've had throughout the year couldn't have been possible without your support: - Giving back to my parents and becoming a home-owner in February - Opening up unexpected opportunities to engage in deeply fulfilling work with [[Linking Your Thinking]], and soon [[Morgen]] 😳 (more on that when it's finalized) - Getting to meet like-minded internet people like my best friend Aidan Helfant ([[Building lifelong friends for self-actualization]]), or role models and peers ([[BASB Summit]]) - Having a chance to just generally explore my curiosities and passions to make an impact on other people's lives with my videos and resources, chatting about these topics in my Discord channel or emails I feel like a major part of being a good creator is correlated with self-actualization, similar to the [[Being mode]] over [[Having mode]]. Although I haven't been as active creating and sharing new things since my "creator" identity has been fulfilled through other mediums like software and personal creations, I feel more aware of who I want to be online compared to a year ago. It's easy to take the simple route of just following what works based on other people's success and current trends to achieve similar metrics, but I want to take a different approach. [[Becoming wealthy is not urgent]] and [[Journey before destination]] — I think sustainability and fulfillment are more reasonable and important to prioritize. To see it as a medium for altruistic personal growth, one grounded in self-awareness and self-expression, rather than just making videos for the sake of consistency. To have clarity on what unique perspective I can share with the world, fulfilling a role beyond my inspirations of existing creators and sources. I don't want to create as a means to an end like financial freedom or fame. I want creating to be a by-product of my own endless journey of self-actualization. So as the new year begins, I'm excited to see how this unfolds :) ## In My Life ### Breaking free from the default life path 🛣️ Although I haven't been that active on YouTube, I've still tried to stay creatively consistent through other forms through podcast episodes with my best friend Aidan Helfant. In the most recent one, we talk about our experiences embarking on a "pathless path" and navigating a future career and life where we don't necessarily follow traditional societal guidelines and milestones. If you're interested, you can watch the episode [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8daQZRgek4):  ### How I self-study using YouTube 🎓 I've gotten a few questions about how I use Readwise Reader nowadays and my previous video on it is a bit outdated, so why not make a video in relation to one of the major learning initiatives in my life right now with watching [[After Socrates]] 😎. It's been my go-to for written media like newsletters and books, but putting it to the test has made me realize how important the digital layout at which you engage with your learning is. Instead of the doomscrolling-prone layout full of shorts and suggested videos, watching the videos in Readwise has made it much easier to actively learn and capture important insights. My outline for the script is finished over at [[My Outputs/My YouTube Videos/How I Self-Study using YouTube|How I Self-Study using YouTube]] which I hope to record soon to give a thorough walkthrough, but if you haven't used the Readwise Reader app before it might be hard to follow along. ### Yearly review in progress 🤔 As I've been doing my yearly review, I've found the system to be helpful in deeply remembering and reflecting on the year. With my Dataview table in `My Weekly Reviews` giving me an overview of the past 52 weeks based on the fields I fill out as part of [[Weekly Reviews#Reflection]], it's helped me remember the ways I've been attending to the various areas in my wheel of life throughout the year, letting patterns and insights emerge. ![[Weekly Wondering 2024-W51-20241227172418492.webp]] On top of this quantitative data, the weekly ratings I've given myself across my [[Wheel of life]] give me quantitative data to have a better holistic understanding of how my year really went, beyond the recency bias I came in with prior to this. Initially I felt like I didn't do much because of the lack of videos and activity I've had for my personal brand, but reading through both my personal and career achievements for each week have proven otherwise 🤪 ![[Weekly Wondering 2024-W51-20241227173841820.webp]] Honestly I'm just proud of being able to maintain these satisfaction ratings across a whole year. A major thing I wanted to prioritize was my daily fulfillment to best enjoy the process of self-actualization, so to see that these 52 snapshots of myself felt just that is. *For reference, this was my ideal wheel of life that I aspired towards (slightly adjusted throughout the year but mostly stayed consistent.* ![[Weekly Wondering 2024-W51-20241227174015122.webp]] Now, 76 is still quite a ways away from the ideal total of 84 I had hope for, but at least there's been a bit of improvement from last year's 74 😅 There's also improvements I'd like with the system as well — it'd be nice to easily get a glimpse to see which weeks had the lowest or highest ratings, as well as maybe even putting in the effort to journal a bit for my satisfaction with each rating so I can have a chronological story of how a certain area of my life developed throughout the year. It's been a few months since I updated my Ultimate Starter Vault, but after a year of experience and iteration with the life design part of the app, I'll probably end up making an update to incorporate my learnings 😁 I might not be able to release it until sometime next year, but if you have any suggestions or features you'd like to see feel free to let me know in the `#usv-general` discord channel 🫡 ### A sneak peek of my new app 👀 Last newsletter I shared my vision for an app I'm working on, to which you can thank my inactivity for 😅 Here's a sneak peek of the app based on how it looks and works so far: - Effortlessly voice your thoughts and have AI automatically transcribe your thoughts - Summarize your thoughts by creating a cleaned version to remove any filler words and turn it into the best format - Auto-generate titles to easily recall the contents of each audio - Switch between the original transcription and a cleaned version of your thoughts One of my favorite use cases right now is journaling and reflecting on the day's events. I used to often use the built-in keyboard transcription during walks or while lost in thought, but dealing with the messy (and sometimes off-base) transcripts was challenging. We still have a bunch of other features we still need to implement before it's ready to be publicly released, so I can't guarantee a release date 🥲 %% The best part? We're considering having our pricing plan primarily cover operational costs like AI usage and hosting, as the main goal is to be a self-sustaining passion project that might be acquired later down the road ;) %% Here's a quick preview on what the app itself looks like so far:  If you think you'd be interested, you can click here to be notified of future progress updates and when an alpha release is ready for you to try :) ## [[Using self-therapy for digital self-actualization]] 🫂 ## My new shining stars 🌟 _A place to share the new stars and constellations inside my digital galaxy_ ### Inputs - [[Self-Therapy A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Wholeness and Healing Your Inner Child Using IFS, a New, Cutting-Edge Psychotherapy|Self-Therapy Book]] - I've been mostly keeping up with my one lecture-a-week pace for After Socrates; going through this has led to some of the most engaging and transformative insights this year. - [[After Socrates Episode 7 - Daimonion Dr. John Vervaeke]] - [[After Socrates Episode 8 - The Socratic Shift Dr. John Vervaeke]] - [[After Socrates Episode 9 - Metanoia Dr. John Vervaeke]] - [[After Socrates Episode 10a - Ecology of Practices Dr. John Vervaeke]] ### Notes - Feel free to visit my notes [[Internal Family Systems (IFS)]] - I've been playing around with [[Datacore]] in preparation for work with Nick and my own vault. I recommend just joining their Discord to see the creative implementations people have already made, as a developer I'm excited to explore its possiblities for highly customized views, performance increases for vaults with large files, reusing query logic, and more! Probably going to be one my next three videos as well. - As I'm writing this I'm starting to set up my own mini-PC to enter the [[Self-hosted]] community. A part of it is to stay away from subscriptions when I can, and another part of it is the fun tinkering and freedom that comes from running your own services. If you've made it this far, I'd also like to hear from you — have there been any interesting insights from your annual review? How are you approaching the new year? ## 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)