--- ## Notes/Brainstorming ### **✨** In My Life - Obsidian tracker video - Started converting my Gumroad products to Convertkit due to their incoming price increase - Lots of reflection and conversation - [[Alone in excelar office]] ### **🔗** Links to Thinks - [[So Good They Can't Ignore You Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love]] - [[How to Live]] ### **🚀** Actionable Tingz - Aidan Helfant Gamified Life - Never saw the parallels between my self improvement journey and the overall process of gamification - Does a good job of showing the parallels by sharing his own experiences - [[Crying for half an hour over andrew's gift]] - Started writing gratitude messages ### **🤔** Food For Thought - Is it good to open up and easily trust people? - Instant obsessive love is a bad sign that you’re thinking of someone as the solution. - Projecting perfection onto someone is not love. - You say “I love you” but really mean “I love this”. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gmmmgghgb7enyhagrekxneav)) - When one of you is being childish, the other needs to be the adult. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gmmmhkmhyt59e7c0hg065kwa)) - You must both be free and able to live without each other. - Be together by choice, not necessity or dependence. - Love your partner, but don’t need your partner. - Need is insatiable. - Need destroys love. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gmmmjhcs0te6hc67snrchxjb)) ### 😤 My Ramblings - Is emotion good ## Publishing Copy Welcome to another edition of _Weekly Wondering_, a sacred time where I share the resonating links, reflections and learnings from my past week to influence your next one ;) ### **✨** In My Life I've been undergoing a lot of journalling and conversation as this year comes to an end. Appreciating the memories and experiences, the conversations and people I've met, and the accomplishments and learnings throughout these quickly passing yet sentimental months. If you haven't already, I would recommend starting your own weekly review. **Track habits and data in Obsidian** To prepare for the new year, I set up some different trackers (line graphs, summaries, calendar views) in my periodic reviews to keep track of my energies and habits. You can watch the video [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekDFvZE6ugo). **Saying goodbye to Gumroad** Gumroad, the platform I use to sell my products, has changed their pricing model, so now I'll have to pay 13% per sale instead of my 5% tier. That's a disgusting amount, so I'm switching to Convertkit and potentially Webflow to manage my email marketing and products. ### **🔗** Links to Thinks **So Good They Can't Ignore You** With my dilemma on choosing a future career, I found Cal Newport's ideas in the book to be reassuring for my future direction. Instead of reading the Shortform summary though, I followed Thomas Frank's advice and just read the conclusion of the book. To sum it up: > If your goal is to love what you do, I discovered, “follow your passion” can be bad advice. It’s more important to become good at something rare and valuable, and then invest the _career capital_ this generates into the type of traits that make a job great. Instead of trying to find an ideal job, we need to prepare ourselves with the right skillset so we're qualified for the rare jobs that are fulfilling, or identify an opportunity to create your own job in good ol' entrepreneurial fashion. To be independent regardless of situation, as the real value lies in yourself and capabilities. In my case, I have an interesting intersection of skills thanks to my different projects, ranging from content creation, product management, productivity/life design, programming, and entrepreneurship. Sure you can just be good at management and outsource all the above, but I feel like getting experience in these different skills have helped me refine my learning skills and capitalize on opportunities like my Obsidian and PKM/productivity knowledge. **How to Live** A beautiful book on exploring the extremes at which one can live their life. It rivals Marcus Aurelius' Meditations in terms of value density. 27 conflicting rulesets amplified to great lengths, all to make you realize the breadth of choices you can make when choosing how to life your own. As I was reading it, I found myself resonating with a lot of the ideologies, which helped me realize that I won't be strictly locking in on one philosophy for the rest of my life. It helped me clarify my current values and offer new ones to slowly adopt as well. It's also reminded me of some of the biggest takeaways from the books I've read. For example, my 3 memorable quotes from the book were: > No matter what you need to do, there’s a playful, creative way to do it > If you can’t remember something, it’s like it never happened. > You could have a long healthy life, but if you can’t remember it, it’s like you had a short life > Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. > It will be a constant state of experimenting and slowly adjusting my values to find something satisfactory. On top of that, I had one major takeaway from each way he suggested to live: Commit - Especially in a relationship Fill your senses - Being immersed in the moment Do nothing - Contentment from the present Think super long-term - Remember the compounding effect of small habits and choices Intertwine with the world - Explore cultures Make memories - Related to filling your senses - Make life memorable rather than repetitive, unless repetitive is memorable Master something - The irreplacability of mastery thanks to the required effort - Intention of what you're doing Let randomness rule - Learning to accept the outcome Pursue pain - Finding transformation Do whatever you want now - If we don't want it bad enough then it might not matter enough Be a famous pioneer - Share your story for inspiration and imagination Value only what has endured - Resisting the bombardment of recency bias in social media and art Learn - Importance of true understanding Follow the great book - Having a set of unbreakable rules to regulate impulses and emotions in a disciplinary way Laugh at life - To laugh at something is to be superior to it. - Humor shows internal control Prepare for the worst - appreciate as if it's your last time, prepare for death and end For others - treat everyone like they're dying tomorrow Get rich - View money as value, it is only a means to an end Love - Need for independence and lack of need Create - Dying with everything inside - Contrast it with a disciplined full-time Don't die - Mindfulness of death makes you view the world seriously Balance everything - View life areas as parts of a wheel - Balance your knowledge I would highly suggest reading it for yourself to review or curate your own set of beliefs for the new year. On a side note, I should probably start turning these into content for one of my channels, but I'll get to that later on 😵 ### **🚀** Actionable Tingz **Gamifying Life** This video by Aidan, a fellow 19 year old PKM Youtuber, on gamification has made me realize the parallels between my experiences gaming and my self-improvement journey. In a way, it's the time I spent obsessed with games that has allowed me to progress at the same unhealthy rate as my games and hours in video-games. By using gamification frameworks like the Octalysis framework as a reference, he deconstructs both fulfilling activities through their fundamental parts. I'm too lazy to explain it myself, so if you're interested you can watch his jam-packed [3-part series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e8nD9GNHJ8). Now we're in the talks of creating something to systematize the process for anyone else needing help doing something similar. If you think you meet the target demographic, someone who used to be competitively or nerdily addicted to games, and want to transfer it to the real world, reply to this email and I'd like to hear your story and potentially get on a call. ### **🤔** Food For Thought **Is it good to easily trust people?** I find myself trusting people and being vulnerable much quicker and deeper than what it should be traditionally. Sharing my inner thoughts, my insecurities, my secrets, with people who can easily use it against me. It's an interesting position to be in. I'm able to foster deeper connections with people, but at the price of my own safety for those who may try to exploit it for their own gain. As my friend told me recently, > Stop trying to see the potential in someone and see them for what they are Obviously I'm not going to since I feel like it's a crucial part of who I am and how I view relationships, but it's nonetheless nice to be aware and have the capability of flipping the switch when I need to. **Codependency** Seeing as I'm codependent at times and show qualities of a lot of [insecure attachment styles](https://www.attachmentproject.com/blog/four-attachment-styles/), reading Derek Siver's _How to Live_ provided some reminders for me to follow for my relationships: - Instant obsessive love is a bad sign that you’re thinking of someone as the solution. - Projecting perfection onto someone is not love. - You say “I love you” but really mean “I love this”. - When one of you is being childish, the other needs to be the adult. - You must both be free and able to live without each other. - Be together by choice, not necessity or dependence. - Love your partner, but don’t need your partner. - Need is insatiable. - Need destroys love.