motivation – Page 4

Tag: motivation (page 4 of 5)

Unexpected gains

You know how awesome it feels to find a$20 bill randomly in the pocket of a jacket?

Or the rush of endorphins in your head when you remember, again, that Donald J Trump is in fact the President of the United States of America?

Earlier today I had one of those moments: my income is now more than double what I made five years ago.

Funny what is factually true but you don’t really appreciate until you’re doing a mental rundown of your budget.

One paycheck now was my entire month’s budget then.

Back then, it was hard to fathom the possibility of making more money.

But what gets me is what the money has to say about my ambitions and abilities and how quickly I’ve risen in an industry that does not allow for bonuses or commissions.

Looking back, I’ve worked hard and made the best of my circumstances and I’m ridiculously more ambitious than I ever thought.

It’s nice to not have to worry about money anymore.

It’s even nicer to think about how far I’ve come. I can look back, and see a track record of (mostly) success.

I don’t have to bluff or pretend or fake it until I make it.

I’ve by no means made it, but now I’m extra motivated to absolutely kill it.

What has boosted your confidence lately?

Last New Year’s reflexion post of 2018 (for now)

2018-01-04 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

I go a little overboard at New Year’s, reflecting and planning and all that. Because so many changes happened in my life (and the world) this year, I think my need to reflect went into overdrive.

This year I started extra early, back in November.

Here’s a note from my bullet journal:

On a micro scale, 2017 was…not great.

On a macro scale, it has been AMAZING. Trump, carnivory, new job, moving, etc.

2018: year of micro?

In my years of working, I’ve come to realize that the most useful vantage points are either on the ground, the front-lines staff who works directly with the data or the people or digging in the dirt–where you have an opportunity to make decisions on a personal and behavior level and impact the world in that way– or high up, the decision-bearing leadership who has responsibility and a clear view of the landscape–where you have the opportunity to craft a coherent strategy.

In other words, strategy and tactics.

But in a bureaucracy, there are a lot of other layers in between. Those tend to get muddy and lost and don’t add much value. The top and the bottom are where things get done. (Ideally. I realize politics is like fifty shades of grey.)

Looking at my micro/macro observations through this lens, it’s clear that 2017 positioned me in a different place strategically. I’m in a different town with a different job and a different way of eating with better health. That’s great.

What I didn’t do in 2017 was a lot of the projects that I had planned. Writing a novel. Working on art. Learning something new and useful. Making new friends. Improving my style. Focusing on fitness.

My macro changed, but my micro didn’t.

However, now that my macro is better, I feel like I can focus more on the micro.

Not the grand, sweeping decisions, but the small moments of my life, the things I do to propel myself through my day.

I’m trying to focus on the incredible gift it is to have the consciousness to be able to plan strategically, but the blessing to be only in one moment of time at once. Focus my consciousness on the task at hand.

(She writes as she pulls up a YouTube video in the background. SAD!) (I put it away.)

Habits, actions, and the doing of it. That’s what 2018 is going to be about–and has been so far.

I’ll check back at the end of March–my first self-imposed deadline.

The sweet feeling of being tired

2018-01-02 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

You know that tired feeling you get after binge-watching a show all day?

It feels hollow–unearned–because at the back of your mind you know you didn’t do anything to deserve it.

On days like this, I almost feel disgusted with myself. I’m tired, because I want to sleep, because I want a reset.

Contrast that with the tired feeling born of a long day of work.

The right kind of tired.

Your body is tired. Your brain is tired. Sleep pulls at you–but in a satisfying, tantalizing way.

Nothing like a good night’s sleep after a job well done.

Like “hunger is the best sauce,” a productive day makes any bed more comfy.

Public goals

2017-12-30 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

They say that the best way to build credibility is to make predictions in public, stand by them, and wait for them to come true.

Of course, that’s contingent upon one’s ability to ~~predict the future.

The next best way is to say you’re going to do something, and then do it.

It’s like predicting the future, but you get near-complete control over that future.

Instead of, say, trying to predict the stock market.

So it would make sense that I could list a bunch of New Year’s resolutions here, and then track my progress as I achieve them.

Truth be told, I am too chickenshit to throw my specific goals out for public consumption–or accountability.

Vaguely, my goals involve:

Using writing to develop a secondary source of income
Taking steps to further bolster my health and beauty

I’m sure I’ll chronicle some of my endeavors here.

Last year ended up being “year of macro,” in which I made some major changes in my life.

This year is “year of micro,” and I’m intending to focus a lot more on my individual actions. How the little actions accumulate over time.

That is the non-stressful way to get to goals. Don’t focus a lot on the decision, but focus more on the doing of it.

And, the volume of “doings” is convenient in letting one document extensively along the way.

Which feeds in to the credibility cycle.

Uncanny.

Top five posts of 2017

2017-12-27 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

It’s the end of the year, when it’s instinctive (or is merely traditional?) to look back and tally how we’ve been doing.

Even though this blog has only been in existence for about six months, I’ve always been curious about what the top posts are. A handful of title always pop up in my “Site Stats” area.

Let’s see if we can learn any lessons.

1. N=many is go!

While I very much regret to say that I didn’t finish the initial 90-day carnivore cohort over at N Equals Many, I was really excited to help out at first. I’m still definitely a carnivore, but I stopped tracking around 30 days in at the end of September. This is mostly because the “roller coaster” portion of my year kicked in and I prioritized keeping my sanity amidst getting a new job and moving, instead of trying to track everything. If you’re interested in carnivory, join us during World Carnivore Month in January 2018.

Anyway, I linked to NEqualsMany from that post, and I get traffic from the pingback.

2. A metric: the Creative Achievement Questionnaire

This one surprises me, as it was born on a day that I had no idea what to write. I was looking around for a “quiz” or fillable question set to use as a template, and since Jordan B Peterson was on my mind, I found this questionnaire. It’s an interesting metric to check creative achievement against. I appreciate how it encompasses all different types of creativity, including scientific and architectural achievement. I question if someone can be truly well-rounded in this modern era of fine-tuned achievements, but it’s still a fun way to measure. Since posting this, I haven’t moved earned any new points, but I’m building a plan to do so in the next six months.

There’s no pingback on the post that I linked to, so people must find it from search.

3. Photo of the week: I hate dating edition

Ah, when I was new in town and spending a lot of time on Tinder and had just launched a series called “photo of the week.” Dating still sucks, and I try to avoid being in those positions.

I linked to this one on Twitter and tagged the person who took the photos, so it makes sense that this post gets traffic.

4. A very personal review of The Promethean by Owen Stanley

My very first fiction review! It’s not a great review, objectively, because my book reviews are very green at this point in my writing career. My thoughts are numerous, but I am not yet disciplined at corralling them into strings of paragraphs that make sense. I always want to tell the truth, but sometimes it’s difficult to write the truth of what I think about something with the thought in mind that the author could read it. The double-edge sword of the internet, I suppose.

I suspect that this post gets hits because I doubt there are very many reviews of it out there, especially outside of Amazon.

5. People who naturally write in passive voice

This is an old post. “Old.” Back at the beginning of this blog, I challenged myself to come up with a longer piece each week, like a weekly column. This was the first establishment (of two), and it gave me an excuse to delve into a people and writing problem that had been bothering me.

No idea where there traffic on this one comes from, which is kinda cool. Looks like I should write more of these long, introspective (extrospective?) posts.

In conclusion, there’s not much similarity between the five posts. The breadth represents most of the topics that I write about, except for fashion and k-pop.

It’s fascinating to me that only two of the posts had easily-identifiable pingback links. Perhaps I can extrapolate new blog ideas to explore from the organic traffic-attracting posts–like doing more looking into “creative achievement.”

It’s also obviously worth writing about my life as a carnivore, and writing book reviews.

But I’m still going to write what I want. That’s how I made it this far, and how I’ll make it another six months.

Image of the Week: “you can do it” edition

2017-12-22 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

Originally, I was going to post that photo of Nikki Haley in the UN. It sufficiently summed up the week in politics. But it doesn’t jive with my personal experience for the week, so I’m not posting it.

This week has been long.

I’m growing tired of so much change in my life, and yet this week just piled on more: new boundaries to my conception of time thanks to the writing of Elliott Jaques, more layers to my understanding of the globalist cabal, the death by suicide of Kim Jong-Hyun of SM Entertainment (also YouTube’s algorithm keeps recommending me SHINee videos and it’s killing me) and changes at my workplace that will render me effectively isolated. I haven’t slept well. I’m tired.

But there’s good news. Reading between the lines of WordPress’ inflated pageview stats, a few real people have checked out Batfort this week. (Hi, people!)

Though I’m tired, I’m motivated.

So with that in mind, this is a photo of Jeff Bezos’ office when he was just starting out, in 1999.

I’m no Jeff Bezos, but we all have to start somewhere.

Productivity Reminder

2017-12-14 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

Warning: blogception ahead.

I’m blogging about a blog post. If we do that too many times, it’ll cause a recursive rift in the internet (although that may not be a problem anymore with whatever is happening to Net Neutrality) that may cause the catastrophic end of all time. Or something.

Anyway, I wanted to document Ramit Sethi’s “Productivity Advice for the Weird.” It’s a good reminder of the real priorities in life, although 1. I don’t really know anything about that because I haven’t accomplished much in life yet, and 2. I disagree with some of his philosophy. I suspect that habits provide a nest for inspiration and productivity to occur, whether they build up in small chunks over time or if they grow with leaps and bounds in one long binge.

If creative productivity mirrors physical healing at all, it’s both at once. You have to have the tiny habitual victories every day, which eventually reach a critical mass for something transformative to happen.

I am terrible at getting enough sleep, so anything that will help me convince myself to get more sleep is a good thing.

The small habits of productivity that nobody wants to tell you except Ramit Sethi:

Get enough sleep
“Clean your room” (live in a functional space)
Stick to a meal plan (make fewer decisions)
Set healthy boundaries
Optimize your calendar (always know what you’re going to work on before you wake up in the morning)

There’s more, but those are the most basic ones that set the stage for everything else. It’s kind of like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but for productivity.

It probably also helps to have some sort of plan of what you’re working on, or at least a general direction of some sort. The best system will never work if it doesn’t have some content to work with.

What is it that our dads always told us? Plan your work and work your plan?

That seems to be another version of what this is. Definitely worth a read.

Six months with Batfort

2017-12-11 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

Guys! Readers! All 2 of you! It’s been six months now.

Crazy, right?

You don’t know me, but if you’d been able to look over my shoulder at all the other blogs that I’ve abandoned all over the internet, you’d know that I usually make it about a month before I get bored with an idea and wander away.

For this blog, I decided on no rules. The only rule is “tell the truth.” Even the supposed question at the center of this blog (what is the relationship between aesthetics and truth?) doesn’t even get addressed in some of the posts.

We bounce around from k-pop to the alt-right to my daily life, books and publishing to fashion and my experiences in higher education. It’s not cohesive, not really.

But that’s okay.

It’s gotten us this far.

Some posts I’m actually kinda proud of. Others, not so much.

The goal for the next six month is to create more posts that I’m proud of than posts I’m not. Here’s how we’re going to get there:

More posts with infographics, because they’re fun
More posts where I talk about what I’m thinking about, even when it seems weird. Those posts seem to flow better.
Prioritize writing my posts earlier in the evening, so I’m not falling asleep while I’m writing
Write about products and books that I like
Try to incorporate more research and sources

Basically, I need to push myself in creating more original content. (Isn’t that the eternal state of the millennial?)

Today at my day job I edited a document that shouldn’t exist. Instead of getting published, it should have been set on fire and drop kicked into the void. Editing that thing was physically painful. If it were to become something that I personally was okay with, I would have to flay it down to the bones and start over.

Looking at that document reminded me that I often have things to say (OPINIONS, WHAT?) and that I have a gift of seeing what should or should not exist on a page or in an argument. Things just make sense once I understand them and their context.

I have the capability. I just need to shift my focus on to this blog and onto things that I want to exist and onto the truth.

That’s what’s important.

Arts and Habits

2017-11-16 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

I’m liking this notion of developing “arts and habits:”

At school you are engaged not so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism. A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain; nor need you regret the hours you spent on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions. But you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness.

The art: how you do it.

The habit: what you do.

I feel like I’ve developed most of these during my worklife moreso than in school. Even though I was one of those stellar students that everyone liked, school (and by extension, my teachers( never pushed me hard enough to have to tackle the basic arts and habits that make up my day.

That said, it would be worth taking a look at my own daily practices to evaluate what arts are being developed, and what daily practices spring into being.

The art of getting faculty to do what you want.

The habit of tracking all expense reports.

The art of translating university bullshit.

The habit of examining the truth.

Etc.

General inflammation vs. localized inflammation

2017-11-14 / childlike empress / 0 Comments

Generalized inflammation is useless. Usually, pain provides enough useful information to be worth the trouble, but non-localized stress is exactly the opposite. It masks problems. Because it’s not specific, it doesn’t tell you anything useful about what is wrong or what might be causing the stress. It bogs down normal inflammation, and because it makes systems less efficient, causes much more work for the rest of the body.

Localized, acute inflammation — on the other hand — is a fantastic tool. It can lead you to what is wrong, and indicates that your body is working hard on that problem. Localized inflammation is your friend.

Life is kind of like that, too. Lots of low-level, incomprehensible stress is muy no bueno. You can never get a foothold in solving problems of that magnitude.

Specific issues, however, are much easier to identify, parse, and solve one step at a time. This approach is much more painful, and rarely fun, but it’s way more effective in the long run.

It all has to come to a head.

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Batfort

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