Creative Destruction is an idea that’s floating to the front of my mind. The notion that you have to break eggs to make an omelette, that you have to let go of who you are in order to move on to who you must become. Refactoring, breaking things up and shaking them around so they can be reforged into something stronger, better, more resilient, antifragile.
I wonder if I’ve ever done it before. What have I created, what have I destroyed? Who am I? What have I been becoming? Yes, I am everything that I am in the present moment, okay. That’s a nice sentiment to meditate on. But what next? What do I need to break in order to move forward? I think back to my model of personal development– there’s self-perception, peer groups, environments, habits, behaviors, yadda yadda. And right now I feel like… there’s a lot of recalibration that needs doing, and I haven’t been doing it.
Well, why? I’ve been holding on to old things. Why? Because those things give me comfort. What sort of comfort? Familiarity, really. But that stuff doesn’t help. The cheese has moved, and I need to lace up my shoes and start running and looking for the new cheese. So this is me trying to do that, somehow.
What changes, what stays the same? Should you try to break everything all at once? That seems unnecessarily daunting. My problem is project management, I need to break down the project into manageable chunks. What can I address right now? I feel I want to worry less about ultimate big pictures, because those things seem invariably limited and limiting. All I can really do is to try to break out of my existing box. Okay. What is the nature of my existing box? It seems to be largely defined by wasteful habits. I spent a bunch of time on reddit and imgur in the past couple of hours, which I found frustrating. Why do I do that? Because when you’re aimless, any road will take you where you want to go (which is nowhere). So if I want to make any sort of progress I first need to have some vague sense of where I want to go, even if it might be that I ultimately change my idea about that.
Well, okay. Where do I want to go? Who do I want to be? I want to be free from minor anxieties and stresses. And the way to do that is to be proactive. I’m not nearly as proactive as I’d like to be. I still react to things. I’ve somehow decided in my mind that there’s nothing better to get me to create things that last-minute pressures and desperations. I still hold that belief inside my head somewhere, even though I intellectually recognize it to be suboptimal. I still celebrate myself when I successfully pull it off. But the big picture reveals that last minute panic and response is a painful path, and I don’t want to be on my deathbed and look back on my life and think “Wow, I was so unnecessarily stressed all the time.” Hell, I don’t want to be 30 or even 25 and feel that way.
So I need to eliminate a lot of things. Maybe I should go through my workflowy and delete as much as possible. Maybe I should list out all my habits and behaviors and see what I typically do, and figure out what I ought to replace them. Thinking about self-perception and identity feels a bit problematic right now. I don’t feel like I can have a grand larger vision for myself. All I want for the foreseeable future is to break out of my current patterns and routines. Exercise and sleep are a huge part of that, so I’m going to go for a run later and I’m going to sleep early tonight. Okay. What do I need to do so I sleep well tonight? I feel like I should do a few more word vomits. Ideally I’d like to do 15 altogether, so that I wake up tomorrow at 0340. And I’d like to finish the weekend having crossed 350. A part of me fantasizes about crossing 400 but I’m pretty sure that’s impossible. If I have done 10 vomits today I would’ve gone back to my previous “good limit”. Equalled my personal best. To break my personal best I need to do 13.
Okay, that’s on my mind, and I don’t want to make that my main focus. So what should my main focus be? I feel like I should write down some of the Success principle type things on my notes. I want to start a few X effects. 1 for meditation, since that’s clearly going to help me. 1 for writing word vomits. 1 for daily reviews. Would that be enough? Is that too many? Oh yeah, and one for going to bed early.
God, I keep circling around the same things over and over again and not doing very much about them. I guess this is just part of the process. But there has to be something missing. The missing thing is probably… accountability? Hopefully the notes to self and the X-effect stuff help with that. I want to run 2.4 kilometers in under 12 minutes. I feel like that would be something I can be proud of. Currently I haven’t been able to go under 15 minutes. I believe 15:30 is my best time in recent times, and I seem to be stuck around 16:00. Getting under 15 would be nice, bit I’ll still feel sad at 13. Under 13 is where I go from feeling like a fail to feeling like something decent. Under 12 would make me feel good, under 11 would make me feel really, really good.
If there’s one thing I think I never appreciate enough, it’s how much of the mental state is affected by the physical condition. I’m not just my mind, I’m also my body. I beat my heart, I breathe myself. I need to take care of my body before I can let my brain progress to the next level.