As always, the world is changing.
Though we don’t know which direction it is towards, we can always find something positive and meaningful that aligns our values. Especially in an era like this, everything is just a click away. When listening to one of the books from Daniel Priestley, he has a beautiful expression about how easy you can make yourself luckier. Simply you can “choose” to be luckier.
Say there’s a conference and you don’t feel like going, but rather just staying at home. However, going to the conference can make you luckier than just staying home, if considering how many new people you will meet there, and how many opportunities will be created via those encounters. The same goes with binge watch Netflix v.s. TED Talks, it’s easier to pick the one that will make you luckier. (Spoiler alert, Netflix is not the winner.)
Things I failed recently
It has been a huge block for me that I suck at talking about numbers in English. Like, any numbers, I just never say it right as soon as it’s more than a thousand. The most common scenario is when I talk about salaries or the housing/rent prices, it’s so brutal for me especially now I often need to do the mental calculations in three different currencies.
The common mistakes I made including:
- Saying 100,000 as 10K
- Saying 28万 as 28K
- Saying 22 億 as 22 billion (billion is actually 10 億 so it’s 2.2 billions)
Before I can overcome this, I should have always warned people with a heads-up that don’t trust any numbers I tell them in English. Hope this won’t be the ultimate solution I’ll adopt in the end.
Good thing I heard people saying about me
I’ve noticed that a few friends telling me that they find me (as a person or the way I talk) very inspiring. This is something I rarely think of about myself. As far as I could recall when tracing back to my young adult stage in life, I see myself a moody person and always easily being trapped in negative vibes. I don’t really know what has changed me but I surely am a totally different person than I was 20 or 10 years ago.
In Human Design I’m a projector and I’m defender in my 16 Personalities test. I find the two tests incredibility fit my profile and am amazed how could they make it. As in Human Design it only requires your birth date to figure out the results, and with 16 Personalities you need to take this very long questionnaire, And they end up reflecting similar qualities of me.
Stay motivated is hard
I’ve been in a state of lacking motivation at work for a while. I wonder if that’s because I’ve used most of the bandwidth in my personal life, like relocating to Japan and learning the language more seriously.
There are lots of books teach us how to overcome this (like Start With Why) and while they are helpful, I have a simple and brutal method I always tried first: looking at the money aspect of your current tasks.
For me, things that I label as “work” simply mean they will bring money to me. That being said, money is the main motivation behind the tasks I’m doing. If I don’t feel motivated by them, it’s very likely because I’m underpaid.
Then, I would just examine the tasks I am working on to see if it’s true that way, or something else is standing in the way.
Surely we always want to be paid more, and will soon become unsatisfied with the salary we were happily accepted when offered. But I find this practice useful because, if you do it often enough, you can get good at differentiating if it’s just you’re getting greedy, or asking for a paid raise (or increase your rate) can help you unstuck.
And it makes sense that, if it’s not something that more money can better motivates you, it worths to take a deeper look into the matter and figure out how to settle it.
Twitter detox
I’ve been on the Twitter detox for more than a month now. It was when I watched a YouTube video and the guest of the show were mentioning that she was off-grid on the internet at the end of the year every year. This reminded me that Paul Jarvis used to do the same (and he now seems to be completely off-grid). I chose to do a minor challenge, which only quit Twitter, but not other platform like Facebook.
I think I’m happier after doing that, so I have no plan to go back any time soon. Two major reasons for me to prolong the detox phase:
- Like in my country, there will also be a presidential election in the US this year. As Trump has been back to the primaries, I could imagine how Twitter will look like as four years ago, and I don’t miss that at all.
- I do feel pressured when it comes to following what other WordPress businesses are doing. It is easily delusional that what the others do seem to be so shiny and more competitive than what you have on board.
Social media should be somewhere you can relax and entertain (except I don’t use TikTok at all). After pausing on Twitter, I never have missed it for one second. Also I feel like having much more extra energy and time for something else like my Japanese learning. It will be wise to keep disconnecting until I must jump back on the wagon.
Closing
I had some difficulties to finish the post for this week and it’s only the third one (out of 52). It’s obvious I haven’t found the momentum yet. The struggle is I don’t seem to have things I want to write about for the week, so it could be I had a more empty week than the previous two, and maybe the next one will be different.
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