{"id":10442,"date":"2017-02-18T11:18:07","date_gmt":"2017-02-18T11:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/?p=10442"},"modified":"2017-05-17T17:01:42","modified_gmt":"2017-05-17T17:01:42","slug":"0645-manage-psychology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0645-manage-psychology\/","title":{"rendered":"0645 \u2013 manage your psychology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some of the best and most interesting conversations I&#8217;ve ever had have been with my boss, who has more experience and perspective than me. I find it helpful sometimes to reflect on the things he&#8217;s said that didn&#8217;t seem immediately\u00a0obvious or intuitive to me. Off the top of my head, some of these ideas are&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Maybe you should find new friends \/ hang out with better people.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;What exactly are your desired end-states?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;What&#8217;s stopping you from getting what you want? Why isn&#8217;t X\u00a0happening?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Isn&#8217;t that entirely within your control?<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;What is your system of doing things?\u00a0Everybody has a system, whether they articulate it or not.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;If you want to\u00a0achieve great things, you have to become a person who insists that shit gets done.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The hardest thing is really managing your own psychology.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I want to reflect on that last particular point. The way I think about it is this \u2013\u00a0every person has some amount of\u00a0resource available to them. It&#8217;s a very limited resource \u2013 and as I get older I&#8217;m beginning to see how this resource is\u00a0far scarcer than I\u00a0ever let myself believe.<\/p>\n<p>For over a decade, I&#8217;ve been buying into my own bullshit that I have a vast amount of energy just waiting to be unlocked, waiting to be tapped into. The longer I&#8217;m around, the longer it becomes clear that that just simply isn&#8217;t the case. There are vanishingly few magical days where I crank out hour after hour of incredibly productive work.<\/p>\n<p>This is a painful and uncomfortable truth for me to internalize, and when I look back on my life I think it becomes obvious that I run away from this truth\u00a0whenever I can. But I&#8217;m getting older and I&#8217;m getting tired of lying to myself, I&#8217;m getting tired of avoiding the truth. The quote from Ray Dalio comes to mind \u2013 success happens when you engage honestly with life&#8217;s truths, and failure happens when you avoid them. (Precise quote: success is a matter of accepting and successfully deal with the realities of your life.)<\/p>\n<p>So a reality of my life is that things don&#8217;t get done unless I&#8217;m really focused, and I don&#8217;t have a lot of focus \u2013 if focus was a muscle, I&#8217;m incredibly unfit. I often feel like a fraud when I show up to work \u2013 I feel like I&#8217;m pretending to be somebody I&#8217;m not, like I&#8217;m wearing a mask. I&#8217;m faking my way through everything, saying and doing whatever it takes to just get through each interaction. And this is despite having one of the best working environments imaginable.\u00a0I don&#8217;t want to get into too many details there except to emphasize that this is entirely\u00a0on me, this is entirely a function of my weaknesses and failings and failures. And I don&#8217;t want to dwell on\u00a0<em>those<\/em>, either \u2013 I want to focus on building strength and power.<\/p>\n<p>I have made some breakthroughs in my life. They feel like they&#8217;re too few and far between, so I need to do them more. The most recent ones were with exercise and cooking, and in bits and pieces about being accountable and responsive at work.\u00a0I&#8217;m still nowhere as high-functioning or as professional as I want to be. Okay, so what&#8217;s stopping me from doing that? It&#8217;s not a lack of knowledge. My mind is a junkyard of tonnes and tonnes of information, and I\u00a0know how to search for the things that I want.<\/p>\n<p>I think the #1 missing thing from my life is a\u00a0sort of efficient central engine that keeps me on track. I alluded to this myself 4 years ago when I wrote &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/productivity-apps-fill-buckets-when-they-should-be-lighting-fires\/\">productivity apps fill buckets when they should be lighting fires<\/a>&#8221; \u2013 my point there was that I wasn&#8217;t sufficiently lighting a fire under my own ass. A conversation I have with one of my\u00a0friends over and over again is that I wish I had a peer that I really admired \u2013 not a\u00a0mentor (though I suppose I could always use more of those), but a peer \u2013 something like a Lennon-McCartney, Axl-Slash, Tolkien-Lewis relationship. Somebody who would challenge me to be better, who I could challenge in turn. And I&#8217;m starting to think that maybe the reason I don&#8217;t have someone like that in my life is that\u00a0I don&#8217;t meet the criteria. A great peer isn&#8217;t looking for someone she needs to prop up, she&#8217;s looking for someone she finds intrinsically inspiring. And so I need to become intrinsically inspiring. I need to\u00a0manage my psychology well enough that I naturally have a fire inside my belly.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a little bit sad to think about how much less idealistic I&#8217;ve become over the last 4-5 years, but those feelings are just feelings. I can wallow in them, or I can just acknowledge them and then use them to inform my next decisions. I&#8217;m still only 26 years old. I could still turn this ship around and have a great decade ahead of me. Sometimes I feel like I&#8217;m not going to live very long, like I&#8217;m going to die at 35 or 40 or something. I don&#8217;t know why I have that feeling, I just do. I feel this sense of urgency. There&#8217;s a strange thing about having a ton of urgency in your mind and yet simultaneously being totally still and totally distracted.\u00a0It&#8217;s probably best exemplified by the phrase &#8220;deer in headlights&#8221;. That&#8217;s been me for 20 years and it just won&#8217;t do anymore. I have to cut that shit out. I&#8217;m going to finish up my vomit then I&#8217;m going to throw myself into just slashing through all of my tasks in my Todo list.<\/p>\n<p>I need to manage my psychology. I need to be in charge of motivating myself, finding purpose, orienting myself, deciding what needs to happen next, getting things done and earning my own respect. Becoming proud of myself. I&#8217;m going to go for a run in about 45 minutes once I&#8217;m done with a few tasks.\u00a0I have a good life, one of the better ones by far. I can do a lot better than I&#8217;m currently doing. I believe that to be true. But what I need to focus on is taking the next step. Lots and lots of little steps.\u00a0I believe it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some of the best and most interesting conversations I&#8217;ve ever had have been with my boss, who has more experience and perspective than me. I find it helpful sometimes to reflect on the things he&#8217;s said that didn&#8217;t seem immediately\u00a0obvious or intuitive to me. Off the top of my head,&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[279],"class_list":["post-10442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-self-regulation"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>0645 \u2013 manage your psychology - 1,000,000 words by @visakanv<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0645-manage-psychology\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"0645 \u2013 manage your psychology - 1,000,000 words by @visakanv\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Some of the best and most interesting conversations I&#8217;ve ever had have been with my boss, who has more experience and perspective than me. 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