Watch Me.
I’m feeling very inspired right now. It feels great. I really don’t know what is causing it. But it’s awesome. I don’t know what to do with it. What is it that my inspired self feels will lead to my fullest fulfillment?
Let me tell you about what I’ve done the past little while.
A few years ago I wasn’t satisfied with what I was spending most of my time doing. With touring. I wanted a change. I wanted a challenge, to see if I could pull off something difficult. I decided to go towards math, towards coding. That seemed pretty different from anything I had done before. So I started teaching myself some coding during my time off between tours. After maybe a year of that, I moved to New York to do coding to the utmost that I could. I went to the coding bootcamp that I thought was the absolute best one. I chose App Academy.
I went to App Academy. I gave it all I possibly could. Fully invested myself. I literally did my best. And I failed. I wasn’t on a team, I wasn’t even competing against anyone but myself. I gave it everything, and I failed out. I’ve never experienced anything like it. I felt such an immense amount of pressure and stress leading up to when I finally got the boot. But you know what I did after that crushing failure? I got the fuck back up. You can too.
I failed the test that was my last chance to stay in the program in the morning. That afternoon I toured another coding bootcamp. I knew that this was something I wanted to do and wanted to complete. I had invested too much already and I wasn’t taking this failure as the way this part of my journey ended. Fuck that. I knew that I was capable. I knew that I was going to be good at this career and that it was going to serve me well.
I ended up enrolling at Fullstack Academy a few weeks later. I got an incredible education there. The instructors were top notch. Sincerely head and shoulders above the instructors at App Academy. App Academy sort of had everyone at each other’s throats. It was a very clique-y and scarcity-mindset kind of place. Fullstack Academy was encouraging while still demanding a lot from you. I value my time there a great deal.
After completing Fullstack Academy, I found a job at a startup called DribbleUp. All of these experiences were so new to me. I grew up on a ranch in california. Here I was living in brooklyn, going to school in mahattan, working on long island, coding (dating a manipulative bitch that’ll be a story for a different time). It was exactly the reality that I was trying to create for myself.
One of the things I’ve pursued in this life, maybe above anything else, is the ability to be comfortable in any situation with any type of people. I put extreme value on experiences that are sure to be very different from anything else I’ve experienced. I think because it’s those sorts of things where you learn the most. And isn’t that the point? isn’t that the best? Growth. When you feel like you ARE better than you were yesterday. That you are capable of more than you were a year ago. Feeling like you’ve graduated to another level.
That definitely influenced why I wanted to do Ayahuasca so bad. A shamanic experience deep in the Peruvian jungle with an ancient DMT plant medicine? Yup. I’m in. I went and attended what some call the Don Howard School of Higher Consciousness. And I graduated to another level of awareness. It doesn’t make things easy, ha, I laugh at the thought. But it does feel fulfilling. Who wants an easy life anyway? I want to fight. I want the challenge. I’m glad I failed out of App Academy. I’m grateful that I got to experience what it’s like to try my best at something and fail. And get crushed. Which makes me think of that relationship with that controlling bitch. I failed that too. And let me tell you that was a lot more devastating to my psyche than failing out of that bootcamp. It’s been 6 months since it ended and I’m still recovering from the damage that relationship did to me.
I’m working on feeling grateful for it too. Like I’m grateful for failing out of the bootcamp. I know what it’s like to be manipulated, controlled, lied to, cheated on and used by a total narcissist… like I said, still recovering, still getting to the point of gratefulness for that experience as well. It’s hard a lot of times to believe that it’s coming, but when I’m inspired and at my best I do think that it is. I can hear the whisper of adding that to experiences that I highly value.
Around the time when that relationship was falling apart, I was feeling like being in New York wasn’t healthy for me. It wasn’t a place where I was thriving. So I decided I would do something about it. Through a friend I was able to get a remote contract at a dope company called PhotoShelter. Once I had that, I started making moves. My best idea for where to go was Colorado. Getting out into the mountains, with mountain people and mountain friends sounded nourishing after being in the metropolitan stress and noise of NYC. I didn’t have enough money saved up just yet to make the move, so I went and stayed at my parent’s place for a few months while I saved up for Colorado. Eventually I did, I packed up my stuff and moved to Colorado Springs.
When I got here, I had an apartment lined up, but wanted to see it before I actually signed the lease. It was kind of a shit hole…water damage on all the floorboards, I was told there was a fireplace, there was not. No view at all, low ceilings. The moment I walked in I thought “If I live here, I’m going to end up killing myself. This is depressing af.” So I bailed on that. My car was filled to the brim with all my stuff, mattress on top and everything. But within a day or two I found another apartment and got myself a nice little 1 bedroom where I am currently living right now. It’s not depressing haha. I now would choose somewhere else if I could do it over. But it was my best idea at the time.
That idea has been becoming more and more significant to me. I really like that. Do your best idea. I feel like I’m not going to get a better idea, until I do my best one. I want better ideas. I want to find the city to live in that is the best for me. I want to find the job that will be the most fulfilling, the woman that helps me be my best and most inspired self. And sure, I try to think of all the variables, I try to plan and think about all the things that will make a city or job the most fulfilling for me. But chances are good that whatever my best idea is now, isn’t taking into account some need or want that I have that I’ve forgotten about or don’t yet realize. So I accomplish my best idea, pretty much for the pupose of seeing what better idea I’ll have next.
I also think about matching that idea with the 80/20 rule. I forget exactly what that is to most people. But the way I think of it is that you can get 80% of the benefit of something with a certain amount of effort, but then it gets exponentially harder for that last 20%. So my idea is to just go for 80%. Get 80% of the best idea and do that.
Like right now, this blog post is probably way too long. I know that, haha. But if I don’t post it as is, at 80% of a good idea, I’ll end up agonizing over how to break it up and what ideas are especially good and blah blah blah, all the editing stuff. And i’ll probably get paralyzed and in a few days I’ll think it’s all crap and too hard and I’ll never post anything.
Part of what I’m trying to do with this post is to encourage myself. To remind myself of how great I am. How I look for challenges and ways to put myself in situations where I will be tested and made better than I was before. I push it so far that I fail. That I go over the edge sometimes. Also reminding myself that when I go at something, I go hard. I’m all in. I don’t fuck around. And that means getting vulnerable and risking a lot. I’m proud of myself for that. When I fail, I get up. When I accomplish my best idea, I look for a better one. Go ahead, try to stop me. You might win a battle, you might injure me, but I’m growing. I’m getting stronger and more skilled. Able to take more and give more all the time. Watch me.
