September Progress Report

“The process of moving through levels of intelligence is not merely linear, your whole life is a kind of apprenticeship to which you apply your learning skills.”

OBJECT LEVEL (what did I do?)

Self-feedback:

Wow — this month has been a rollercoaster. I’ve experienced feelings on the both ends of the spectrum: from suffocation and desperation to light-headedness and happiness. I’m ridiculously excited to announce that I’ve made the biggest move of my life yet: creating a learning bootcamp curriculum for myself and spending the next two months fully immersed in writing and instructional design.

Here’s where I’m at for goals:

Previous goals:

Previous goals were always areas of play that I wanted more of in my life: writing, videos, dance. But they were so removed from my everyday life, existing in their own little subset, never growing and expanding because I had limited time to spend on them.

Now my life feels more holistic, more balanced. I’m finally blending the lines between work and play — by focusing on writing (a hobby that’s very close to my heart) and instructional design (a potential career field that merges all my interests). And I’ll have more time and energy to spend on videos and dance because my other activities fuel, rather than drain me.

How I did:

Rather than how “I” did, it’s more of how friends closest to me has supported me in creating this alt.MBA inspired personal masters. Having my basic and psychological needs cared for, I feel there’s so much potential to get closest to self-actualization as I have ever (never?) been.

Snippets from insightful posts:

Cultivating knowledge vs. consuming info:

• The Circle of Control is anything that relates directly to you; situations where you influence the outcome, like the skills you build, the projects you create, or the habits you engage in. Basically, information that improves how you spend your time
• When you say that you are going to expand your Circle of Control, what you really mean is that you’re going to reduce irrelevant information and spend more time exploring the depths of those topics relevant to you. Especially because 99% of what you will see won’t matter to you
• Ways to expand Circle of control: improving job skills, experimenting with new interests, creating more work/art, getting intentional with learning
• Health and happiness are determined by how you spend your time overall. It’s the compounding interest that produces the biggest results, not individual swings

Good habits:

• micro quotas + macro goals: quotas are the minimum amounts of work that you must get done every single day to make your goals a reality; goals are the big picture items that you wish to someday accomplish.
• Motivation is interwoven with the goals you make and the habits you plan to form in order to achieve them

How our projects shape our personalities:

• What you do affects who you are.

That’s because personal projects are all about the future — they point us forward, guiding us along routes that might be short and jerky, or long and smooth. By tracing their route, we can map the most intimate of terrains: ourselves. Most thrilling is that we can learn to adjust our trajectories, riding over the rough patches and extending the smooth stretches to make our endeavors more effective. In this way, projects help define us by shaping our capacity for a flourishing life. In a sense, as go your projects, so goes your life.

• Personality traits are certainly a strong predictor of happiness, but projects can trump traits when it comes to well-being. Your deeds speak louder than your dispositions
• This is how what you do can remake who you are. You may not be naturally open and extraverted. But given an important occasion or project, you have little choice but to act out of character, to rise to the occasion and be an alternative you — in a sense, perhaps, an optimized you

Made you think podcast: letters from Seneca:

• when choosing books: use the Lindy rule (has it been around for a long time) and ask yourself “would you reread this book”?
• reading is a conversation with your brain and the text on the page, every rereading is different because of new perspective you’ve gained in the meantime

How distractions shape who we are:

• Process of developing expertise is not passive accumulation of bits of knowledge; it’s contending with the basic relationship of ourselves to the world: that it resists our will.
• But this makes education a tricky matter. Because the first step in education, training, or skill-building is, again, submission. Submission to communities of practice, aesthetic traditions, and the guidance of teachers and mentors.
• Our education taught us critical thinking and analysis, so that we could have opinions of our own. But personal development requires stepping beyond the personal — starting with submission to a world beyond your head.
• The question that hovers over your character is no longer how good you are, but how capable you are. Capability here is measured in something like kilowatt hours — the raw ability to make things happen

Leverage info overload as creative fuel:

• complete small projects to integrate the learning: “ Learning is not memorizing information. Real learning happens when you take action. Taking action gives you feedback from real life experience, which gives you new data to reflect on that feeds onto your work.”
• Action → feedback → reflection

PROCESS LEVEL (how did I do it?)

Belief updates:

• Mindshifts in “alternative paths of how my future can look like”: first time experiencing so vividly why taking steps towards our truest dreams are the scariest.
• I am the artist of my own life: wow, I can really shape my future. Is it really that malleable, can I really mold it so easily? Am I really the sculptor of my dreams?
• Every interaction is a free trial to a lifetime of compounding returns

META LEVEL (why did I do it?)

• to explore before I get pigeon-holed into a path that I have not consciously chosen for myself
• to take some time away from social constraints and listen to my self, my deepest self
• to embark on the path of creatives, without financial or day to day stability
• to take a huge risk, yet the least risk, as an investment in my future self
• to take action on a choice, as not acting is also a choice in itself

Goals for next month:

Here’s what my learning plan looks like:

A more detailed explanation for each section:

• Theme: topics I want to write about
• Potential projects: areas in which I can use writing to create a tangible product, like a portfolio piece
• Schedule: # of hours a day, # of times per week
• Weekly outputs: plans and final deliverables at the end of each week
• End goal / success metric: quantitatively, what I want to accomplishment by end of the month and qualitatively, what kind of impact I want to make with my focus area
• Resources: books for inspiration or books I’ll use in my projects
• Prep work: to do list of pre-class homework for myself, whether it’s creating a writing schedule or reaching out to people for feedback

Monthly project:

• ^the learning bootcamp above is my monthly project. Now that I have aligned more of work and play, I don’t have to have separate monthly goals and projects, as I’m more unified in the things I’m doing, heading in the direction that I want, heading towards a more unified direction :)

Thanks for reading! This is #8 of my monthly progress reports. You can check out the previous one here:

August Progress Report