Re Human — Week 1 Recap
I’m adopting a lifestyle where I’m developing myself in 15 areas at a time. This post is part of my Re Human project.
If you own your day, you own your life. I feel like I was able to own every day this week. Although it was definitely not easy, I did all I set out to do for my Re Human project this week.
Re Human System Improvements
Using a visual aid to remember all the activities.
The “first day” of my Re Human project was on Monday. At the end of the day I thought I did everything in my system because it seemed like so with what I had written down but the next day I realized that I had forgotten to include the 10minutes of Piano in the post and thus forgot to do it on Monday. So I did Piano twice on Tuesday — right then in the morning when I realized and in the afternoon. This was enough to make me realize that a visual aid would be very useful as I’m adjusting to this lifestyle to remember all the activities I want to be doing. So I made this:
Documenting thought process every day. You can see all the daily posts in my Re Human Publication.
On the second day my friend and co-founder Max, who had done a similar type of public personal project, mentioned he found it useful to write his thought process publicly every day — so I decided to give it a try.
Renaming to Re Human.
On the third day an idea popped into my mind of renaming the project to “Re Human”. I like it because it’s shorter, rehumans.com was available (so I got it), and it gives me a lot to play with. I love the concepts of Re-Thinking, Re-Defining, Re-Creating, Renaissance, Revival, Refresh, Re-Design, Re-anything and now Re Human. I love it. The power to transcend paradigms is the highest leverage point for “systems”. I think Re Human can be an awesome concept and start a movement around re-defining how you want to live.
Internalizing the power and beauty of Art.
On days 5 and 6, the power and beauty of Art started becoming more clear. Since I can remember, I’ve had “4 main life pillars” that I’ve always made an effort to keep a balance in— mental, physical, spiritual, social. This has been one of my most important and rewarding “life compasses”. I thought those pillars encompassed pretty much everything and kept it simple enough — but I’ve realized that Art hasn’t been a big part of my life; the “excuse” that Art was encompassed within Mental or Spiritual hasn’t been working. I consider myself a creative person and have always cultivated creativity and creation, but now I’ve come to realize that Art isn’t necessarily just creativity.
I’ve realized it’s an awesome dimension of life that I want more of, so I decided to conceptualize it as one of my life pillars so I can remember it’s important for me. I think an Artistic mindset can be applied to anything you do and it’ll add color, play, inspiration, beauty, creativity, and other surprises.
Areas Week Overview
Daily Habits
Meditation: I experimented with 20mins in the morning, 20mins at night, 10mins in the morning and 10 at night. My favorite is still 20mins in the morning — maybe because that’s what I’m currently most used to.
Writing: This is the habit I’m the most surprised by. I studied Computer Science and Applied Math in college, so writing isn’t something that I’ve had extensive practice in. Writing essays was always like continuously having to jump off a cliff for the first time — throughout each essay.
But this week I’ve somehow been able to write each of the daily posts for documentation (6 posts) plus 9 completely different “daily thoughts” (small blogposts) and put together my Weekly Present and this Weekly Recap post. Wow. I feel like I’m getting more comfortable writing and publishing — two things I wanted and continue wanting to improve. Oh and I also do daily morning and night journaling — separate from all that.😱 (although each of these little journals take only ~3minutes though).
Piano: The first day I did the classic “learn piano” search in Google and one of the first results was Flowkey. I looked around a bit more, but decided to give Flowkey a try. I’ve loved it so far — have used it every day. More reasons on why in my first daily post.
Books: This week I read a very short book on how to improve your skill of improving at skills, called the Little Book of Talent. Then I read Genius Foods — awesome tips about nutrition (useful because now that I’m not in college and don’t have access to a dining hall, I’ve been trying to figure out how to eat very healthy without much time or money). Then I finished re-reading (had started re-reading last week) The Art of Living by Epictetus — also a super short book but definitely top 3 most “wisdom-per-page” book I’ve ever encountered. Then I’ve been reading and I’m almost done with Why We Sleep; basically reaffirming my belief that sleeping 8 hours is the single most important daily habit everyone should have. My notes on these books and a couple of more (only started actually taking notes on books I read recently) here.
Media Influencer: This is the area I think I can improve the most. Having some trouble figuring out the best approach for creating and presenting content on Instagram — tried posting an Instagram story of my Salsa classes, posted my initial “grid art”, and did some brainstorming / talking with people about this but that’s about it. I’m probably going to compress this weekly recap into a single instagram post. I’m trying to figure out a system that’s valuable, interesting, and doesn’t take much time from me.
Soccer trick juggling: I’ve felt a lot of progress in this area. Practicing every day — even just 10 minutes has been super helpful. It’s hard to “describe” the soccer tricks without videos so I’m just going to let this be better presented in Instagram. One good thing I found is practicing in a spot that has 4 walls close to each other, so if the ball falls I don’t have to walk much to pick it up.
Fitness: I’ve been trying to get a real “one hand pull-up”. Today I came very very close (my friend said it counts but I want to do it even better). It’s wild that I can do 42 straight pull ups but can’t do a single one-hand pull up. (I’ve been starting my workouts with doing “as many pull ups as I can”). Also been focusing on the side abs (obliques) for that human flag.
Building and Running a Startup: Had an awesome week, having “breakthrough” learnings and ideas every day, and full of “deep” work every day. Having my phone in do-not-disturb all day and also using airplane mode smartly is an amazing hack.
Weekly Habits
Music Production: Learning and practicing a lot — still very far from feeling comfortable using Logic Pro and from creating things I find remotely good. But it’ll come.
Digital Drawing & Painting: Feels nice to take time to “paint”. iPad and the app Procreate has been beautiful for this.
V.R. Artist and Architect: Been learning three.js, an awesome javascript library for creating 3D things in the web.
Graphic Design: Been using Figma and loving it. Love how graphic design allows me to see thoughts and ideas visually, and help me make them pretty.
Salsa Dancing: Went to a Salsa class and learned so much in an hour! Very fun to interact with people and notice things like how eyes also dance.
Different & Positive Social Interaction Systems: putting together my weekly present newsletter is one of my favorite parts of the week. I feel like writing these documentation/recap posts is also a way to interact socially.
Topics Deep Dives: Sundays (today) is the first day of “topics deep dives” so we’ll see. I’m probably going to be choosing “systems over goals” as my first “topic deep dive” since I’m writing a blog post about it. Haven’t decide how long the “deep dives” will be.
More detailed thoughts, tips, and takeaways about each area, organized by day in my Re Human publication.
Connections, Takeaways and Ideas
Wow this post became huge. There were already several connections, takeaways, and ideas throughout so I’m going to keep it simple and say that thinking “in systems” is very useful.
I’m writing a blog post about this so if you want to stay updated, sign up to my 🎁 Present Newsletter and join my journey on my instagram (@re.human).
