Re Human — Week 8 Reflections — Day 56
Re-inventing ourselves is the most important skill nowadays. I’m reinventing myself by improving in 15 areas at a time. This post is part of my Re Human project.
Last night I was faced with a tradeoff.
My girlfriend had to wake up early for her morning class, it was past a good bed time, and I hadn’t finished my weekly present newsletter and hadn’t started my weekly recap.
I could: try to hurry my weekly recap and publish it overnight, or just finish it in the morning the next day.
I concluded that I value my girlfriend’s sleep & time and a higher quality post more than a 1am rushed weekly recap that most people will read the next day — or many days afterwards anyway. So I decided to finish my weekly present because it was mostly done, and work on my weekly recap in the morning, which is now as I write this. It’s really important to think about what really matters and whether something that you think matters is really an arbitrary thing that doesn’t matter much.
Weekly Recap
For this weekly recap, I’m mostly going to write about some stories and reflections of the week — another way to do a “weekly recap” I hadn’t experimented with yet.
This week I flew from SF to Providence (Brown) on Wednesday. Even though travel disrupts routines, I was able to find time to do all my re human activities. It was also much harder to find the times to do all the things while I’ve been at Brown — again because the routine I had crafted had to adapt itself to several modifications — but I was able to do all the things.
For example, some days it made sense to swap some extended activities, like instead of doing Salsa on the plane, I did music production, and then the next day I would do music production I did Salsa.
Also, since it didn’t make sense for me to travel with my piano keyboard, it was an adventure to find available pianos around the Brown campus. Some times I had to ask people in rooms if they would mind switching to another of the free rooms that didn’t have the piano. Other times I had to find a Brown security guard and convince him I was still a Brown student so he could open a building that was locked during the weekend. Other times I had to search through 4 different pianos in order to find something that could work. Other times, finding a piano in the airplane seemed pretty hard so I instead watched piano video tutorials.
Something else I realized is the value of routines.
If you reflect what are the important things you want to be doing and then create a routine that helps you do those things, then there’s way less chance the things won’t happen.
Because I’m not in SF in my house and there’s a lot of things that I had to change/innovate during my day to do my activities, there was a much higher chance that I wouldn’t had done several of my activities. I came very close.
Also, the nature of the work I was doing for my startup was very time consuming in an unexpected way — I did a lot of bottom up research (talking with people (both scheduled and anyone that crossed my path) and asking them questions trying to understand how to build something valuable), and sometimes it made more sense to keep talking with a person or group because the information was valuable or I wouldn’t be able to reach them in person any time soon.
Another important thing I realized:
If you know what you have/want to be doing, you can be way more efficient & effective with your time.
If I hadn’t reflected and made the decision that I want to be doing 10mins of soccer trick juggling every day — and instead just had the nebulous idea that I would just somehow would want to get better, I would very likely not practice almost ever, because things always get in the way — literally everything in the world wants our attention; that’s what all companies, people, and activities are fighting for.
Did you like this format of story/reflection based writing? What has been your favorite style of weekly recaps? Or do you enjoy seeing different styles? I’ve actually found it useful to write these in many different styles, because I’ve learn from each one of them. Another important realization. Experiments are awesome.
More detailed thoughts, tips, and takeaways about each area, organized by day in my Re Human publication.
Read the next post. Read the previous day’s post.
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Thank You :).
