Week 1470

I have been procrastinating writing this reflection for a few days now. Part of that procrastination has been thinking about why I am procrastinating and I have come to the conclusion that while I like that I have pivoted away from trying to focus solely on activities that have inherent utility to my life, I feel a slight shame with it. 

I know the lifestyle that I want to live and I know that it will take a lot of work to achieve it but I still find myself struggling with identifying where I want to focus my energy to drive the outcomes. 

My wife has taken a large step towards making a passion of hers into a business right now, and I am proud to support her in this endeavor. She is off to an awesome start and thoroughly enjoys what she is doing. Plus, I am too risk averse for both of us to be in the start up phase at the same time. 

We have achieved a nice standard of living and I would rather continue working on my various interests when I am not working. 

I am also a bit tired of pivoting repeatedly. While I like that I don’t force myself to commit to any one thing, it feels at times like I am unable to fully commit myself. 

It has been really bothering me that I stopped studying Japanese (I have spent over two years using Wanikani, Lingq, listening to Japanese podcasts, watching anime, trying to output a tiny bit) and, while my motivation is based on the idea of going back to Japan and connecting with people, it is something that I want to see through. While studying has genuinely kicked my ass and made me feel like an idiot, it has been fun and part of my life I have greatly enjoyed. 

Additionally, I have been a bit of a gym rat and haven’t thought much about it until recently. 

I have no desire to be a fitness expert. I just want to see what I look like jacked and genuinely got tired of being overweight. 

I am currently 32 weeks deep and it has become a deep part of my life again. I lost 35 pounds and am beginning an 8 month lean bulk (8 weeks in at the moment doing an experiment for Jeremy Ethier’s app, BWS+). 

I don’t regret any of the other work that I have done this year. Coding with AI was eye-opening at the capabilities of AI agents and how much work goes into building software. It also informed me of my ignorance to coding and how I still believe that it’s important to understand coding even if AI will be able to do most of the labor. 

Trying to make courses showed me how much I hate teaching concepts that I don’t feel like an expert in. Posting to YouTube has continually shown me that I don’t want to lock myself into a corner with what I do. Listening to Podcasts and audiobooks has exposed me to SO much helpful information and interesting people. 

The inundation of information has also shown me that I can’t stand dogmatic (a word I didn’t know earlier this year) thinkers that are close-minded to any ideologies that aren’t theirs and it has made me really like the idea of experimenting with my life and practicing in public. 

I really have no idea if bodybuilding and fluency in Japanese will make any meaningful contributions to my life outside of having an interesting skillset but maybe they will open me to opportunities that I couldn’t possibly be aware of. 

The above is a larger reflection. Below will be the reflection on week 1470. 

I have been running in preparation for the OneWorld Canine Obstacle Course with my dog, Truman but have felt tightness in my left hip flexor and glute. This seems to indicate a muscular imbalance or an issue with my overall running form. I went on one run this week and experienced a larger degree of discomfort than I would like considering running is not a main priority for me outside of aerobic conditioning. 

In addition to my hip flexor and my glute, my left shoulder has been feeling off. This has prompted me to look at more functional styles of training. My temptation to buy maces, clubs, gorz, ropes, bosu balls, and various training methods has skyrocketed. 

With that, I decided to focus my attention on rope flow. While I am new, it is pretty intuitive and I have been enjoying having a way to get a little activity in throughout my day. I am focusing dominantly on how I engage my legs, shoulders, and spinal rotation. 

With my Japanese, I haven’t found myself as interested in reading anything on Lingq right now, I’d rather read a book and you can’t import books from Kindle easily. I have been diving back into Wanikani and had over 800 reviews going into the week. I am now in the 700s. It seems slow but I am writing out the example sentences so I can get used to outputting and understanding the various contexts. 

The idea of copying the sentences came from my brief introduction into copywriting and the numerous recommendations to copy sentences over and over and over again until it is committed to memory and natural. 

I’m not a fan of tedious work but this has been interesting to me and I have enjoyed being able to type out sentences in Japanese. 

I am also going to play through Pokemon Violet in Japanese. 

I took a long weekend from work to take care of my wife’s car and played a disc golf tournament with my buddy from high school (and lost a couple of discs—typical). 

I decided during my procrastination that I would lean into the concept of time management for mortals in tracking what week in my life I am on to encourage me to live with intention. I like the concept of memento mori and the idea of reminding yourself of your own mortality. 

I also decided on weekly reflections as I am leaning into the seemingly boring parts of life and a daily reflection felt… trivial and a bit unengaging.

Life is made of the seemingly boring but typing out the daily repetition felt redundant where with weekly, I have a bit more to reflect on and some decent highlights.