Weeks 1520 and 1521

07/20/26

For the life of me, I can’t remember his name but in my usual content-consumption routine, I listened to Mel Robbin’s podcast featuring Dr. K from a Healthy Gamer and he said something that I couldn’t help but act upon today. 

I honestly can’t remember what he was talking about but he talked about the importance of reflecting on both the good and the bad and how this reinforces the correct behaviors and helps you grow. 

This led me to think about how often I kick myself when I don’t accomplish everything that I want to in a day. 

Sometimes, I live so far in the future that it feels like I have to pull the future to today when my future consists of all of the little actions that I take today.  

What this means is that instead of focusing on the week or the month or the year, I need to focus on the day. Solely the day in front of me. If I can conquer what I want to each day, it will slowly get me to where I am going. 

I have the fortune to worry about the future but failing to conquer the day makes my concerns about the future futile. 

I wanted to take the dogs on a walk in the morning and the evening today - I want to do that everyday while I am cutting to be more successful in this cut than my last. I did it even though I had been laying in bed for an hour before I went on the second one. 

I wanted to work on my Japanese. I did all of my Wanikani reviews this morning and half of my Bunpro this evening. 

I wanted to play a little Fortnite to decompress after work. I won 4 games in a row.

Okay okay, I'm not sure how helpful that one is but the little Sprites are fun to find. 

I got my protein in. 

I installed the new faucet first thing this morning(ish). 

I didn’t want to do a lot of things today. There was friction in the decision making but in each instance, I felt better for doing it. 

This list is so simple but I am wondering if my desire to pull the future to the present has present me longing for the future more than acting upon the desire with my future state as a north star.

I still struggle with the idea of making the work the goal. It feels so… uninspiring? Yet, my overarching goals aren’t. 

And there is something inspiring about knowing that someone put in the work. Knowing that you did the work even when it was hard. 

The Rest of the Period

The above is much easier said than done. While I feel I’ve been better overall on a daily basis, it’s hard to change habits each day and I still struggle with how much to push it. 

I was watching a video on training today and Mike Israetel mentioned how much better it is to push yourself at 80-90% than to go for 100% every day and burn yourself out so much that it takes an indefinite period to recover. 

While I recognize that his point was focused on physical training, I believe there is a ton of carryover into mental fatigue. 

One of the biggest differences is that it is much easier to quantify physical fatigue when lifting weights than it is to quantify mental fatigue. 

I can measure the number of sets, the weight lifted, the RIR or RIE, but I can’t nearly as effectively measure how hard I am pushing myself mentally with Japanese practice. 

Does periodization work the same way for Japanese as it does for lifting? Can I do Japanese mesocycles?

I could measure by the number of lessons read in Satori reader or through clearing my Wanikani queue but I’m not quite sure how that carries over. 

Ultimately, all that matters is that I am progressing consistently. 

Speaking of, the dogs and I have upped our number of walks from one to two a day and I am much more consistent with my cut and rejecting food this week to stay on track. It’s important that I do so to help cut my body fat into the ~10% range before I start my bulk. 

My systemic fatigue has been pretty high so I’m about to deload but I’m really looking forward to gaining weight and approaching it in a disciplined fashion. 

Below is a summary of the last two weeks of Japanese. I transitioned from using Claude to ChatGPT so the format is slightly different. Outside of that, you’ll see a big drop off in Wanikani as I was doing more Bunpro and switched to Satori reader as I am really struggling with SRS for grammar.