When I decided to dedicate a significant portion of my life to extensive self learning experiments, I did so with a suspicion that there might be some patterns in personal development pursuits that hold true across different domains. That belief was the primary reason I had the confidence to try and carve my own path in the world even when I already had a decent one in front of me. As I’ve continued to pursue different learning journeys I’ve started to find some familiar beats. Today I’m going to discuss the one I find myself at today, the phase of initial dissatisfaction. This is the part of the journey when you decide out to wipe the fog off your mirror and you realize don’t like what you see in your reflection.
When I take a good hard look at my life I realize it isn’t the life that I want. Let me tell you what I see when I look in my mirror. I see someone who is not physically depressed, but is also not happy. I see someone who is embarrassed that they’ve spent so much of their life skateboarding, but it still can do so little and is unconfident about how to move forward. I see someone who feels as though they are compromising in their life’s work. Someone who dreams of being an extraordinary person who does great things, but whose current position and trajectory make these dreams seem like nothing but fantasies. I see someone who is afraid of being trapped at their current place in life. I see someone who desperately wants to break ahead of the pack even though most days it feel like they need to run their fastest just to keep up.
While this is a harsh picture to take in, I can also make out a glimmer in the reflection of my eye. I see someone who wants to learn how to run faster. I see someone who sees the present situation well enough to put improving it into action. I see someone who is familiarizing themselves with the truth as it will be their guiding light to their next destination.
Why does the harsh truth matter so much and how can we use it to improve the image we see in our reflection?
When I started lifting weights I did so because I thought that it would lead to results. I started by going to the gym, following random workouts, setting the pins in random positions, and working out until it felt good enough. I would convince myself that I was seeing results, but I didn’t know exactly what those results were. I would show up at school later that week and see someone with a strong build and muscular arms. Someone who didn’t have to say they worked out because you could tell simply by looking at them. These people infuriated me. I would make up excuses for why genetics made it easier for them. I would stop looking at myself honestly which only drove myself further into my delusion. Eventually something snapped and I realized I wanted to look like I worked out. I wanted to come back from summer break and I wanted people to notice that I had become more muscular. I wanted to be stronger and more attractive, and I was willing to bear some psychological pain if it meant I was going to accomplish this.
So I identified the problem. I was skinny, my arms were skinny, my chest was flat,I could see my ribs, and my weight was lower than I wanted it to be. So I committed to making progress and I decided what dimension I would make meaningful progress across, bodyweight. I was here and I wanted to be there. To accomplish this, every week I had a moment of truth, where I would need to weigh more than I did the week before by a certain threshold, or I knew that I needed to eat more, lift heavier, sleep more, and be more strict with my routine until I made the type of progress I wanted to make at the rate that I wanted to make it. Once I aligned my focus on that I found my worries evaporated away, and when I returned from summer break people noticed and I felt like I had successfully reinvented myself.
Where do I find myself now? I’m in the phase of initial dissatisfaction once again. Although my focus has shifted away from gaining muscle mass, I’m still the skinny kid looking at himself in the mirror. I’ve decided I’m dissatisfied with what I see (I want to be better) and I’m making a plan to fix it (I will be better). I’ve called my current plan Term II, and while I don’t know how to get from here to there yet, I know that the only way to make honest progress is to take a hard look at one’s self. I’m entering my 6 month “summer break” hoping to come out changed on the other side. I want people to notice that I’ve taken my skateboarding to the next level. I want to be taken seriously as a data scientist, something I started knowing nothing about. I want to be a significant individual contributor to an indie video game. I want to see my bank accounts grow from products I developed while having fun with my best friends. I want my physics skills to stop atrophying and to grow beyond where they once were. I have an idea of what I want to see in the future of my reflection, but I understand that a holistic view of myself will be the guiding light I use to make progress. My flaws will direct me towards areas of improvement, missed progress will dictate a course correction, and the payoff will be much more satisfying when I know it’s rooted in reality.
Now that I have an understanding of this phase as a part of the learning process and a rough idea of the phase that comes next I have come to welcome and embrace it. But how do you measure progress if you don’t know what you’re doing? How does a skinny kid track their progress without labeled weights, a scale, or a tape measure? Which metric should we attach ourselves to when we don’t know enough to know which metrics matter? That is part of the next phase. Maybe I’ll write about that in the future, but for now I’m going to start with what I know for sure. If I follow a progressive training program and I put in the hours, I will see some results (even if those aren’t necessarily the results I’m looking for). Hours might not be the right metric, but it’s hours of work that separate the before picture from the after picture, not just the passing of time.
Next Time: The Hours