3rd year anniversary!

Woooooooooo!!! 3 years into this blog!!
It's been a loooooong ride but sure worth it! I'm finally reaping the benefits of writing this blog consistently and being able to look back at my life 3 years ago and enjoy the journey.

Today's the day I do a big evaluation of my life so far and to be honest, it's good :) I mean, I still have a lot of goals to achieve but in a way I don't feel like it's filling in holes that are like eye-sores but more like journey's I'm excited to take. My mental shift from feeling inadequate to feeling challenged has been the biggest difference. Before, in my early entries, you'd read about my struggles trying to stay afloat, but now it's a matter of what can I do while on top of things?

In fact, not achieving goals doesn't bum me out like it used to because I've come to realize, if I've failed at one thing, chances are I've succeeded in something else of the same caliber.

I suffered from food poisoning a few days ago and it was one of those bad ones where you just feel dead and don't want to move from bed deals. I was truly annoyed at first because I had everything planned out for the day, things were supposed to move smoothly and nothing seemed like it could get in my way..... except myself.

So a couple of days letting myself rest and now being day 3 since I enjoyed myself some extra special time with the toilet bowl, I'm trying to get back on track as before. So there are a few things I'm trying to get done today, one of them is obviously this entry, then the rest is listed out in my trusty Remember the Milk list of to do's.

I've finally got myself into proper routines that have turned into habits and thanks to rootein.com constantly bitching at me when I slack off, I've managed to use self-expectation to keep myself on track. Speaking of self-expectation, I don't know how many people believe in affirmations but unlike the typical new age way of thinking your way to change, I wake up and promise myself certain things and what happens in it kind of becomes a self-trust thing where I don't want to let myself down. Kind of like how even though you know someone doesn't deserve your help but you still help them because you can't get past yourself as a person if you just stand there watching them fail. In it's own way it's like I subconsciously promise myself certain things and over the day when I feel lazy or lose that motivation, I keep reminding myself "man, but you promised yourself you'd do it" and the idea of that promise keeps it going. It's kind of what David Allen said in Getting Things Done. The reason you feel bad when you don't do the things you always wanted to do is because it's kind of like you promised yourself to do them and ended up breaking that promise. It also helps when you have things reminding you of your promises every now and then. Say this blog, and I have my GTD system remind me of stuff like "Write comedy!" and mark down my calendar which days I should be hitting the gym.

I'll admit, sometimes you mentally lose that focus and want to just give up, but speaking of wanting to just give up, I was randomly searching some youtube clips and came across the training for the movie Ninja Assassin for the actor/singer Rain. Woah, the training he went through puts the seemingly brutal workout I have for myself to shame. Seriously, check this out:



There are a bunch of other clips but it was impressive to watch and realize that sometimes when you have that person watching you, you push yourself that extra mile. Sometimes I try to do this at the gym, like I pretend people are watching me and pretend I want to show off to them. I even get angry at barbells and stuff and pretend they are laughing at me :P It's quite bizarre really.

But my point is, watching people like this push to envelope really reminds me that this is one of my promises to myself. As one of my earliest posts quoted from Albert Einstein:

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

And an even better one by Bruce Mau that really explains a lot of what I think now:

Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we're going, but we will know we want to be there.

Ahh to know that this is what I thought 3 years ago is encouraging. It's great to see how the same things can mean something different over time.

The most interesting thing is, 3 years ago I'd never have my current state of life in mind, I didn't know the outcome but I knew the process I needed to take for the sake of progress. Much like I won't ever know if I will ever win the lottery, but I do know the process of getting there. Along the way I might end up winning or doing something else, but if I never went through the process, I'd only know that winning the lottery would be impossible.

I was speaking to one of the Chinese comics last night about my goals this year and at one point he told me I was really crazy for trying to accomplish so much, but he was more surprised at the fact that I wasn't going nuts about it. Like I wasn't allowing myself to get obsessed about stuff and sacrifice other things. Now I have to admit this is not 100% true, sometimes I do get obsessed and it's hard for me to realize that other things in my life need attention too. For example, everyone knows that I could go on and on and on with blog entries, but I keep trying to keep things simple and set a maximum time for everything. It's quite hard because many things are out of my control to be honest, but whatever I can fix myself, I don't let it slip by my hands without a time stamp of some sort.

So the final verdict, 3 years into this blog is, I've finally come to enjoy the journey more than just achieving the goal and ending my trip. Instead of seeing only 1 light at the end of the tunnel, I'm setting milestones and celebrating everytime they're done :) Heck, at least it gives me more reasons to feel good about everything rather than "be patient" all the time.

And here's to another 6 months of great journeying before my next blog milestone and see you in 10 days!