by Oto | Jul 16, 2026 | Creativity, Design, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Personal Development, Productivity
AI didn't make me lazy. It handed me my own subconscious.
Right now I’m eating turkey pepper soup at my work desk, and I have multiple jobs running with AI.
One agent is taking a client project from brief to restructured profile to redesign, start to finish. First time I’ve ever let it run the whole thing. I don’t know if it will work. Another is deploying new functionality to one of my platforms. And in Obsidian, I’m voice-dumping to a third one, playing with an idea I want to post tonight. The post you’re reading now.
For the past year I’ve been all the way into AI. Like, REALLY into it. Last year, I was very skeptical. This year I had my road to Damascus moment, and I wrote about what I saw back in April, after building eight apps in six weeks without knowing how to code.
I said work was no longer about doing the work but directing it. That you need a meta approach: understand the work, its value, the systems and workflows around it, not just the task in front of you. I said AI was a motorbike for the mind, but it still needs a mind to steer it.
It’s hard to explain sometimes, but something in my mind shifted. I felt the shape of something, innately, and I’ve been chasing it ever since. The months since have been me living inside that idea. Pushing it to new and strange places.
Hold on. My agent just sent back design references. I’m laughing. Goddamn, that actually looks pretty good. Okay. Wow.
Where was I...
Oh yes, I’m always thinking about the work, not just the task.
What does it actually take to do the thing? What are the systems around it, what is the workflow, how does the work get done? Because once you can see that clearly, then you can abstract it. And once you can abstract it, you can encode it. And that is a profound thing.
If you can encode the work then you can manipulate it, engage with it in different modes. You can switch things around. You can add force multipliers at different points. You don’t just know what you are doing, you have a sense of how, and it can live outside your head and talk back to you.
I’ve spent months encoding ideas into software. I built a brand operating platform that walks you from audit all the way to growth. It’s built on my methodology, prompts, sequence, step by step. I found the methodology as I built the different parts, intuitively, in the dark it seemed half the time, with moments of radiant brilliant recognition.
That’s an idea encoded into a framework. It works.
Earlier this week I wrote a book about that methodology in five minutes. Assembled it, really. Five minutes of assembly, sitting on a vault full of notes, a pile of blog posts, months of conversations with my agents, and ten years of doing the work. First the idea lived in chat. Then it became software. Then content. Then the book. And halfway through restructuring the book I realised part of my software was wrong, and now I have to go fix it. That is what it looks like to attack an idea from every side.
Each medium teaching you something new about the whole thing.
Moving at this speed poses some questions. After months of it, “can I do it” is not the question anymore. It’s more like...okay, where are my leverage points? How do I stay sharp, hone my true unfair advantage, and not succumb to outsourcing the real thing to the machine?
My intuition points me to the loops. With these tools, the loops are faster. Iteration, feedback, build, review. That is the defining feature. When you can move from idea to software to content to book to corrected software in a week, what would take months, decades even, to surface and refine can come out much faster. The sheer speed of the loop makes you better faster...I think...It is a lot. The brain is still adjusting.
Now on to design...taste. That has always been the tricky part. That’s the piece I wrote off in April as the untemplatable part. And even as I push further into AI (I’ve moved from working in Claude chat, to cowork, to code, to terminal, and now my own agentic dashboard, in months), lately I’ve been circling back to doing more design, more writing, more directing. I have a clearer sense of what can be reliably delegated and what can’t. For now.
I’ve been seeing a lot of things as code lately. By that I mean breaking everything into its component parts and seeing how they relate, how they combine. I have been thinking about brand design the same way.
Here’s the workflow I’ve been running for a few weeks. Point the AI at a reference, or an old document, and have it extract everything, the ideas, the layouts, the type, the colour, the textures, the imagery, into a structured brand guide template that I can parse and it can understand.
Then we work. Sometimes twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours straight on one guide. Tweaking, tweaking, tweaking. I still work very hard. More now, I think. But every time I work hard now, the payoff is more than the thing. The payoff is the lesson. The payoff is me understanding my own process and learning how to communicate it to the machine. The work deposits something now, where it used to just get lost to the subconscious.
People say AI makes you lazy. I don’t know, not really my experience man. I think it is the most incredible extraction tool for everything you’ve been doing for years, for better or worse. All that subconscious knowledge, the stuff you were just good at without knowing why, for the first time you can extract it, name it, use it, tweak it. Being good at it becomes knowing why you’re good at it, becomes being able to hand it over. Conscious competency, then conscious delegation.
And once you have it named, and in your hand, it is a very powerful tool.
When you know the pieces, you know what to tweak. I understand the visual side of branding differently now. A component is no longer there because I like it. It is there because it makes sense for what the brand is supposed to be. Every tweak points at the concept. Naming my own process made me better at the process. The extraction improves the thing it extracts from.
Which brings me to tonight’s test. I’m tired. It’s been a heavy week, two days straight deep in platform UI, and a client needs this thing. And I’ve been wrestling my way to a simple admission: it is time to let go more. To embrace the leverage I’ve been building.
Sometimes you hold the AI’s hand all the way, step by step. But after you’ve done that long enough, like training a junior, there comes a day when you say: just do this. And what comes back is decent.
Tonight is that day. That’s the agent running the client project while I chop pepper soup.
And maybe there’s one more step. Maybe the agent that knows me, that has my context, my workflow, my biases, all the things in my head I usually have to connect myself, maybe at the end of the day I can jam with it the way I always tear the workday down, and out of that comes a blog post. In my voice. Edited by me. Fueled by my flow, by what happened today.
Tonight is the first time I’m fully embracing that as a valid part of my process. Dump to draft to posted, tonight. Because honestly, I’ve been having ideas and documenting concepts and lessons faster than I can deploy them, and I’ve been deploying fast.
So this is another experiment: what happens when I post the ideas as I have them, instead of sitting on them until they’re perfect. I want to join the conversation. I want to hear what you’re learning and trying, because some of what I’ve found is genuinely interesting, and I suspect some of what you’ve found is too.
That’s what this is. The same creative flow. With the brush, with the mouse, with the pen.
I am pouring my heart and mind out, the way I always did with a piece of paper in front of me. The way I always did with the blank Notion page.
The surface just thinks now.
The tools got smarter.
The hand is still mine.
by Oto | Apr 11, 2026 | Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Productivity
And I don't even know how to code
There is a revolution happening right now.
At the very front lines, things are pretty insane, new tools, frameworks and lines of attack open every day. Entire workflows and production lines are flipped on their head weekly. The very fabric and nature of knowledge work is being rewritten at the speed of algorithm.
But at the back of the class, things are still chilled. In some spaces, there are hushed whispers of a coming rumbling, but really, most people are mostly oblivious or living like everything is business as usual.
I have used AI for about a year now. I will admit I was hesitant, the earlier use cases were not very inspiring, the ethics were dodgy. Was this a real tool, or just some other hype train thing that Big Tech was bent on making a thing? They have been flailing for a real win, a real life changing, paradigm leap forward. From the crypto to the metaverse to NFTs, now AI…was this it?
At first, I mostly used it as a glorified ‘ipsum lorem’ generator for website builds.
But it was over conversations with a friend over Christmas, last year that started the second wave of my journey. He casually mentioned that he used AI for everything, he even showed me some rudimentary apps he had made.
I shrugged it off, but eventually, I got curious. What if I actively used AI to solve problems, or build things?
I needed a proper notion dashboard for my business - something I could use to track my numbers, keep track of deals, open projects, client meetings, content, all of it.
So, I tried first, got stuck and then told ChatGPT what I was trying to do, sent some screenshots and in a few minutes, we had mapped out what I needed to do, and I spent the afternoon building it out. Soon enough, I had my dashboard.
Hmm…interesting.
I fed it another idea I had - automating my brand workshops.
I had an idea of how I wanted to make it work, it gave me a workflow, I took it and went off to build. I spent a day struggling and fussing, but couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted, and the AI kept not giving me the solution I needed, so I left it.
I used it to work through some brand clarity issues, create a content plan and solve some small problems. It was helpful, but too focused on its own paths. Every time I used it to write, it sounded more like itself than me. And sure it showed me how to build things, but it itself couldn’t do much.
Then I met Claude. I fed it my idea for the automated workshop. It asked me a few questions.
And then it just built it.
It didn’t give me a long list of things to do. I didn’t need to learn new technologies, or go do further research. It just made the thing I asked for.
That was the first mind-blowing thing. Over hours of prompting back and forth, I had a working prototype of my idea. It was a real thing, that worked just the way I imagined it should. Over the next week, I kept prompting, adding features, adjusting the layout.
Eventually, I took the UI, put it in Figma and explored design options until I found one I liked, threw it back to Claude and it coded my project pixel perfect.
Incredible.
The next week was mostly ideation, bouncing concepts back and forth, putting my brand through my workshop, pushing the answers into Claude, refining, creating reference sheets and brand guides, giving Claude even more context. A process of iterative refinement.
Every time I would log on to X, I’d see even more use cases and projects, and workflows. People were actively experimenting and documenting, pushing the boundaries of what we thought was possible.
A new way of working was literally being born. For the first time, a lot of ideas were possible, at the very least, we could take them from static designs and interactive prototypes to actually real, deployable products.
The tasks that always took too long, the steps that were tedious, the bottlenecks…here were emerging the tools, frameworks and workflows to fix all that.
I realised that my tech stack was obsolete. Sure, it is still working now - the Office Suite, the Adobe Suite, all the management, note taking, communication tools.
But in truth, everything was free game, everything was subject to change. The hot new design workflows on the block are not in Adobe, they are in Figma, and Framer, and Claude and Stitch and Nano Banana. There will be even more new names tomorrow.
These tools take skills that were hard to access and democratise them.
For the beginners and the unskilled, it gives them a chance to enter the game, to play around with ideas, for now.
For those who are already skilled, with years in the game and hard-won experience and judgement, it makes us 10x.
If you are actually already good at what you do, AI gives you the ability to be even better.
The opportunities for leverage are insane.
Yes this is a glaze fest.
And I haven’t even gotten around to the most sublime experience I had.
Prompting through a Saturday night in March, working on my ever expanding list of ideas, I decided to feed Claude my personal website. Look at all 200+ of my blog posts and analyse and give feedback.
The rest of that day was almost a spiritual experience. It went through all my writing and in less than 3 minutes had given me a full breakdown. It pointed out my best writing and my weakest, it led me down a path that felt truly cathartic, helping me process something about my writing that had never quite been articulated before.
Sure, I might be microdosing on AI psychosis.
I mean I am aware about how ‘weird’ it is to feel strongly about something that isn’t…alive.
But it fulfilled a real need, it gave real value, it made me more confident in my peculiar style of writing, in what makes me me.
In all of this, I have come to understand something that I have hinted about throughout this piece, and something I touched on at the beginning.
The world is changing. In more profound ways than people realise. I might be being hyperbolic, but it is what I truly believe. AI is beyond AI slop. There is definitely low quality AI output and tools and products, sure. There is also slop of everything.
But for the creators, the generalists, the combinators, the one-man armies, there is a whole paradigm shift of work that is happening, a whole generation of tools and workflows that are emerging, that fundamentally change what is possible.
And if you are not actively experimenting and seeing what works best for you, and trying out not just new tools, but new ways of thinking about and approaching work, then you will be fundamentally unprepared for the world that is to come.
That is what I see happening.
There are some key ideas I will leave you with, ways I am thinking about AI and how I am making my own way forward…
If the computer was a bicycle for the mind, AI is a motorbike.
The computer allowed us to do so much more, store more information, manipulate it more, create more. AI will allow us to do even more, faster. AI is a tool, a very powerful one, but It still needs a mind to steer it.
Work used to be about doing the work. Now it is more about directing the work.
You have to have a meta approach to work. You need to not just do the work, you need to understand the work you are doing, what its value is, where it plugs into, and the workflows you use to get them done.
You have to think in systems and workflows
This is a fundamentally different way of thinking about work or life than most people do. Most people just do things, they don’t often apply a meta abstraction to what they do. But this is a core skill everyone needs to have now. When you understand your workflows and systems, you are first of all able to design them better, before even applying technology.
With this understanding, you can streamline it even further with AI, or replace some parts of the workflow or hand it off to AI completely. The point is you can supercharge the way you do things.
Experiment. Do old tasks with new tools
These days, I try things a lot. I try to build a whole website with Claude instead of WordPress and Divi. Instead of defaulting to Illustrator for design, I try Figma instead. Instead of building a whole presentation from scratch with Powerpoint, I try out Canva.
I am often slower, I often have to revert back to old tools for certain things. But I am shaking things up, understanding the tools that are available and thinking about my work and workflow in new ways.
Just this morning (of writing this), a client woke me up, he needed an excel quote designed into a branded pdf one.
Now, usually, I would have opened up Excel, edited the tables in there, or created a word document, and imported all the information in, and redesigned the whole document to fit the brand.
Instead, I fired up Claude, asked it to convert the document to PDF based on the brand look and feel. A few prompts later, and a quick sample design in illustrator to show it exactly the visual layout I wanted, we had it done. A successful client project, using new tools and workflows.
This morning I have been experimenting with Wispr, trying out its dictation capabilities.
Document, Iterate
An interesting effect to notice has been this iterative, self referential aspect to the process.
I work with AI (mostly Claude) to better understand myself, my processes, my positioning. I document it with AI, and then feed it back to AI. We improve, we refine. We inject in ideas from other places, fields, experts. I define myself again, document it and feed it back to AI. On and on. We keep shifting and evolving and becoming even clearer.
The documentation helps the AI to remember, and it shows me a documentation of how far I have come. With this focused iterative process, I do feel I am growing much faster than I used to. I mean just my studio homepage has changed at least 7 times since the year started.
Build your own tools
In the past 6 weeks, I have built about 8 apps. 4 of them based around my thesis on brand and brand building, the rest as internal tools to help me understand and run my business better. Each of them uniquely tailored to my situation and needs. Each of them opening up new ways of working and creating. This new wave of technology allows us to create things that commercial software couldn’t. Tools that are truly customised to us.
These are exciting times we live in. A whole new emerging world of knowledge work powered by AI. Things have been changing quickly, there is a lot of uncertainty and dangers to navigate. But there is also a lot of opportunities if you are willing to seek them out and embrace change.
Let’s keep building.
by Oto | Apr 29, 2024 | Inspiration, Musings, Personal Development, Productivity
By nature, building a Life by Design requires a perpetual sense of intentionality. Getting clear about what you want, where you are, what is standing in your way, and what action you can take. To process these questions, we will often resort to our tools of introspection - pondering, writing, journaling, all that good stuff.
Sometimes these are simple musings, or us jotting down our wildest dreams, the things we hope to achieve but have no real way of engaging with yet. Other times we are busy making concrete plans, lists, and checklists.
As we work out our lives, we piece together our dreams with scraps of information, knowledge, messages, and drafts of content. Each piece adds to the puzzle that is the pursuit of our goals.
Every day we come across a wide range of inputs. We dig into the ideas of others, the lessons from those who have gone the way before us. We dip into the daily rapids of social media, a stream teeming with entertainment, propaganda, tips, tricks, and showcases.
A lot of it is useless, sure. But there is also so much information that we stumble upon that is clearly useful to our lives, our goals, and our routines. If we are lucky, we capture them somewhere, maybe in the bookmarks folder of our favourite platform, or in our watch later tab on YouTube. Where they proceed to be lost to time, never to be seen again.
Eventually, managing all these bits of information grows unwieldy. We have our notes and ideas strewn across notepads, notebooks, sheets of paper, as well as the aforementioned plethora of apps and social media platforms. If we are particularly messy, perhaps even our actual digital desktop is a chaotic mess of files. I’ve been there.
More frustratingly so, when we need to get work done, be creative, and pursue a goal, taking action becomes hampered by the difficulty of remembering and finding that cool idea or resource you came across the other day.
There has to be a way, a framework to approach this problem of personal knowledge management.
What if there was a way to wrangle all these platforms and mediums, all this knowledge, ideas, thoughts, and intellectual property in a way that is streamlined, and effective?
Imagine having a way to handle every stray idea or inspiration that came to mind or that you stumbled across. Imagine being able to archive the information you gather and find it at a whim. Imagine sitting down to work and having all the research and notes you’ve gathered, processed, and available at your fingertips ready to be whipped up into your next magnum opus.
Imagine reading books and retaining more, and being able to quickly dive back into the contents of those books just by quickly browsing your notes.
Consider the mental bandwidth it would free for you, grasp the kind of gains you could make to the quality and quantity of your work and your life.
Enter “Building a Second Brain” a book by Tiago Forte.
I first heard about this book some years ago but never got around to reading it properly. At the time, what little I knew about the concept paired well with Ryan Holiday’s idea of the Commonplace Book. But I definitely appreciated the premise and core idea, the need to have a framework and method to manage the information you collect, consume, and create in a way that deepens your learning and supercharges your effectiveness at getting things done.
I have always used notebooks and A4 sheets of paper to understand myself and plan my life. I have also dabbled with almost every app and platform known to man. And while my process had certainly improved over time, In 2024, there was certainly much room for improvement.
So over the past few months, I finally got around to it and I’ve been reading and re-reading the book, and I highly recommend the book. If you would like to build a proper personal knowledge management system and become a ninja at using and manipulating information, this is a good place to start. Get and read the book.
If you already have some form of personal knowledge management system going on, this book could help you refine and improve that still.
In the meantime, here are some key ideas.
First, what the hell is even a Second Brain?
A Second Brain is a system of note-capturing apps and processing methods that allow you to effectively manage the information you come across, consume, and create.
With it, you can collate all the random ideas, notes to self, research, plans, checklists, dreams, creative projects, goals, all the bits of information that run your life and put them into a framework that allows you to easily capture things that resonate with you, process them and find them when you need to use it.
Essentially, your Second Brain is an external digital repository that handles the collection and storing of facts, ideas, and information, so that your actual brain, your First Brain is free and primed to do what it does best - think, imagine, and create.
This is especially important for the creative. A huge part of the creative process is collecting information, references, ideas, and inspiration. The way we collect these pieces of information and the ease with which we can manipulate, use, and reuse them will have massive impacts on our creative output and experience.
It is important for everyone, even if you don’t consider yourself creative.
"Anything you want to accomplish - executing a project at work, getting a new job, learning a new skill, starting a business - requires finding and putting to use the right information."
Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain)
So, why build and maintain a Second Brain?
- It keeps you organised. We consume and create an enormous amount of information daily, we need a system to keep all of it in check, capturing what is truly important in an easily scannable, digestible, and implementable format. I have talked about the power of being organised many times. Bringing this philosophy into your knowledge management system is a superpower. When you are set up like this, you are able to work effectively, and even when you are thrown off course, or take breaks or time off from the project, you are easily able to pick up right where you left off because of how organised you are.
- It helps you look deeper at the world around you. Knowing that you have a system on hand, to easily capture and review information that is important to you, you begin to engage with the world more deeply. You deepen the texture of your life. You are no longer overwhelmed, but able to listen properly, take better notes, notice things you never saw before, and make connections you never noticed before. You can freely go down rabbit holes knowing you have a way to capture the things you learn.
- It helps you understand and retain more from the content you consume. With the Second Brain, you will have a way to capture the ideas you glean from videos, social media, books, random chats with friends, and so on. More so, you are able to actually engage with the ideas, put them in your own words, and apply them to your life.
- Curate your storehouse of ideas and epiphanies. All those crazy and powerful insights you get in your daily life. From that book, video, podcast, conversation. Now you have a place to put them and return to when you need them. Over time, you will build your personal library of wisdom, your own tao.
- Makes it easy for you to do the work that matters. In our fast-paced world, we are bombarded with information and requests all day. Having a Second Brain allows us to focus on what is truly important to us and handle the rest appropriately. In today’s age, the quality of work and opportunities we have are a direct function of the information we use and have. Building a Second Brain is a powerful tool in increasing our skills, and advancing our careers.
- Frees up the mind to do what it does best, be creative. Like I said earlier, the Second Brain does the work of remembering and organising all the information that you come across, so you can actually do the fun stuff - being innovative and creative, actually putting remarkable things out into the world.
"Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work."
Gustave Flaubert, French Novelist.
This might all seem overwhelming, but the key idea here is to take this concept and make it your own. Embed these ideas in your way into your daily routine and lifestyle. As you build your Second Brain, it will become second nature to capture the ideas that resonate with you, as well as review and process your notes, so as you work on your practice of work or creativity, as you build your Life by Design, you are able to be incredibly effective and do amazing things.
by Oto | Mar 11, 2024 | Inspiration, Musings, Personal Development, Productivity
As you walk down the path of intentional living, you will end up refining, curating and building a life tailored to your soul. Your routine, your habits, and your environment all working together to move you to the place you want to be and to a fuller expression of your potential - your most authentic self.
At this point, you know yourself, and what you are all about. You know the things that you like and what resonates with your soul. For the first time, you might actually have the opportunity to truly immerse yourself in these things. How do you go deeper?
This is something I have been thinking about lately - how to improve the texture of life.
These days, my life feels very intentional. For the first time in a decade, I feel truly ready to live the life I have always tried to create. I am doing good work, with good people. I have the relationships and space and everything I need to make things happen. And that is great. But what comes next? How can I improve the day-to-day experiential texture of my life? how do I deepen the results I get?
This idea of deepening the texture of life first occurred to me in the context of improving my creative process.
As a freelancer over the years, I always had the experience of going for quantity over quality. I would pack my schedule full of work to maximise the amount of money I could make. And because sometimes clients fall off, or payments are delayed and all sorts of things happen, the easiest way to deal with that instability is to pack on so much, that on average things work out.
The problem with doing things this way is that you end up rushing a lot. You move quickly from thing to thing, doing what is good enough, as opposed to what is best. And to an extent, it can work. I have become able to do a fair amount of high quality work in a compressed period of time.
However, I do want to improve the texture of my creative work. To make it richer in meaning, execution and impact. And that means more time, that means more experimentation. It requires an investment in learning, in studying, practicing new techniques, pushing software to its limits.
To deepen the texture of my work, I would need to set aside time for just that. Periods of time to be fully immersed. To sacrifice efficiency and instead linger longer, to wonder, ponder and create.
When you scale this concept up, deepening the texture of life means adding new layers to the things to do. To discover what you love and to invest the time and energy in knowing it deeper, to practicing it deeper, slower, more intentionally, to really flesh it out and grow in that dimension.
It means being mindful of your experience, and investing the time and resources to doing it well.
Deepening the texture of work means being more organised, tracking your progress, staying strategically aware, collaborating with people, and seeking more impact.
Deepening the texture of relationships, means more time spent with loved ones, deeper conversations and bonded activities.
Deepening the texture of rest means truly unplugging, setting boundaries, improving sleep, exercising the body, and engaging in hobbies for the simple pleasure of doing them.
It is really just about identifying that things you love and engaging in them in a deeper way to enrich the quality of your life experience and your output.
This is usually the opposite of what we generally do, which is hurtle from one thing to the next. In the bid to do more, we get busy, burdened with tasks and responsibilities. And so we rush from thing to thing, never truly paying attention. In turn, we live shallow lives, getting things done but nothing exceptionally great, nothing that activates and deepens the soul.
Deepening the texture of your life is highly focused curation. The energy you cultivate and entertain around your interests is very important. It is crucial to walk with people who share your passion. In this way the depth multiplies, everyone bringing something unique to the shared experience.
As you deepen your life in this way, you will experience new levels of joy and satisfaction and reap the benefits of a profoundly intentional life.
Enjoy it, grow from it and share it with those whose energies are attuned to yours. Walk with those who are passionate about the things you are, and unlock a new experience.
by Oto | Mar 14, 2023 | Inspiration, Musings, Personal Development, Productivity
A couple years ago, I wrote this piece - Start by Doing it Badly. Inspired by a Jordan Peterson video by the same title, it is a powerful concept that can be used to free you from the shackles of perfectionism and serve as a vital tactic in the war against Resistance.
In the pursuit of our goals, it can often be hard to get ourselves to do the things we need to do. We doubt that we are any good, and paralysed by the fear of failure, we do nothing. However, It is our willingness to look foolish, to suck at first, to begin by doing it badly that will make our eventual success more plausible.
Once we have gotten started though, we need to sustain that effort. With every iteration, we learn, we improve, we get better. We create the rough drafts to work with, we make mistakes and learn more about the thing we are doing. Over time we should definitely get better automatically from repetition, but how much better we get is also within our control.
To really improve, to truly operate at higher levels, we have to embrace the craftsman’s mentality. We must seek to be excellent, to strive at perfection.
It is like playing a video game. At first you suck, dying to enemies, not sure what button to press or how to wrangle the many mechanics. But the more you play, the more you get into flow. You know what to expect, you know when to attack, when to draw back. You learn what abilities and resources to invest in. You learn to play the game.
At this point, you could just coast on your abilities and get right through to the end of the game, barely eking out your victory. You could take what you know and survive, doing good enough work. Doing okay, being average.
Or you could strive for more. You could seek domination. You could know this game inside out that the hardest bosses eventually seem trivial. When you enter the arena, it is they who hear the boss music, quaking in their boots.
So it is with life. You start by doing it badly. But whatever you choose to do, eventually, strive for perfection, strive for excellence. Strike to give at least more truly remarkable performance, in your career, in your calling, in your art.
And how do we do that?
- By dedicating yourself to the craft
- By studying and imitating the best
- By studying the game, the craft
- By deliberately practising and seeking out feedback
- By being obsessive
This improvement is not something that happens automatically. But something that must be fought for and hard won. It is through dedication and hard work and practice that we can approach perfection.
But understand that perfection might not be possible, but it is the trying that matters, giving every drop of what we have for the cause. By running the good race, fighting the good fight.
Start by doing it badly, end by doing it perfectly.
by Oto | Jan 24, 2023 | Inspiration, Musings, Personal Development, Productivity
As a person who has been obsessed with the ideas of personal development and self growth for a long time, I have espoused many times the usual mantras of hard work, putting in the time, waking up early, and so on.
In my life experience however, I’ve noticed that even though a lot of these things are useful and definitely do have their place in the pursuit of excellence and fulfilment, sometimes, doing the opposite can also have positive effects.
In my last post, I briefly highlighted how you can actually break the rules if you respect core truths. Here are some of the ‘bad’ things you can do that could actually help you succeed.
This piece was inspired by this article by Jessica Wildfire. So if this intrigues you, definitely check that out as well.
So without further ado, here are 8 bad habits that could help you succeed.
Wake up whenever you want
Shout out to the 5am club. I am just not one of ya’ll. At least not yet. At least not all the time. A little caveat. Of course this would not work for you if you have a job, or a routine that demands that things happen at a certain time. But if you are unmarried and without kids, and also working remote or for yourself, then you could indulge yourself by waking up whenever you like.
For the past couple years, I have had the most erratic sleep and wake up times. But more often than not, I am awake till very late at night. These days, I am up until noon the very next day when my body starts to shut down, and then my day would begin around 8pm. It is admitted weird, but those all night work sessions are some of the most focused and productive I ever have. It doesn’t matter so much when you wake up or go to sleep. What matters is the quality of your sleep and what you do when you are awake.
Be lazy
Hard work is key. I believe in pushing hard. I believe in being obsessive. I believe in putting it all on the line. The work is the work, and the work must be done. However, too many times, we are working furiously climbing up the wrong ladder, trying to scale the wrong wall. Sometimes when we feel the urge to be lazy, the lack of desire to engage with work, it is because we really do not want to, it is because we are misaligned. This is a good time to be lazy, to ease up. To do the bare minimum, to recover and refocus. To discover what we really want to do, what will excite us, what will drive us. Be lazy long enough and you can discover a better way. Often, our obsession with working hard is just an excuse to not apply ourselves in working smart. It can be much easier to do what we normally do, instead of putting in the effort to allocate our time effectively.
Disappear from the world
A big part of success is being engaged and connected with the world. No one lives in a vacuum and the more tapped into your network, the more opportunities come your way. There are times we must do the opposite, times we must withdraw. In times of overwhelm and burnout. When we have given all and we are empty. Pulling away can give us that much needed rest and perspective to make the changes we need to make and come back stronger.
Follow your obsessions
In the midst of being lazy and withdrawing from the world, you might start to feel something well up within you, a new interest, an old obsession. Nurture it and indulge in it. For a long time, I was completely over watching or listening to anything growth related. I suddenly grew a deep interest in political systems, long breakdowns and analysis of modern media, and video games. None of them have been directly useful to my business yet, but they have enriched my mind, my life experience, my thinking and the way I engage with the world around and indirectly affected my creative output and connection to the people around me.
Have fun/Party
All work, and no play makes Jack dull af. Life is short. Enjoy it. Sure, this is an area where you can overdo it. But it is okay to go out, to be social, to see and be seen. It might be vain and futile sometimes, and even a waste of time and money. But it can also be a great time to connect with friends, to make new memories, to bond, and sometimes, even to network.
Play video games/Have hobbies
Some people say you shouldn’t play games at all. And I used to be in that camp. I always wondered what the point of engaging in virtual worlds was, when you could simply just engage with life itself. Life is the biggest open world RPG you could play. But video games as a whole are an incredible achievement, a mix of art, science, technology, design and storytelling to give you some of the most immersive and engaging experiences every created by man. So play if you like. Play helps us see things in new ways, helps us grow, process trauma, and grow and learn. I for one have learned a lot about life playing video games. Sometimes when I’m facing something tough in life, I think about bashing my head repeatedly against a particularly hard boss, and I think to myself, if I could do that, then I can do this.
Binge
There is nothing like a good binge. Whether that is partying, watching that new show on Netflix or spending 12 hours straight at your desk working. the idea is dive completely into whatever you are doing. It would be a bit intense, but you will come out of that session better for it. You would have scratched the itch you needed to, and come out relaxed and chilled enough to get back to work. Or if you were bingeing work, you would have let it all on the court and come off exhausted ready to rest. The point is, sometimes it is good to binge.
Work when you feel like it
Some people think you should show up every single day, whether you feel like it or not. There is surely a place for that. Sometimes you just have to show up. The muse should find you waiting and ready. Other times though, the inspiration just isn’t there. If you aren’t feeling it, the best thing to do might be to just not do it. Do something else. Go hangout with friends, go play 6 hours of your favourite video game. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve left the work to do something else, and then inspiration hits me at the weirdest time and I’m good to go.
Even typing this right now is a good example. The whole day yesterday, I was in the dumps, so I did nothing but sleep really. Today, I’ve been been at my desk since 4:30am. C’est la vie.
