Ok, so it’s actually Saturday (sssh!). But that doesn’t stop me reflecting on the week…

The hard stuff

Feeling blocked

I’ve been feeling the “procrastinate and find it hard to focus because something isn’t right for me to dive into it” feeling about starting the game dev article series. I spent the first few days of the week really looking forward to my days off work (Thursday and Friday), but when it came to them I didn’t accomplish much. I’ve done a bit of thinking about it, and I think my lack of clarity is caused by mixing the two sources of motivation I wrote about previously. I haven’t been consciously using one or the other, so I’m defaulting to a mix of both. The result is that I feel conflicted instead of motivated. I’ve only just figured this out (horray for insights!), so I’ll have a play with it over the coming week.

The good stuff

The Fluent Self

What’s so great about The Fluent Self? Havi writes about fear and stuckedness, and dealing with it. I didn’t realise how much of an issue this was until I started thinking about doing scary things (ie. job quitting and online-business-making) and getting annoyed at not doing them (see above). Along with IttyBiz, this blog supplies great brain-food for those working towards biggifying something (ok, I’ll stop stealing Havi’s words now).

Talking to Clay

I had a chat to Clay from Finance Your Freedom the other day about how to start an online business that doesn’t fail (like the last four or so I’ve been involved with). He pulled out a key point, the lack of which I think underlies all the failures thus far: do market research and identify a demand before creating a product. In this case, market research == search engine keyword research, and a demand == people searching for something. I’ve had a vague notion I should be doing something like this, but I’ve never gotten into keyword research before. I’m having a go at the first three days of the thirty day challenge to get the hang of it. I’m feeling much more confident of being able to make something that actually gets some interest, and it’s nice to be able to get some instant feedback on ideas instead of committing a month or two (minimum) to building them first.

That’s it for this week!

Hopefully I’ll have some Real Live Actual progress to share next week. Catch you then!

Over at The Fluent Self, Havi has a weekly check-in ritual to reflect on the week. I’ve decided to borrow this ritual (thanks Havi!) and see if I can’t gain a bit of perspective. Ready? Here we go…

The hard stuff

Losing momentum

The last week’s been full of planning but not so much doing. But first, maybe it’d be good to take a look at what I’m planning. I’ve come up with five “projects” that I’d like to put some time into:

• BotLand: A web-based not-quite-realtime strategy game with awesome tweakability.
• Game dev blog articles: A series of blog articles where I write about my attempts to develop Botland the Right Way. Best practices, agile methods, and tips from the trenches. That kind of thing.
• Game dev consulting: Where I help game developers (who are probably part of a startup) to adopt said best practices and bring their out-of-control projects a little more under control.
• EEEBot: Makin it. I need to buy some parts first though. Anyone know where I can source a 74HC32N, L293E and 74HC00N IC for the motor controller?
• This blog post! And the next, and the next (every week).

I haven’t actually made much progress on them this week, but on the other hand it’s pretty awesome having the list, and I’m feeling ready to get going That actually sounds pretty good, so what’s the hard bit? I work Monday to Wednesday at the moment, and having those three days away from this stuff takes its toll on my momentum.

The good stuff

Bike!

I got my bike today! It’s a 1998 Kawasaki GPX 250, and it looks something like this. Oh man it’s fun. I’ve been in the process of getting one for over a month, but I didn’t know how fun it would be until I rode on the back of David‘s bike to inspect the one I ended up buying. That was my first time on a bike going > 25k/h, and he has a Suzuki GS500, which is a fair bit more powerful than mine Anyway… conclusion: Awesome.

Aikido

The Aikido beginners course starts for the year this week at ANU. I’ve been heading over to ANU before work for a few days to put up posters and help at the market day stall. Our strategy was to play videos on my laptop, then capture people as they stopped to watch the video. Very effective If you’re interested in learning a martial art and you’ve got Tuesday and/or Sunday evenings free, I highly recommend joining up for the Aiki-kai beginners course at ANU. It’s awesome fun and cheap too (only $90 for the whole semester). Here, watch a video to see what it looks like

Tidying my mind, tidying my room

I meditate pretty much daily. I vary the technique I use (eg. watching the breath, visualisations, etc) and I also have quite a variation in the “quality” of the meditation. Sometimes I’ll feel quite peaceful, other times I’ll be really distracted and unfocused. I find when I have a particularly peaceful meditation, I’ll often go on a tidying binge afterwards, and that happened this week I cleaned up a bunch of stuff lying around my room, then got through about 50 emails, then did a bunch of small things I’d wanted to do for awhile. Now I have a bit more mental and physical space to work in again

This blog post

I feel a bit clearer and more motivated having written it. Yay

And that’s it!

Catch you next week, if not sooner

Have you ever noticed how some people have a huge impact on the world? People like Mahatma Gandhi and Richard Brandson, who each in their own way have created massive changes in the world. How do they do that, when the vast majority of people leave little legacy beyond their family and a small contribution at work? Let’s take a look at the sort of motivation they need to do what they do, and then we can dive into where it comes from and how it works.

Let’s start by having a look at the conditions for creating an impact. To be able to make a huge impact, these people need to have a) a very strong source of motivation that b) points in a consistent direction. If one of these conditions is missing, you’re not going to have a great impact. I’ve often had ideas for software projects (usually web apps) that seemed great when I was planning them, but just didn’t seem worth developing after a few weeks had passed. I’d get upset that my motivation was fading, then a new idea would grab me and the whole process would start over again. Continually changing direction doesn’t work, at least not if you want finished projects. Likewise, if you have no motivation, nothing’s going to happen. This is what happens when you don’t really know what you want to do so you just go to work, come home and watch anime all evening. At this stage a consistent direction isn’t even an issue because you don’t have the energy to pursue anything. So to have an impact of any scale, you need to have a strong source of motivation, and it needs to point in a consistent direction.

It’s nice to know what we’re after, but at this stage it’s still a bit academic. Knowing that you need a strong source of motivation pointed in a consistent direction doesn’t give you one. To get a better idea of how to have a consistent sense of direction, let’s have a look at why we don’t have one right now. Imagine that you’ve got a problem that you’re trying to solve, so you go to your friends for advice. You talk to one of them and they give you a great-sounding piece of advice. You’re pretty confident that you know what to do now, but you’re not completely sure so you ask another friend for a second opinion. Their advice is great too, but there’s a problem – it’s different! Now you’ve got two great ideas but you’re stuck because you don’t know which to go with. How does this relate to motivation? We need to pick a single, reliable source of direction to motivate us. In the case of motivation, there happen to be two sources to choose between. Let’s take a look at each of them.

Your own highest enjoyment of life

The first source of motivation is your own highest enjoyment of life. Chances are you’re aware of what many people in your life want from you. Your boss wants you to work overtime, your partner wants you to spend more time with them, and your friends are wondering why they don’t see you any more. Each of these pressures is like advice from one of your friends in the previous example. To use this source of motivation,  you tune out everyone else’s clamouring that pushes you in different directions and tune in to your own true desires. You’re tapping into this source of motivation when you say “Enough is enough! I’m sick of being pushed around! I know what I want, and it’s my way or the highway!”. By following this source of motivation, you become an empowered agent working on behalf of your desires; you have a mission and you’re not going to let anything get in your way. You figure out what you want and make a plan. Then you identify all the challenges, the parts of your plan that you think you’ll have trouble with, and you seek to dominate and conquer them with a complete overkill. Say, for example, you want to save up money for a deposit on a house. The thought of owning your own house makes you drool, you want it that much. However, it’s going to take 3 years to save up the money, and you’re worried that you’ll be tempted to spend the money on other things. You decide that enough’s enough, and you’re not going to let anything stop you. So you head over to your bank and set up a 3 year fixed-term savings account that you are unable to withdraw from and set up an automatic transfer to take money out of your salary on pay day and deposit it in this savings account. For good measure, you bet a friend that you can make it without touching your savings and arrange to show them your bank statements every month, with the promise of paying them a hefty sum if you slip up (which is close to impossible anyway, thanks to the arrangement with the bank). After doing all this, do you think you’ll have much trouble sticking to your plan? Nothing is going to stop you now.

That’s pretty awesome, we’ve gone from being pretty wishy-washy about our goal to being certain that we’ll succeed. But wait, there was another source of motivation, wasn’t there?

The highest good of all

The other source of motivation you can tap into is working for the highest good of all. Again, you tune out the pressures you feel from different people, and you still make contact with your desires, but this time you’re focus is on what you can create and give. You become an empowered agent working for the good of the planet, the good of the universe. You’re here to create, to love, and to set a great example of how to live. If you set a goal and you’re not feeling motivated, it’s because your goal won’t help enough people in a meaningful way. To illustrate how that might work, let’s return to the house buying example. This time, you start by looking at who will benefit from the achievement of the goal apart from yourself. Your partner will be able to enjoy the house too. You’ve also got a few close friends who are also planning on buying a house, so you start meeting up regularly and discussing the sort of houses you’re looking for. Together, you plan to buy houses in the same suburb so you’ll be close to each other. You’re worried about spending your savings on impulse buys, so with your friends you set up a pooled high-interest savings account that you can all deposit your money into, requiring all of your signatures for a withdrawal. With your pooled savings you can access a higher interest account than you could otherwise, so you’ll all end up better off financially than if you had used individual savings accounts. Your plan is working really well, so you start blogging about it to share your plan and your progress with other people from around the world. Now keeping up with your deposits to the savings account is a no-brainer. Your friends and your blog readers are helping you out and looking up to you. With all that support, do you think you’ll have much trouble sticking to your plan?

That should give you a taste of the sort of motivation that can really make an impact. If you’d like to dig deeper, you might enjoy Steve’s series on polarity and Pace and Kyeli’s series of motivation. Good luck!

I’ve been a vegetarian for most of my life, but at the start of this year I finally went vegan. I’m still eating a vegan diet now and I feel great for it. I know there are plenty of people out there interested in making dietary shifts, so In this post I’ll talk a bit about some of the obstacles you might face going from a vegetarian to a vegan diet, or in fact in any dietary shift. I’ll also talk about some solutions (yay!).

One of the first obstacles you might face are family influences, or the influence of the people you live with. At the time when I started this trial, I was living with my family (my parents, brother and sister). My brother is vegetarian, but the rest of my family is omnivorous. Some members of my family had strong objections to me removing dairy products from my diet, believing I’d be socially ostracised. This caused a regular conflict at meal times, especially since I wasn’t cooking my own food for dinner, so whoever was cooking would have to prepare a vegan meal as well as a carnivorous one. Not such a big leap when you’ve already been making a vegetarian side meal, but a cause of tension none the less. This situation was unsustainable, and had I not moved out of home a few weeks into the trial I’m not sure if I could’ve kept it up. I now live in a sharehouse (phew) and although my housemate is omnivorous we cook for ourselves so it’s a non-issue.

The lesson here is that to succeed in a dietary shift, you’ll need acceptance from the people around you, particularly the people you live with. It’s quite possible to live with people who eat a different diet, as long as there’s no tension or conflict between you over what you eat. Here are some steps you can take to overcome this obstacle:

1. Spend the time to discuss your plans with the people you live with if you think it could become an issue.
2. If you’re not already preparing your own meals, begin to do so. Gain some independence, which will give you more control over what you eat.
3. If all else fails, it may well be easier to find somewhere else to live. Eeep! If you’re lucky, you will already be planning to move (as I was).

So there’s a few steps to help with family conflicts. The second obstacle I’d like to discuss is eating out. This can be a challenge since most restaurants have vegetarian options but not vegan options, and you won’t always be lucky enough to find yourself at your friendly neighbourhood vegan restaurant. I thought this was going to be a problem until I watched Karen Knowler’s video, where she discussed eating out on the raw food diet, which is off the planet when compared with the Standard Australian Diet. Her approach when eating out is simply to ask for a salad, request that any meat or dairy products be removed, then double or triple the size. If you’re eating a vegan diet, the solution is even simpler: just ask if X contains dairy or ask for X without cheese/milk/eggs.

Doing this comes down to a matter of your own confidence in your diet. Do you feel uncomfortable about what you’re eating, particularly when it’s different from what all of your friends are eating? Do you feel guilty at the thought of asking your waiter for a modified meal? Or are you proud of your food choices and comfortable with the extra attention from your friends that eating a different diet will bring?

I’m still getting the hang of eating out as a vegan, but so far it’s been far less trouble than I expected. That’s largely because I feel really happy, comfortable and self-confident with this diet, something I never expected when I started. That’s great to hear if you’re already comfortable being different from your friends, but what if you’re not? That’s too much to cover in one post, but you might find this article by Steve Pavlina valuable. Have a look at the “Social Shift” section.

So there’s a few solutions to the largest problems I faced in making the leap from vegetarian to vegan: family influences and eating out. I feel a whole lot better about what I eat now after wanting to make this shift for a long time. Good luck with your own changes and let us know how it goes!