Vali2003

To be honest, I thought it would be possible to do a poll somehow. Apparently not. Just feel free to share your thoughts via reply.

There’s another issue that I’d like y’alls help with. I have a job (only 20 hours per month) at my university as a work student for a quite renowned sociology professor. It’s really a good position in terms of connections. I only got it because I wrote an A+ paper for somebody who works with her. The thing is, the work is quite shit. Basically, I do whatever is too annoying for her. That’s not a problem for me per se. But the nature of this work is that it‘s little tasks that can just come in per e-mail at any point of the week. Then, maybe there’s something that’s super urgent, or there is a lot of work all of a sudden when there was nothing the last two weeks. It’s unpredictable, and always different tasks. Which makes 20 hours of this much more exhausting than 20 hours at Starbucks, for example, where you’re in your grove and have fixed work times. My contract has now ended. She wants me to continue working, but I’m unsure if I should. The connection would be good for my bachelors thesis, as she could be my supervisor. However, it also takes time and energy away from my business. But then also, it’s only 20 hours per month. What do you think?

Is it possible that the servers are working better again?

I’m really enjoying the whole process though. I’m hoping to gather a lot of feedback from my free clients that will help me improve my product. It will make paid work much easier. Especially if I have some testimonials. Man, I have some great plans for making really compelling testimonials. Alex Hormozi has an amazing guide on that. The only issue is that Uni is starting back up, so this whole thing will become more difficult. I can still do it. I really need to work on my capacity for work and be strategic. I think 4-5 hours of deep work per day is the maximum I can reach. This is work, where I’m learning something new, difficult. Right now, this would be writing cold-outreach messages. But as I get more practice, it won’t be deep work anymore. Sometimes I’ll have to use my deep work hours for Uni, that’s ok. But I should try to put as many of them as possible in my business to learn the new, hard skills — learning sales, closing deals, writing social media posts sooner or later, improving my service, writing my offers and so forth. I’m thinking too far ahead… I’ll figure this out when the time comes.

Outreaching is really new to me. I reach out to people via e-mail, IG, FB, maybe WhatsApp, whatever I get from them. I would also cold-call them, but it’s a bit difficult as I’m targeting people in the U.S. and have a German phone number. It definitely feels a bit sketchy to reach out to people out of the blue. However, I’ve already had an insight how I can be less salesy. Just try to be as honest as possible. Of course it’s not 100% honesty. There’s some sort of compromise involved. But generally, trying to be honest makes messages seem more authentic — because they are!

I started outreaching to the first clients today. I’m offering them my service for free, in return for feedback and optionally a testimonial. Precisely, I’m offering them a dedicated landing page (+ hosting it for 45 days) and a five day e-mail course. It’s quite a lot of work for me, but I think it will be worth it. I’ll do this for two to three people, and then I’ll transition to paid work.

I’ll try putting the timer on a time that I think is possible at a more normal pace.

I love coffee, but I just can’t drink that shit. One small espresso has effects on me that are similar to 20ug LSD. It stimulates me so much, it’s incredible. Not in a positive way though. I just feel jittery and like I’m rushing everything. Of course it’s also sort of a concentration boost, but I just don’t like the feeling. It’s too much. And I will feel it almost the entire day afterwards. I definitely feel it for like 5-6 hours. Aditionally, I bought a little pretty timer that I want to use for working. I thought, I’d always set it on the time that the next task likely takes, and then I have a bit of a challenge to complete it in that time. It works, in that I’m less distracted, but it also makes me do everything very fast. And that feels kinda shit. Anyways, this plus coffee was just too much.

Would’ve fallen asleep twice already now, but each time, someone in my shared flat making noise woke me up. Has to be one of the most annoying things ever, this. Especially if you’re wide-awake afterwards.

It’s hard not using the forum, honestly, because I love this place. But I know this is the better solution for me.

I have to really focus now, on getting my room properly set up. I still don’t have a desk, lol, so I do all my work sitting on the floor. It’s a bit annoying because I’d much rather work on my business and I don’t care all that much about my room. But I know the smarter thing is to do it nicely. A workspace that I love will do a world of a difference. Gotta bite the bullet now and be patient. It’ll take about 2-3 more days since I have to paint one of my walls.

I’ve decided, not to use the forum and YT at all from Monday to Friday. But I still allow myself to watch a bit of a sitcom before sleeping, listening to podcasts, to music etc. This is quite balanced and I think will work out better than anything I’ve tried before. I’ve probably done about 10 dopamine detoxes before — some as long as thirty days — and I’ve learned quite a lot about how to properly do it (for me). This is not a detox, however, it’s a permanent change. I will reassess how it works in two weeks and then I may tweak some stuff. I currently do not have a time limit for the weekend so we’ll de how that works.

There was one very positive development today: I’m finally able to believe that I can succeed. It feels tangible now, and possible. Before, I always had a lot of doubt whether a new online business could even work in this AI-age. But I’ve realized that this thought is quite detached from reality.

My social media use has been annoying though. Tomorrow morning, I’ll decide how I’ll deal with that. There’s not time to mess around.

I feel I’m making progress with my business. Not in terms of being very close to having paying clients yet, but in terms of discovering effective principles and aligning with them.

I’ve rediscovered the Sedona Method. Aka just letting go of stuff. It’s so simple yet powerful. It works really well for me, especially if I let go of the same feeling several times, in close proximity. I’ll try to keep in mind that it exists for the future, but probably I’ll forget about it again soon.

Still lots of things to improve with my sleep as well. Making it colder and darker in my room are the two main things.

It’s nuts how good I feel when I consistently sleep well.

I highly recommend reading the book How to Become a Straight-A Student by Cal Newport. It‘s a fantastic book on how to succeed at university, without being a grinder — a person that spends all day in the library. He interviewed many of the most successful students from Ivy-league colleges, who don‘t spend their entire day studying. The book is a collection of their methods. I don’t think AI changes that much in terms of studying.

My three day social media detox ended today at 6PM. And… right away I spent too much time here on this forum. The thing is, especially if I engage with posts, they become incredibly magnetic to me. I check them way too often, look for answers etc. It has to do with my need for approval. At the moment, I’m doing a three day social media detox at the beginning of the month and at the half-point. But I need to find a solution that is more permanent. Less of this up and down. Most of my social media problems come from this forum, YT-Shorts, and YT-videos. So these are the ones I need to limit. I also sometimes watch some Netflix before bed, but that’s not a problem for me. I could say that I limit my use of this forum (except for this journal) to 0 minutes during workdays and 60 minutes during the weekends. And I’d do the same with YT. This way, I think I’d get away almost completely from my addiction, while not having to cut myself off from it completely. Maybe I can lock YT via my phone so that I can only use it on the weekends and then have a time limit of 60 minutes. I’ll flesh this out tomorrow. Am too tired now.

I sent a bunch of messages to potential mentors, but I don’t think anyone is gonna work out unfortunately. That’s fine though, I got Alex Hormozi. I also enjoy the process of figuring stuff out on my own, although it definitely isn’t the most efficient. But yeah, there are free resources out there as well, so I’m not on my own.

Sleep is so sensitive to interruptions or irregularities in schedule. My sleep the last three nights has been really good. Still, every morning except today I felt tired, and sluggish in my mind. Just because for one night before that, I slept late, and didn’t get enough sleep / the quality was too bad. It only takes one night to accumulate enough sleep debt that it takes three really good nights to make up for it. Usually, at the point where I’ve just made up for my sleep debt, something comes in between and I have a bad night of sleep again. This time, I’ll try to extend my good nights streak to at least a week or something like that. I’m visiting a friend of mine in Hamburg tomorrow and I said I’ll sleep over at this. I will probably cancel this, and see if we can meet earlier so that I can get home in time to get into bed.

I use too many commas, lol.

One more thing: Today, I prepped everything for finding my mentor. I found about twelve potential candidates and their contact infos. Tomorrow I’ll use the cold-outreach strategies I learned from Alex Hormozi to contact them. I think, tomorrow, I’ll focus on the best five candidates, contact them over all mediums I have available, and do this probably two or three times spread throughout the day. I must be consistent in trying to reach them, because there aren’t so many potential mentors in my niche. I gotta make the ones I found count. Calling them will be the biggest challenge. I also feel slightly guilty for doing this approach but I think they would truly be very happy about the offer, as I’m willing to pay them a good amount for some simple mentoring. I also already prepped the criteria for what the person needs to have, and a written agreement — or contract if you want.

Fuck it, why not. Here we go. I’ll have to reach back a bit to properly explain my fear so this will be quite a long post, I reckon. I have a tinnitus. Like I mentioned before. I have it on both ears, but differently. The left one is more steady, and the right one is more dependent on how much direct pressure was on that side of my jaw or neck. For example, the noise will be louder, if I sleep on the right side. Anyways, when I first got this tinnitus at age 16, I developed a big fear of silence. Or more accurately a fear of lack of noises. Since this would always reveal the tinnitus and force me to confront it. It was probably the biggest fear I ever encountered up to that point. It may be hard to relate to this fear for people without tinnitus. I’ll try to explain it a bit. The way, fear of tinnitus works is that the noise feels like a threat to your survival. At least in the beginning. It’s incredibly frightening for something in your consciousness to suddenly change and not know where it comes from, if it will ever go away again, if it’s dangerous etc. Because of this, you develop a sort of protective stance of the noise. You try to block it out as a sort of mental position, but also with music, white noise, people talking or whatever noise is available. This way though, whenever this is not possible, fear arises. You can’t run away anymore. Now you start listening for it. You put your attention there hoping not to find anything. Is it still there? It is, of course still there. And then, sometimes, you hyperfocus on the noise anxiously. And the noise grows stronger, and you grow more anxious, until you cope in some healthy way, or find something that donates enough dopamine quickly, so you feel alright again. Now, the tinnitus doesn’t scare me anymore. I’ve grown accustomed to it. But since probably over a year, I sometimes hear this ringing as a very faint siren noise. It‘s worse when there’s some noise in the background, like the radiator, or dishwasher. The siren noise isn’t really there. If I focus my attention on where in my consciousness it lies, I notice that it’s just the ringing. It’s like a smokescreen, sort of. But still, it scares me. It does, because I can’t fully grow accustomed to it. I fear that this is not actually somehow a result of my anxiety combined with my tinnitus, but that I suffer from schizophrenia, and I’m slowly losing my mind. The fear is perverse, because it combines the two greatest fears I’ve ever had. It combines this listening for the noise, like I said above, with my fear of mental illness: Is the noise still there? And, if this is answered with a yes, does that mean I’m mentally ill? Of course because of my fear for the answer, just like I used to fear the tinnitus still being there, I hope not to hear the noise. I already did some sort of test for psychosis — or more so, if my mental state would suggests a tendency —and I don’t actually have any of the symptoms. Also, it’s somewhat common for people with tinnitus to develop such things, although I’m not as well read in this as I could be. However, fears don’t answer to logic, so here I am. I guess, if I really want to free myself from this fear I’lll have to let go of certain parts of my identity. Of those parts that would be ruined, destroyed, or killed by my fear materializing. For example, I cling to having a family at some point, to having peace of mind, to being successful in this world, to have great relationships, to be normal, to have sanity etc. All these things would likely be ruined by psychosis, which is probably why fear of mental illness is so common. Mental illness destroys many of the parts of life that we hold closest. To defeat that fear I’d have to be willing to give all that up (mentally at least, I’m not saying I’d have to actually stop pursuing them). Safe to say, that is quite a tall task. If you read all this, hi and thanks and good night