jmiskill
January 7, 2023
I recently followed a man on LinkedIn who posts advice and musings that I find to be actually interesting and maybe even a little helpful. His name is Sahil Bloom. On LinkedIn, he posted three questions that I wanted to use to reflect. I am a strong proponent of constant reflection. Today I am going to answer his three questions.
What really matters in my life right now? Am I dedicating the necessary energy to it? The biggest thing that matters in my life right now is my health. To you, the reader, this may seem shallow, but I assure you it is something that is a journey and process that yields far more than simply doing a few push ups and going for a run.
A quick background on my history with health:
Young:
My interest in health started as a child nearing “teenagedom”. My mom always stressed to me the importance of health, saying things along the lines of, “Health is the number one priority. Everything else comes after that.”
I grew up playing soccer and as a result I was constantly running (and fit). My dad used to be my coach and would make my team and I run shuttle sprints (called something a bit different back then) and do a few dozen push ups before we were allowed to have a full scrimmage. As I write, I am realizing that this is my first memory of loving exercise.
When I got to middle school, I was a bit of floater – trying to figure out where I fit in socially. As I bounced around different social groups and dealing with a big trauma, I grew to be relatively unfit in comparison to my peers, which was something that surprised me given that I played soccer. I got cut from the middle school soccer team, twice, and played club ball where I was benched more than I was played. It was also the time where I started to feel knee injuries and experiment with the sport. Plain and simple: I just was not skillful enough or healthy enough, both physically and mentally.
High School
Once I got to high school, I tried out a sport that a friend of mine suggested: rowing. I absolutely fell in love with it. I was highly competitive and I became incredibly fit. In my freshman year, I lifted for the first time, competed and did well in rowing competitions, and took 2nd at a state competition in a 4-man boat. I felt alive. I was thriving. In sophomore year, I got even better, rowing with the varsity crew team. I got a lot faster, a lot better, and a lot more fit. At the end of the season, I took 2nd place in a quad full of seniors and 10th at a regatta where we normally got 30th. I was on top of the world. Things changed very quickly for me, however, as in my junior year, I stopped rowing. I was having serious mental health issues and needed to step away. Unfortunately, I did not go back. Instead, I played soccer again- the sport I missed dearly. I captained the mens soccer team in my junior and senior year seasons (the sport was in the Spring). I felt very lost during this time- like I had little to no purpose. Coming from crew, I really had no path to follow.
the 10th place boat I was a part of. COVID-19 and College
Then, COVID-19 happened and I was forced to adopted the individualist approach to exercise. Every day of quarantine I would go for a run and do calisthenic exercises and I became fit again. I felt like my old crew self was coming back again!
Then, college happened. In my first semester, I started lifting weights per the encouragement and excitement from my hall-mates (and future roommates). I did this for a semester on a great routine that really manifested goodness within me. I still felt good and productive. Very much like myself, again.
Then, I rushed and stopped working out on a routine basis because I was so busy. Since then, I lost touch with the routine that I had developed at crew and my first semester of college. I would run occasionally and lift occasionally. I felt like I was way too busy to do anything. For months I was on a consistently downward trajectory. Every week felt worse than the last. All as a result of dealing with some mental hardships. Then, as a cherry on top, in Spring 2022 I tore my ACL. I had surgery May 17th, 2022 and have been in physical therapy since then. It was almost poetic.
Now
I have recently gotten back into a better routine of working out and have developed what I believe to be a great system for me to work out. I lift every other day and go for a run on the days in between those. I am working on building that routine again!
Let’s Talk About All of That
A lot has happened in my health journey. This journey was much more than just what sorts of exercises I was doing and what sport I was playing. Over the course of these early years, I redefined what it meant for me to be healthy. And I am still working on it.
My Definition
To be absolutely clear, it took me a long time to come to this point of thinking. This view, this ideal for myself. Moreover, it took me a long time to convince myself that this view was good for me and should be the number one thing I put before everything else.
For me, health is about being physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. This is taken from the Boy Scout oath (as I was a scout from ages 7-18). Quitting rowing was a pivotal moment for me. I was quitting because I was so anxious that I could not think straight (hence not mentally awake). I felt like I was not morally straight either as I felt I was losing the capacity to care for people in the way I had when I was much younger. This was crushing.
There is a lot to unpack with this. My views are still shaky and I believe that this is something that needs to be dealt with on a long term basis, which is why I will be dedicating a post a week to speaking about health and my journey with it. I am only an expert on myself. Only on me. But I want to discuss the things that have impacted my journey with health.
For now, it is enough to answer the question. What really matters in my life right now is health. I want to be the best at being physically strong (fitness), mentally awake(mental health and feeling awake), and morally straight (doing the Right things that are Good for me). Am I dedicating the necessary energy to it? Yes. But I am not perfect. Every day, I get 1% better. By the end of the year I will be 365% better than when I started.
Are my current systems and habits aligned with my long term goals? Routine is my best friend, but I have not been good in return. Some of my best, most productive, happy moments in life were the moments where I had a solid, established routine. Take sophomore year for example. I would get up and go to school at 7:00 every day, would sit through 4, 90 minute classes with 1, 30 minute lunch and then go to crew where I would part-take in several different exercises where I was routinely getting better every day. Every day I learned, created, solved, and became stronger. It was perfect.
There were two points in my life that I made routine my enemy: junior year of high school when I quit crew and my second year + third year first semester of college (which, at the time of writing this, was this past semester). I lost my way. I would wake up and fight through every day rather than flying like I did during crew.
The Routine
Read (30 min) Work-out (1 hour) Meditate (15 minutes) Personal Code (30 minutes – 1 hour) Practice Music (30 minutes – 1 hour) I recognize that this is a lot, but these are aspects of my life that I routinely neglect during school semesters. Even if I only get to 30 minutes of the practice things every day, I will sleep soundly as I will know I held the instrument and played (and consequently got better) and wrote code (and consequently got better).
A slight side note
My big thing is that I need to do things physically in order to understand how they work and to get better at them. This is why I have the meditation, music, and coding built into my routine. I need to practice and don’t have much time to do so. The tough thing is that I will be dedicating roughly 4 hours of my day, every day to these things, which will be incredibly difficult with classes and needing to study and Phi Delt and Philanthropy and all of that. But, I believe that I can do it and get 8 hours of sleep. I just need discipline.
What do I need to cut out of my life to operate more efficiently? There are three things I want/need to cut out of my life: stall periods, lack of attention/flow, and consumption.
I need to cut out stall periods where I am inactive. I have acquired a bad habit of sitting around sort of waiting for something to happen, when I could be using that time to work on something. This both wastes time and makes it difficult for me to react when I need to get something done. I want to replace these stall periods with reading or studying or practice doing something. That way I don’t need a ton of mental energy but can really put myself into what I am doing.
I have another bad habit of attention. I have a lot of ideas and things that I want to accomplish, and a lot of the time, I will multi-task, when I should just do one thing at a time. Recently, I have bee reading a book on “flow”, which is a psychological phenomenon that human beings experience when they have an “optimal experience”. I was turned onto it by a YouTuber that I watch- John Fish. I want to create optimal flow experience conditions for myself when I am working on things that really matter to me. I believe that I can eradicate this with better focus on the constraints and environment of the task and attention to the task itself.
YouTube and consumption rather than creation. I am super super bad about using YouTube for consumption purposes rather than creation and learning. I will sit there and watch endless “funny video reels” and video-game walkthroughs because of the nostalgia and ease of mental capacity. This is something I do in “stall moments”. I think that YouTube is a beautiful thing, but that I use it incredibly wrong in a lot of ways. Further than this is the juxtaposition of consumption rather than creation. Creation is a beautiful, complex phenomenon. We as human being ogle at it. However, we have been seduced into being consumption-oriented creatures as opposed to creation oriented creatures. I want to be someone who creates things rather than consumes them. Hence: this blog.
Fin I have had a great time answering these questions. This post has helped me to organize myself in a way that is different and better than before. I hope whoever reads this finds inspiration despite only being able to consume the writing. Further, I sincerely hope you use the questions and ideas to write (create) on your own.
Further, I expect some of my articles to be this long, but some to be much shorter. I have many thoughts and I want to get them written down!
jackson miskill