Building The Foundation: What I Have Done So Far And What I Am Working On

[Locke]

I like forums.
They allow for me to write lengthy paragraphs about whatever I feel like without having to feel clustered by the way a website is designed (thanks Facebook)

 

I decided to make an account tonight to just have somewhere to write some things down or to just share my thoughts/ask some questions here and there to get my head on straight.

 

As of right now I'm 21 and am in my third year of college pursuing a Computer Science degree. I have known since I was 8 years old that I wanted to make video games and I'm still chasing that passion today. I didn't really start to think much about self-improvement and fixing my mindset until September 20th of 2014, where I got a wake-up call from a friend of mine. For many years in my life, I have never really had something to open my eyes to how badly my mind was in terms of wanting to get better at something. Never before had I been challenged on such a scale to improve myself than when I got into the Super Smash Bros. Melee community back on April 10, 2013. I had always wanted to play in a competitive game of some sort when I was growing up, but everything that I was interested in didn't really have a competitive scene or required me to find team mates that I didn't have. It was after playing the game competitively for roughly a year and a half that on September 20th, 2014, while at a major tournament in Atlanta, GA, I was told just how bad my mentality was. I was told by someone who was being realistic with me and not sugar coating anything and making sure that what he said stuck in my mind, and it absolutely did.

 

Ever since I had this epiphany that I needed to put in more work into the game in order to actually get better, it kick-started more than just a quest to improve at the game, it jump-started a journey for me to improve myself as a person, because I believed that I had many flaws back then that I really wanted to fix in time.

 

You don't need to know much about the game to understand where I'm coming from. The game has brought out my competitive spirit that I never knew was there and made me realize some positive and especially negative things about myself. Since December of 2014, I have been keeping a weekly journal entry of my progress in the game, so that when I look back on it later, I can see how much I have grown. It wasn't until December 1, 2015 that I decided to start a life journal of my own, where I keep track of what life goals I want to accomplish and what my thoughts are at the current time. I have been watching Actualized videos on Youtube for several months now, and with the recent announcement of the forum, I felt like this was a good opportunity to use this as a platform to see if I am on the right path and seek help in making some difficult life decisions that come my way.

 

As of right now my daily routine is to do 40 minutes of meditation a day, where originally I was listening to one of the Actualized videos on the background while my eyes were closed and I sat down on my bed as soon as possible, but I'm feeling more like I should be meditating in silence with only the white noise of my fan for me to listen to. For me, trying to sit completely still for 40 minutes straight is a challenge of my mental fortitude. I've done it a few times where I hardly move at all and when I am done I feel much better usually, even though I tend to feel pretty numb in some areas, it is a nice way for me to meditate. I've seen the numerous videos on how to meditate, starting with the one where it is suggested that you try to quiet your mind and have no thoughts, but I have also liked experimenting with the "loose-monkey" meditating where I just let my thoughts do what they want to do, and catch myself when I feel like my thoughts are going on too much of a tangent. I feel like throughout the day I am constantly thinking about a lot of different things and I can very easily get distracted by my thoughts. Just dedicating the 40 minutes a day to meditating I feel like helps me feel at peace and at ease when I am doing it, especially when I have the sessions where I don't move at all and I have total concentration on my thoughts, as if my body is slowly fading out of existence.

 

I also try to make it a habit of working on something I want to get better in on a daily basis for an hour. Lately I have been doing it with Melee and I have seen some slight results for the short time that I have been doing it, so I believe that if I were to do it with my other passions like artwork or game development, I could learn to master those things in time. I guess you could say that I think a lot lately about how I want to manage my time, and how I can eliminate distractions outside of my mind in order to achieve a more productive habit. I'll be graduating college soon and I really want to make a portfolio for myself to get a solid job in the game industry. I know that there are sacrifices that I'll probably have to make, and I'm more than willing to do them, but I also believe that anything is possible if you truly try hard enough.

 

I'll probably be posting my own stuff here later on and maybe participating in some occasional discussions. Forums are typically nice because they don't take up too much of my time as long as I'm disciplined about what I consume, which I feel I have been doing a much better job in the past few months than where I was a year ago. If I get a self-actualization idea, then I'll likely post it here from now on.