2024-05-13 | 09:21:54 AM
It’s a slow day today — not much to do other than wait for tasks at work and my university. I really didn’t have to do that much these past few days. It’s been one of those days when I feel like my work is just… there, existing. It’s not bothering me or anything, it’s just there. It doesn’t stress me out, it doesn’t make me feel inadequate or challenge me, etc.
I wouldn’t say it’s a bad thing. I’d say it’s only right for me to embrace this slow season as it is. I needn’t have to always be busy, always do something, always look for the next thing, because that will come. It’ll come, and I just have to wait, patiently, while doing my own thing. It’s not that I’m anticipating something bad to happen, but in the professional world it’s really the case that various challenges appear here and there every so often, and I shouldn’t be forcing them to appear all the time.
There have been lots of times that I’d felt my creative juices being drained because of a creative task. One of those was when I and my groupmates at my Capstone subject were brainstorming on the Big Idea of our project — the key creative execution. At work it’s a constant struggle also. I get to work with extremely talented people and I sometimes feel as if my title of “Intern” really is something I deserve, even after spending nearly two (2) years in the industry. Despite having worked with major brands 1 as a creative, I still feel as if there’s a lot in me that’s not quite there yet. There’s a ton of things to learn, especially in the marketing industry, and my specialized knowledge about design really isn’t ideal when I want to be a creative with holistic capabilities in advertising. Sure, I’m confident with my technical capabilities, as in I can use industry-standard tools in the Adobe Creative Suite, and I’m very much well-versed in Cinema 4D, I know a few stuff in Blender, etc., but those aren’t enough to make me a good designer. I really have to study more about the wider realm of design, as in I need to keep myself informed about the wider industry that surrounds my expertise (marketing, in this case), and more.
The good thing about having a multitude of interests is that I frequently find myself applying concepts from my different areas of interest to make fancy connections between Timeless thoughts. A good example of this happening are the case studies I’d been writing about for countless times in my public journal. 2 During these times that I find similarities between my realms of interest, I can’t help but think of David Perell’s idea of the personal monopoly.3
The idea of the personal monopoly is also the reason why I find Peter Attia fascinating:
An hour into reading the book and this dude has been a surgeon (well, that ultimately didn’t turn out to be something he would pursue, but he at least trained for it by becoming a resident at Stanford!), someone who “…swum from Catalina to LA a few years earlier” and who did exactly that again, and now someone who studied applied math and mechanical engineering in college, who also happened to have planned on pursuing a PhD in aerospace engineering!
Link to original
There’s a bunch of more interesting people that I could cite here, such as Joe Rogan, who is “A standup comedian for over 20 years” with a bunch of comedy specials, a UFC commentator, owner and host of (arguably) the most famous podcast show ever, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belter, and more. He’s interviewed a lot of notable guests in his podcast already such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, Matthew Walker, Andrew Huberman, Peter Attia, among others.
There’s also Cal Newport, who had “signed his first book deal with Random House soon after his 21st birthday, while still an undergraduate at Dartmouth College.” He’s the famous author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. He’s also a “regular contributor to major publications including the New York Times, the Atlantic, and WIRED.”
These, among many other people, make me really interested in knowing more about myself. I feel like there’s a lot more that I could be, given that I’m only 22 years old. 4
2024-05-13 | 09:05:54 PM
Hi there, not much to talk about since my day was really boring — just the usual me reading articles and progressing on Outlive. Today I read The Personal Productivity Assessment by Ali Abdaal and realized just how much I could still improve in my productivity process. I don’t really have a lot of energy to type right now so I’ll just move on to actually making progress on my coding project. I’ll see you at my dev log.
2024-05-13 | 10:49:44 PM
Tonight’s mood is this song. The way it’s really bright outside despite it already being 10:53:16 PM. The flashes of lightning, the cold breeze, soft gusts of wind as I type this message — they all make me want to say it’s almost a hopperesque night. But I’d opt to say it’s a slow day. There’s a melancholic vibe to it but I can’t exactly explain why I feel that way. I aim not to understand it more, however. Instead, I hope to feel it as deeply as I could.
Footnotes
Footnotes
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I’d worked with brands such as Google, Hennessy, P&G, Unilever, Pampers, among others. ↩
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Some examples of my case studies can be found in the index page, my Timeless note, and probably some (or many) more that I couldn’t specifically remember at the time of writing. ↩
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Having a personal monopoly is demonstrated so well by Maggie Appleton. Here’s what I had to write about her in 2024-05-11: “Maggie has always caught my attention since she stands out among the common bunch that I see online. Whenever I see her work, I constantly tell myself I want to be “Just like her.” Understandably so, as her interests are fascinating. Here’s a direct quote from the about page of her website: ‘I sit at the intersection of design, anthropology, and programming. These three are at the core of everything I make.‘” ↩
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Fun fact: I’m turning 23 this coming June 18, 2024. 🥳 ↩