imake

Greetings from Madrid! The last few days I was occupied with the MIT Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp reunion here. It was refreshing to see everyone and for all us to spend a few fun days together.

I am now sitting at Café de la Luz, about to finally start "working" again after all the festivities. I put "working" in double quotes because I am using the word "working" in a fluid sense. "Working" these days, in the absence of any structure or a job, is really just analogous with me just having my laptop open.

I bring this up because today is special. It's a day where, for the very first time, I have no plans in my life. Literally zero. Nothing. Nada.*

Sitting here at this coffeeshop in Madrid, I have no sense at all of where I should go next or what specifically I should do. There's no reason for me to be in Madrid, but there's also no reason for me to be anywhere else, really.

At the same time, I have the capacity to do practically anything. I can take off on a world-trip if I feel like. I can go to the Far East and indulge in martial arts. I can go to Africa and climb Mount Kilimanjaro, or maybe Nepal to do some meditation?

What I am experiencing now is the luxury of having the ultimate freedom. Having said that, there is a very fine line between ultimate freedom and being completely lost. That fine line, I think, is purpose. I currently have no purpose that I am fully committed to, and as a result I consistently feel lost.

I do believe though that purpose is attained with a blend of thinking and acting. I have done plenty of thinking (and this blog is a testament of that), and it's now time to be acting. More to come on that.

* Well, strictly speaking, I just booked a bus to Cordoba tomorrow. But, I think of that as random probing rather than an actual plan.

In my last post I wrote about my state of mental weakness. I have been lacking firm opinions, deferring decisions to the last minute, easily getting distracted, giving up on things I plan very easily, etc.

Before when I had a stable job and home I was able to get away with this. But, now, gaining mental toughness and emotional resiliency is becoming increasingly necessary.

Another way I can describe my current state is that I am simply in a limbo state. I don't have a clear purpose, I'm not offering the world anything of value, and I don't have a sense of where I should live or what my life should look like. Not only that, but I am also falling into an "analysis paralysis" while trying to figure this all out.

To be able to get myself out of this limbo state, I need a sense of direction. And, to get that sense of direction, I need focus and a methodical way to explore the possible directions I can go. And, to get focus, I need mental toughness and emotional resiliency.

A few days ago I came across a great book: 8 Weeks to SEALFIT: A Navy SEAL's Guide to Unconventional Training for Physical and Mental Toughness

The book is inspired by principles from the Navy Seals, Sun Tzu, yoga, and ninjutsu. So far the underlying philosophy in that book resonates with me a lot. It sees physical training as a catalyst for mental toughness and emotional resiliency.

The training in this book is certainly not easy. It's been very physically demanding the last few days. Here's an example training I did yesterday and today:

• Warmup
• 5 rounds of:
  • 20 airsquats
  • 20 burpees
  • 200 jump ropes

In addition to intense physical training, the book is emphasizing "the warrior mindset".

"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win." - Sun Tzu

"Pain is weakness leaving the body" - Navy Seals

I started seeing training as a battle. Not only should I prepare the body, but I should also prepare the mind.  Here are three steps of mental preparation I do prior to training:

1. Clear the mind. I eliminate distractions and focus on the task ahead.
2. Know the "why". I am doing this not just for the physical fitness, but for improving my mental toughness and emotional resiliency. I need both to help me explore and get a sense of where to go next in life.
3. See victory in the mind, and practice for it. I imagine myself finishing the workout in perfect form in my head, feeling it as much as possible.

The first time I did this workout, and halfway through the first cycle, my first instinct was to immediately cut my goal from five cycles to three cycles - the burpees were just too tough! But, sticking with the warrior mindset, I plowed through it. I won that battle, and several other battles since.

This process of mental preparation is definitely helping me and is something I want to inject not just in physical training, but in anything challenging I intend to do.

I plan to continue with the SEALFIT training, as I am getting a lot of benefit out of it so far.

And, today is my birthday! I'll be spending some time tonight with the family and tomorrow at dawn I head to Madrid. The MIT reunion is coming up!

I left Lebanon and have been back in Egypt for over a week now, and generally my time in Egypt is an interesting introspection as I tend to spend a lot of time alone and without significant obligations.

But, the more I am spending time with myself, the more I am realizing a very apparent weakness in me, and is something that is becoming more and more painful for me as time lingers.

I am in a state of mental weakness. I lack firm opinions, I leave decisions to the very last minute, I give up easily, I easily get distracted, and my mind is dominated with negative emotions. Not to mention that a lot of the "plans" I make are often better classified as "wishful thinking" at best.

I don't think any of the above is actually new. It has been creeping in me over the last couple of years at least. Now, though, that I have more time for introspection, that reality is more often than not hitting, slapping, and punching me in the face.

For me to do anything worthwhile in life, I need to overcome this state of mental weakness. Not only is it a blocker for practically anything I do, but it's also causing me to suffer.

Here's a recent example of my mental weakness. When I flew out to Egypt my goal was to spend two weeks working on side projects. Here's what came out of it:

• I decided to build a simple alarm clock app that greets with refreshing bird sounds. The primary driver behind this is I have never done any mobile dev and thought it would a nice gentle intro to get a feel of what mobile dev is like. I worked on it for a bit and didn't finish it.
• I decided to build a speech recognition system for understanding how people say the time in Egyptian Arabic - I wanted to use this as a building block to speak with my phone in Egyptian Arabic and have it wake me up at certain times. I read some papers and downloaded some datasets, but also never fully committed.
• I decided to put all three routers in our home on one wifi network (as opposed to three separate ones). I thought it would fix a small nuisance and I'd learn a few things about networking while doing it. After a few hours of triaging problems, I actually set up the network. There was one issue though: a device connected to one router would stay connected to that router even if the signal is very weak, as opposed to switching to the much closer router on the same network with a stronger connection. I was supposed to figure out a fix for that problem, but I never did.

Or, consider for example my workouts. When I left my job almost three months ago I wanted to spend more time focusing on my physical fitness, as it's something I haven't been putting as much attention to as I'd like. Here's how things evolved:

• I came up with a plan that I wanted to train for Half Iron Man and be ready by next Summer.
  • I ended procrastinating and didn't do much training, but a big hindrance for me was that a big pool was inaccessible. Traveling to Lebanon and not sticking around one location long enough makes it more difficult for me as well to commit to a gym for pool access.
• I changed my plan to do something very simple but over an extended period of time. I decided every morning that I'd spend a couple of minutes doing ab workouts, following the guidelines of the book Convict Conditioning.
  • That plan lasted (with many misses) for 40 days, but relocating several times and the sheer ease of the workout didn't make me feel like I was actually working out, so I subconsciously made the decision to stop.
• The whole workout plan fell apart.

So far during my stay in Egypt there has been precisely zero projects that I took to full completion. This is dangerous, as it could spiral into further mental weakness.

I bring this up here because I have been thinking of ways to build up my mental toughness. More to come on that.