Say Hi

Happy Sunday to all fellow outliers reading Claudia’s Digest.

This week, I haven’t been super active on X.

Except spending tons of time rethinking & strategizing the next steps on my journey, most of my headspace went into preparing for my first taekwondo tournament after 2 years, so I didn’t have enough bandwith one that one.

Anyway, since tomorrow, I’m back in full force.

Also, wish me good luck on that tournament.

For now, let’s dive into this week’s digest ↓

Yesterday, I did an awesome podcast interview with my friend Owen Sheasby.

And…

I realized it was exactly one year since I’ve done my first ever podcast interview.

And although I can’t say that I’ve improved as a speaker, I was noticeably less nervous than before my first interview.

What’s more…

I’ve been noticing these little sparks of becoming less ‘socially awkward’ and better at communication almost every single day.

Here’s the thing:

Over the last 2 years of putting out my ideas & connecting with strangers, I had to learn how to detach myself from the opinions of other people.

As a result, not only I became better at starting conversations with strangers online & get less offended by hate comments.

Most of it translated into the real world too.

Now I’m able to do things myself a few years would only dream of, like

• joining a random group of strangers at a volleyball game

• saying hi to my gym crush

• or asking myteacher a question if I don’t understand something

Communication is a skill.

Internet is the best vehicle to practice it.

1) On Getting Your Life Together

It’s easy to slip into situations when you feel like your life is falling apart.

It can happen for various reasons. Failure. Rejection. Anything.

Whenever any situation like this happens to me, I try not to project my worries too much into the future.

Instead, I focus on fixing my daily schedule first.

This means:

• less screen time

• more sleep

• more focused work

• talking to cool people

• more books

As I’ve learned from Hunter Weiss:

“You can’t plan how your year goes, but you can plan how your day goes.”

2) Great Questions To Ask Yourself

One of my top struggles lately:

Identifying the ‘highest-leverage’ tasks that will move me the farthest on my journey.

If you can relate to this, here are a few questions from Sahil Bloom I found helpful (and you’ll likely find them helpful too):

• If you woke up in 10 years and were in flow, what actions did you take that got you there?

• If you woke up in 10 years and everything were broken, what went wrong?

• If everything else stayed the same, what one variable would create the biggest positive change?

• Imagine you're living your ideal day in the future, what are you doing?

I got all of these questions from this article.

3) 2 Useful Heuristics

I’ve been thinking a lot about finding my life’s work (or as some of you might call it, ‘passion’) lately.

These 2 follow heuristics were very useful for me to figure out what is the stuff I truly enjoy & don’t enjoy doing

1/ Fast when it matters, slow when it doesn’t

What are the projects you’d rush to go home from school as soon as you’d get the idea?

On the contrary, what projects do you tend to postpone? When do you tend to wait for the ‘perfect time’?

The former might be a better thing for you than the latter.

2/ How many steps are you imagining?

I first read about this in Derek Sivers’ book Hell Yeah or No, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it since then.

It’s simple:

When you’re planning to do tasks that are tedious, you tend to imagine tons of tiny steps you need to take to complete them.

Example: ‘I have get out of my sofa. Turn on my computer. Then open Gmail. Then open Facebook. And then send 100 boring cold emails to prospects.’

But when we’re about to do tasks that feel more natural to us, we tend to imagine them as one fun step.

Example: ‘I’m gonna go and write the blog post.’

If you’re imaging too many steps, chances are the thing isn’t for you.

Alright, that’s it for this week.

Talk next Sunday,

– Claudia