I was talking to a friend the other day about how he's changed his life over the last couple of years and something he said really stuck with me.
I really wish my memory was good enough to recall it exactly, but here's the gist:
My mentality changed when I started questioning not just the things that make me upset, but the things that make me happy.
Our conversation was focused around themes of self-identity and reflection, and I think this stood out to me because I've never been really good about investigating my feelings deeply (whether positive or negative). I put a lot of pressure on myself to succeed, and more often than not that comes in the form of pinpointing things that I can improve about my lifestyle, my workflow, or routine rather than putting a positive spin on the things that I am enjoying spending my time on.
Weirdly enough, when I'm involved in a team culture though, my first priority is to focus on the positive side of things. To highlight the silver lining and the benefits that we can gain from any situation. I guess because I understand that I can't reasonably hold all of my teammates to the strict standards that I hold myself to.
So anyways, related to this topic of questioning, I realized that although I have been spending a lot of time focusing on my self-identity recently -- more often than not I've been focusing on how to improve the negative sides instead of fostering and embracing the existing positive sides of my self-identity. As I've spent the last month or so unemployed, I have spent a lot of time falling back in love with different sides of technology while I've pushed myself to re-engage and have been asking the question more: "What do I love about this?" I think this has been super valuable because it's making me think more deeply about the parts of the things that I'm doing and actually identifying the things that I enjoy about them.
I'm writing this as a reminder to myself to continue questioning the positive things, to continue documenting my process, and to continue to find the things I love in what we're required to do every day. I'm starting a new job on Wednesday and I'm excited to find the things that I love about that too.
As I've been working on these things and pursuing the quest of questioning more, I've noticed that my reliance on taking notes and writing things down has become more and more prevalant.
I like writing down quotes that I hear, or underlining and annotating the books that I'm reading when there's a particularly moving sentence or paragraph, or putting a quick mention in my notes app when a friend tells me that they love chocolate muffins.
This has been incredibly frustrating.
It's frustrating because I feel like my brain isn't actively accompanying me through my life sometimes. It's not that I don't care about my friends or the media that I'm consuming, I'm just not engaging with it enough, I think. Taking down notes about it helps make it feel more real.
This frustration is a part of the reason that my goal is to question (and think critically) about these things more often. If I make the effort to truly understand why I find something moving or motivational, it becomes easier to communicate about that intelligently instead of just parroting someone else's take and making it my own. I got very far early in my career by parroting other people's good ideas and adopting them as my own. I don't know if that's a solution I can rely on for the future.
I've mentioned to that same good friend from above that I feel like my life is in an era of transformation. I think now that that transformation is focused on questioning and learning from the results of those questions.
I think that similar to how social media can affect mental health and be addictive because of the dopamine it causes to be released, I have a similar experience with using AI tools lately. So often it just becomes so easy to turn to these tools to speed up whatever I'm doing, get the dopamine from doing it, and become addicted to the loop of prompting again. I'm looking to change the way that I interact with these tools, so that it enforces patterns that encourage me to think deeply and question not only the results but also the process.
My hope is that I can turn that process shift into something that I really love doing, which is taking notes and keeping them organized. Whether that is in my calendar, my notes app, or some other format (maybe a markdown file added to a blog), I think it will be really valuable in making sure that I'm actively engaged in my life.
That's also why I didn't use AI to proofread or edit this.
Thanks for reading. Keep on keeping on. Have a happy Monday.