I have done what I “should” do for most of my life. I worked hard to get into a good university for mechanical engineering, finishing second in my class, got into law school, got a job as a lawyer, and passed the exams to become a patent agent in Canada and the US, winning multiple awards for the highest score. Now what?
This traditional path, what I was supposed to do, has left me feeling burnt out. I know that there must be a better way to live, a better path to follow. One that is true to myself and the full potential of where I could be. Self-actualization.
Part of what I’m trying to do with this newsletter and through education more generally is to provide people with an alternate path. There is so much potential with the Internet and the creator economy that people can start to make it without relying on traditional means, if they want to.
When the pandemic hit, I started putting more energy into the development of my passions: reading self-improvement books, editing my photos and timelapses, building a social media following, establishing my website, creating technology tutorials, etc. Trying to do all of this while working a full time job has been a lot.
To help deal with burnout, I have spent a lot of time researching productivity methods and mindfulness. Learning to be more efficient at work and to control my mind to maintain my mental health while putting myself out there online. Mindfulness has been one of the greatest skills I have learned and I look forward to helping others figure it out as well.
My goal is to be able to learn new things (which I love doing) and distill them to their most simple and interesting forms (which I do as a patent agent). I can then take these data entries and use them to reflect on how they fit into my life, changing my thoughts and behaviours as needed based on the reweighing of my system. In other words, I want to use the new things I have learned to recalibrate my existence to better fit my current path to my desired path.
As I take in new information and add more data entries, their relative importance tends to shift and vary. I can become obsessed with a topic one month, only to move on to another topic a month later. That’s not to say that the previous topics were unimportant, merely that I feel my intuition pulls me in another direction and I like to follow my intuition. Following intuition tends to put me in a flow state where I become the most engaged version of myself.
But I don’t want to lose the depth of my understanding of previous topics once I’ve moved on from them. I want to have their essence stored in a way that I can return to later to refresh myself if needed. I want to be able to recalibrate based on new data, but retain the weight of my previous experience for reference so that my path does not get too distorted by my latest interests.
That is the goal of this newsletter. Each week, I will summarize the most interesting things I have learned on my path towards finding self-actualization. These summaries will continue to fill my database, providing a training model that can be recalibrated as new information is entered to form a compass for myself. Through self-reflection, I hope to continuously update my path so that I optimize learning and creation in a mentally and physically healthy way that leads to a satisfying life. Through automation with AI and authentic content verification with web3, I hope to teach people how to develop their self-sovereign identity so they can maximize their potential in the creator economy.
It’s time for me to stop doing what I “should” do and focus more on who I am and what that means for my life.
You can join me at any point on this journey. The dataset is there for anyone to read to help calibrate their own model for life. There is no wrong point to start at, no right way to go. I recommend taking a look at the topics below and see what jumps out at you. Follow your intuition. Find your flow.
The entire archive will be posted on my website here.
The topics of the newsletter will vary, but will have the same consistent themes:
- The Journey: Where I am at, what I am trying to solve, what I plan to try next week, how it went
- Tech update: review of emerging technologies
- Age of Imagination: AI and content creation
- Reflection: mental health and mindfulness
- Authenticity: digital identity, web3, and the creator economy
