Ironically, after titling my last post, ‘I Feel Really Good Today‘ where I talked about being in a euphoric state as my personal goals for mind, body, and business were all moving forward together, my computer’s HDD crashed.
Everything from 100 days of traveling. Gone. Everything not backed up in probably a year on my computer. Gone. And it would be 6 days of no computer as I arrived in a Costa Rican beach town, Jaco, hoping to have a productive work week.
The usual questions immediately flooded my head:
“Why do I have such bad luck?”
“Why did this happen to me?” “Shit’s not fair”
“I can’t believe I was so dumb to not back up my computer along the way!”
“Why are you so bad at planning Brad?!”
And then I snapped out of it. If there’s one thing you take away from my writing is this: Shit happens. How long you let it affect you afterwards is Your Choice. You can be a victim and spiral backwards into your old unhealthy habits, or you can choose to keep pushing your goals forward.
While I was pissed at the lost opportunity to work and relax (I knew I would have to go back to San Jose to get my Mac fixed and had already booked 5 nights in Jaco), I switched perspectives to say how can I benefit from this? What was the universe trying to tell me?
So after one angry dinner of internally berating myself with statements of self pity, I decided I couldn’t let this linger for one more day. Picture of my face during said dinner:
Brad wallowing in self pity over the loss of material (digital) things
So I committed myself to really following my ideal morning routine:
Wake Up: 7am
Morning Mindfulness: 7:15am (20 min)
Circuit bodyweight fitness routine: 7:40am (30 min)
And morning mindfulness helped me more than I could imagine in completely switching my mindset from despair to excitement for a week without technology.
With body, and mindfulness moving forward, that still left my business goals for this site in flux. How could I push forward on developing this site I was building sin computer?
Enter an old friend: Drawing.
One big problem I have when tackling projects is I tend to start running in one direction and working towards completing this vision as fast as possible. The problem is did I have the right, complete, exact vision at the beginning? So while we think we are racing towards a solution we can easily be running in the opposite direction.
So while I desperately wanted to get back to building this website, I now had time to plan out exactly how to build this: site map, wireframes, prioritization. And what came out of this, was much more concise vision for what I was building and how I was going to build it.
So it got me thinking, among other things, more broadly when the unexpected hits our life, how do we prepare to handle it? For me, I instantly reverted back to bad habits and mindsets, feeling sorry for myself, going to eat comfort food and wanting to do nothing productive (i.e. Watch Netflix but I didn’t have a computer). This post explained my specific road bump. Next post I want to analyze how can we potentially input a framework into our lives where we have a roadmap for reacting to the unexpected. I’ll do some research on what’s out there and incorporate in the next post.
Visual affirmation to live life