I'm really starting to realize how much you truly can improve in your life, and things I formerly didn't even consider on the plate, I'm now able to do with relative ease!

It's a massive mindset change that I'm currently in the midst of and realizing that there isn't much I can't do if I set my mind to it. There are so many things you can make huge improvements in what you want to learn with focused and intentional effort. The problem is, I often face the scenario where I don't feel up to doing something, and previously, I would write it off as something I can't fix, and there are just going to swing like that. To a certain extent, I believe that to be true, but I'm coming to find that you can program how you show up in those scenarios and throw the odds in your favor of wanting to be up for something. 

For example, these past few weeks, I've felt absolutely drained and pretty unmotivated in a lot of my work. But after a conversation with my father, I forgot to take into account that I was massively losing weight (on purpose) each week and that in months past, it would leave me sucked dry. Just coming to realize that the weight loss may be a reason for my weird lack of motivation helped me see what kind of changes I can make to improve it or consider when making decisions. 

Key takeaways:

1) There isn't much you can't do if you set your mind to it

2) Don't take things you thought were impossible for granted; you can change them

3) Set the odds in your favor by doing things ahead of time to feel the right ways

I absolutely love high-performance and taking things to the next level. My favorite thing to do in my free time is read on the subject, and I try to bring my highest performance levels to whatever I happen to be doing.

I want to bring more value than the average person into my tasks, and the problem with this is that it takes more effort, which can lead to failure. I've found myself in several situations where I went in wanting to bring my all, and I fall short of it; not only that, I do less work than the average person would in that scenario. It's the case of too much to do and not enough time to do it in. 

I would often overbook my time and not leave any room for 'life' to happen. So when 'life' inevitably happened, my plans would fall apart. Thus, I came up with "Before going the extra mile, make sure you can do the first" basically, instead of figuring out what the extra bit you want to give, think first about the actual task, and do that well first foremost. Then, formulate what you can do to bring a bit more value than expected. I love the 80/20 rule for this; a lot of times, there are some small efforts we can do that aren't apart of what we need to do that can make big impacts. Doing those small things that get you really far. 

An example of going that extra mile in my own work is cleaning the office up when I'm finished. Restocking products even when it can wait until the morrow. This creates a clean and open working environment where I come to the next day with a clear head and can laser focus on the tasks that need completing. 

1) Don't go the extra mile until you know you can go the first

3) Consider first how you will do your job and get that down as the priority

3) Use the 80/20 rule when trying to figure out what to do, like the "extra mile."

I'm working on the model car project again today and making good progress on it!

One of the things my boss wants for this model is to highlight the outline of the smaller features with an engraving. So like the outline of the doors, handles, and windows. The problem is, creating these features are a bit more difficult than you might think. Since the features I want to engrave aren't flat, I have to use a projection toolpath to generate the path I want the endmill to follow. However, I keep running into an issue where if it's got both steep and shallow surfaces that it needs to follow, it tends to have a delayed effect. 

Above I've got an example of the toolpath cutting into the material as it should at the beginning. However, when it comes to the curve, it cuts the air, then dips down, follows the curve farther along than it should, and completely avoids touching the material. I had this same issue with the rocket project, and the solution for that was to isolate the problem portions and create a manual offset by duplicating the toolpath. 

I published a question on the Fusion360 forums to see if other people have had this issue and found a solution. 

One thought I had was to project the geometry manually onto the 3D surface in the sketch environment and then use the trace toolpath. However, when I attempted to project it onto the vehicle, it would only project a short segment of the features (see picture above) and wouldn't take the whole thing. 

I'm still very lost on this and had to give up for the day. I'm trying to develop alternate solutions by drawing the geometry myself, but I've found that to be a complicated task, involving 3D sketches. 

While running the rocket operations, I got a low-lube warning light come on, and got the opportunity to fill it back up again! The process was pretty straightforward, just cut off the line to the air pressure and purge whatever's left, then unscrew the tank, fill it, and put it all back together.

However, when I went to fill the tank up with the Haas liquid grease (HLG) lubricant, I found they were two different colors. This really threw me off, and I absolutely did not want to mix anything and mess the machine up. I couldn't find any information about this online, so I ended up just calling Haas customer service and got my answer within minutes! It turns out they just switched distributors. The color change was just different dyes being used and had the same compound. 

Something I'm becoming more aware of in my own life is realizing the impact of the story I tell myself.

Tony Robbins said in one of his seminars "Becareful what story you tell yourself" because we will view everything through that lens, be it right or wrong. Basically, what we tell ourselves, will oftentimes come to pass before us. If we expect a situation to go sideways, there will always be something that goes sideways. This all comes down to perception, for everything we do and learn, there is always a positive and negative, and they aren't mutually exclusive of each other. 

Focusing on the positive things rather than the negative will change how we view life in general and creates in us a hopeful look to the future! It's very much the power of limiting beliefs, 'whether you think you can, or cannot, you're right' -Henry Ford. And a lot of things in our lives are brainwashed into us from such an early age, good and bad, and sometimes we have to take a step back and change our mindset on how we go about grasping a new concept. 

Key takeaways:

1) Be aware of the story you tell yourself

2) We are who we think we are

3) We're ingrained with what is the norm from a young age, it takes intentional focus to overcome those

"Teaching it will help you better understand it" This is something I hear quite often from the thought-leaders I follow. And I know it to be quite true from my own experience of grasping new concepts and ideas.

This is why I'm trying something new related to learning new subjects, and you can refer to my previous post, where I tried it out in practice. I'm calling it the "Super-Specific-Hyper Learning Method," where if I want to learn or better grasp a new piece of information, I can take myself through a series of steps to speed the process up a bit. 

I've heard that not only writing but speaking, what you learn will help you get a deeper understanding of the subject. It forces you to put what you learned into new words and structure your thoughts. On top of that, speaking it out loud will cause your brain to hear it differently from how you learned it and cause new insights to spark. Plus, you get the bonus to refer back to it when you don't recall all the points. 

The basic outline goes as follows:

1) Find content - go to a few videos or written posts on the subject you want to learn, and hear what they have to say

2) Commonalities - Find what's common between the content

3) Write a summary - either a blog post or with pen and paper, outline what you learned

4) Record it - Video yourself talking about the subject, and go through each key piece of information

One of the skills I greatly desire to be good at is public speaking, which is part of the reason I started making these videos.

Doing some basic research, I found several things I need to work on to start learning how to be a better speaker. One of the major things is removing filler words. Doing this will make us sound more confident and avoids the distraction of people counting the 'ums' and 'likes' while talking.

I pulled up a few short videos on the subject and found the common key features among them.

1) Get comfortable with silence - we often are afraid of leaving space between thoughts and want to fill them with something. However, this isn't necessary, and often the other party doesn't even realize the pauses.

2) Count your filler words - You can record yourself and review it or have another person ring a bell when you use the filler words; this helps you become more aware of what words you use and how often. 

3) Breathe - We often get flustered and start using filler words to formulate our thoughts, so take a deep breath, even in the middle of a speech.

4) Focus on how you want your listener to feel - Think about how you want to get your message across; let that be the motivator

5) Practice - The more you practice being aware and replacing the filler words with silence, the more natural it feels. 

I finished up the instruction card that went along with the little model rocket kits and decided to make a small animation to go along with it!

Something I learned while putting this animation together was that you could reverse the sequence of movements. I started with the assembled rocket already complete and exploded it as I wanted, but it was in the wrong order. I wanted to have it open with an exploded view and then assemble itself into its proper places. I didn't know how to do this without moving each component out initially, then reassembling it in the animation workspace, which would mess with the design and cause a headache when trying to get things back in the right spots. I ended up finding that you can right-click the storyboard tab at the bottom left of the screen and hit 'reverse order,' which flips everything in your storyline front-to-back. 

Once I had the animation complete, I moved over to Canva to finish it off. As it turns out, Canva has a pretty decent live image editor, and I had no problem importing the animation from Fusion. I found that in the video side of things, Canva works with pages, rather than a timeline, like most video editors. 

Each page consists of one sequence in the animation, and you can import videos or images and set the duration for each page, like a slideshow. Because of this, I took still images of each area I wanted to add a note in the animation and added them as separate pages, then set how long I wanted them to show for. On top of this, I built transitions between added elements and the following video, called "animate," where you can choose from a few default settings as to how the features would appear and disappear, like fades or flips. 

I'm really excited to learn these new tools in Canva and Fusion360, and it has been a nice change from the programming and machine setups!

I just finished listening to the audiobook 'Man's Search For Meaning' by Viktor Frankl, a jew and former brain surgeon who was forced into a concentration camp where he observed a lot of pain and had deeper insights into the will to live.

Viktor Frankl writes about his experience in the camp and the inhumane things that happened there, not as a way to share his story, but rather to illustrate a better picture of our purpose and desire for life. It's a weighty book, but absolutely fascinating to hear how far we can really be pushed before we have given our all. He really writes about how big an impact our will to live has on our longevity, and oftentimes, those who give up tend to die shortly after. 

One thing that really caught my attention was the desensitization of cruelty and inhumanity that they all grew accustomed to. Not only that, but there was a 'higher' rank of a prisoner in the camp, where they had more favor with the guards and often treated their fellow inmates with cruelty and almost acted as spies, while still being beaten and forced to work, though just not as hard.

It's really eye-opening, and I'm happy I read the book. It really confirms my thoughts on mindset being almost everything in life, and how you look at things really defines how you live and the quality of living. 

Viktor Frankl outlines the "psychotherapy" where you immerse yourself in something to look forward to, finding something beautiful and great. 

Key takeaways:

1) WW2 concentration camps were battles in themselves

2) The will to live oftentimes defines if you do or don't

3) Mindset really is everything we can overcome the worst tragedies if we have a hopeful spirit

One of my favorite books I've read this year was "the first 20 hours" by Josh Kaufman, where he outlines how you can become quite skilled in almost anything within just twenty hours of intentional learning.

This book reminds me of a lot of the 80/20 rule, where you spend 20% of your time to make 80% of the progress, and Josh Kaufman illustrates this very eloquently. 

The basic principle is you spend 20 hours of focused and dedicated learning regularly, where you take apart what you want to learn and find the few "core" things within that skill. Then break each of those into subsets of smaller skills that you can practice and self-correct to do them almost perfect before moving to the next. He sights many examples of people excelling in concise periods of time and identifies that the first 20 hours of focused learning typically gets you 80% of the way. It's not at an elite level, but you can get surprisingly good with very little time. 

The 20-hour method has actually been one of the core backbones to many of the projects I take on and skills I try to pick up. I don't set myself with exact hours, but I've found that I can get quite a bit of learning new things just by being intentional about learning and growing when I take the time to do that. 

Key takeaways:

1) Intentional learning is the key to developing skills faster

2) 20-hour method uses focused specific skill-building techniques to master subjects

3) I've found the 20-hour method works really well for picking up new skills extremely quickly in my own life

One of the biggest things I've learned this year was, you can live life to a complete level, and I'm on a journey to get a better idea of my 'purpose' and what kind of work I would find the most fulfillment in. 

Often, we take moments in life for granted, and I know I'm especially guilty of this. And that's why one of the big reasons many thought leaders out there today have some 'big moment' in their life, where they realized life is precious, and so started a journey to start enjoying it and living it to their fullest potential! 

The thing is, I don't want to have a 'big moment' (most often some tragic accident) before I can really appreciate all that I've been given. Because of this, I've been reading a lot more, finding more outlets to learn and take on projects that challenge my current abilities and never be in a state where I'm not growing or moving the needle forward in some way.

I don't fully understand this yet, but I've heard this a lot from many different people, and that is, 'You only get one go-around at this life,' so why not live it to the fullest. Serving, loving, enjoying every moment possible! I think that's one of the biggest reasons I started walking down the path of becoming a 'High-performer" and being as present as I can in each situation I find myself in.

Key takeaways:

1) We often take life for granted

2) Many big thought-leaders have a "big moment" in their life, and I want to avoid that

3) Try new things, and challenge your abilities to keep growing

4) The life of a high-performer is one that engages fully in every scenario, and I want to emulate that