76 · Death and Birth, Quarterly

BOOTCAMP is not a daily routine — it's DQ REVAMPS. Every daily quarter has to be a revamp of myself. CodeChef, Google Code Jam, Google Kickstart, Meta Hacker Cup, building circuits — a fucking revamp. That means death and birth. "Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. If you don't cast a vote for the new identity now, you are casting a vote for the old identity to remain. If nothing changes today, accept that you are choosing to be the same person a year from now." And if the current version of yourself serves you well, don't beat yourself up — that's masochistic. But for those who want radical change: "If you don't change your habits today, you are not planning to change. You are planning to stay exactly where you are for the rest of your life."

Whip yourself into the concrete knowledge. Jolt the pendulum to the complete other side.

I keep finding this part hard: systems. Not that every part of life must be imprisoned in a routine — you need some malleable system to manage it all. Every operational error is usually a failure of maintenance of the basics: the most negligible daily things failing, culminating. There's no structure, no sense of urgency; just waking with the day. It's so hard to be productive when nobody tells you what to do. Why is this so hard? Is this how much of a slave I am to externals — the reason people crawl back into tyrannical systems, because they can't tolerate the discomfort of freedom?

You need to create the future yourself. That's how things get done. Make the plan for the work that must be done — controlling what you can control matters. You have freedom of time for the next five months. Before bed, write the frogs for tomorrow and the hours they'll be executed. Go fully into getting those done and stick to the plan as if your life depends on it. You will fail — but you converge toward the work.

Stake your life on the situation. Burn the boats. Put your back against the wall and dive into the work that makes you vulnerable, overwhelms you, stresses you, feels awkward, is intimidating — and figure it out. If you're only doing work that makes you feel good, you're not pushing beyond your limit. The work should sit beyond the comfort of consciousness — by definition it must feel unfathomably uncomfortable, and you need radical faith to bring it into existence. You must be uncomfortable, stressed, confused. If it just feels fun, there isn't much progress happening.

Set a timer. Find the frog. Dive deeply into it, doing only that.

You need to be fucking radical and execute as if your life depends on it — the Markov Vows done every single day, attacked head-on with a sense of urgency. There is way less time than you think. Enact your goals, because the counter is failing to birth the dreams God has in stock for you. These are existential vows from God; you have a moral duty to bring them into fruition. We have an eighteen-month runway to pull this off and be legendary.

Time to start diving in: constructing habits, small things culminating over time. You become the person with good hygiene. You already cleared the first phase — move on. Now learn to pay attention to the smallest possible things your past self would disparage as minuscule. One pushup before bed. One verse before bed. Ten jump ropes and call it a W. On a day-to-day basis, the threshold for a W is anything above zero. Anything that is not nothing counts as positive. Kill the pride and ego — there's a lot of unconscious pride still to eliminate.