Intended as a reply to Lovie Price, the site wouldn’t let my publish this as a reply (probaly because of the amount of links). So instead of figuring out the restrictions on that end, I’m just going to post this as a post here. For those of you who haven’t read her blog, Wake up! Operation Get A Life I reccomend it because not only is it interesting and insightful, but for me it really spawns a lot of deep thinking and helps me draw connections in my own life in a way I don’t really understand.

Your writing is really helpful for me, I wish I could put it clearly and easily why, maybe because you tell the truth in a way that is uncommon and encouraging.

I used to feel the same way about writing (that nobody cared less) until reading the “Boldly Celebrate Yourself,” post by Nomz. There have been other people who encouraged me since then and it helps, but for the first time changing myself to allow myself to celebrate what felt like an accomplishment with myself, by myself shifted all my feelings just a little bit, but in a way that has allowed me to be less afraid of doing creative things. There is some kind of a need for celebration and encouragement to fuel the creative process, it’s fine to accept it from others, but it’s so helpful to learn to be able to provide it for ourselves. To become friends to ourselves. Since I’ve restarted my blog I was really revitalized by noticing how a few writers were going through similar trials in different places all over the world, I tend to think my problems are because of a failing in me, but although it’s partial correct, what I didn’t look at was the universality of some problems because of our shared human condition (of being human). Through reading your writing in particular, it allowed me to see past myself in myself to see the universal human within me a little bit more.

The “Life Improvement System” is really complicated and hard to understand, it started years ago after reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey talks about aligning your goals to not only your values but also natural principles of virtue. He argues that even a thief has values, they value prosperity ext. So that it’s not wrong to align life with values, but that they first need to be aligned with principles of nature, such as truth, diversity, love ext. When I used to set goals I had trouble sticking to them, Steven Covey argues that when the “why” is strong enough you will find a “how,” so that it isn’t just bad time management rather a lack of your soul’s true values aligning with the goals in a succinct way. So I am attempting to align the principles of virtual and what seems good and right with the world (pono in Hawaiian) with my particular values (such as integrity or honesty) excluding the values that are still valid, but not my values, and then use my strengths from the Clifton Strength Finder test, because using one’s strengths rather than trying to skill build your weaknesses is supposed to be more effective. I read the book Strength Finder 2.0 and it said that if your manager primarily ignores you the chance of your being actively disengaged is 40%, if they focus on your weakness it is 22% and if they focus on your strength it is 1%. So as my manager or me, I try to apply my top 5 strengths to my goals and it has really helped me achieve things that I had always dreamed of, but never been able to do. So the system is a very complicated multi-prong approach initially a copy of comedian Demitri Martin’s system, which he explains in the comedy show “If I?” Since he got divorced while living by his system, I felt that since I’m married and don’t want to get divorced I should add some relationship building priorities in and also since I’m not Demitri Martin that the system would need major changes over time. It was just easier to start with his framework than to build from the ground up. I use the Hawaiian system of Lōkahi as my base for natural principles or virtue, it’s harmony/life balance = humankind + spirituality + care of the Earth since that’s what resonates with me. The three major components are 1. Aligning Natural Principles with Personal Values 2. Choosing Weekly Goals in Line with the Personal Values (from The Life Values Inventory and Russ Harris) and 3. Choosing what personal strengths from the Clifton Strengths Test . Everything except the Clifton Strengths Test is free, the test is $50 for all your strengths or $20 for the top five, there is a free version, but it was less helpful because it doesn’t match the book to find out more about the strengths, the test is included with the Audible book: Strength Finder 2.0.

It seems, and is, really complicated, but that’s what it took for me to be able to put my very complicated mental life down in words, which helped get the complexity off my personal mental plate, yet still allow me to use the concepts I had heard of and wanted to try, in order to get leverage on completing the changes that I struggled to be able to keep track of, or accomplish, without having in some kind of a system.

It was never really meant to be public, but since the vast majority of my writing is public it ended up that way as well.

My blog, in general, serves the purpose of organizing my mind, it was meant to be a home to my consciousness, which is why it has my martial arts class, right alongside with my struggles with family life, right alongside with my journey as a writer, because in life they exist that way, influencing and affecting each other, they also exist that way in my blog.

For years no one read my writing at all, that’s just the way the traffic worked, but I switched back to wordpress.com because of tech problems with the theme I ran on a Blue Host site with the same domain name and I wasn’t really aware that switching to wordpress.com would expose me to so much more traffic than having an independently hosted wordpress.org site. It’s been quite nice because it has allowed me to meet really inspiring writers, it seems like only writers are drawn to my writing, but I take that as a compliment. It also allowed me to achieve the only goal I ever had as a writer, freeing me up to be able to think about and set another one at my leisure.

Thank you again for your post “Step#1-Let’s start with Labels,” it was the first time I had been invited to define and redefine myself, it was something so fast and simple, yet emotionally life-changing in a way that many people may never understand. 💐

(Updated Summer 2020)