We fixed the leveling problem, and we even have the cities displaying text now which is exciting. The issue I ran into last week was maintaining my own motivation to get work done. It stems from a lot of things going on in my personal life.
It’s difficult to put a finger on it, but if I were to guess one of the other parts of my life isn’t running at the capacity I need them to be at. In the book “The Mystery Method” the author Mystery talks about how everyone has three main needs. The three needs are health, wealth building, and social life. Health focuses on working out and eating healthy. Wealth building is the ability to make money. Social life has to do with love life and socials with peers. He goes on to state that if you were to rate those categories from 1-10 and any one of them is a 1 then the others will take hits as well. Honestly I’d say that I spent the bulk of my time working on socials this week, and I worked out on one of the days. Both things seemed to help reset me.
I feel better tonight but now the week is over. Still I should finish a couple of things and get some more done. I’m hoping to finish all the baseline text for the game and replace all the enemies with prefabs to get the next beta released. The good news is that my artist delivered a new cursor icon for me today.
I spent some time with a new friend on Saturday watching the anime Re:Zero. I often like to watch an anime I haven’t seen yet when I’m getting to know someone. It creates a connection with them. In the anime we watched the basic premise is that the main character can get killed and come back to make changes and figure out how to get the best outcome to move forward. It’s kind of like a video game with the idea of Groundhog Day.
It made me go back to some recent events in my own life and wonder what things would be like now if I was able to go back and make some key changes. I guess that’s what makes life, life though. We don’t get a chance to try again, and most people love to say things like “given the choice I wouldn’t change a thing.” I’d say those people are a lot less tortured by their analytical thoughts though.
Going back to “The Power of Now” Eckart Tolle says that we need to make sure we don’t spend to much time living in the past or in the future. We need to live in the now. I found that my drive to pick up my kids was so long that I had an extremely hard time staying present during the drive. My mind drifted back in time, which caused a lot of emotions that I wasn’t ready for. It’s easy to start spiraling out of control, but understanding what is happening to me is the first step at least. I need to spend more time keeping my thoughts in check and not let them get away from me to keep my productivity high.
Eckart says that you need to step outside of yourself and become the observer of your own thoughts. Most of the time when I do this I laugh at the character of myself as I agonize over things that become more trivial from that vantage point. It’s sort of like what authors have their space characters describe looking down on the earth. “It looks so peaceful”. From that vantage point you would have no idea that there’s a presidential election, a disease outbreak, or uncertain future outcomes on the horizon in general.
It’s important to do internal work to understand what’s happening inside yourself so that you can learn to control it.