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How are you Jun-te on
March 2024.
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A monthly newsletter of insights, hacks, and automation tools to help you balance your emotional and logical needs.
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A friend of mine came to drop off a small gift to me to celebrate my birthday.
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Gift 1 ( A gift to help you grasp the shortness of life):
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For the uninitiated, each circle represents a week in your life. It assumes you have 4576 weeks (88 years).
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For past readers, I mentioned the death of my uncle. He didn't make it past 66. How many circles did he miss? How many circles am I going to miss by not looking after my HealthTrinity?
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How would you like to spend this time?
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Gift 2 ( a gift to help you spend time intentionally ):
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He didn't plan this but did it more as a gimmick due to my Pomodoro journey. ( A gimmick I truly appreciate 🤣 ).
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He didn't plan it like this but after using this tool, what a beautiful gift.
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He has no idea but I've been playing with the idea of no music in my work time to increase the intentionality of my work.
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Music can be used as a tool to help me move when I don't want to and not be present at Mcdonlads.
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However, when it comes to my code, my videos, my craft, I'm at the stage now that I start it effortlessly but I wanted to hide from the pain of discomfort. The pain I get whenever I'm stuck on the bug. The pain I get when I'm not sure what I should do next.
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The music softens that blow A LOT.
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In the spirit of not running away from discomfort, I wanted to minimise or get rid of music when I'm not moving. As you can see from the picture, I already owned a timer but my digital one was silent.
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This timer comes with a ticking noise, due to its mechanical nature.
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So his gift to me was a representation of how I would like to spend my finite time and a tool to help me be more present with the ticking noise. What a beautiful gift.
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This gift came perfectly when I was recently going through self doubt.
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Self doubt in my business. Self doubt in my journey and next steps.
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Should I get a full time job? Am I doing the right thing? Am I good enough to accomplish my goals?
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Upon reflection and before the gift, I had systems to help me navigate this doubt.
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However, I much prefer this programming:
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Life is short. What would you rather fill those circles with?
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Today I listen to my calender as it is a representation of what my future self wants.
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I gave a line ( a year ) to living unintentionally (first employer, second employer and illness).
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I want to be able to keep giving circles for my mission (Help people balance their emotional and logical needs).
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I have a lot of debt to pay to my unintentional living.
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I'll do it one circle at a time.
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At the time of writing, I have used up 1455 circles.
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Only 81 circles have been for intentional living. That's only 5 percent of my life so far. I think I can allow myself to give myself a bit more time on this.
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It is tradition for my family to call mum on our birthday.
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We call mum and repeat the sentence that can be literally translated to 'Thank you for giving birth to me'.
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I never thought much of it in my unintentional living. However now that it's coming up, I had a lot of time to reflect on this little tradition we have.
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It is very common for people to start their birthday about themselves. I mean, it is your birthday after all.
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However, I never had a chance to reflect what this traumatic day was for my mother.
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Birthday to me is a celebration of an achievement I did nothing to accomplish.
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This is the same as a participation event. I participated but wasn't the person going through the act of suffering.
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I'm sure, without asking, my mum didn't want to suffer the pain however, like every mother, she'll tell you that 'it was worth it'.
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I would love to say my mum is delusional at this point but I feel she is wiser than us all.
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Some pains are worth doing. Some pains allow us to be more resilient.
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This could be exercise. This could be sleeping on time. This could be following your diet.
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My pain point is helping my mother and father (people) balance their emotional and logical needs.
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Without going into too much detail, my parents have a belief that I have a 'brick wall' for them.
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Years of me saying 'yes' has made them expect a yes from me and my 'no' was never respected. ( I would highly recommend a book called boundaries.)
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In fact, I had a belief that if I said 'no' to my parents, I would not receive the love and support from my parents. So much so, that after my illness I began to establish better boundaries with my father and said 'no'.
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I said 'no' to my father and this involved me being kicked out of my house of security at the time.
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However, this does not mean I don't love them. ( Please feel free to tell me I'm delusional, it wouldn't be my first time being told this 🤣🤣 ).
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My father kicking me out of his house does not mean he doesn't love me.
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Although, it does feel like that at the time.
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On my birthday, I have decided to embrace the pain I've been avoiding. This is saying 'yes' to a favour my parents have asked me to do. Just this once and only access to my time on this day.
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If you guys want to give me a gift for my birthday, I would truly appreciate a video of you doing a 'cold plunge' (not a shower) for 2 minutes. Trust me when I say this, the majority of our pain is only in our thoughts.
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The act and after the cold plunge can actually be enjoyable.
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I'm sure it'll be worth it.
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Feel free to call me crazy.
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“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.
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After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.”
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Let's call enlightenment here being very rich in money.
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So before riches, I will do an act
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after riches, I will do the same act.
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It might be worth working out what that act is.
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Back in January 2024, I wrote on my newsletter of me achieving my exercise goal. This was to do 100 pull ups with 20kg additional weight on me. A feat I didn't think I could do.
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It was very easy to make me move when I had a purpose. However after reaching that goal, what was next?
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The easy answer would have been to make the goal harder but I wasn't a big fan. For my business, I like to do this in 10 times the magnitude.
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So if I had 1 customer, the next goal would be 10 customers etc.
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However for exercise it doesn't quite work. Time to lift 200kg with 1000 pull ups?!?!!
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So I've been doing my normal routine that I can maintain for the rest of my life.
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This is still, 50 pulls ups, 50 push ups, 50 dips, 50 knee raises and 50 squats (same as January). I've been very consistent with this doing it 6 to 7 times a week.
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I want to save my goals tool for my business endeavours. So what can I promise myself to do everyday?
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I have a lot of proof that I can do my callisthenic routine. However to do my pull up goal, what was sacrificed?
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Boree (my fiancee's dog) is currently 11 years old, a life expectancy for a Cavachon is 10 to 15 years. Boree has a heart murmur and was overweight like myself (10.3kg). Due to this realisation, I stopped giving her treats and enforced a very strict routine on the family to not give her as much food. With this I was able to get her weight to 7 to 8 kg. She has lost equivalent to 20 to 30kg of weight for a human adult in a year! Puts my 10kg weight to shame!
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Boree has an amazing diet discipline but weaker exercise routine. I have great exercise discipline but weak diet routine. We can learn from each other. We can help each other.
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Due to my focus, there were days I neglected my walk with my dog. We would always do it if we were dog-sitting but as my focus narrowed my walk discipline to myself and the dog was neglected.
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Thus the act of chopping wood and carry water:
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- Calisthenic workout for muscle stimulation
- A walk to see sunlight, smells and see movement
- Cardio for my heart
- Calisthenic workout with music + podcast
- A walk with the dogs
- Cycling on a 30 minute stationary bike while DOOM SCROLLING
Currently, I've been neglecting my cardio due to doing 10 kettlebell swings and or jump rope before my pull ups but I also wanted an area where I solely focused on my cardio everyday.
The plan is to do this BEFORE my work. However earning work ( McDonald's and other full time jobs ) that are outside my control will happen. When I can, I will execute.
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I've been a big fan of Alex Hormozi and he basically says f*ck morning routines. To me, the trade off is mental health or business. Physical health or business.
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Right now, I will never trade my mental and physical health for business. No matter how amazing the business is.
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However it's just a belief. We can have it all 👀.
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Health > Relationships > Mission, In that order. Oh hello again, Naval. How you been?
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- Sleep (McDonald's (job) Enforced)
- Exercise (Calendar Enforced)
- Diet (I want to cook diverse food and accomplish my fitness goals... this is hard...)
For the last year, to help my exercise goal, I have sacrificed one of my loves. Cooking.
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When my parents found out I was working at McDonald's, they weren't surprised I was working with food.
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When my university friend found out I was making a food planning app, he said, "I can see how your life has set you up for this moment."
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I live to eat, I don't eat to live.
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Let's solve this problem to get both.
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Once I solve it, I will go back to chopping wood and carrying water but also before I will chop wood and carry water.
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Relationships hurt diet. Or so I like to make myself believe.
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"Oh I didn't stick to my diet because of Holiday" ( going on March 29th till April 15th 👀👀👀 ).
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"Oh I didn't stick to my diet because Eden (my fiancée) ordered take away"
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"If we don't finish the food, it's a waste. Think of all the starving children in Africa."
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We all have traumas, beliefs and excuses to our problems.
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I am proud to say, due to my exercise and inconsistent diet, I have been able to make great progress on my health. My blood work, blood pressure and weight are no longer at obese levels. I am still overweight according to my BMI and body fat but it's all trending downwards.
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It is my job to take responsibility of my problems. Due to major warning signs I was able to avert a health crisis of diabetes and gout.
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I'm happy to report I have not had a gout episode since December 2022.
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Relationships are the excuses I like to give myself to stab myself in the foot in regards to my diet goals. No one is force feeding me like when I was a child. ( I would like to defend my parents a little bit. My parents had a trauma of starvation being a very poor family after the Korea war. They had trauma of a lack of food. So the way they showed love to their children was an abundance of food. It is not their fault that my trauma is now the lack of food control. It is my job to manage it XD ).
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My solution to balance my love of cooking and my diet is to make a plan.
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The act of meal planning is very difficult and time consuming and I have not been able to find a solution that works for me.
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Thus, my solution is to finish MealCraft for me. So that my love for cooking and diet goals can be reached easily. Thus my HealthTrinity will be accomplished.
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My plan is to go in a 'Season of No'.
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No to Relationships. No to weddings. No to social gatherings. No to online games.
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When I got an invite to something, I replied with, "I'm about to enter a season of no, thank you for the invite but I want to focus on MealCraft at the moment.'
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I thought there was going to be a massive backlash. Instead I received a massive amount of support and love.
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I am fortunate that I had such a loving and caring network.
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After my holiday 👀, April 16th, I will be entering a season of no.
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This is to focus on my love of cooking and diet problem which I want to solve through MealCraft.
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I conquered sleep. I conquered exercise. I'm ready to tackle diet.
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Thank you for taking the time to read my newsletter.
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If you did end up doing the cold plunge, feel free to send me a WhatsApp message at +447519 530 549 and/or email me at junte.kim@mealcraft.com.
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I look forward to hearing about the pain before and the relief afterwards.
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