We’re all facing crazy uncertain times lately.
Whenever something like this happens, our tendency is to default to fight or flight.
The fight-or-flight response, also known as the acute stress response, refers to a physiological reaction that occurs in the presence of something that is terrifying, either mentally or physically.
The term ‘fight-or-flight’ represents the choices that our ancient ancestors had when faced with danger in their environment. They could either fight or flee.
Luckily our choice is not between running or being eaten by a blood-thirsty sabertooth. However, this fucking virus is pretty thirsty nonetheless.
Our choice here is more about either wasting or leveraging the time we have while segregated at home. I think a more practical way of seeing it is this:
Are you gonna use your time to produce or consume?
Since I’m going out once a day for my workout, I really have more time that, prior to this, would have been spent doing something outdoorsy or social.
So the question for me is: “Am I gonna sit on my ass, fill in the extra time with ps4 sessions and just read through my backlog until my head shatters into pieces? Or am I gonna do something new, fun and that actually engages my creative muscles?
I choose the latter.
And don’t get me wrong, I’ll still find time to play some ps4 (Horizon: zero dawn will last me the whole year at a pace of 1 or 2 hours a week 🤔) and read… but I’ll dedicate more of that idle time to a few side projects:
Writing on this website
It’s fun (when I can get myself to actually doing it), eye opening and it somehow keeps me accountable for the stuff I say I’m gonna do. It also doesn’t take much time at all.
Building up my niche website Concrete Surfers
I want to start writing more and engaging with the e-skate community. I don’t have any revenue goals, but the whole niche is really interesting, so why not?
Learning the basics of HTML and CSS
As a UX/UI designer I think combining this new knowledge with my existing skillset will be very useful and fun. I’m following some free courses on Freecodecamp and and Codeacademy.
Experimenting with something new
On a spark of inspiration, I headed online to buy the domain names thetalentstack.net and mytalentstack.net. I’ve always been a fan of learning and skill building. With this (still very up in the air) project I want to see how it feels to explore these concepts deeper and where it leads. More on this in another post.
I stumbled on a post by Seth Godin the other day that inspired me to write about this.
He says:
Learning takes effort, and it’s hard to find the effort when the world is in flux, when we’re feeling uncertain and when we’re being inundated with bad news. But that’s the moment when learning is more important than ever.
You can make a choice here. What is it going to be?
