The age of 25 is like that. "Most geniuses did their best work in their twenties"-pressure. "My God, 30 is just 5 years away"-pressure.
I suggest tackling this from a psychosomatic perspective. The body is an indirect but very powerful agent of change to the mind, Give yourself the permission to be calm and collected and deserve an average, wonderful, American middle-class day without guilt or anxiety. Enjoy that yummy sandwich and coffee and count your blessings. Avoid breathing like a bull in a fight. Avoid walking fast as if you're in a Jason Bourne movie. Avoid thinking rapidly, as if you're a hacker in a bad Hollywood movie. Real-life badasses are often deliberately slow. Real-life geniuses are very slow at the beginning when you ask them a puzzle. Secret : Expand the gap between perception and deliberate-thought as much as possible. That's where the magic happens.
Thus, using your body, allow your mind to reach a place of inner calm. Turns out that Clarity is the perfect path to doing anything good or great. Because it naturally leads to slow-thought, which leads to natural Know Thyself questions, which lead to self-confidence and a moment-by-moment ability to discriminate between what I want to do right now to be genuinely happy vs. what you should do right now as an employee, as a boyfriend, or other role-player (external conditioning). This leads to exercise, cutting down work hours to focus on a startup business plan, being a good serial killer, or whatever it is that you realize as part of the everyday slow Know Thyself process.
All the best! I'm sure you'll do quite well based on what you wrote!
tl;dr version : Deliberately Slow => Mental Clarity. Rest = automatic, by natural design.
Give yourself the permission to be calm and collected and deserve an average, wonderful, American middle-class day without guilt or anxiety.
I don't know. I did this when I was 25, and two years later, I feel as if I wasted my time.
I'm probably being unfair to myself. I worked on fun little side projects here and there that never went anywhere, but I felt contented. Now I feel like I have to be working on something big; "fun" projects have lost their fun.
For me, this is probably due in part to having made something that got a fair amount of blog coverage last fall, attracting interviews at big tech companies and even a few conference invitations, and then after about six months, landing right back where I started. I feel like this has proven that I should be shooting for the moon, but that I just can't sustain the momentum.
Sometimes spending those two years in an 'average day without guilt or anxiety' can lead you to the proper motivation. For example, I spent about 4 months playing World of Warcraft and not really worrying about anything once I returned home from work. I didn't strive to be the best in the game (went down that path before, easy burnout), but instead just enjoyed myself.
Then one day I just got bored, stopped logging in, and turned my focus to my startup and I haven't looked back since :) (this was 8 months ago or so, we'll see how long it holds)
Same here. Up to recently I would watch a movie every single day. If it was too long I would watch it in two days. Amazingly it is isn't as if I did less work. I would just stop browsing the net and looking for stuff to read and simply enjoy a good movie at the end of my day. Worked very well.
I suggest tackling this from a psychosomatic perspective. The body is an indirect but very powerful agent of change to the mind, Give yourself the permission to be calm and collected and deserve an average, wonderful, American middle-class day without guilt or anxiety. Enjoy that yummy sandwich and coffee and count your blessings. Avoid breathing like a bull in a fight. Avoid walking fast as if you're in a Jason Bourne movie. Avoid thinking rapidly, as if you're a hacker in a bad Hollywood movie. Real-life badasses are often deliberately slow. Real-life geniuses are very slow at the beginning when you ask them a puzzle. Secret : Expand the gap between perception and deliberate-thought as much as possible. That's where the magic happens.
Thus, using your body, allow your mind to reach a place of inner calm. Turns out that Clarity is the perfect path to doing anything good or great. Because it naturally leads to slow-thought, which leads to natural Know Thyself questions, which lead to self-confidence and a moment-by-moment ability to discriminate between what I want to do right now to be genuinely happy vs. what you should do right now as an employee, as a boyfriend, or other role-player (external conditioning). This leads to exercise, cutting down work hours to focus on a startup business plan, being a good serial killer, or whatever it is that you realize as part of the everyday slow Know Thyself process.
All the best! I'm sure you'll do quite well based on what you wrote!
tl;dr version : Deliberately Slow => Mental Clarity. Rest = automatic, by natural design.