Woke up today, feeling super motivated, some thoughts:
Rest up!
A new thing I’ve been trying to do inspired by Cindy is like a mild coffee and caffeine detox on the weekends. Either cutting back or eliminating coffee and caffeine sources, allowing your body to do some sort of soft reset. I think the best thing is to just accept the fact that you’re gonna feel super sluggish and uninspired for the weekend, but that’s OK… As long as you’re ready to conquer Monday.
routines?
I think the big idea is you want a routine that you love! A routine in which, you essentially streamline doing more of what you love doing?
I think we are not foolish. You’re not going to be motivated to do something that you don’t want to do. I think this is a big secret in life… All motivation in life must be autotelic, self motivated, and also self directed and directional.
it’s all in your hips
Also, a big thing that I’ve been doing with my fitness stuff is first always prioritizing my hips. To prioritize exercise exercises which strengthen mobilize stretch out and warm-up the hips. For example, most yoga related stuff, ninja poses, pigeon, pose, sumo squat, and this is a big idea… When you are stretching and warming up your hips, adding weights! For example, throwing on your 60 pound weight vest and doing a pigeon pose with it, or grabbing 105 pound kettlebell by the horns and using that to stretch out your hips, or two 45 pound plates stacked together, just have fun and be creative with it!
The benefits are, the more hip strength and mobility you got, essentially, you will be able to lift more, and also, less likely for injury? I actually think that most injuries with weightlifting, especially leg related stuff is simply because our hips are not strong enough?
Also most knee leg foot ankle Achilles tendon issues and even lower back issues tend to originate from the hips because it is the first fulcrum and lever in terms of walking movement and mobility. So I wonder… Are most mobility issues, simply hip related? And it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or woman… I think it affects us all the same. 
Assuming the concept of motivation is related to movement like walking or lifting weights or whatever… Physically and physiologically moving your body, the more you oil up your hips, the more that you’ll walk and move? With greater strength and mobility?
motivated to do what?
I think the great savior of AI is… For what, 20 or $30 a month, do you have this cyber you that is like 1 trillion times more productive than you? And the good thought is… That means that you actually don’t need to work on being productive anymore. That your purpose in life is not productivity, most people think about motivation for the sake of being productive. But once again… If we could offload all of our productivity to the AI… Doesn’t that mean we could simply focus on better things?
Like do you remember back in the day, also thinking about Tim Ferris’s 4 hour work week… isn’t the goal to only work four hours a week? And just let AI do the rest of the dirty work?
I think the trap is… You could either let the AI do all the work, and you maximize your mind space and creative leisure, or you have AI fill in the gap, actually extending your work week in order to produce more?
I think one thing that does not scale well is human attention and time. Like for example… Even though you might listen to podcasts on 2X or 4X speed, you cannot listen to 1000 podcast a day, irregardless of how disciplined you are. Also, there’s really no virtues to reading 1000 books a day either.
Once again, it’s a via negativa thing –> actually the ideal is to read little to no books, listen to very few podcasts if none, and spending more of your day to let your mind go empty, and channeling that mind space in order to write more, think more, maybe vlog more?
Mind space 
One of the best ideas that I got for my friend Jeffrey Lam is this idea of mine space. The idea that, it’s not about the total numbers of hours that we got in a day to think, but rather, having the privilege to let your mind go empty and fallow in order to have the privilege to have an empty mind.
obsessions
For the most part, I think obsessions are good if they motivate you, perhaps not so good if they do the opposite.
don’t check don’t measure
Probably one of the most useful things that I discovered almost like a decade ago is… In order to be more motivated and productive as a creator is to simply disable and never look at any metrics, because then you start to attach self-worth to these arbitrary numbers. Especially in the age of AI… Algorithms almost don’t really matter anymore. Because the AI simply sidesteps the algorithm, and AI becomes the new middleman, replacing the algorithm. So it’s not about gaming the algorithm anymore, it’s about gaming the AI.
I actually think, the new way to be successful on the Internet is, making all of your websites and Web presence optimized for AI, ChatGPT, Grok, x search. The big question is how to monetize this right now cause nobody is clicking on websites anymore which means no Google ad revenue or upselling?
I think having an email newsletter is still very useful but even that is starting to get filtered by the AI? For example, in today’s world, the intelligent strategy is to use an AI bot to scan your email and do the dirty work for you. So I suppose then, it’s trying to become creative and think beyond the filters. 
The magic of photography
Cindy recently just got us a brand new Ricoh GR 4 HDF, highlight diffusion filter. It’s quite magical essentially what it does is… Especially when shooting high contrast, black-and-white, any part of your frame, which has bright highlights, or what would typically be blown highlights, become soft diffused, like some sort of dreamy, fairy glow, which looks absolutely amazing and dreamlike. It’s almost like having the upside of the softness of film, paired with the harsh contrast and sharpness of a modern day digital camera?
Chasing that glow or simply my curiosity on how the highlight diffusion filter will work on different scenarios is actually what motivates me to shoot more photos. Because I’m genuinely curious how the photos will manifest. The same thing goes with the Ricoh monochrome, my curiosity and using the red filter, turning it on and off to see how that changes how the photos turn out.
Also, if anything, my fascination with black-and-white photography was simply because I was curious on how you take reality and reinterpret it into monochrome, and how that changes how the scene or thing looks?
I suppose that’s the magic, the magic trick, not knowing with certainty how things will turn out. And maybe this is also the motivation or the self motivation for scientist and experiments, the joy of doing an experiment is precisely… You’re curious how the outcome will be, and you’re not 100% certain? Like Jeff Bezos said, if you already know what that’ll come of an experiment is going to be, it’s not an experiment. And perhaps that’s what being an inventor is all about, the uncertainty, joy, and delight of trying something new that you’re curious about?
ERIC