Category: Thoughts

For reference, my current meal plan is below:

Breakfast: 

• 3 free range eggs with ground chicken teriyaki & sweet potatoes 
• 20 oz Protein Drink or Amazing Greens drink w/MCT oil, strawberry protein & everly drink mix to taste

Lunch: 

During Summer A Big Salad From The Garden with:

• Lettuce Cut Salad From Garden – or romaine/spinach mix
• 1oz chopped cashews
• 1/2 chopped apple or pear
• 1/3 cup shredded cheese
• Hot Giardiniera
• Olive Oil & Vinegar
• Mustard
• Optional Grass Fed Ground Beef or Shredded Chicken

During Winter A Big Medley Of:

• 1 Cup cauliflower rice
• 3/4 cup chopped and cooked sweet potatoes
• 1/2 cup frozen carrot slices
• 1/2 cup frozen broccoli florets
• Giardiniera hot peppers to taste
• Scope of frozen sweet peppers from the summer garden to taste
• Wholbers stone ground mustard to taste
• Greek Yogurt to taste

*A great meat hack is to purchase all meat in bulk from a local meat processor or farmer. You will save massively over store bought prices.

Dinner:

• 1 Cup cauliflower rice
• 3/4 cup chopped and cooked sweet potatoes
• 1/2 cup frozen carrot slices
• 1/2 cup frozen broccoli florets
• Optional 1/2 cup ground turkey or beef or 1 chicken breast
• Giardiniera hot peppers to taste
• Scope of frozen sweet peppers from the summer garden to taste
• Wholbers stone ground mustard to taste
• Greek Yogurt to taste

This meal plan has a roughly 32 carbs, which based on my previous eating habits feels about perfect for my body. If I want to mix in an optional dessert, it can be a rice cake with almond butter and a light dusting of erythritol, for an added 18 grams of carbs.  Beyond that, I get plenty of carbs during social events and/or date nights. If I want to get fancy and cook a decadent meal I just find one from this website and follow along (https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes).  Transitioning to this meal plan cut my monthly food budget from $600/month to roughly $250.

In many ways all I want to really be is a simple guy.  Growing up however, I honestly thought for a long time that I would be a professional athlete. Either a hockey or baseball player.  I suppose that might even be a pretty common thought for many kids as they grow up.  Once I got into College and I realized professional sports were not in the cards, this was about the time that I was starting my own business.  For several years after I started my business I thought that I would build something that would catapult my business into stardom. Building something like Twitter, or Facebook, basically some type of software as a service business.  I even chased this dream for several years, squandering over 40 thousand dollars on one large scale project.  Luckily before I wasted too much time and energy chasing that dream I realized that I actually didn’t want to own a large company, or even really be a part of one.  I would much rather keep the company small, work at my own pace and make enough money to live comfortably but I had no need for truck loads of money to buy a bunch of fancy possessions.

As I get into my 30’s now, it is a strange feeling to realize that I don’t want to be some big famous type of person, a professional athlete or president of the United States or even president of a big company.  For all my life I’ve had a great confidence that emanates from deep down in me. A confidence that has motivated and driven me.  I’m honestly not even 100% sure where it comes from, but even to this day if you ask me if I can do something or figure something out, pretty much anything, I’d tell you that I can.  I’d take on the challenge and direct so much mental energy and focus at it that the problem would wilt under the pressure.

But it’s odd knowing that I might never be a well-known inventor or businessman. Someone who will be studied in history books.  That I might just live a completely ordinary life, be a great husband, a great dad, a great friend & accomplish some impressive feats (like renovating a 100 year old house… a feat I’m currently working on )

It’s odd though; I still cant escape that nagging feeling that my character in this game of life is supposed to do something big and meaningful that impacts the world…. I guess we’ll just wait and see how it turns out!

A friend of mine recently asked me what I do with my time now that I’ve been cutting back on work and approaching life in a the vein of early retirement. I’ve been playing around with this “ideal day” concept for about 2 years, but his direct question really helped spark me to think deeper about this and really make more purposeful choices about daily activities and habits. Through trial and error I’ve created an “average” daily routine that works really well for me. This routine is:

**Choose At Least 1 From Each Category Below**

Morning Drink:

• Water w/ACV
• Electrolyte Water
• Patio Amazing greens power drink (Greens/MCT/Strawberry Protein/Everly)

First Thing: Accomplish Something… Things Like

• Clean Dishes/Tidy Up House
• Vacuum, Wash or fold clothes, Brush Teeth, Shave, Shower
• Mcconaughey chest bump // Jcurl stretch
• Neighboorhood Walk or Jog // hang pulls on bar
• N/A

Exercise:

• Workout Video
• Evening Jog/Stroll
• N/A

Breakfast:

• Full Breakfast
  • 3 scrambled eggs w/ground teriyaki chicken & sweet potatoes
  • Occasionally stir eggs with non dominate hand to strengthen
• Protein Coffee – MCT, Butter, Protein, Cinnamon
• Fast

Manual Labor:

• Sisters house remodel project
• Regularly scheduled maintenance
• N/A

Hygiene:

• Shower w/Full teeth detail
  • Occasionally brush with non dominate hand to strengthen neural connections in my brain
• Hot bath + book

Nap:

• 26 minute nap
• unlimited
• N/A

Altec:

• Focused solo Altec work
• Relaxed work w/Limby
• N/A rec day

Freethink:

• 1 hour solo free thinking stroll
• 1 hour free thinking stroll w/Ellen
• 25 Minutes of Spanish Practice on App
• N/A

Unwind:

• Meditation on Pillows // Water Plants // Stoic page // Journal
• Sleepy Time Tea // Hot bath + book
• N/A

Ongoing:

• Spending Time in Forest Park
• Date night with SO and discussing life and plans
• Meeting up with family & friends for walks and sharing meals
• Listening to a podcast

I’ve been having such weird thoughts lately, really negative thoughts.  Normally my negative thoughts are more outward, or if they are about me/my death they are more in the shape of things like when I’m driving I picture hitting the guard rail and then that’s it, my life is over.  And I start thinking about the idea of multiple universes and how I wonder if that is true, and if it is true I wonder if my tire popped and I did in fact swerve into the guard rail and die in one of those alternative universes and I kind of “felt” or sinced that in some way. That’s usually the type of bad thoughts I have in my head, and by thinking of the alternative universe concept the thoughts usually just kind of pass through my head from time to time.  It wasn’t always like that, I used to get stuck in a thought loop with these thoughts. Overall they don’t affect me a ton but they also can start to tip me into a bit of a downward spiral, where I start to over analyze life/death.  If that happens I can slide into a bit of a bad state where my mind starts to basically accelerate and think about all the possible negative things of dying. Never seeing any family or friends again. Being alone and conscious of it. Being not conscious of it but just gone, erased and nothing. Everything I ever did had no reason, no meaning and it’s all just over.  If my mind accelerates into this space it’s typically not great and it can be hard for me to snap out of this line of thinking, it can be a process of several hours before I’m able to stop having these bad thoughts.  Luckily I have developed a lot of techniques to try and combat these thoughts and to speed up the process of calming down, I can usually stop thinking about it with some effort, and once I stop the “warp speed” thoughts I can just ease out of it and then go on and not have these types of thoughts for long stretches of days/weeks/months.

Recently I’ve started having these negative thoughts more and more, and I’ve even started slipping into the “Warp speed” negative thoughts during the day, something which is almost exclusively reserved for night time, right when I’m about to fall asleep.  I’ll start to think “shit what if I don’t wake up tomorrow” and then I will tip into the spiral of negative death thoughts, this especially happens if I feel like I wasted the day. 

It’s pretty rare for these thoughts to happen during the day, but they have been lately.  And another odd thought/feeling is I’ve felt the presence of the guns in my house a lot more.  I’ve not had any real thoughts about killing myself, other than having like a deep seeded worry about dying.  The best way I can describe it is an analogy to harry potter.  Lately I’ve felt like the guns in my house are similar to a horricrux, I can just feel that they are in my presence and I start to think about their destructive power.  I don’t really picture using them on myself, but I also have this like very low pitched worry of “why even have them here, why make anything related to dying easier”.  I can counter that thought with “well I would 100% want them here if someone broke in, so were fine just keep it moving brain”.

I really just wanted to write these thoughts down, so now they are saved and I can tell my brain to simply stop having these thoughts, I can always come back to this page and read these thoughts since they will be saved here forever, I don’t have to spend any more time thinking about these negative thoughts.

If anyone else out there has similar types of thoughts, I wanted to end this with a few helpful ideas you can try if you are looking for a way to stop them or put them on pause at least. The ideas below are a bit of a jumble of thoughts from my sisters and I:

#1 Multiple Universe: It turns out this concept has a name, the Multiverse. you can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse

How this relates to our negative thoughts well, I started thinking and somewhat believing maybe people who have these types of thoughts just have a closer connection to the Multiverse. I don’t know if I actually fully believe this, but I believe it enough that it calms my mind down which is super useful. The way I believe in this is relatively simple, we see examples of animals “feeling” things that humans can’t feel all of the time. There are countless examples of elephants running to high ground before a tsunami, of other birds and animals fleeing before earthquakes ect… so I think it is plausible that some humans can feel or since things that others can’t, and maybe people who have these types of negative thoughts are really just more sensitive to their existence in other universes, and therefore if every possible variation of our lives is playing out in real time across all of the multiverse, its plausible that we might feel actions that happen in some of those other worlds.

#2 Thought Control: I tell myself; ok you can have these thoughts later, I just don’t want to have these thoughts right now.  Right now I’m going to take a deep breath and calm down, I’m in control of my mind and what I think about.  These thoughts are not serving to make me happy or enjoy the day so I’m going to stop having them right now, and I can always come back to them later.

#3 The whole idea is to just kind of be an observer of your thoughts instead of getting tangled with them. a metaphor of it would be a train leaving the train station- the train is all your intrusive thoughts and you can decide if you want to hop on board with them or just watch the train go by- non judgmentally. “There’s one of those thoughts again. Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn’t- I’m not going to try and figure it out right now” and then use mindfulness to bring you back to whatever’s going on in the moment. You can name off each of your 5 senses- something you see, hear, touch, smell, taste to kind of ground you back to the present moment. And when the thoughts pop back up again ( which they will bc it’s just your brain being creative) just acknowledge the thought is there but remind yourself you do not have to stop it or interpret it. It takes a lot of practice and I know in the beginning I was so confused by it bc it seemed like I was accepting the awful thoughts but it’s not accepting the content of the thoughts, just accepting I have these thoughts and I don’t have to figure out what they mean about me. Accepting uncertainty And another important part is accepting feelings. So the thoughts may make you feel anxious or scared but just leaving room for those feelings to be there instead of trying to get rid of them helps. Basically the more you fight with thoughts or feelings the more you are telling your brain that this is something to be on alert about so it’s going to focus more attention on it. Just accepting thoughts, feelings will let them pass easier.

#4 The metaphor i really like to think of my mind like a river after a storm.  It’s fast and full of water and debris will come by pretty often. The debris is the thoughts/ideas; but I am not the debris. I am sitting on the shore and I can make the decision to either let the debris float by or grab it and pull it out (i.e. focus more on the thought and start obsessing

— Other Great Articles & Thoughts From Others —

My sister recently sent me these articles by an ex NHL hockey player that were amazing, I honestly never really stopped to think about if any other people had these types of thoughts. I assumed they did not, and I also assumed that I had to figure solutions out on my own, for some reason it never dawned on me to ask anyone else about techniques they had to try and overcome these types of thoughts. It is really pretty funny how the brain works sometimes, I do wish I had seen this article when I was growing up, but better late than never!

• https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/corey-hirsch-dark-dark-dark
• https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/18691270/nhl-opening-struggle-ocd-anxiety-former-new-york-rangers-vancouver-canucks-goalie-corey-hirsch-helping-other-players-find-support
• https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/corey-hirsch-you-are-not-alone
• https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/corey-hirsch-nhl-hockey-mental-health

From sister: Accepting the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen and moving on with my day is probably what my therapist would tell me to do. Because all these scary thoughts we have are unsolvable and that’s why we get stuck in a loop with them. No matter how long we think about it we will still never have an answer the satisfies the ocd part of your mind. We want to have proof or an answer to something that is scaring us but there is no answer. So there’s no point in ruminating on it, just move on. And keep reminding yourself “oh there’s one of those thoughts I’ll never know the answer to. I could sit here and get myself worked up about it trying to figure it out or I’ll just leave it and move on with my day

Lately is has become apparent that Tesla is having a hard time servicing their vehicles in a timely manner. To fix this they have stated they will build more service centers. While this is possibly a good long term goal, they should also consider adopting the servicing model of the Bird Scooters startup.

Bird scooters service model works by allowing anyone with the app to apply to be a “mechanic”. Once they are tested and approved, then they are able to open the app and see scooters that need servicing. Each scooter will have a “bounty” depending on what repairs are needed. Tesla could mimic this approach, open up their app to allow mechanics to apply. The benefits of this approach would be:

– Mechanics would scale up and down in each location as needed. Tesla would not need to predict how many services centers to build and where to build them. If a particular city or state had lots of repairs, mechanics wold naturally sign up in these areas to accommodate the work load.

– With the disruption that is about to take place over the next 10 years in the automotive industry, many retirees from the automotive sector will need to supplement their income. Countless mechanics and parts men who have worked for 30 years to pay into a pension are going to have their pension severely cut over the next 10 years. Assuming things go to plan autonomous cars will take over and have far few accidents, meaning far fewer repair jobs available. Electric cars require far less maintenance than ICO cars, so the traditional franchise dealership model is going to implode. Without collision, service & parts revenu the traditional dealership will not survive. All of this adds up to a massive influx of trained mechanics and body repair men flooding the market in each state. Tesla should use this influx to their advantage and put these people to work in a distributed service model!

• As many people know it is Tesla’s stated goal to become more of a Software as a service company over the next decade. This distributed mechanic workforce fits perfectly into the master plan.
• On a human level this plan also helps soften the blow for the actual workers in the automotive industry. Instead of being out of work and needing to completely retrain, workers can become contractors with flexible work hours, potentially working from their own “home office/shop” or possibly renting space in co-working buildings that should spring up to meet the demand for this new type of mechanic. Many of these co working spaces can most likely be setup in the old franchise dealership stores.
• Overall this plan would help Tesla scale their mechanics and fix the current service bottleneck. Additionally it should buy Tesla tremendous goodwill by saving the actual workers who are currently in the automotive work force from financial ruin. Both of these help Tesla tremendously in the long run.

—– Update —–

After some feedback on this idea I wanted to outline how to avoid a few potential problems:

Mechanics would need to be thoroughly vetter to make sure they provide great service

– To solve this a star rating system similar to Uber could be instituted. Additionally the owner of each vehicle could select if they would like to “approve” the mechanic before the mechanic is allowed to fix their vehicle. Once a mechanic claimed a car to fix, the app could notify the Tesla owner and show them a profile of the mechanic including past customer reviews.