I’ve found the secret…

November 2015 · 5 minute read

Finally, I think I’ve found the secret to my balance..

I went to see some friends compete last weekend and they all did such an amazing job! All the fights were, the whole line up was really well matched. I think it’s the smell of Thai oil, the excitement of my trainers during the fights, the look on my friend’s faces after they fought, the whole atmosphere on the night. It just makes me miss Muay Thai. I really miss training, I miss the fitness and the fighting, I miss my friends and I miss my trainers. But then I have to remember, I am getting back to it. That’s one thing I’m working towards. And with a shoulder injury, I couldn’t go back right now if I wanted to any way. I would just potentially do more damage.

I am back at the gym though, weight training to strengthen my stretched muscles, which is great. I can feel my body getting stronger as the days go by. I’m not ready to go back and spar or fight yet but that’s okay ’cause I still don’t quite have the time to commit to that anyway. But the plan is in motion, at this rate of improvement with an ability to successfully complete several upper body exercises with some weights and not irritate my shoulder, I’m hoping to be strong and back in the ring by mid-2016. I just have to be careful in the mean time to not bulk up too much or push too hard…

By that point, all of my extra geeky, extra curricular IT study should have died down a little too since, similarly, my rate of improvement seems to have increased and I’m picking things up much faster. After successfully deploying one website, I am now working on a few others too. I’m also rapidly expanding my knowledge of web systems and online marketing in comparison to what I knew 6 months ago (almost nothing). It’s really just a matter of repetition now. I’m also starting to branch out into new technologies, well new to me any way… Some are more difficult to learn and to use but that’s okay. I think it will be good in the long run to have the ability to solve problems with frameworks that are difficult to use as well as ones which are incredibly user-friendly.

Although I’m not writing as many articles now days, I feel like I’m actually accomplishing more each week. You see for me to write a technical article, I first have to think of what I want to do, then learn how to do it, then do it and then re-do it while writing about it. This is a great method for solidifying what I have just learned to do and obviously it’s a useful reference for the future, but it is incredibly time consuming. I still think it’s well worth the time though – the more I can understand now, the easier things will be in the future. I guess also the things I’m trying to do now are more difficult and therefore take longer to learn how to do and implement in the first place, and since writing takes twice as long as both of those combined, well… it’s easy to put that part to the back of the list of #todo’s.

I have noticed though that the more I learn and do and write, the way I write my articles has been changing. I’m skipping out a lot of the really basic steps, which kind of goes against the way I had intended to write all the articles at the beginning. The reason I started writing in the first place was because there are so many articles and tutorials out there that don’t include those stupid little steps. Because when I was starting out and didn’t know anything those stupid little steps weren’t obvious to me, my research skills weren’t as good and my ability to separate the advanced from the basic didn’t even exist yet. Not that I’m great now or anything, I still have a lot to learn. I just know that the reason I don’t include those things any more is because I have improved and they’ve become more of a second nature to me.

The cool thing about everything that I’ve been doing in the last 3 months is that I can now integrate some of the webdev and marketing stuff that I’ve been learning into my every day job, at the restaurant. Since I take care of the online content and social media anyway, why not also manage the website and build extra features. This is cool because I get to use what I’ve learned in a real world application and better balance some of my time, which I’d been struggling with. It means I can actually sleep at night and have the energy to train while keeping evenings free for less-often socialising and learning about new technologies.

This is the way forward, I just have to keep pushing to get closer to my goals. I’m so lucky to have supportive and motivating people around me. I’m the only one who can get me to where I want to go but they help keep me focussed. They put things into perspective when I get too cocky and they help pick me up when I stumble. If these are not the sort of people you surround yourself with, you should really reconsider how much of your life you want to spend with the people who are around you. Time goes on forever but life is too short to be wasted and people are too plentiful in this world to think that there isn’t at least someone out there that you can connect with. Just talk or listen for a bit and you might be surprised at the friends you can make in places you’d never have thunk…