33

Birthday was never an actual holiday for me. It was always time for self-reflection. For the past five years, two weeks before the birthday were primarily a time of negative thinking. Everything was fucked up, and I needed time to feel sorry for myself.

Last week was my 33rd birthday. And this time… it was different. Emotionally different.

Still no parties and American movie-like celebrations. Honestly, it was the most boring day you can imagine. I woke up, bought a cake for myself, and went to sleep. That’s it.

But this time, there weren’t those two weeks of negative thinking. No worries, as I had usually. And… I feel VERY proud of the past year.

So… something’s changed and definitely changed. It was a year of changes for me.

There are three most significant achievements I want to mention:

Books

I’ve read over 50 books this year, mostly about self-development, human psychology, and copywriting. I didn’t expect that at all – it’s around one book a week.

Hundreds of times, I caught myself thinking, “Ah, that’s why that happened in my life! Now I get it.” Learning that way is much better than making many mistakes by yourself.

These are the best ones:

• The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts by Gary Chapman
• The 80/20 principle. The secret of achieving more with less by Richard Koch
• Omgiven av idioter (surrounded by idiots) by Thomas Erikson
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

“The best present is a book”. When I was younger, I thought it was a joke. Why would you prefer a book over… everything else? Now, I got why. A good book becomes a real value and a sign of attention when you can afford almost anything.

Business Launching

I’ve made a strong foundation for two projects – an email copywriting agency, Copy Click Convert, and a CG-related project, Shapernode.

It’s exciting for me since I’ve never worked as a freelancer or a businessman. It requires a different set of skills. I lack some of them, and that’s the best reason and time to learn something new.

Copy Click Convert

Copywriting became a discovery for me. Copywriting is a (relatively) easy and the most effective way to improve everything. And that’s why I do the best – find how to do things more efficiently. You can read more about it in this blog post.

It’s an absolute pleasure to help others and boost their sales/projects/games/etc. I got just a few gigs since I started it, and the results were fantastic.

So, the following year will be a year of scaling this into a full-scale service-providing business.

Shapernode

It’s an announced project yet but technically launched.

I’ve been fucked up multiple times by game companies, and it was very heartbroken. I lost my passion for working on others’ projects. However, I love CG, game development, and interactive media, so I don’t want to give up. Instead, I want to make a project that will stand out across everything we have in CG. Or, at least, I think I’ll do it. I can do that after acquiring all the new marketing and copywriting knowledge

This project will be built across node-based stuff – procedural materials, geometry, world-building, and game-level design. I’ll tell you more later in the upcoming blog post.

For now, it lacks content, has a few articles, and only one helpful asset – the Portfolio Mastery course by my colleague Daniel. This course is a small step toward how I want to use emails to communicate with the audience and make everything on the website efficient. However, this helped a lot in testing and trying various technical things, and I found a chain of software and services I’ll use later.

Positive thinking

If you cannot change the situation, you can change your perception. Think positive. It’s a bit of an info-guru device, but after reading a few books about the brain, I found the reasons behind it – neuroplasticity. You can train your brain in the behavior you want to achieve.

It was worth trying, so I spent this year preventing myself from thinking negatively. In the beginning, I felt like an idiot. After a while – my brain understood the assignment and started noticing more positive things.

I need to note that, technically, nothing changed dramatically this year. However, this positive thinking leads to a better and happier life. And it trains serendipity.

Serendipity is an unplanned, fortunate discovery. You notice more opportunities that you’d usually ignore. Those opportunities are always around you. You do not recognize them. With positive thinking (or, at least, with no negative thinking), your brain will magically show them. And then, it might become a tool to change the situation you couldn’t in the beginning.

Positive thinking includes understanding the values and setting boundaries and goals.

I’m just on the first step on this journey and cannot guide you here. Or everyone should walk their way, I don’t know. However, I can recommend two books. The first is “The Productivity Project: Proven Ways to Become More Awesome” by Chris Bailey. The second is “The Magic of Thinking Big” by David J. Schwartz.

They helped me a lot to become a less toxic person. 🙂

To do next:

When everything goes wild outside, the inside is the way to go. So, I would like to continue this journey and focus on those things:

• Develop my business and share the process.
• Find and work with good people.
• Read more books and learn how this world works.
• Do not participate in any war on the planet.

We’ll check how it turned out a year after 😉