id: thestart title: The Start next: mop date: 2021-01-01 ---

## Where I started:

I have always been fairly competitive and enjoyed pushing myself. From sports at a young age to chemistry and computer science in university I don’t generally shy away from the difficult. I am also lazy however and don’t like to exert myself unnecessarily. A classic case of preferring to work smart over hard.

It has only been in the past few years that I have really begun to make a study of performance optimization. There were a few books on studying better that I read before that, but it was never a large focus in life until recently. Like many people who go down this road I got my start with Tim Ferriss’ 4 hour series. His results first approach drew me in quickly and I drew some parallels between what he was suggesting and what I already did. Specifically what I did with games.

I have long been an avid gamer, board games, video games, role-playing games and any other type of game I can get my hands on. The structured systems have always fascinated me and I am the sort of player (that some dislike) who spends a large amount of time thinking about the games and their systems. Figuring out how they interact and seeing if any interactions I can find break the system and provide easier or unintended paths to victory.

It was not until I saw his approach to applying the same sort of deconstruction to challenges in life that the two worlds connected. I had always treated games as something separate living in their own space but that is no longer the case.

Over the last few years I have read dozens of books on everything including business, learning, fitness, health (physical and mental), focus, discipline and scheduling.

Like with games however I have run into another problem. Especially with games that are not online my academic interest sort of consumes all the time I spend on the pursuit. Some of the information I have been able to implement but it has not been a large portion. I am aiming to change that.

My plan is to work to create tools to help facilitate the implementation of the various techniques that I have read about and record my success (or failures) at the implementations themselves.

As this is my first blog post it is a pretty exciting time, anyone who either reads this near its posting, or who reads this far back (I am committing to one post a week) you have my thanks.