Nikita Khutorni's Site

Today I though a bit more about my values. Yesterday I thought about ways to set a goal for my value of connecting openly and honestly with people. I thought about measuring my persuasion skills, as persuasion is an important part in working people. I tuned in to a voice chat room sales on r/sales subreddit and asked them this question, but no one replied. From what I’ve read in Greg Larkin’s great post. (Don’t fucking remember) I don’t know how to measure persuasion skills, so it is not viable to set it as a long term goal. Instead, I decided to set speaking at a TED conference (or TEDx) as the 10-year goal. It is a great goal because it is hard and unlikely to achieve, and most importantly it requires multiple skills that are aspects of connecting with people — i.e. social skills.

Speaking there would require great speaking skills, and in particular storytelling skills (watch this amazing video by David JP Phillips where he explicitly “modulates neurotransmitters of the viewers” with his speech. He studied presentations and bases his findings on neuroscience. Here’s how to make great presentations), body language skills (again video by him), social interaction skills to get the required connections; and also I would need to become an expert at neuroenhancement tools and focus on my area of research to get there.

Calling it neuroenhancement made it clear to me that I need to start reading about it, and do it asap. I am missing information. I don’t have the vocabulary. I don’t know the research nor the progress in the field. I think a part of that is the fear of finding that somebody eles already did it. But this should not cause me fear. There are many other ways to expand into this direction, and whatever somebody might’ve come up with, it’s highly unliklely that it encompasses all my ideas.

While taking time to read is great, there are many other things coming at me that I will have to deal with very shortly. Bachelor’s thesis, helping my parents build their business, major work on Textery and the fucking job. I don’t know how to get this all done.

I spend almost all day today first helping my brother get his shit together. At breakfast at noon, I asked him:

“On a scale from 1 to 10, how would you rate your current happinness?""
“Oh man. Like 1 or 2.”

That shocked me. I realized that I have responsibilty to help him, because I am the only one in our household who actually can. My brother was struggling with organizational chores.

These were small organizational chores, but they were tied to strong emotions — fear and anxiety. These tasks were major holdbacks for him that made him procrastinate on them and beat himself up about them for months.

I can help him, because I have to deal with the same shit. I know this from my own experience — this blog is the prime example of that. Later, my dear friend called who told me that he has been suffering from the same problems, albeit in more difficult form as I have been in the past 2.5 weeks. I assisted him too.

Spending all day on helping others and not getting any of my work done didn’t make me feel guilty today, because I realized and made it clear to myself that I value my friends and family and people close to me.

My friend, my brother and me all have these motivational, organizational and at the core, executive difficulties. They cause large problems for us on daily basis. Helping myself and people with the same issue is one of my primary motivators for building neurointrospective tools.

I think I should research more on the type of people that we are and how prevalent this issue is. I should also create a separate folder or tag for posts related to this.

Tomorrow I will start with an exercise, namely drawing myself now, and drawing myself with my dream life, as proposed in this exercise. In general, visualization seems to be an important and powerful factor in achieving your dreams with a solid scientific foundation. Mark Manson’s exercises are nothing more than visualization exercises.

Today multiple things reminded me of staying honest, telling my true story and sharing it with you. Greg Larkin stated that the opposite of weakness is vulnerability, which sounds great to me because I am being pretty fucking vulnereable here. I don’t want to ever have my achievements be perceived as unreachable (if somebody would ever think that for some reason). I want to show the reality. That a lot of the time, I suck. Most of the time, I have no fucking idea what I am doing. And most importantly, what I did, you can do too!