Am in a hustling mode these days, spending hours till late to work on two personal projects of mine: Mutual Tracker as well as Fix My Meeting.

Honestly been hitting several motivational brick walls with Fix My Meeting. The act of creating is hard: it’s often a constant battle with my own flaws such as procrastination, fatigue, occasional disinterest, frustration, self-doubt and fear. Seth Godin term such this phase as “The Dip”: the time when the initial enthusiasm peters off and the frustrations starts to kick in.

It’s good that I had several unimplemented features for Mutual Tracker which I had in the back-burner for months. Though admittedly the reason I had features for it being left at the back-burner is the fact that I couldn’t get over the dip during that time.

Therefore it’s important for me to hustle: it’s the only mean to developing myself, continuously working on my skills and willpower to pull it off. As an experiment of public accountability, I will be posting progress from time to time, occasionally post the lessons I had learned along the way. For the time being I would be making these public accountability posts every other Saturday and work out the kinks along the way.

And speaking about Saturday, I’ll be attending GeekCamp, Singapore this Saturday and really hope to get to know some new friends there. And I pray very hard to avoid the iPad shopping marathon.

Let’s introduce the nutty little friend that inside the brain of every one of us: the amygdala. The little friend of ours are a group of small nuclei in our brain, having the size of a peanut. It may be tiny, but it has been a part of us since the very early days of our human species.

The fact is that this little friend of our is so crucial that, without it, we wouldn’t have roamed the earth till this day. It ensures our very survival by triggering two of the strongest emotional responses we had: fear and rage. With that, our ancestors are able to flee from predators as well as fighting against them. This allows us to conquer the harsh odds that were stacked against us in survival and becoming one of the most powerful species on earth.

Millenniums had passed since then, and thanks to evolution we have create an environment where we can thrive without worrying about predators. Yet our amygdala remains the same: instead of fearing about life and death issues, we now fear our future – the what-if scenarios of all sorts of negative outcomes that could potentially befall on us. You know: failure, ridicule, crushing debts… modern worries and first world problems, most of us would put it.

It’s funny isn’t it? That we still let our “nut” run our lives – sometimes to the point of wallowing in helplessness and running away from living a life we really want.

Seth Godin had posted a great article, Quieting the Lizard Brain, and the conclusion is this:

The amygdala isn’t going away. Your lizard brain is here to stay, and your job is to figure out how to quiet it and ignore it. This is so important, I wanted to put it on the cover of my new book. We realized, though, that the lizard brain is freaked out by a picture of itself, and if you want to sell books to someone struggling with the resistance (that would be all of us) best to keep it a little more on the down low.

In the midst of a challenging environment, there couldn’t be a better time for us to learn how quiet down our fears and do something remarkable instead. Taking positive action is the only way of changing our world for the better and we should not let our ancestors from millenniums back down.

I had just got myself a Wacom Bamboo tablet and this is the first card-toon that I had done digitally.

This remind me of a great article from Dave Navarro, aptly titled Give Up, explains that the reason we met with persistent obstacles and frustrations is because we are unwilling to give up tolerating with them.

Stepping up to owning responsibility and claiming what we rightfully deserve could be a scary thing, hence we allow ourselves to be hindered by limiting beliefs. David really nailed it when he says:

Whatever seems ludicrous, whatever you say “I could never do that …” to, that’s the limiting belief that you are absolutely committed to.  In fact, you’re so committed to it that you’ve got a ready-made collection of reasons excuses to support it – and you’ll fight me like hell before you give it up.

I have lived with my own limiting beliefs for about a decade: taking self-inflicted abuse way longer than I should. I’m now taking matters into my own hands now and I had a deadline set for it.

I will disclose my plans in a future post: for now it’s suffice to say that I’m fully committed to live up to my manifesto.

Complaining, one of our greatest vices.

Not only it’s easy to do, it’s also extremely enjoyable. Even better, you can weave any sort of excuse to your satisfaction.

The only problem with is such habits is that you may develop learned helplessness: by abstaining from personal responsibility, you may develop a worldview all problems occurs to you and you have no control over your life. Also if you happen to believe in the law of attraction, what do you think you’ll attract more of in your life?

Yes, there’ll be a lot of things that proves to be impossible or extremely resistant towards change: like what had happened to you and its consequences, or hard-headed person you constantly brings you nothing but grief. But that doesn’t equate to you unable to change your personal reality at all and get out of the situation.

So instead of delving into such nasty habits, why not learning how to ask yourself better questions and take positive action towards resolving the grievance you’d in life?

It’s easy to dream.

It’s easy to prepare and work towards your dream.

However, have that feeling of immense fear that holds you back from pulling the trigger? It happens especially at times when you’d gathered all the resources, waiting just a “yes” from you; it happens when the star are all lined up and waiting for you to take that first step; it happens when that opportunity of a life time had arrived and waiting for you to accept it.

At that moment, you just freeze there: unable to respond immediately as you’d thought you’d. A sense of overwhelming fear gushing within: it’s not just the fear of failure – where you imagine scenarios that you’d screw up somewhere along the way of claiming your ultimate prize; it’s also the fear of success, the “what if I couldn’t handle [a change in life]?” or even worse “what if I lose it all in the end?”.

It’s funny that we’d hope that someone else who actually pull that trigger on us. That would certainly save ourselves from our internal jeopardy.

Unfortunately, the only person who could do that for you is usually yourself. After all, such a wish is an excuse to abstain personal responsibility towards yourself and you’d have someone to blame for if your dreams didn’t turn out to be as good as you imagined.

So, are you going to pull the trigger and crush it?