Delicious Smoothies, 37 Steakhouse Roppongi, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and much more

First of all I need to correct a little something. My last blog wasn't really meant to say I was overall unhappy or anything. It mostly just illustrates I've been thinking about the meaning/purpose of life, been searching for my true passion, but most of all been fiddling around with the best way to schedule my life as an Entrepreneur in Tokyo, rather than a Poker Player in London. I've pivotted again since my last update and made some adjustments, but it'll be a few more weeks before I update about that particular subject again.

This blog will mostly be an update about what I've been up to in the past month or 2 and contain a ton of pictures. First some random life stuff, then more towards the bottom a full business update.

Workout Routine and Smoothies!

First of all, I've gotten back into a solid workout routine courtesy of http://www.workoutbox.com/! 6 days/wk, 2 hrs/workout like I used to in London. And a sick workout routine goes hand in hand with a (mostly) solid diet. Which in my case means quite a few smoothies. Here's the recipe for my post-workout shake:

-100g Blueberries(I use frozen ones)
-100g Pineapple(I use frozen)
-150g Watermelon
-1 Banana (~100g)
-300ml 2% Milk
-60g Whey Protein Powder Strawberry Flavor

Nutritional Facts:
-640 Calories
-85.5g Carbohydrates
-55.7g Protein
-11.6g Fat

Very healthy and very delicious! A perfect post-workout meal!

Home Cinema Theater

Furthermore, I've got my entire projector setup complete and I got a ton of awesome new blu-rays! I promise to shoot a few proper pictures and even a video of my entire apartment fully furnished and my home cinema in my next blog, but for now here's a few pictures I took a few weeks ago, before the screen arived. Projecting on the wall looks great too though.

 Love Lord of the Rings. Gotta do a marathon again at some point!

Waseda University Tour

 This past week, I got a tour of Waseda university from an American professor who's been in Japan for well over 30 years! Unfortunately enough it was summer vacation so I didn't get to meet any students, but the prof was a very kind and interesting man and although not as beautiful as the university I saw in Seoul the main campus Waseda campus is quite nice.

 The founder's statue

 Library

 Waseda's iconic tower.

Such peace in Tokyo's city centre!

Best Unagi Ever

Last but not least, I had a few great meals. First of all I went to a very popular Unagi restaurant and had the best Unagi experience of my life:

Unagi is a pretty small meal, but I love it and I need to eat it a lot more often. The world's most renowned Unagi restaurant is walking distance for me and still high on top of my list of must-visit restaurants. Unfortunately enough it's not really a place you go on your own, so if you're reading this and you're interested in going, get in touch!

Great Fish Restaurant with my Landlord

The second one was a great fish restaurant which my landlord took me to. The sushi's rice was cold, which is usually a very bad sign, but in this case it was quite good. What stole the show however, were the starters. I got served some Natto(fermented soy beans) on Tofu and although when asked if there's any Japanese food I don't like, Natto is usually on top of the list, this time I actually liked it! Highlight of the night was the fried fish, which was the best piece of fish I've ever tasted! No pictures were taken unfortunately enough.

37 Steakhouse Roppongi

Lastly I went to a friend's favorite steak restaurant in all of Japan(and quite possibly the entire world), 37 Steakhouse in Roppongi.

 The Oysters weren't that tasty, but the Prawns were great! Superjuicy!

 Awesome salad!

 American Prime Beef

 Australian 35 days aged

 The above 2 and a piece of Australian 21 days aged

Me and 2 friends ended up splitting 3 slices of meat, American Prime, Australian 35 days aged and Australian 21 days aged. I'm not sure if it was the fact I got to taste 3 different kinds of steak or what, but this was quite easily the best steak I've ever had! The seasoning was especially SUPERB! I started off liking the Australian 35 days aged best, but after I finished eating I liked all of them equally. All 3 fantastic pieces of meat!

Unfortunately enough the side dishes(creamed spinach and fries) were very disappointing and very blend, but the steaks were so outstanding, I will definitely return here!

FrankPeelen.com

Business wise, I've been working on a few projects. As I mentioned in my last blog, I decided to drop the referral project, but my own personal website is finally up and running! There's a Japanese version coming very soon aswell, but for now you can check out the English version here:

http://www.FrankPeelen.com/

Meishi

 

aka business cards.

 

Language Link

Language Link is still progressing sort of on schedule. I had hoped to be able to start actual coding this past week, but hopefully we can finalize the specifications early this next week and get started on the actual coding towards the 2nd half of this week.

I've also made some minor additions to Language Link's website's wireframes and I've hired a team to build this website. It's a slightly more complicated website than FrankPeelen.com and thus will cost a bit more and take a bit longer, but it should be up and running in 4 weeks. Something which I'm very excited for.

On top of this, Language Link's Facebook page and Twitter page now have professionally designed graphics. You can check them out at:

https://www.facebook.com/LanguageLinkApp/

and

https://twitter.com/LanguageLinkApp/

There's not a ton happening on these pages yet, but as the application gets closer to launch there will definitely be a lot more exiciting stuff on LL's social network pages.

Tokyo 2020 Olympics

Last but definitely not least, me and a close friend are working on a very exciting project for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. I can't really say much yet besides the fact that our vision is grand and we plan to make some big things happen in Tokyo leading up to and in 2020!

The Lean Startup

I've also been reading this great book by Eric Ries on his approach to building a company. It has really resonated with me, because it's very scientific and analytical and reminds me of playing poker. I'll definitely be taking a lot of things away from it and can already recommend the book to anyone interested in business, startups and entrepreneurship.

I think that pretty much brings you up to date! Next time I'll post a video of my fully furnished apartment and whatever else I've been up to.

Frank

Dissecting my own Psyche

In my blog post about my first week as an entrepreneur I mentioned that I had started using this To-Do-List template to plan my days:

On top of that I've been using a file on my computer to list what I want to do each week and month. I've been using this system for about 5 weeks now and for half of it it's been amazing for me! I got an unbelievable amount of stuff done. During the first week of September for example, I did almost everything I had planned for the first 2-3 weeks of the month!
On the other hand, there have been weeks where, although I still got a decent amount of work done, I wasn't particularly motivated, felt a bit sluggish and wasn't all that happy overall. So I set out to find out what was causing it.

First I blamed sleep. I have been sleeping less than the 9 hours I used to, but by now I've realised this is not the issue. The 8 hours of sleep I get each night are enough, because there were also weeks where I did completely fine sleeping 8 hours a night.

Next was the lack of exercise and healthy food. I hadn't been to the gym in 2-3 months, due to 2 injuries, spending time in Europe and moving to and getting settled in Japan. I had also been eating out the vast majority of my meals for the past 6 months. So 3 weeks ago I finally started going to the gym again and eating superclean and healthy 90%+ of my meals. But regardless of the 6x2 hours/week I've spent in the gym and the healthy food, I still have had the same periods of sluggishness and unhappiness since then.

At this point I started to question what it was I actually want to do. I figured, maybe I am not enjoying what I'm doing. I am very confident that entrepreneurship suits me. I've never had a regular job and always made my own schedule. On top of that I really need to be challenged.
However, I did start to question exactly what kind of business I want to build and asked myself: "What is it you want to do with your life?". I still don't have the exact answer to that, but I do know that I'm very excited about my  Language Link project. Especially building out the website and the millions of different marketing possibilities excite me to no end!
Another project I was working on was an affiliate website for Udemy.com. Udemy is a website where you can take a wide variety of courses ranging from 'Learning How to Build a Website' to 'Learning Photoshop' to 'Photography' and 'Management' courses. I completed a course on building websites, which was fairly interesting and should prove useful in the future, but I found myself not so excited about building the actual affiliate website. Especially when the affiliate program turned out to work differently than I originally anticipated. So I've pretty much decided to drop this project.
{However, if anyone reading this is planning to sign up for Udemy, hit me up! Got some referal links and I'm happy to share the money with you that Udemy pays me for refering you!}
I was also planning on playing quite a bit of poker, but after playing 1-2 sessions, I've noticed it's just not gonna happen. I may play every now and then if I really feel like it, but mostly for fun. I don't expect to do any serious online poker playing anymore.
In the end I decided that it'll come to me eventually. I'm only 24, so I have plenty time to figure it out. And for now I'm very excited about my Language Link project, so I will be working on that whenever I can.

This still left me with the periods of sluggishness and lack of motivation. So I started to ask myself a few slightly different questions. "What excites you?", "What do you want to do right this instant?" and "What if this was your last day alive, how would you spend it?". Worringly enough I still wasn't able to come up with any clear answers and I began to realize not much TRULY excites me at the moment.
Sure, there's things I really enjoy such as good food, movies, socializing and certain parts of the Language Link project I'm really looking forward to. But the food has to be really outstanding and there's only a handful of movies out of the 1000+ I've seen that truly get me to jump out of my seat.
Possible causes are for one the remaining effects of having been a professional poker player. I developed a lot of skills that'll serve me extremely well throughout my life, but I also feel like I've surpressed my emotions quite a lot. Secondly, I've already experienced a lot of pretty big things for a 24 year old, which has been great, but it makes it harder to find newer and bigger things to be excited about.
Last but not least, I've always liked to be challenged. The issue with that is that I may be overconfident in some ways. I feel like there's almost nothing I can't do, everything seems so possible and within reach and thus not much of a challenge and less exciting...

I think lacking a true passion is definitely one part of the problem, but on top of that I've definitely spent time doing some things I was clearly unexcited about. Mainly the affiliate project and poker I wasn't that excited about. So I've decided to make 2 main changes on top of dropping the projects I'm not excited about:
1) Change the entire way I schedule my days.
Throw out most of the to-do-list as is and instead after I finish up a few things that have to happen that day, I just do whatever I feel like. No joke! Usually these are useful things like working on Language Link anyway. I think I'll be focussing a lot more on Japanese studies again aswell. I haven't progressed that much as of late. I've especially been speaking Japanese very, very little despite living in Japan.
2) Get out of the house more and meet more new people.
Take my laptop with me and do work from coffee shops more, so I don't spend too much time at home behind my desktop just like I did in London for 2 years playing poker.
And since I rarely have a bad time when I'm socializing, I've decided to go out of my way and try to meet more people. Which I was sort of planning to do anyway for networking purposes.

For now I think making these 2 big changes, should have a big positive impact on my life, but we'll see how it pans out for real in a month or 2.

I have a LOT to update you on regarding my Language Link project, life in Tokyo, my totally furnished apartment, some movies, some dinners and possibly upcoming trips too. However, I think this blog is long and dense enough as it is, so I'll promise to update you on all of that as soon as I can. Hopefully within a week or so, although this week is really busy so don't expect it before the weekend!

If you actually got through all of this, I'm impressed. Maybe my writing isn't as boring as I thought it was! Leave me a comment if you did, especially if any of this resonates with you I'd be interested in hearing from you!

Weekend Productivity

I've never really been someone who's taken weekends off. Especially during my time as a professional poker player I often worked weekends, because that's when the best games were running. However, as of late weekends have blended together into my normal workweeks even more so than usual. Here are the 3 main reasons.

1) Workout Schedule

I recently started a new fitness program and it happened to be convenient to start this on a Saturday. My fitness program is a 6 days/wk split, which means my only day off is Friday. As a result, my Saturday feels like the start of the week and thus like Monday.
Don't think for a moment that this makes Friday feel like weekend though! My friends, business partners and the companies I interact with still work on Friday, so I still deal with people working and do a lot of work myself, because I get important emails that need responding to.

2) I enjoy what I do

A lot of the time what I want to do is work! Even if I had clear and defined weekdays and weekends, I would still do work on weekends. I am very excited about the things I'm working on and making progress on those is a lot more fun and rewarding to me than my hobbies.
However, like any other healthy human being I too take breaks from work, but...

3) I schedule non-work time

Definitely not all of it, I still decide to call it quits when I'm tired and decide to go out with friends when they ask me last-minute, but I do schedule breaks here and there to stop myself from burning out. For example, next week I'll join a university baseball team in their practice and most weeks I schedule going out for some food and such.


I believe that on top of my strange work schedule in the past as a professional poker player, these 3 things have recently made the line between weekdays and weekends even vaguer for me. This has made me more productive during the weekends and best of all I really enjoy this kind of schedule!