What We Do And Thank You

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Along the way we’ve had many difficulties and trials to overcome and sometimes we’ve failed to make our targets. On behalf of the team at V-CAF, I apologise.

Hold Onto The Power Within You

We’ve had a few technical difficulties this past couple of weeks that quite frankly, pushed us near to breaking point. And as the saying goes, “it never rains, but pours”, we’ve also had a myriad of personal issues to deal with.

It’s at times like these that your will to carry on can start to falter, and you ask the question if it is really worth carrying on anymore.

In a previous article I wrote about the importance of writing down your purpose or motivation for doing something, and luckily for us at V-CAF we had that to remind us about what we are supposed to be doing and why.

Capturing The Essence of What We Do
Photo by @deivitt via Twenty20

Why

I, most probably like you, want to be successful with what I do. I want to be successful in having a positive impact on people’s lives, hopefully helping them to achieve their own goals in their own way.

Whilst studying for my A-Levels all those years ago I pushed myself too hard so as to successfully pass my exams, but at the cost to my health. To stay awake and alert so that I could study everything that I could, I consumed too much caffeine (in tablet and liquid forms) for six months to the point where my hands couldn’t stop shaking.

The lesson I took away from that incident was that my health is more important than any perceived external goal. Without my health, there are no externals, just internal misery and pain.

Since then I’ve used many alternative approaches to the problem of having a heavy work or study load which have helped me (and by extension, the rest of the team at V-CAF), to be more productive and overcome many difficult hurdles.

As a way of saying thank you back to those that I’ve learned from and the situations I’ve experienced throughout my life, a colleague and I came up with the idea of sharing our collective knowledge with regards to increasing alertness and wakefulness naturally without the aid of stimulants.

What

In our numerous discussions we came up with the idea of creating this blog that would inform people of the dangers of relying on stimulants to increase your perceived productivity, and apparent boost in energy.

We also thought that it would be good if we could epitomise this worthy goal in a program or software package that would let people know when they are at the limits of their alertness, so that they wouldn’t need to resort to consuming stimulants to force themselves to stay awake.

Although we both agreed that this would be something worthwhile to work on, we both knew that the path ahead would be long and difficult. Anyways as evidenced by you reading this post, we started down this path wondering where it would take us.

How

So, more than two years ago we designed and developed this blog and the V-CAF Apple Watch app. Neither of us had done anything quite like this before and both of us were excited and eager to start.

As we had a lot to do, we started building the app, whilst in parallel we formed the company and sorted out the hosting for the blog and setting up the structures of our processes.

Many of the lessons we’ve learnt along the way are the foundation for many of the articles on this blog. We’ve learnt by doing and getting on. When the watch app was complete, we tested it on ourselves, using it as we started to make the iPhone and macOS versions of the app, and I used the watch app whilst doing work on the blog (something I still do to this day).

Review

The picture used in this article (see above), encapsulates what we are trying to do. To capture the moment of the setting of our energy and alertness levels so that a user of our app can take the appropriate actions necessary to replenish themselves and then start again, if need be.

Along the way we’ve had many difficulties and trials to overcome and sometimes we’ve failed to make our targets. On behalf of the team at V-CAF, I apologise.

As stated in the introduction, recently I came very close to giving up. But looking back to where we were, compared to what we’ve done today, and all the people we’ve helped along the way, all I can say is thank you.

Afterword

“Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it – turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself – so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.”

Marcus Aurelius source: 20 Stoic Quotes On Handling Adversity
Download V-CAF from the AppStore
V-CAF - Learning Hub's 50 Best Apple Watch Apps Must Haves for 2020
V-CAF - Learning Hub's 50 Best Apple Watch Apps Must Haves for 2020.
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