🔬 Life Experiment 11, 2021

Hey There.

So being quarantined for a week as part of a long trip officially sucks.

Although being a hermit and all for a week and working, being focused is excellent, I propose that you take a more social route. What worked for me was:

• Making a lot of social calls. Zooooom.
• Make sure to have a good web. I had crapy WiFi, so thank god (OK engineers) for inventing mobile phone hotspots.
• Make sure that you have enough things to keep you busy.

Plan some sort of exercise routine. I didn't do that ...

So today, I decided to start the day with a two-hour walk to the Corona test facility. I could drive since I came to Germany by car, but nope. I decided to stretch my legs, and ten kilometres was just what I needed. I'm exhausted and will sleep like a baby tonight.

With all the time on my hands, I scrolled through social media, worked, wrote, did some thinking. Let's see what my brain decided to spit out this week.

🔬 Weekly experiment 10, 2021

In life we have many paths in front of us. We could walk them all but we can't pursue all of them:

When we have an abundance of options, we can get paralysed. Which path is the right one? If I do x, do I then have to give up y?

From personal experience, I can say that you have to find the balance around what you value. You can't have it all, but you can have a lot. I think.

For example, I'm doing a PhD and trying to create a Freedom business (emphasise on trying here). That means that I also work on weekends. I "sacrifice" a few things so I can work on those two things. That's OK because I decided to do so.

So how do we know that something's got to give?

When things start to slip out of our hands.

You might be OK with this. I'm not! I rather prioritise then do a lousy job. Still, I found that I can push the envelope on the number of things that I pursue if I'm slower and highly systematic.

When we are younger, we learn things and can retain most of the information thrown at us. Our brain is like a sponge.

Then university/life comes and jams us with so much information that the brain starts to do cleanups. We start to forget so our brain can make space for new things. OK, most of us forget things, except for a few unicorns out there that remember everything.

Depending on your line of work, some of those past experiences, learnings might be highly relevant to your future self. We can document those learnings and create a trail of breadcrumbs for our future selves to follow.

Or we can skip the part of leaving a trail that we can pick up in the future. If we go loose and fast, we (especially in the knowledge sector) pay the price later:

Whoever works fast works twice.

When we start to slow down, to make sure we capitalise on our work as much as possible, we might tend to ask ourselves:

Am I doing enough?

I recently realised that we often feel the pressure that we are not doing enough in a given moment. The mantra: I could have done more today. Hence, we push, we hurry, ...

Then, in the long run, we realise that we are, in fact, moving too fast. Don't believe me? For 30 days:

• 1.) Hang A4 papers on the wall.
• 2.) Before you go to bed, write down the highlights of each day. What did you do each day?
• 3.) Review.

You'll be surprised how much you did in a day, week, a month without realising. So the fact that you push yourself too hard is well just self-pressure. Kudos to those of you who regard this as common sense.

Smart people in the past realised that:

We tend to overestimate how much we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year.

So when we don't hit our daily goal, we tend to beat ourselves up. But for what? Most of the time, for no good reason.

Time to get to work and spin up that brain of yours and identify some of the traps we are stuck in.

Thinking 🤔 experiments

Let's use guided thinking—one of the thinking through writing approaches to figure things out. Pick a question to journal about it. Few options based on what we talked about above:

• Am I moving to fast on a daily basis?
• Am I paralysed by all the options that are in front of me?

Or:

• How to find time to watch more Netflix and not feel guilty about it?
• Should I spend 2000$ on this fancy course/course/shoes or not?

Maybe those particular topics aren't for you. That's fine. Pick your own.

You can still use a question to guide your thoughts. Recipe:

• 1.) Pick a question.
• 2.) Block all distractions for 30 minutes.
• 3.) Write. On paper might be better 😉
• 4.) Go over what you wrote. Draw conclusions.

I keep a list of topics I want to dig through in the future. If I have no clue what to think about, I just pick one from the list. This way, I always have material to chew on.

Thinking through writing

Some of you have asked me to tell you more about Thinking through Writing. There will be a page here , but it's still empty. Material is in the preparation.

We'll talk about guided thinking, what building blocks you can use to enhance the thinking process while you write. There will be a well-curated library of books that can help you sharpen your thinking when you write.

The basic idea is this:

• 1.) capture your thinking process on paper,
• 2.) digitalise your analogue thoughts,
• 3.) organise your thoughts by tagging them,
• 4.) find patterns among your thoughts.

The page will contain all the nuts and bolts of how to repeat the above process most effectively and incorporate it into your daily life. Why?

So you can figure out which of the many experiments you can run in your life are actually worth pursuing.

Don't forget to experiment and cheers till the next experiment.

Ziga

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