🔬 Life Experiment 12, 2021

Hey There.

At the beginning of the last week, I settled into my new home. One I'll be in for the next month. I'm adjusting to my monastery life (OK accelerator life). I found a few quiet trails for my long forest walks.

The next home office is not that bad. I even have my own reading chair 😍

But last week was quite busy; every time you come to the accelerator physics facility, there are thousands of errands to run. Do the medical exam, radiation training, figure out what happened while you were gone, ...

You basically live a few clicks from your office, and it is soo easy to just go and check something. I went to the lab at five today for only a few minutes and returned two and a half hours later. There are so many expensive toys to play with. I enjoyed it, but if you're not careful, the place sucks you in.

As a result, I wrote way less last week. So when the Friday Ness-Labs writing session came by, my mind was not up for it. I simply had too many thoughts floating around in my head to do some profound writing. Which is something I'm not used to anymore.

Thinking 🤔 experiment 11, 2021

I'm a physicist. My job is to think. I prefer to think through writing.

Every morning I take a hot shower. Prepare my breakfast. Get into my cosy chair and think as I sip my first cup of Earl Gray.

I do it for two hours minimum—usually more. Sometimes I pick a topic and use it as a guide. Sometimes I free write. I jolt down whatever thought surfaces up.

To me, it's not about writing. But about thinking. About capturing the thoughts so I can sharpen my thinking. Figure out how to focus my efforts. To calm down.

I've been doing this for years, and I realised that the benefits of journaling's personal are enormous. Yet, not many people practice regular writing. Even in physics and science, there are not many systematic writers and thinkers around. This is so sad because writing has enormous potential as a tool if you use it correctly.

How to explain the effects of regular writing/journaling? Let me give you an analogy.

Mind

Your mind is like a beehive. Bzzzzz. You don't want to get close to a beehive.

Thoughts are bees.

By writing thoughts down, you put the bees to sleep.

At some point, all bees are asleep.

Your mind becomes like water. Or like a beehive during winter. Still. You aren't afraid to approach it and carefully examine what's going on.

The more you write, the deeper you can go. You can explore the hidden thoughts. Stuff that's buried deep into the brain surfaces up, but first, you need to regularly remove the free-flowing surface thoughts. Then you can go really deep.

Try it out. Regularly write for 30min+. Write down whatever surfaces up in your mind. Sooner or later, you should start coming to realisations that you never thought were possible before.

Extra stuff

Till further notice, I'm stopping with link sharing. There are thousands of curation newsletters out there, and I'm not going to play this consumption-curation game anymore. I prefer creating my own content. It's more challenging but also more satisfying.

Although there is something new. From now on I'll be organising one on ones. The idea is that you (my subscribers) can Sign up for a 45 min chat with me. We can discuss whatever you want as long as it's somehow related to the Life Experiment topic. There will be two such sessions available each week.

Why do this? I'm looking for feedback on my work and a better connection with my readers, and I believe that this is a great way to achieve just that. Plus, conversations with people with a different perspective always spark cool ideas and challenge me to shift my perspective.

So sign up 😉

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

Ziga

P.S. Forward this newsletter to a friend. If the friend subscribes, they have to send you a bag of gummy bears in return. Send pics, or it didn't happen. 😉

P.S.S. If you want to unsubscribe from this newsletter, send me an email: Un-subscribe me. Yes, I still do it manually because I like to focus on the content rather than the coding.