🔬 Life Experiment 13, 2021

Hey There.

This week and the past week, my life is a physics experiment. Not a Life Experiment. But it's an experiment, so all is fine.

For a week, we are measuring the physics phenomena with the equipment developed and built by a large team over the past few years. We have entered the "beam time" period, as we call it.

So what are we measuring? Highly simplified. We are trying to measure masses of rare isotopes that are produced in exotic stars in our universe. But we don't have the star in our lab, right? Yes, but that's why we have an accelerator facility that allows us to reproduce those stars' conditions.

For a non-expert. We basically wire a bunch of cables and fancy equipment, set up some control PCs:

Then we work 24/7 for a week. After that, we have a fancy physics result. If everything goes well, we can sell our results to a fancy journal easily. If we have trouble with our equipment, we need to carefully explain why we did what we did the way we did it and why some things didn't work as planned.

Let's leave the physics experiments and focus on our Life Experiment for the rest of the issue.

Before we dive into the non-physics topics. You can still book a slot for a one on one discussion here . You're reading what I think. Take the opportunity, and let's chat about topics that occupy your mind.

🔬 Weekly experiment 12, 2021

This is the 40th issue of the Life Experiment newsletter. We did:

• 5 editions in 2019,
• 23 in 2020,
• 12 in 2021 so far.

Who knows, maybe issue number 80 comes out at the end of this year.

As I'm reinforcing the habit of daily writing, I'm not seeing this newsletter as an obligation anymore, but as something I really enjoy. Which was the whole point of why I started this newsletter in the first place.

As subscribers are slowly chipping in. There's 32 of you at the moment. I'm slowly from week to week, improving the content. Or so I believe.

After two years of writing, I'm starting to see some progress. Sure, I mean, there's a long way to go before I get to the Tim Ferris, Ali Abdal or James Clear level. Still, after two years, I have the fundamental processes and habits in place. I have a topic that I write about:

Life Experiments designed with thinking through writing.

It might not sound like much, but before a newsletter that is a bit novel and has a clear direction takes off, you need to get a loooooot of moving pieces just right. Novel high-quality things take time.

Any substantial progress takes a minimum of 3 years.

When your boss and a famous YouTuber say the same thing, you start noticing that there might be a bit of truth in this statement. Yet we want results fast. The (sad) truth is it takes time. To get anything remotely substantial off the ground, you need years of practice and work. It's not enough to just work. You need to develop systems that help you stay on track over the years.

Systems

When we start something new, there's friction. Things feel clunky; take time. Over time, when we do something repeatedly, things begin to feel more natural. We subconsciously design a system.

If we put a little effort into it, we can design a clever system. For this newsletter, I developed a system:

• Create a skeleton draft a week in advance.
• Over the week, make notes and mark stuff interesting for the newsletter with @N.
• Over the weekend, type up the notes marked with @N.
• Then, gather all @N notes in one place and pick a topic of the week. This week the topic is systems.
• Filter the notes and create a basic structure of the newsletter.
• Make sure to have a photo for the newsletter and a short personal story.
• On Monday evening, polish the whole thing into a 1k+ word piece.
• Then, dispatch the issue to my eager readers.

Not long ago, my process was:

Hey, it's eleven o'clock in the evening. I have a blank page. Now what.

No shit that I struggled. Now that I have a process (that I'm still refining), it's way easier to stay focused and on track. That's how you do long term projects. You develop a system, and then the long term hairy big project becomes a game.

OK, there's also a bit of fine print that comes with long term projects. It's called the focus. You might have heard of it before.

Focus

You can't do everything. You need to pick something. Something small, something niche and then dig deep into that. Such focus isn't for everyone, but it's what it takes to get to the edge, to become the best at something.

Doing a PhD is one example of digging deep. I'm trying the Thinking trough writing to be the second thing I dig deep into.

So how do you know if you are doing too much? How do you know if you are defocused? My rule of thumb:

If you need a task manager, you are doing too much.

It's not about logging all the tasks, having fancy todo lists, the latest 100$ software. Or constant reminders. You need to focus on few things and push everything else aside.

Focus is saying no to something that you think is a phenomenal idea. You wake up thinking about it, but you say no because you are focusing on something else.

Once you internalise that, the concept of time management disappears. You get to the next level where:

Productivity becomes mood management, not time management.

With fewer things on your plate, you don't have multiple people, obligations pulling you in every possible direction. Once you're focused, all you need is to maintain that focus and be in the best possible mood.

So you need to get enough rest, water, exercise and anything else that lifts your mood. That's it.

So how am I maintaining focus and a positive mood? With writing 😂

Thinking 🤔 experiments

As you probably know by now, I write daily. So should you. But why do I do it? Why do I really write into my journal? To capture all the directions I want to take, then choose the path that is the most aligned with my current goals.

Yes, I have to leave behind a lot of possibilities and pick one and focus on it. Writing helps me choose the option that's most promising and most urgent. Yet because I write down all the possibilities, I know that I can always revisit my thoughts. Most of the time, it turns out that most of the ideas were not that clever after all.

This week I filled my 2nd 200 A4 page journal of the year. I'm on the way to my reflection yearly record. Maybe that also means I have more mess to process this year than in the past. Or I'm finally dealing with most of my shit. Who knows.

But one thing that my daily writing reminds me of is that I have an overflow of ideas and options that I could pursue, but I need to be brutal and choose only a few.

So pick that journal and start sharpening your focus. Once you practice this habit for a while, you'll be amazed by what you can achieve if you try to focus through writing.

Life then becomes a game and not a daily uphill battle.

Ziga

P.S. Sharing is caring, so forward this newsletter to at least two friends. The friend who subscribes to the newsletter after you forwarded it to them has to send you a bag of gummy bears in return. Plus, send pics, or it didn't happen. 😉