ReThought

Lately, I have been thinking about a lot of things. Some of them include how to make my brain more powerful, how to learn to live alone, how to learn better and how to create stuff. For a long time now, I have valued intellectual superiority over a lot of things. Knowing more about things that matter and knowing them well enough is crucial in the process of making the world a better place. For me, it’s all about that. Changing the world. Sculpting it and accelerating it towards the future. Learning is addictive. It is a wonderful process. Learning calculus, economics, international law, complex analysis and the dynamics of black holes. It’s ecstatic.

Being a creator, I believe in loving what I do or leaving. This is important. Once you get through the superficial boundaries of the subject, things are going to get tougher. It’ll be hard for concepts to just click after one reading or for questions to make sense after the first try. Problems will seem like chores, something you dread. This is where you bring your passion into play. If you don’t love something, you’ll probably never be good at it. You’ll become someone who you don’t like. You’ll be swimming in the same slew. And you won’t even realize what you’re doing wrong because after a while all of this will become your reality. You’ll stop dreaming and you’ll stop creating. You want to avoid that all costs. Life is too short to be living someone else’s dream. It’s just too damn short.

If you love something, go learn it/do it. Don’t let the result motivate you. Immerse yourself in the process, live in it and let it take over you. That’s how you’ll create things that genuinely matter. How many milestones you hit along the way, how many awards you receive, none of that matters. Acknowledge them and move along. Same with failures: learn from them and move along. Don’t ruminate them. What you create now is all that matters. If you ruminate over your past successes and never produce worthy henceforth, you’re simply a one-timer. You’re not a performer. Your goal is to create every day. It could be a piece of text, a paragraph for a scientific paper, part of a solution for a crisis, or a better way to solve an integral. Focus on producing better ideas instead of just consuming them. A consumer mindset will never help you in coming up with ideas that solve issues. Create prototypes, test them, and re-create them if they fail. Experiment and observe, don’t just take someone’s word for granted. You’re an astrophysicist. Experimentation is your livelihood. For all of this to happen, you need to focus entirely on the process. Learn to love problems, spend time thinking about the problem, asking better questions, playing around with it, before you come up with a solution. Only when you absolutely love the process of being buried under a set of integrals or finding out alternatives to RP-1 as rocket fuel, you’ll want to wake up as soon as the sun hits your eyes. Make learning fun so that you can’t wait to learn complex analysis or orbital mechanics.

Focus on the process and make it a part of your life. Live in it and surrender to the art of quality work.

Until next time.