Monday, December 24, 2012

My only goal for 2013


It was pretty easy to write this blog entry. Essentially, I just consulted my Workflowy goal list that I've been accumulating. I organize my life around Workflowy, using it as my to-do list, idea capture tool, journal, shopping list, and bucket list of things to do. Everything (thousands of items) goes in one simple and elegant document, but it's super easy to find exactly the information I'm looking for at any given time. Much better than a GoogleDoc. Check it out if you're looking for a productivity tool for the new year.
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Why only one goal?

One mistake I made last year was focusing on too many goals at once. I gathered a massive bucket list, pared it down to 3-5 goals per month, and it was still too much. I wanted variety so that I would develop multiple skills and ways of thinking that could synergize, as well as discover new things I was passionate about. That logic still holds- and I still intend on trying a variety of things.

Other than my research, this year I will only focus on one goal, my Major Goal for 2013. Reasons:

1) Spend less time planning, more time doing. Last year I found myself worrying about planning when and for how long I would work on each goal, so I spent more time optimizing my schedule than actually accomplishing anything.
2) Focus and deliberate practice. If something is really worthwhile, then it's worth pushing my limits on it, challenging myself, and taking the time to carefully analyze and optimize every aspect. Rather than just haphazardly grinding through the task so that I can run to my next goal, I will sit and force myself to THINK. What are the essential elements of this goal and which will yield the greatest benefits? How can I continually improve? How can I apply these skills to other activities in an unconventional manner? What mistakes do I make and how do I fix them?
3) Prioritization. Taking the time to identify what is really useful or important will allow me to put less stuff on my to-do list but still get more stuff done. A long, unprioritized to-do list is the best friend of procrastination.
4) Habit for life. Some skills are so invaluable that they ought to be life habits. Yet we often don't do them because we don't prioritize them.
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The Goal

So I can TRY many things at once, but I will only be focusing on ONE GOAL. This one fought off quite a few other contenders from my list.
~Goal: Read one book per week~
That's it. Looks simple on the surface. Check back later for a detailed blog post on my Major Goal for 2013. I'm not going to be reading casually- I will actively improve my actual skill of reading (speed, comprehension, control, deep thinking, etc). One book a week is pretty ambitious for me, so I will adjust as necessary.

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What else might I want to accomplish?

I love variety, so I'm going to try a bunch of other things. But these won't be "goals" where I need accountability, tracking, and analysis. They fall into two categories:

1) Habits I definitely want to continue. No need to focus on them, as the habit has already been more or less established.

Fitness
Journaling
Blogging
Reading scientific papers daily
Generating ideas daily
Introducing myself to random people in cafes

2) Things I may experiment with this year. I may elevate one of these to a Major Goal for 1-5 months (meaning I focus on it, not just try it), but only if I'm comfortably completing one book per week. Again, truly focusing on a goal is an energy- and time-intensive endeavor, involving a lot of research, experimentation, reflection, and analysis.

Lucid dreaming
Learning Spanish
Writing letters or e-mails to scientists that I find unique and intriguing
Thoroughly organize my lab notes at a set time every day
Carry around a pocket notebook so I can capture all my thoughts and observations
Travel to multiple countries (Asia and South America especially)
Learn 20 tunes on a new instrument
Try snowboarding, rock climbing, and/or parkour
Take a couple of online courses
Develop out-of-the-box teaching methods and make them freely available
Write a program to analyze something in lab or get something done faster
Leadership skills
Conference crashing (completely unrelated to my professional/private interests)

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Long-term goals:

Finally, it's a good idea to reflect on what sort of life I want in the future, although my plan is certainly a work-in-progress. Of course, it would be a terrible mistake to fret about whether or not what I'm doing right now will translate towards my vision of my future. This year I learned that "Following your passion" is terrible advice. Instead, I should utilize my current environment to develop long-term skills that can be applied to anything I decide to pursue later.

What I want:
Every single year, I should do at least one big thing where I can say, "Wow, last year I never imagined I would be doing what I am doing right now." Diversity of experiences, both in professional and private life, is most important to me. Career-wise, that means pursuing many different career options, but only one at a time. For example, one decade as a practicing neurologist, one decade focused on basic research, one decade working on startups, one decade part of a large company. At some point, I'd like to be a contestant on Jeopardy!, teach an online course, start my own business, give a TED-esque talk, make a bunch of DIY projects, and go into space. Yes, I'm totally serious about that last one.

Monday, December 17, 2012

A Unified Theory of Albert's 2012

It's been a while since I've blogged. I can feel a little anxiety, a little tightness in my chest, likely representing some silly fears: "How do I choose which blog concept to start off with? What if it takes a really long time to get back into the blogging mentality? What if it's obvious that I'm out of practice? What if…" Actually I found myself struggling to explain the anxiety while writing that, so I'm not so anxious anymore. I let it go.

It often feels like the same problems plague us year after year. Everyone has bad habits they'd rather eliminate (wasting time on the Internet, poor eating, unnecessary arguing with loved ones, anxiety in X or Y situation, etc). A big one: procrastination. I was going to write this blog entry on Friday but I put it off just to watch Netflix. I did procrastinate- just not nearly as long as I used to, and I didn't beat myself up over it. Same goes for everything else nowadays.

So how did I actually write this blog entry? I just started. I told myself, "Let's just see where this goes. Quality doesn't matter. Two paragraphs, go." Now I'm on my third.

Now, "Just start" probably sounds like really trivial advice. I probably heard this "Just start" advice years ago, and it never helped me stop procrastinating for all these years. So why do I claim that this one little trivial statement is now making a marked difference in my life and my work?

Because in 2012, I deliberately and consciously focused on this little piece of advice. It's one thing to be aware of an idea. It's quite another to focus on an idea long enough to realize when it's applicable and then to execute it. I wake myself up frequently from my daily routine and remind myself that I need to "just start." If I can say I accomplished anything this year, it's that I have trained myself to pay attention to what I'm doing, and more importantly, what I'm thinking at any given time. This is way easier said than done. It took a year of recognizing this was the underlying problem and several months of serious work. 


The Actual Grand Unified Theory
So what unifies all my pursuits in 2012 is my awareness of what I'm doing. For the rest of the blog entry, I'd like to break this up into three synergistic ideas and then offer some lessons that go along with each one. It's not particularly organized or detailed, but many received deeper treatment in past posts, and many will in the future.

1. Think about thoughts. You can call it "Mindfulness" if you want, but this essentially allows me to be my own psychologist. This allows me to figure out which thoughts are getting in my way, and which ones will help me achieve my goals.
  • Stop repeatedly thinking about things. Pointless. Replaying bad memories, regrets, future fantasies, upcoming deadlines, someone who was inexplicably mean, something wrong in my life. The solution was simple: think about what I can do about the situation today. If I can do something, do it. If not, think about something else.
  • Stop stressing. I used to think stress was a necessary evil that helps get stuff done. But stress is only correlative. Thinking objectively about the problem and executing a solution is what actually gets stuff done. Stress hormones only cloud the mind: they're evolved for fight-or-flight. To get stuff done without stress, I re-frame situations to motivate myself positively: treat the task as an opportunity, not an obligation
  • Stop judging other people. It's easy to do this subconsciously. These judgments will never make a single difference in the real world. It's a waste of brain power.
  • Instead, pay attention to the present. This makes it easier to appreciate what I have, and it prevents me from engaging in the useless thought processes listed above.
  • Keep a journal of my thoughts, ideas, important events. I now write down 1 to 5 things a day about my thoughts and daily situations, plus specific things I could have done to handle them better. Then I do them next time.
2. Deliberate Practice. Thinking about thinking allows me remind myself frequently to implement behavioral changes, so I can break old habits and develop new skills. Deliberately expose self to small challenges and then take on progressively more difficult challenges. Treating things as practice frees me to experiment, so I am more likely to make progress.
  • Think about thoughts. What, again? Well, the issue is that it's difficult. Or more precisely, it's hard to remember to think about thoughts, and some thoughts are so powerful and ingrained that they take persistence to eliminate.
  • Social anxiety. Everyone experiences social anxiety in at least one situation. It can be eliminated through practice. Identify the situation that makes you anxious (eg public speaking). Deliberately put yourself in that situation (offer to give a toast at a party) rather than waiting for some obligation to force you into it (eg best man toast). Observe your anxieties. Acknowledge them. Explain to yourself why they are irrational (they usually are). Think of something specific you can do at the moment (e.g. poke fun at yourself and get the audience laughing). From that point forward, you already win, because you already made progress. Everything else is just fun, and if you embarass yourself, who cares?
  • Honesty. I don't just mean not telling lies. I mean revealing things to other people that may bring judgment. I've discovered that when I reveal risky things to people, they will trust me more, not less. No one believes that anyone else is perfect, so revealing a secret won't hurt. This is really difficult, especially society says such things are stigmatized (this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, unfortunately). Difficulty can be overcome with practice.
  • Generating ideas and being creative. You can train yourself to be creative. You can train yourself to not accept things the way they are and to constantly ask "what if?" Just practice writing down ideas.
  • Take deliberate breaks. If I keep working until I'm exhausted, I'll involuntarily take a much longer break and actually get less done. I also stop thinking about thinking, so I fall back on old bad habits (eg wasting time on the Internet). Instead, I now take frequent, short breaks. It's hard to remember to do this, so I practice it.
3. Life is an experiment. There are no stakes, only opportunities. My brain pays attention at a much deeper level while experiencing or doing something new.
  • Try new things, all the time. This felt like the longest year of my life- in a good way, because I deliberately tried lots of new things. Also, trying new things has made discover that I can do things that I always told myself that I couldn't do. I never thought I'd ever be able to walk up to a random cute girl in a cafe and take her out on an instant date.  I never thought I would ever train for a triathlon. I never thought I'd actually have a blog, even though I wanted one.
  • Meeting a new person and don't know what to say? Conversation turning boring? Try saying something provocative and risky, something that you personally find entertaining or funny. Play with the other person's reactions. If they are turned off by it, who cares? It's not a person you'd get along with anyways, if they don't share your sense of humor. And if they do find it hilarious, you've just found yourself a friend.
  • Make your own way. Don't be afraid to stick out, no matter how uncomfortable it is to have others judging you. Don't get stuck in the mindset "College => job => stable career => significant other => marriage => house in the suburbs." Society tells you that this is what you're supposed to do. You might be 100% happy doing this, but you should do it because of reasons that you have established for yourself, not because society tells you to. If you're doing it for your own reasons, you will get more out of it. And this might not be what you want to do, and you should not let friends or family pressure you into following a set path. 
  • Never be afraid of failure. I realized that I was dramatically overestimating the consequences of my choices. Once I started taking risks, I started seeing that small, fun risks are everywhere.

Finally, laugh at yourself. I'm laughing at this blog entry right now.

About Me

MD/PhD student trying to garner attention to myself and feel important by writing a blog.

Pet peeves: conventional wisdom, blindly following intuition, confusing correlation for causation, and arguing against the converse

Challenges
2013: 52 books in 52 weeks. Complete
2014: TBA. Hint.

Reading Challenge 2013

2013 Reading Challenge

2013 Reading Challenge
Albert has read 5 books toward his goal of 52 books.
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Goodreads

Albert's bookshelf: read

Zen Habits - Handbook for Life
5 of 5 stars true
Great, quick guide. I got a ton of work done these past two weeks implementing just two of the habits described in this book.
The Hunger Games
5 of 5 stars true
I was expecting to be disappointed. I wasn't.

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