The Outreach Habit: 50 consecutive days of doing something I'm bad at

The Goal

Every single day for the first 50 days of 2014, I forced myself to do something outside my comfort zone. And that's how I ended up having drinks with the vice president of a powerful company.

~The Outreach Habit: Everyday, I must make contact with one person that I otherwise would not have.~

Completion rate: 100%, tracked on Lift.

This usually entailed cold e-mails to people I don’t know. I wrote to the blogger Philip Guo telling him how much his article on grant writing helped me write my predoctoral fellowship, and he got back to me immediately and posted my message on his blog. I wrote to a graduate school dean proposing a collaboration- we start Monday. I got the new President of the University of Michigan to agree to speak to the MD/PhD program within 24 hours of the announcement of his selection by the Board of Regents. I also contacted dozens of alumni and other professionals to organize a series of career panels.

The Outreach Habit also included going up to a speaker after a talk. At a conference, this led to an e-mail exchange with a professor comparing data to assess the potential for a collaboration.

I suppose you could call this the Networking Habit, but I also want to get better at keeping in touch with old friends. Therefore, I wrote up a New Year's update blurb complete with photos and sent them to my friends. Many reciprocated. On really busy days, sending a quickly-modified blurb to another friend I hadn’t seen in years was a good, easy default.
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Difficult Skills = Worthwhile Skills

Why did I choose this habit?

Answer: because it’s hard. Really hard.

Or at least it's hard for me.

First, I just spent the last year maximizing my personal productivity, cultivating my ability to focus, and cutting out distractions. I wanted to focus on my science and my work. With that mindset, other people are distractions.

Second, when I started out, I had no idea how to make these meaningful, productive exchanges. The problem was that I was not used to putting myself in others’ shoes. If I was this person, why would I want to engage with this person who just sent me a random e-mail?

Solution? I tried to make these exchanges meaningful, not worrying about how incompetent I was. Once I made the decision to reach out to a particular person, I forced myself to come up with more and more reasons to make contact. I researched the person online if I didn’t know them. I thought about my own goals and what reasons they would have for wanting to help me out. I thought about each unique person and crafted an equally unique connection. With this information in hand, I could craft a meaningful (yet short) e-mail with a meaningful outcome.

But I didn’t give up just because I sucked. I wrote e-mails that were terrible and got no reply. I’m pretty sure I offended some people. I made some embarassing mistakes during public speaking events that resulted from this outreach habit. But that is part of the process. I only stuck with it because I knew that failure is actually just feedback to help me improve. This is the “get better” mindset- all that matters is that I improve. When I hit an obstacle, that’s life asking me, “are you sure you want to change?"
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Habits Change Who You Are

A week ago, I wanted to see if I truly made Outreach into a habit. So I ended this habit plan and archived the goal on Lift. 

What happened? I began seeing outreach opportunities everywhere.

I heard that the vice president of a major company was coming to the university to give a talk on careers, and I immediately pulled up her e-mail address on LinkedIn and sent her a cold e-mail asking to meet for coffee. Within 1 hour of realizing she existed, I was on her schedule. We ended up having drinks for 3 hours and bonded over intellectual discussions and hilarious personal stories.

I now encounter very little inertia when e-mailing a random big-shot and ask for a coffee meeting. They almost always say yes. I’m meeting with a Principal at Boston Consulting Group this evening- I only e-mailed him yesterday.

Given that I used to suffer from social anxiety, it’s still a little hard to believe how comfortable I’ve become at making rapid and effective connections with complete strangers. How easy it is reach out to people who I’ve been feuding with or neglecting. And how fun it is. 

It also opens up a whole new realm of possibilities. I can only reach a certain level of productivity working alone, no matter how much I improve personal skills like focus and time management. I can’t wait to see what I can make with others, working together.

Want more autonomy at work? Here is the first step.

More on balancing productivity and relationships! Again, I’m writing a lot of this for myself.

This series of blog posts was partially motivated by a reader’s question about defending one’s time while also maintaining relationships. It’s an important question, but there’s an important nuance. Yes, it is critical to defend your time and say “no” to a lot of things- even to your boss. But make sure you are effectively managing and utilizing what free time you already have before you start asking for more.

In fact, utilizing your current free time more effectively is key to obtaining more autonomy later on.
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Rule #1 can be summarized as: Schedule dedicated time to invest in your relationships and your ability to build relationships. This solves a lot of conflicts.

Rule #2: The First Step: Gain others' trust by proving your value and honesty

On value

There is a fantastic interview in Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You. It’s worth repeating. After graduating from college, a young woman named Lulu takes her first job. It's a mindless, boring job pushing buttons to test for software bugs, and she doesn’t have much control of what she does and when. She just follows orders from an unending parade of micromanaging bosses.

While defending one’s time and acquiring autonomy is critical for taking control of one’s work life, it would have been a mistake for Lulu to start doing that immediately. Instead, she used what little autonomous time she did have (mostly her free time at home) to build skills above and beyond her job requirements. Instead of watching TV, she spent countless hours learning how to code on her own, and re-write the company's underlying computer system.

Eventually, she figured out how to automate the company's entire bug-testing process, saving it a ton of time and money. No one asked her to do this. Her bosses were impressed, and she was given a major promotion heading up a new software automation division with lots of responsibilities that probably had her working 80 hours per week. At this point, Lulu was really valuable. So she decided to demand a 30-hour per week schedule to reserve enough time to focus on her side projects. They couldn’t say no- they needed her.

Therefore, if you feel constantly harassed by external responsibilities, a micromanaging boss, and other demands, don’t just try to fight them or avoid them (or worse, complain). Increase your value by any means necessary and then you can negotiate your time commitments on a more equal footing.

Now, PhD students are given a ton of autonomy and then must learn how to use it effectively. I didn’t need to “earn” it like Lulu did. However, the pattern still holds. Early on in my PhD, my boss would give me a project with specific goals and I’d work on them. If I didn’t fulfill them (which happened a lot early on), it would be a problem. I had other project ideas, but I honestly didn’t know how to execute them, so my boss’ ideas came first.

I started coming up with solutions that my boss hadn’t considered. I delivered surprise results. I took note of what areas my boss was not focusing on (rigorous statistics, bioinformatics, automating common lab tasks), and dedicated time to learning how to do those things. Today, it’s pretty clear my boss is happy with my progress and fully trusts me to figure things out on my own. His ideas are now (very helpful) suggestions, not requirements. 

Every PhD student has the time and autonomy to build skills above and beyond what is immediately required for the project they are given by their boss. If a corporate indentured servant like Lulu can find time for it, so can PhD students.

Book recommendation: Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You. Lots of good stories like Lulu’s. 

On honesty

Being trusted is more important than being liked. So don’t be afraid to piss people off. Don’t go around pissing people off on purpose, but if honesty necessitates some uncomfortable words, go ahead. 

If someone else is causing you problems, the solution is simple: talk to them about it. Don’t complain, and certainly don’t write them off as inept or uncaring. If someone else is demanding too much of your time, make sure they trust you and don’t just think you’re lazy for saying “no.” If you prove your honesty first, they will believe you when you say you are too busy.

Just like defending your time, don’t go overboard with this immediately. If your boss has some major flaws that are hurting your company, don’t walk into your her office and start criticizing her management style, unless she is already very open to feedback.

Instead, start small. If someone says, “I love New York!” and you really dislike New York, don’t be afraid to say, “Being in New York City makes me want to blow my brains out.” Even if this person greatly outranks you. Most people are secure enough to not take offense at a trivial preference like that. The very fact you are disagreeing with them shows them that you are telling them the truth. Of course, don’t be unnecessarily mean about it, but don’t be afraid to be polarizing.

Then, move up. Be open with your criticisms of your organization’s plans. Be open with what you support and don’t support. Even if your boss started off squelching feedback (I hear this is a common issue in the corporate world), but if you’ve built up trust, you can always get to the point of full honesty eventually.
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Finally, note that neither of these things, proving value and proving honesty, requires you to get more free time first. You just have to do it. And it will open many doors later on.

Time to re-evaluate how I build relationships and interact with others

This has been on my mind the entire month of November. It’s something I've put aside for a while. Therefore, I am talking to myself in this post just as much as I am to my readers.

Some context: my previous experiments developing focus and batching potential distractions were meant to increase the time and energy spent on what is important but not necessarily urgent. This includes building skills, exploring ideas through reading and moving my project forward. In other words, striving to produce quality results and increase my ability to produce quality results.

Just one problem, which a few readers noticed.

You have to take control of your schedule to make time for the important. Your schedule cannot be constantly subject to external demands, or else they will fill up all your time and you will have no time to nurture yourself.

To do this, you have to defend your own dedicated productivity time. We live in an interdependent world and in most jobs you have to do things for other people. You have meetings you must attend. You must report your progress. Other people will make unreasonable demands of you because they themselves are under pressure.

So if you make yourself unavailable and don't respond to people's requests immediately (something always presented as urgent but is of highly varying importance), that might piss other people off if you don't handle it properly. Rule #2 from my last post may be especially hard for others to understand.

But the issue goes deeper than that.

"Important but not urgent" also includes one more big thing that solves this problem: investing in relationships.
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Apply newfound time and energy to investing in relationships and your ability to build professional and personal relationships

It should be no surprise that conflicts occur when people don’t trust each other and don’t know each other well.

Rather than waiting for conflicts to occur and then frantically trying to resolve them before they put your relationship at risk, why not try to prevent them from happening at all? If you’re trying to protect your time from other people’s demands, you’ll be on much better footing if there is mutual trust and understanding.

But it’s not easy. 

To state the obvious: Building solid relationships requires you to invest your time getting to know them on a "deeper" level," something which requires dedicated, focused effort. Just as it takes unbroken focus to move your project forward or develop a new skill, it takes undivided attention to cultivate a strong relationship. 

So schedule time for it. And don't be afraid to sacrifice your schedule for a person you care about.

So… how does one actually go about building solid relationships?

Personally, I find cliches like “be nice” or “be yourself” or “think of others” or "be a good listener" to be extraordinarily unhelpful. They are too general to tell if you are actually making any progress. It’s also easy to be a good person a few times, and then stop thinking of others because you just assume what you do is “good” because you’re a “good person.” It’s called moral licensing.
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Getting better

Disclaimer: I've focused on just a few concrete things. Clearly, this is an incredibly complex topic, and there is infinite variation and variables in how relationships are built. There’s a lot more I could do, but I needed to select just a few I could focus on.

High-value activity #1: Listening with the intent of identifying what the other person considers important, especially if you aren’t (yet) interested.

Caring about what they care about immediately builds trust. Not sure if you understand their priorities yet? Say you think this person is emotionally attached to a gardening hobby. The next time you see them, are they genuinely complimented when you ask them about their garden?

So imagine that person e-mails you, “Could you do X for me?” But you know that this person cares about Y a lot more, and you are in the position to deliver Y more easily than X, you can offer that instead.

High-value activity #2: Deliberately practice eye contact and other signs of listening

If eye contact is uncomfortable, practice making it comfortable. Another example of listening is never pulling out your phone to check e-mail while chatting with someone. Are you able to comment on what they are talking about that shows you are processing what they say? Even if you don’t care about the topic, you can 1) still practice, so it comes naturally when it matters and 2) build trust with this person.

Feedback mechanism: it’s not a bad idea to carry around a notecard and make a tally mark for every conversation where you make good eye contact. It’s critical to know if you’re actually making progress compared to yesterday.

High-value activity #3: Re-think how you perceive other people. 

If you think someone else is unprofessional, uncaring, unethical, a straight-up asshole, incompetent etc., don't just write them off as such. Certainly don't talk about them behind their back.  Complaining just makes you feel helpless. If you think they aren't listening to you or responding to you, try to understand WHY they aren't. Most of the time, you will discover you two simply aren't on the same page. They don't have the same information as you. If you want them to put in the effort to change their behavior, you should at least consider putting in the effort to see their point of view and then make a more effective presentation to them as to how and why they should change.


I have freed up a lot of time and energy through focus and batching. I came pretty close to simply picking up a new project and getting more work done, but I realized there’s something more important to invest in: people. Note that these “high-value activities” require full attention, and are enabled by the time freed up by enhanced productivity. I can’t resist pulling out my phone during a conversation if I’m constantly worrying about my work.

June Review: Results and hard work are mutually exclusive

It's already time to reflect back on the entire month.

I was healthily hypomanic for the first two weeks. My willpower and confidence was through the roof- I felt like I had the discipline to break through any obstacle. And indeed I did. I easily wrote off thoughts of other's expectations (does X person expect Y from me right now?) and was able to focus on what I thought was most important.

I didn't get much stuff done in lab this past week. Most of what I did do failed. I'm OK with that. I was trying to accomplish a lot before next week's International Worm Meeting in LA, but I think ultimately my brain told me I didn't have enough time to do everything I had planned. My brain felt saturated- by everything I wanted to do, AND everything I thought others expected me to do. I took Thursday off to run some errands and read, and that was easily the best decision of the week.

My time is now constrained- I leave for LA on Wednesday morning, and I still need to make my two posters for the meeting and take care of some obligations. Not to mention do laundry and pack. So I have little doubt that today and tomorrow will be a productivity bonanza.

Then the upcoming Worm Meeting is the perfect chance to incorporate everything I've been working on these past few months- interviewing successful scientists, my first manuscript, practicing eye contact, teaching, literature reading, my current projects, and gathering ideas for the next phase. It has the potential to concretely advance my work in a measurable way. Time to level-up.

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Embrace the Cycle

There is a clear cycle at work here. When I started this month, I thought I'd be working hard every week and be relentlessly results-focused the entire time. That's what I had developed my scheduled bursts for. But hard work is NOT the best time to get results.

• Phase I: Perspiration. Work intensely to the point of discomfort. Acquire new skills and try new things. Ignore results.
• Phase II: Rest. Mental distance. Do something else, and don't worry about your work.
• Phase III: Level-up. Concrete progress. Demand results from yourself.

Phase I vs Phase II: Progress takes discomfort and hard work. There's no way around it. But that sort of mental training is impossible to maintain. As biological creatures, we need Phase II- time to rest and let our bodies and thoughts reorganize themselves. 

Phase I vs Phase III: One should NOT be results-oriented during the hard training phase. Obsessing over concrete results leads us to take shortcuts and take solace in easy and ultimately unimportant accomplishments, because it is impossible to make meaningful gains on a daily or even weekly basis. Instead of focusing on what you accomplish, focus on how you work. Refine your process and treat it like a craft. Once you have built a solid base, then you can later apply them to getting results.

Phase II vs Phase III: Phase II gives you the time to consolidate your newly acquired capabilities and build up your mental energy for the final push for results. Then, you can tell yourself during Phase III that you WILL do something amazing, and this brings the exhilaration and adrenaline required for a truly meaningful accomplishment.

The entire perspective of this post was inspired by weightlifting. My weekly workouts cycle between  intense training, a light workout, and a PR day. Analogies are awesome.

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Just because I promised it

No schedule for the upcoming week, since it will be inherently dictated by the Worm Meeting schedule.

Green blocks are successful scheduled bursts, red blocks are failed, and blue blocks are prior commitments.

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.

I'm lost. What's my purpose in life?

I have a personal mission statement and constitution. I try to review it at least once a week to revise it and reflect on how well I've lived it the last week, and to plan on how I'll better live it.  In my constitution I have principles and values written out, such as "I will have fun at failing," and "I will not judge other people." Sometimes I succeed, sometimes it's like I've forgotten this list exists. What is perhaps more important than the constitution is the mission statement. I have not been very happy with the life purpose I've defined for myself. It's vague but it's the best one I've come up with. The only thing I'm really happy with is that I deliberately chose a purpose that I thought most other people wouldn't understand on any level (I'm weird- I embrace it). I'm told that reflecting on my life purpose should bring me to tears. That you can find your life purpose by sitting down and writing hundreds of "life purpose" statements until you find the one that makes you cry. I've tried that, but nothing gives me that emotional "umph." And I've been worried that I can't find it.

Sometimes I think, hey I just need to focus. #1 Work on finding a proper life goal everyday. #2 Have some flexible plan for advancing that life goal each and every day. #3 Make sure by the end of each day I've met some milestone and feel like I've made progress. Then things will work out.

Not only is this focus hard, I'm also not sure it's the best plan anymore. I've been worried that I don't have a satisfying life purpose, but I think now that the worrying is the real problem. It's occupying me with trying to find some "ideal" life path and so I feel like I don't have enough time to experiment with new things. 

Society teaches us to focus on the career progression (in science it's undergrad => grad student => post-doc => junior faculty => tenure), or the life progression significant other => married => family => house in suburbs. If you don't make progress, others are trained to ask you why you haven't. Some people are happy with it, but a lot of people aren't. Some people think it's necessary, and they don't want to wander off it because it's risky. But you know what? I think a lot of it has to do with life/career progressions being pre-defined for you.  If you find your own reason to get married and buy a house that you won't pay off for 10 years, a reason that is made for you and only you, you'll be a lot happier with it.

This pre-defined path through life can sometimes feel like a prison. So we rebel against it, and we often go overboard and rebel in unhealthy ways. People party a lot, do drugs, cheat on their significant others, quit their jobs without a plan. Most of the time people do this to a lesser extreme, where we might simply lose focus on our work and do our own thing for a while. We might grow in new ways, but then reality sets in and your boss yells at you and you realize your peers have published 3 papers while you have nothing to show. So you freak out and go back to the pre-defined path. You feel bad. Nothing you feel bad about can ever be maintained (omg I HAVE to do this or else my career tanks). So it starts to fail. You work long hours but your work doesn't go anywhere, and it's because you feel bad about it. It's a hell-on-earth prison. So you rebel against it, and it starts all over again.

These are meanderings. We have to deal with societal expectations, but we also have to find our own way. Finding a correct balance- no, the correct MIX of the two is critical. And what's the best way to address something that is critical? Find a way to make it fun. Then you'll do it each and every day, and you won't worry about it.

I recently served on a panel to discuss graduate and medical school with a group of high schoolers applying to college. Every other question was along the lines of "What should I be doing right now to make sure I get into medical school?" It didn't bother me so much that they already "knew" what they wanted to do right out of high school- sure, it's naive, but I have confidence that they'll properly re-evaluate once they are exposed to more life choices during college. What did bother me was that they thought they would be trapped in whatever career path they chose, so they were scared to death that if they didn't optimize everything in their education that they would be stuck in some unhappy mediocre position. That they had to choose their career path NOW so that they could do everything right in the pre-defined life progression. Society is pushing students to imagine some ideal path through life, and if you just follow that you'll be all set for life. I was sucked into this for way too long, until I really started to reflect on what I wanted to get out of life.

Over the past year, I've been focusing on internalizing the mantra "Don't think life is good vs. life is bad. Think about what you can do right now to make it better, regardless of whether it's subjectively good or bad." It's self-managing your own thoughts. But I've really only been applying it to the "what" and the "how" of life. Not the "why" quite yet, and I realized this month that this has been a constant source of distress that I haven't been able to really address until recently.

My goal now is to be lost. And I'm going to have a ton of fun doing it.

Last-minute edit: Yesterday I found a life purpose statement that brings me to tears. But that just moves the bar up, and I bet tomorrow I will subjectively feel just as lost. Finally, this post was motivated by the first question in this Q&A by James Altucher. I have found his blog to one of the most thought-provoking ones out there, even if I don't agree with him. And his honesty is an inspiration to anyone who feels like they have hide their failures to prevent society from judging them- which is everyone.

Update: Tracking my Monthly Goals

I briefly mentioned at the beginning of one of my recent blog posts that May felt like it lasted the equivalent of 3 months. It's still true- when it's Tuesday, the weekend feels like it happened a week ago. Why? I couldn't really put my finger down on this until I started thinking about this blog post. I realized I'm spending far more of my waking hours fully conscious. I'm no longer shutting down my brain for hours everyday by wasting time on the Internet. I'm deliberately planning and working towards my goals and developing my habits. Therefore, it feels like I have three times as much… time. Concrete accomplishments and productivity are a natural and happy outcome, but they are almost incidental at this point.

Today is an update on the goals I established at the beginning of the month.

I had 5 goals that I established for myself this month. These are, of course, in addition to everyday work.

• Focus: An incredibly important meta-goal. I'm trying to stop myself from becoming distracted by cool-sounding goals other than the 5 I've listed here. It's way too easy to move from goal to goal because of the allure of novelty, at the expense of never fully internalizing any habit and never satisfactorily completing any goal. I have specific criteria for checking this off each day, based on how many of the following goals I finish each day and how early in the day I finish them.
• Idea habit: The most enjoyable goal so far. Each morning I spend up to 30 minutes coming up with lists of ~10 ideas, to actively develop my creativity. These can be relevant to my day or not. Some example lists.
• Wake up at 6am: This one is fantastic when I actually do it because it's a productivity bonanza. However, waking up early is not a priority when I have evening social obligations or when I'm hosting someone at my place.
• Reading habit: Keeping up with the literature is critical to any career in science, and I've been neglecting it. I try to read at least an hour each day, or read to the point that I feel like I've gained an important insight. I'm also trying to develop a systematic way to proceed through the literature, but I've made minimal progress.
• Long-term lab plan: This one didn't really work out as I hoped. I've been treating it as a two-step process. First, developing a list of experiments that would be critical for proving a case in a manuscript. Second, putting it into a calendar format with 1-3 critical experiments I could perform each day in addition to run-of-the-mill labwork. However, I haven't actually done the second part because the first part keeps on changing (ah the realities of science).

I'm using Evernote to keep track of both my "Big Rocks" for each week as well as my progress on goals.

And how have I actually been doing? This morning I'm experimenting with graphing my results and seeing if it's useful.

Yes, I used Microsoft Excel to do this. So sue me.

Clearly, I'm having bursts of productivity (at the beginning of each week, I noticed) and then I slip up as the week goes on. That's just good to keep in mind as I finish the month- I don't necessarily have a plan to correct it. Notably, I'm pretty happy that my reading/plan habits are hovering in the 60-80% range, and the idea habit is a stunning success.

Observations on how I can keep up each habit:

• Focus: When I have an idea for a self-improvement project, I just write it down in a note in Evernote and then forget about it until it's time to make next month's goals. Don't want to get distracted. Also, waking up early gives me a boost of motivation that allows me to finish all my goals early in the day.
• Idea habit: Just continue my excitement over being creative each day. Also, I want to try mixing my already-generated ideas in non-intuitive combinations. That's also one reason why I share my ideas- because maybe one of your ideas will have sex with mine have a bunch of little baby ideas.
• Wake up at 6am: Have something I'm excited to do that day. My buddy Jake mentioned this piece of wisdom: "If you don't know why you're getting up in the morning, you should just go back to sleep."
• Reading habit: I can really only accomplish this when I drag myself away from lab to a cafe somewhere and tell myself "OK you are going to read now." Perhaps I should start reserving a specific timeslot for this each day.
• Plan: Just start with the calendar. Use the calendar as my mechanism for generating experimental ideas, rather than trying to list out all experiments first and then stick them into a calendar.

Finally, I have another habit that I've picked up even though I'm not actively focusing on it. And its quite simple: try something new everyday.

Meta-Blog: Practicing honest self-expression makes you better at it

Time for the start of the June blog! I really can't believe it's only been a month since I started- it seriously feels like May lasted at least the equivalent of 3 months...

This week, I've decided to write a two-parter entry about... blogging. Yeah, I know it's meta and perhaps a bit self-serving, and I'm going to take some risks with this one. Furthermore, there are already lots of similar articles from other people, like this fantastic one from James Altucher. But I'm not worried about being novel, because that shouldn't stop me from writing. Just like it shouldn't stop anyone else who is interested in blogging. So today's entry will be about why one would want to blog. The next entry will be about common reasons why one would NOT want to blog (or take on any other side project for that matter), and why those reasons are all just silly.

Several of my college friends have recently started blogs:

• Scribbles in the Cyberdust: generally awesome person working in the consulting industry. Will be musing on life, relationships, and transitions.
• Greg Poulos: college roommate and computer science major who recently quit his tech start-up job to start writing novels and short stories
• The Literary Fix: humanities-expert extraordinaire writes reviews, reactions, responses to books and literature. 10X more culturally adept than I.

Our monolithic group of friends (aka Blocking Group One) had a long e-mail thread tossing around topic and name ideas for these blogs, so I threw in my two cents based on my own experience. It would seem natural that I offer my advice given my fresh experience on the topic, but I have to admit I was a little hesitant at first because I wasn't sure how it would come off. I used to fear offering advice to people because I was afraid people might interpret it as an I'm-better-than-you attitude. As cockiness or arrogance. Some of that fear was mixed in with a lack of self-confidence, which was compounded by a further fear of telling others about things I lacked confidence in. So I used to be afraid of both acknowledging my strong points and of showing my vulnerability, solely because of what other people might think. That's where blogging comes in.

Good blogging is an exercise in being honest. This is by far the most important thing one can gain from blogging. For people like me who have trouble connecting on a deep level with others, it is a wonderful stepping stone to getting comfortable sharing one's thoughts with all the other human beings who inhabit this planet. For more extroverted individuals, it is a constant exercise and reminder to trust other people and strive to make social interactions meaningful. A blog is a great way to develop honesty because it is public enough to take you out of your comfort zone and enable you to grow, but it's a solitary enough that it lets you develop your thoughts deeply without all the complexities and anxieties of face-to-face interaction. It's an interesting dichotomy.

Opening up to others is undoubtedly scary and opens you up to judgment, but like anything else it gets less scary the more you do it. Just practice expressing your opinions, just practice revealing your weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and just practice giving advice to other people in a way that really shows you care about them. Acknowledge that it will definitely be awkward at first, but have fun working at it. Soon, the questions holding you back disappear. Questions like "What if people have no interest in what I'm talking about? What if it creates conflict? What if this person doesn't like me anymore? What if my concerns or ideas are dismissed? What if I look stupid? What if I'm proven wrong?" When I started acknowledging my weaknesses and vowing to address them, both publicly on this blog and privately with my friends, did anyone judge me? Perhaps, but I didn't hear about it, nor does it really matter. In private, others have done the same and opened up to me- you'll have to take my word for it but I feel more connected to my friends than ever. Heck, because I now feel like I can open up to complete strangers (to a lesser degree than my friends, but still) I also feel more connected to the human race in general. I hope it continues to deepen my relationships. In public, other bloggers bravely share their ideas and opinions with the world, and that is a good thing.

There are many other reasons to open yourself up in a blog:

1. Find other people with similar interests. Lots of people are introverts and won't reveal their personal interests widely, leaving lots of discoveries of mutual interests up to chance. If you post a specific topic, perhaps a majority of people won't be interested in it, but you've have provided a conduit for others who are interested to find you.
2. Practice fully fleshing out your ideas. Good writing demands this. While I'm not a good writer, what matters is that I'm practicing and slowly getting better. I've never been a very detail-oriented person. This is unfortunate for my graduate studies, which require very detailed analysis of numerous experiments, papers, and ideas. I need to be able to communicate not just big ideas but also very specific logic. Now by habit whenever I'm reading a science article or designing an experiment I think about how I'm going to talk about it. You haven't fully mastered an idea until you can teach it. Also, now before I start an experiment I automatically write out all the possible outcomes and what they would tell me, and if it's not enough information then I re-design the experiment. Detailing the logic of your ideas can change what you end up deciding to do about your ideas
3. Make yourself accountable for your goals. Tell everyone what you're doing. In your heart, you will not want to disappoint anyone else. Knowing that others know your goals will make you constantly remind yourself what your goals are. This point might run contrary to some experience- I found that in the past I would tell someone else about something great I'm "planning" to do, but it was just to make myself feel better that I WASN'T doing it. But I only did this if I knew it was unlikely that this person would ask me next week how my great idea was progressing. Again, I wasn't being honest. Because you constantly blog about what you're doing, you HAVE to be honest with yourself about whether or not you're making progress on your goals.
4. Motivation to learn new things and grow yourself. No one wants to be boring. Knowing that I could choose anything happening in my life or any of topics I'm reading about on the Internet to be the subject of a PUBLIC blog entry is a fantastic incentive to try to make my life interesting and learn things I never would have touched otherwise.
5. Do more than click the "share" button. You know the drill. I do this all the time: I read something that's really cool, I share it on Facebook, and then I forget about it. I feel like I'm just observing the world happening. But a blog post is your own creation. And when you make something that's your very own, you won't forget about it.

Finally, a blog is completely unnecessary. Wait, what? That's a good thing? Yes indeed, it is. You know there are dozens of things that you could do that are completely voluntary, i.e. not in your job description. But they help you grow as a person and see another side of life. Challenge yourself.

Anyway, I hope that this blog entry didn't come off as one of those braggy it-changed-my-life-and-it-will-change-yours-too articles. If you decide call me out on it, maybe I'll go cry now. Yeah, I do cry sometimes.

Keep reading Part 2.