Reconsider Your Whole Value System
I feel completely different person since the last two years. My perspective to the world and humanity shifted and gradually became bottom-up process, which I realize lately, and had very good impacts in my life. The stream of information, cognitive toolkits, and knowledge are easy to be attained. In order to make my daily life more interesting, I decide to learn about everything, since there are a lot of thing you can learn on the Internet. But, if you don’t have guidelines of how to perceive such stream of information, failure to read information could lead you into cognitive load, which more likely stressful than when you less receive information. So, continuously, I search things that interest me. I do design in my daily life, web programming and coding, and I’m writing a trilogy. A fiction- Saga, about how to save our rainforest, reconstruct the chronicles of human kind and I would like to end it with deconstruct the dimensions of our universe. In order to achieve that, I need to learn a wide range of multi-disciplinary fields, from ancient history, biodiversity to human brain and quantum physics. Extra dimensions. The universe. I know, it’s a huge stuff learning. But, with scientific concept-esque approach, I believe I can do this. One toolkit that I find very helpful is structured serendipity.
My approach stands in stark contrast to the standard scientific concept: find an area of interest and become increasingly knowledgeable about it. Instead of branching out from a central speciality, I’m interested in ‘interdisciplinary’ problems that cross the boundaries of different disciplines. My approach is nomadic. I move about, searching for ideas that will pique my curiosity, extend my horizons, and hopefully make a big impact. At least, to how I perceive the world and deal with people around.
This is what I got from college, I don’t view myself as a practitioner of a particular skill or method. I gotta learn everything. I’m constantly looking at what’s the most interesting problem that I could possibly work on. Something that don’t fit, something that bugging me. I really try to figure out what sort of scientist I need to be in order to solve the problem I’m interested in solving. Rather than specializing in any one area, I take the opposite tack. I naturally gravitate to problems that I know little about.
The reason is that most projects fail, if the project you know a lot about fails, you haven’t gained anything. If a project you know relatively little about fails, you potentially have a bunch of new and better ideas. And I have a habit of using my failures as springboards for success. The best types of problems are those that seem harder at first than when you think about it. If you have ten such projects and one of them works, you’re good because lots of people think it’s astronomically unlikely the project would have worked and they don’t know you’ve tried ten of them. The failures very naturally lead to new successes and opportunities. That’s why it’s great to get a couple of failures under your belt in a new area.
I’m always on the lookout for new methods that I think will open up whole new domains. And that requires you to upgrade your cognitive toolkits. There are a lot of scientific concept that would help you understand things, the universe, the human behavior, science, anything. My reasoning was that I would be able to figure out the universe and make all subsequent life decisions from first principles. It turns out you can’t work everything out from first principles, because it seems like a lot of things have happened. I’m reading forward from ancient history, trying to write the chronicles of mankind, deconstruct the 5th dimension and stopping when the those streams met in the 21th century. And I find that this cognitive toolkits are very helpful to me understanding the universe and beyond.
This comes at an obvious price: it is hard to hit the ground running in a new area, and I often find myself playing catch-up. But to me, my broader horizons compensate for this drawback. People have this romantic notion of inventors as people who go into caves and come out with an amazing thing that’s totally novel. I think a huge amount of invention is recognizing that A and B go together really well, putting them together and getting something better. The limiting step is knowing that A and B exist. And that’s the big disadvantage that one has as a specialist – you gradually lose sight of the things that are around. I feel I just get to see more. These are the moments that justify my nomadic journey. If we’re in a room and we’re talking about X, the X specialist will know more about X than I do, but I’ll know more about not-X. Every once in a while, something that’s not-X turns out to be very relevant.
A famous writer has a good tip, “Make it great, no matter how long it takes. There’s no such thing as too many drafts. There’s no such thing as too much time spent. As you well know, a great book can last forever.” But, sometimes things don’t need to last forever to be perfect.