Falling back to the obvious
Hey there đ,
Last time, I confessed how disappointed I was with how few projects I finished in 2021. Well, today Iâm actually happy with it. Let me explain.
My goal is not to teach self-help stuff! So this is a very personal one. But try to ask yourself where you are right now as you read along. Hopefully, youâll take away 1 or 2 things out of it đ¤
Only today, do I realize that every time I feel lost and have a big decision to make, the obvious path is the one I always fall back to.
But in order to find the right path, you first need to make enough room to wonder for hours. For me, it looks like this:
long walks,
writing a lot,
questioning every single thing Iâm doing.
It doesnât feel good but every time it happens Iâm always glad I went through it.
After high school, I went to med school. I knew early on it wasnât right, so I gave myself the space to think (long 5 AM walks, journaling for the first time). And at the end, the solution was actually quite obvious, always there in front of my face: math of course!
I always loved math and wanted to go as far as I could, yet I picked another path, medicine (not so random as youâll see later).
Another important condition I havenât mentioned yet is facing a wall. If you are following the wrong path, but youâre not challenged enough, youâre not incentivized to doubt your choice.
Med school was fucking hard! If it wasnât, I would have just kept going and only realize 5 years later it wasnât the right choice.
Now Iâve built enough self-awareness to feel that Iâm not in the right place even when everything feels great.
This week I found this archive (disclaimer: itâs cringe): 2 years ago, I used to write a blog every single Sunday (unlike this newsletter đ). It was one of the best things Iâve ever done!
No one ever read it (because it wasnât listed on Google, as I discovered a year later đ), but writing down my thoughts and ideas was amazing. More than that, sticking to a habit for so long boosted my confidence through the roof!
Anyway, this is not the point. The point is, this blog is called âstudent experimentâ for a reason! The first-ish post was âUsing Machine Learning to optimise my lifeâ
Iâve always been a big health/longevity nerd. Thatâs why I went to medicine, tried veganism, meditation, fasting, taichi, polyphasic sleep, sleeping on the floor, cold showers and a bunch of other ridiculous experiments!
Itâs funny cause at the time I wrote this post, I knew nothing about web development, ML and programming in general.
Over the past 2 years, as I was learning about all of that, I kinda lost track of the initial drive: using these tools to up my game in health and longevity.
But, these past months, as I was completely lost about what I was going to do next, I realized that building apps, freelancing, trying to build the next Facebook, wasnât really my motivation. It was just me trying to follow the regular path after learning programming. But it wasnât mine and I felt it.
Giving myself enough time to think over the last 4-6 months allowed me to find it back: the motivation that led me to learn programming in the first place.
Web and ML are not the end goal, there were always just tools. Tools I wanted to use to explore the limits of longevity science!
Whatâs next?
I guess Iâm gonna rekindle this old project of mine and focus on that for the next 6 months:
⢠reading a ton of books and studies on longevity: diet, fasting, exercising, supplements, sleep;
⢠finding the data, the projects and the people working on this topic;
⢠leveraging all my new skills - ML, web dev, design - to build apps to help with body monitoring (existing ones are đ¤Ž)
Wish me luck đ