An Observation of Consequence

My attention is much more productive, the less I spend time online. Over Christmas, I finished Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.

It was a fun read and I was struck by how much slacking off and fooling around he did. He seemed to almost exclusively follow his curiosity. I can’t recall the story exactly, but he once left his dinner at a diner to go to a paint store after an old painter told him he could mix two colors to get one that Feynman was almost certain wasn’t possible. He brought the paint back to the diner and tried mixing it like the painter said he did.

It seems like he never shrugged much off as uninteresting, or even chance. It was all interesting. There was enough time to go to the paint store and see if this old painter new something about colors that he, a physicist, didn’t yet know.

1. Observe things about the world

2. See patterns in things

3. Write about those patters and observations

4. Form ideas about how the world works

5. Delight in all of it

This observation - that there is enough time - is a fundamental ambition in 2024. It not only needs a list of daily habits in order to do it, but a list of things to not do in order to not waste the time.

I call the list of things to do “Laws of Motion” and the list of things not to do “Disturbances. Or, chaos.”

Laws of Motion

• love

• live well

• be active

• work

Disturbances. Or, chaos.

• twitter

• inconsistency

• the self (anger, ego)

• fear.