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5 Thought Experiments That Might Change Your Life

What if… Deep in Thought

I’m a fan of thought experiments. Sometimes they’re annoying, but other times they can help you sift through that heap of assumptions that sloshes around your brain and guides a lot of your behavior. In today’s post, I want to offer five thought experiments that yielded, at least for me, some interesting insights. Give them some thought. They might catch you in just the right way. Or not. But at the very least, they’ll provide you with some excellent cocktail party conversation.

Depending on popular demand, I can later share my own answers to the conundrums below…

5 Thought Experiments That Might Change Your Life

  1. A mad scientist attaches a probe to your brain. If you become bored or tired while working it delivers a painful shock. If you had to stay with your current job or school, how would your work schedule change? What habits would you lose? What habits would you gain? What’s stopping you from working that way now?

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3 Simple Rules for Making your Free Time Count

RelaxedThe Trouble with Freedom

In Tuesday’s post I repeated a familar refrain: underschedule! By now, you probably know my argument by heart:

Having significant amounts of unstructured time in your schedule provides three benefits…

  1. Time affluence which generates happiness.
  2. The ability to master the small amount of structured things you leave in your schedule — the only route to becoming famous.
  3. Freedom to expose yourself to positive randomness, the key to stumbling into cool opportunities.

The argument is clear. Putting it into practice, however, can become problematic. I know this because I’ve received several e-mails from students reporting that they’ve given underscheduling a try, but didn’t know what to do with all that free time.

The result: lots of doing nothing, which made them unhappy, which, ironically, made them procrastinate more than ever before on their work, which made them even more unhappy, and so on.

In this post I want to help rectify this problem. Below I’ve listed 3 simple rules to help you get the most out of your experiments with an underscheduled lifestyle:

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Start Your Semester Off Right By Quitting Something

Ben’s YearTrash

In a recent blog post, Ben Casnocha summarized his adventures during 2008. Here are some excerpts:

I traveled to Quito and the Ecuadorean Amazon jungle, Zurich, Prague, all over Costa Rica, Alaska, and rural Tennessee… Gave a dozen paid speeches in various U.S. locales. Read 60 books. … Wrote a hundred thousand words on my blog…Won an essay contest. Made new friends. Tried to become closer still to old friends…Fished for halibut off a boat…Met one-on-one with David Foster Wallace and then mourned his death. Philosophized. Watched too many Seinfeld episodes….Plotted world domination.

This seems like a lot. And it is. But in this post I draw an unexpected conclusion: the long length and indisputable awesomeness of this list should inspire you during this upcoming semester to do much, much less.

We begin with a simple question…

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Three Student Resolutions Worth Making

A New YearHappy New Year!

Making New Year resolutions proves a tricky business. We all know that setting too many goals is a recipe for disappointment, so it’s important to choose a small number of changes that will have the maximum impact.

In this post I describe three simple resolutions that I’ve learned from experience to be incredibly effective. If you’re unsure where to direct your resolve in 2009, forget the cliched crap about going to the gym more or “studying harder.” Give these three habits a try — they’ll completely transform your entire student experience.

Resolution #1: Commit to Full Capture

It’s the oldest trick in the proverbial productivity book, but it’s also the most essential. Without it, you simply cannot eliminate copious stress from your life. I’m talking, of course, about capturing every task, date, and deadline in a trusted system that you review regularly.

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Case Study: How Tyler Aced a Difficult Course

Tyler Gets NervousA New Beginning

Our friend Tyler, whose quest for student simplicity I profiled last April, recently sent me a message. He was nervous about a course he was taking for his linguistics minor. The grade was based on bluebook essay exams. As he recalled: “The last time I took a bluebook course I almost failed it.”

We traded some e-mails. I gave him some advice and he sent back some updates. The final result: he aced the course.

In this post, I explain how…

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How to Avoid Fighting With Your Parents While Home for Christmas Break

Study BreakA Christmas Tradition…

It’s a tradition as deeply ingrained as overdosing on eggnog or decorating the tree: college students home for the holidays getting into fights with their parents about school. There are uncountably many different ways for these fights to be kindled, but once raging they fall into one of two predictable paths: the always popular “you don’t understand how hard I study” theme and the well-worn classic “I know everything and you’re hopelessly naive.”

This post, in the spirit of the season, teaches you how to avoid such brawls. Below are three simple pieces of advice. Give them a read now and the vacation days ahead might just remain merry.

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