As of late, I definitely think I’ve been too consumed by physics and also somehow the game of science.

In acknowledging that, here is a public list of things I want to commit to doing over whatever amount of time that has nothing to do with physics.

If there’s something you think I might enjoy doing or something that you think you would enjoy pursuing with me, please reach out.

Sports :
– Run a Half marathon again.
– Get to a 40min 10km.
– Build my endurance up to a full marathon.

– Get to 50 push ups in a row.
– Get better at handstands.
– Do more fun movement training.

Books :
– Plato’s Republic
– The Sandman Series, Neil Gaiman
– The Book of 5 Rings, Miyamoto Musashi
– The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Leguin
– Some book by Neal Stephenson
– Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
– Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
– Guns, Steel and Germs, Jared Diamond
– Trojan, Alex Vella Gera

Guitar :
– Get back into it.
– Transcribe some Erik Satie.
– Transcribe more Bach.
– Buy a scale and chord book.
– Learn Waves by Guthrie Govan.

Food :
– Learn how to cook a beef wellington.
– Learn how to make a pepper sauce.
– Learn how to bake a pie of your choosing.

Misc & Travel :
– Visit Boltzmann’s grave.
– Do a UK road trip to see some friends.
– Do a diving course in Malta.
– Camping & running on Comino.
– Keep learning German.
– Spend 3 months in South America and see the Cerro Torre.

————————————————————————————————————————

This is a bit of a confessional, which I realise as I write this is definitely too cheesy for my taste. But I think it could be useful and so worthwhile.

I work way too much.

Which is not in and of itself not necessarily a bad thing when you’re 24. I love quantum theory and for a long time I was alone on the island of Malta grappling with these ideas and dreaming of the day I get to discuss them with other people. Well, I live that dream now. I’ve been traveling the world for the past year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, talking to some of the most inventive and wonderful humans in the world about this beautiful landscape of ideas. Of course that is intoxicating.

I get what’s at stake. I am in many ways, the luckiest Maltese person in a scientific context that’s been born in the past half century. This means I’m playing for keeps. I get the responsibility that comes with that. That I have the capacity to maybe some day in the future build a great group in Malta, bring in some money to do science there and invigorate the scientific culture there. So that undergraduates there won’t have as tough of a time as I had or my friends around me had.
This feeling definitely takes the levity out of science at times and I acknowledge that’s not a good thing and I need to develop a better relationship with this thought.

I am also a competitive person and science is a hyper-competitive game. Firstly, it is alluring to want to work on as many deep ideas as possible and to put out as many great manuscripts conveying those ideas within a given year. Secondly, the system wants this out of you. If you want to apply for a grant or something, you’d better be worth you weight in a published papers.
I want to get better at approaching this game with more fun, with not caring about deadlines and being less frustrated with when collaborators don’t meet my expectations.

Working so much is to the detriment of trying to do this thing right over the long arc of things. I will be a better scientist if I am able to do good work consistently over many years and enjoy doing it.
So it’s also to the benefit of my want to do science to focus on continuing to cultivate my interests outside of science and not compromise on the time I allocate for them.