Hi! I’m Richard, and I’m so glad you’ve arrived here on my blog, Experimenting Through Life! I hope to document thoughts and life lessons through my experiences, taking everything as an experiment and breaking any expectations of perfection. I hope these stories will be relatable for many of you as we enter our late teens and early twenties together!
This is actually the fourth iteration of my blog, after a few attempts in high school that never stuck. I was really bad at consistency - I’d write if I was inspired, but didn’t make a habit of it. Same thing happened with practice routines for music and everything else; I was a huge procrastinator with a habit of putting too much on my plate until the end, always playing catchup.
Why now?
In my freshman year at USC, I started taking a daily journal/log of what I did every day and a few thoughts that came with it. Every day, generally in the late evening, I’d pull up a google doc for the semester and write down how I spent my time and anything that affected me personally. This wasn’t super difficult work, but it did test and improve my short-term memory.
The foremost motivation for logging my days this way was to remember what I did on any random day—in the past, I’d look back at what I accomplished in a year and think, “where did the time go?” as if it was all wasted because I had no way to see what I spent my time doing.
But the issue about having a log-based journal is that while it captures my life in good resolution, it’s very surface level; I never put much further thought into my weeks, months, and semesters. And so, I have to distill and synthesize my learnings and write them out. Through this, a sense of direction comes out, ever more important in a world with so many distractions and a lack of clarity.
After having prioritized writing about my life this year, I know I can finally sustain posting regularly on a blog. In addition, I turn 20 next month, and as a formative decade with infinite opportunity, I’ll need to process it. If there’s any time to start, it’s now.
Why the title?
I came up with “Experimenting Through Life” when reflecting on what this Substack should be, at least for the summer. While it is a personal blog, calling it “Richard’s Substack” would be giving it a disservice—who the fuck is Richard, and why should I listen to him?
“Experimenting Through Life” provides a framework to understand how I’ve started to think about my life after starting college. Besides the fact that I’m a STEM major who loves making puns, experimenting treats everything as a trial instead of a test. Like many students, I’m a perfectionist, even though I denied it for the longest time, and this is an effort to get past that.
If you treat life like a series of tests, like I did for the longest time, you’ll procrastinate your studying until it’s needed right before the exam. If you’re a musician, you’ll only practice before a performance instead of actually working on improving your craft. You’ll do your homework the day before it’s due, and prepare for somewhat arbitrary evaluations of your value. In a fixed mindset, you’ll avoid trying new things unless you put your defenses up. And you’ll orient your life to milestones set by others. Sure, you might succeed at that game, but is that what you really want?
And what if you fail?
In most cases, you’ll feel miserable, like your life’s work has been all for nothing. Maybe your coping mechanism is “well, I didn’t try because I crammed it last-minute.” Or, you’ll look back at your life and wonder why you peaked in middle/high school (in certain ways).
Well, that was me.
But if you treat life like a continuous experiment, the world opens up to you. You’ll start with an expectation of what should happen, but nothing happens until you actually test it out—instead of thinking it, you have to live it. If something doesn’t work out, so what? You’ll consider ways to fix it on a future try. Or, you’ll reevaluate your metrics for success.
And thus, this blog is an experiment, too.
What can you expect from me?
There’s so much I want to put into this blog, so I hope that you’ll join me on this journey and subscribe to this Substack! I’ll post weekly recaps this summer, but I’ll also add essays on individual topics that come up. In the future, I’m hoping to include interviews and who knows, maybe even a podcast!
With love,
Richard Shi Zhang