The Great thing about Kuala Lumpur is that it is 12 hours in advance of Boston (+8 GMT).
I flew in from Dakar (Senegal) with:
- 4 t-shirts & boxers & pair of socks
- 1 jeans & 1 pants
- 2 shorts
- Macbook, iphone & kindle
- 1 DSLR camera
- The rest are docs needed for travel
Everything fits in my backpack and I could've fit more in it but didn't.
A friend told me the less you travel with, the less gravity in your mind, optimizing it for lateral thinking. I am noticing that right now.
In his own words: "I've often found that traveling really helps me understand myself and my world better. Not having an external objective makes it easier for my mind to wander, and it often leads to creative thoughts I couldn't have had predicted in the first place".
The trick though is that your mind tricks you in feeling empty, urging you to buy and get superficial stuffs to fill it with. Once you learn to ignore that, you gain more awareness, become more present, more in touch with reality.
Sounds hippie but here's the structure of my days:
- Wake up 7:00 am, read papers on crypto-currencies or daydream
- 9:00a - 2:00p, programming stuff
- 2:00 - 4:00, street photography
- 4:00 - 8:30, read papers while charging, programming & writing stuff
- 9:30 - 12:30, work stuff
No hard rules here, because of the jet lag, I sometimes sleep until 10am then just shift everything.
In brief, I want the best of both worlds:
- Minimalism to allow my brain to perform as much lateral thinking it can.
- Structured schedule to minimize decision fatigue and kick up my productivity a notch.
Another great thing, I am constantly asking myself why I am doing things I am doing. I get the feeling that this will be a fun experiment. Hopefully will write about my experience after the 26 days.
The downside of temporarily moving to a new place though is that you constantly get lost and can't maximize for the good spots and deals. But nowadays, inspiration, creativity, learning, discomfort, experiences are worth to me any price.
Lateral thinking, like lucid dreams, is interesting because it allows you to make connections between totally different domains. For instance, my first article on steemit is the result of it.