The TED website hosts a large collection of inspiring talks on many different topics. The talk on how schools kill creativity is particularly fantastic; both funny and insightful, and is in fact the most-watched TED talk to date. During it Ken Robinson makes the following remark:

There’s something curious about professors in my experience — not all of them, but typically — they live in their heads.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this describes me perfectly. (Although I am a graduate student rather than a professor.)

This behaviour has both its strengths and weaknesses. For example, I have almost never felt lonely in my life, despite being alone a good portion of the time. Perhaps this is because by living in my head I am able to keep myself company. Indeed, my modus operandi when thinking about something could be described as a “conversation” with myself in which I try to make arguments for both sides of an issue.

However, like all human emotions, loneliness undoubtedly exists for a reason. In this case, it seems to be a trigger to make friends, which in turn improves one’s well-being. Without loneliness one has less short-term pain, but also less motivation to seek out ultimately beneficial connections.

In my case, I never gave much thought to the downsides, or even viewed them with a kind of perverse pride; the “cost of doing business” as it were. In short, I didn’t make much of an effort to ameliorate the absent-mindedness; in fact, I thought such traits were essentially unchangeable.

Early this year I decided to make a conscious effort to get out of my head. There were multiple reasons, but one is that almost every job I do involves interacting with other people in some way, so I figure that becoming more empathetic will actually improve the quality of my work.

How does one go about venturing out of their head? Well, I am still learning that. One step I’m taking is to learn—and remember!—the names of people I recognize from somewhere. I haven’t had a 100% success rate, but I’m already much better than I was previously, when I would be likely to forget someone’s name before my conversation with them had finished. Additionally, I will not ignore the fact that yes, I have a body, and to this end will pay more attention to things like exercise, diet, and appearance.

So I took the plunge and decided to start up a blog, primarily as a way practising writing, something I’ve always enjoyed but never made a habit out of. I read a fair number of blogs, but to be honest I wouldn’t miss most of them if they shut down. I’ve found a few which consistently produce high-quality content; here are three of my favourites:

• Paul Graham – A fantastic collection of essays. I like Graham’s writing style more than anyone else I’ve ever read, and don’t understand why the clear, matter-of-fact style that he employs isn’t very commonly used. Many of his essays are about entrepreneurship, which I am not especially interested in, yet I still find his writing engaging.
• Scott Adams – Best known as the creator of Dilbert, his blog is a constant source of unique ideas. As a compulsive thinker who loves kicking around new ideas I look forward to reading his near-daily posts.
• Eric Raymond – An open-source software advocate with an extremely strong ego. The unusual part about that is he actually has the accomplishments to back it up. He writes about a diverse number of things, and his writing is usually interesting even when I don’t care much about the topic.

My intention when starting this blog was to only write about things of interest to me. I had thought that this would necessitate being boring to everyone except in the case where a common interest is shared. Judging from the above list, in the optimal case that’s not actually true.