Just out of curiosity

I see that there are some  recurrent  themes in this blog. I do not even remember some of the things that I have written, so probably I am repeating myself.  It doesn't matter: the middle point is always important and worth repeating many times.  This came about yesterday when I was talking with a colleague about my plans of coaching first-year students. We discussed that it is not an easy thing to do, especially because we need to relate to each other, and for that, students have to communicate what is going on with them. First, we discussed students with low self-confidence. I think this is one of the main themes in coaching, because it is pervasive. But then, we started to discuss the opposite case: students that are over-confident or that are perfectionists. Well, they suffer too, and not only do they suffer: just like people with low self-confidence, they sabotage themselves, it is just that they use different strategies. Students that have an identity of 'being...

I can feel the tiredness accumulating from the last few days, but it has not prevented me from enjoying the first day of the conference in Konstanz. It has been great to meet again so many people, including old collaborators and colleagues.  I find socializing very hard when I am tired (probably because I get grumpy and it is hard for me to focus). I see that some people get energy by socializing with others. In my case, sometimes it is the contrary, even if I enjoy the interaction very much. It used to be much worse when I was shy: it would eat out all my energy. But today it has not taken me any energy. I think I was very conscious that I have very few occasions to see these people and I better make the most of it. It is funny how, despite that  I do not see  some of these colleagues  so frequently , I follow their careers over the years and see how they grow from PhD student to post-doc to post-doc to tenured or they decide to leave academia. It is like seeing sna...

It has been a long day, but it has been a good trip overall. I was travelling by train from Vienna to Konstanz (Germany). The departure time was around 10:30 from Vienna Central Station, and I was supposed to arrive in Konstanz at about 18:50. But of course, there was some delay. I actually missed the first connection in Münich, but I took an alternative route, which actually had a very nice landscape (I think it was Switzerland), and since the temperatures have suddenly dropped, the landscape was full of snow.  It was a nice view to enjoy inside the warmth of the train. I was supposed to change twice, but I ended up changing 5 times. In the last change I had 3 minutes to change platform so my Usain Bolt spirit had to be awakened for that one (and actually also for the previous one, where I also had 4 minutes to change). In any case, I took this as an adventure, so I guess that was the right attitude to do this. In the end, I reached Konstanz at 19:20. If I had to do this often it ...

With the house renovations, my habits have gone out of the window, and with them, all my mental structures. Everything takes longer (I keep forgetting what I need, what I need to do, when I need to do them) and more energy (because I need to take many more decisions as I cannot function in "autopilot mode" anymore). Email is piling up, messages are piling up, deadlines are piling up. I work a lot, but I seem to produce less.  I have not done sports for a week. I have not been eating so healthily for a week. I have not been sleeping well for around 4 days (and I normally do not have issues sleeping). My head is slightly foggy. I am more stressed. My stamina is down. I am not saying this to complain. This is just a period and it will be over soon enough. I am using this period  to remind myself how important is to have a good organization in life.  The good thing about this, though, is the challenge: the challenge of finding a mini-organization in the disruption; of finding...

I started yesterday reading a book by Danielle Steel, "The numbers game", and I am completely hooked. I have already read half of it. It has been a while since I got so hooked on a non-fiction book. The funny thing is that the topic of the novel is not one of my favourites, it could even be argued that it is a stereotyped story - or, that the same story has been told a thousand times already -, sometimes I even can expect what is going to happen (actually, it is written in the first page of the book), and, nevertheless, despite all this, somehow the author keeps me hooked and wondering "and then, what happens?" Literally, she took one of the stories that I would have considered a priori among the most uninteresting ones (for my personal taste) and completely took me in. How does she do it???

This blog post may be long, but it is really worth a read. It illustrates very well how stereotypes reinforce themselves and the "invisible" effects that they have. The title is 'Picture yourself as a stereotypical male' by Michelle G. https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-stereotypical-male/

In the middle of the night, I woke up: "I have not written a blog entry!" Well, God knows what time it was, so I was not going to get up and write. In any case, the day had already passed. I do not have a particular time to write. It typically happens at the end of the day, because it is when all the rest has been done. But yesterday it was special, "the rest" was taking forever: construction works were starting at home and I had to get things ready. And it took a while. Everything takes time. But it was not the time, because I could have just written a line or posted a photo and I would have kept the streak of posting every day.  So, no, the problem was not the lack of time, but the little stress that comes with having house renovations. Not that I am particularly nervous, but of course, there is some tension. My house, my refuge, my corner is a total mess. Strangers are coming in and putting down walls. I cannot cook (well, even with a kitchen I cannot cook, so I ...

I was reading a book by a professional fiction writer. She insists on the need to always keep improving, never stagnating, avoiding the attitude of "I have arrived at my destination, it is time to rest". It is like pursuing perfection without pursuing it. Because perfection is just a ghost: it only exists in our minds. So in our lives we keep moving, we keep improving our craft (yes, I consider research a craft), we never arrive, there is no real destination, just the journey. The only thing that matters is to keep moving.

Whatever career one chooses to study at university, there is always a common challenge: managing oneself. And this is especially true if you leave home to study. There may be a lot of new responsibilities that you did not have before: 1. Housekeeping: doing the groceries, cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry, paying the rent and the bills,... 2. Own schedule: when to wake up, when to go to bed, when to eat, when to study (and where and with whom), to decide if to attend class or not, which activities to pursue and when to pursue them,... 3. Own psychology: self-doubt, motivation, knowing or not knowing what you want to do,... These are just a few points. They may look stupid, they may look obvious, but we all have to reflect on them at some point or another to make our lives simple and effective. For example, there are classical tricks, like: - Do not go grocery shopping when you are hungry; go grocery shopping with a pre-made list and buy only the items on the list; make sure that you...

It is quite common to find an initial barrier every time that we want to start an activity: when we wake up in the morning and we feel lazy to prepare ourselves for running, when we arrive at the office and we have to start working, when we sit to reply to emails and we see a long list awaiting us, when it is cold and we have to change into our pajamas,... I do not know the psychology of it, but I have observed that this initial barrier is quite common. The issue is that we may think "I want to do X, but maybe not now, now I do not feel like starting " - substitute X for whatever you want: running, baking, reading a book, writing a book, going for a walk, calling that friend,.... It is not that you do not want to do it, it is just that there is an initial resistance. Use a little willpower to overcome it, or even better, just ignore the inner voice that moans "Oh, now!? Really!? Why not better another time?" Know that this moaning is just trying to prevent you from ...

I know a senior researcher that divides people into two categories: people that finish things and people that don't. He only hires people that finish things. This is such an essential quality for a researcher. Projects are long, they can take years, sometimes we lose sight of them, we encounter difficulties, and then..., they stay unfinished, sometimes even with a draft version of the paper.  As a group leader, I can make people finish things by setting up deadlines, but this works up to a point. The best is to find inner mechanisms for this to work. On this, I do not have much advice because finishing what I start comes naturally to me. Actually, I get nervous when things begin to last way longer than they should. It takes too much headspace. But I can tell you this: if you tend to start things and not finish them, find the psychological reasons behind this first. For example, a classical reason for not finishing things is perfectionism. I always say "there are two types of t...

Continuing on the previous post, I want to clarify that there are moments during the day when we require more willpower: namely, the moments when we have lower levels of energy. For me, typically this happens at the end of the day, which I guess is the same for everyone, otherwise, it does not make much sense to go to sleep if your energy levels are high. Anyway, the point is, when the energy level is low, everything seems tougher. Obvious, right? But we do forget that when scheduling activities, and, more importantly, we forget that low levels of energy foster negativity. So that is why at the end of the day, things may start to look black and it is impossible to enjoy what we are doing. And, as I said in the previous post, enjoyment is the key to not needing willpower. But when negativity comes in, thoughts come in, like 'nothing works', 'everything is wrong', 'what the hell am I doing with my life', 'everything needs to change', etcetera, etcetera. Ju...

When we want to achieve something difficult, or something that we find hard, we are told to use our willpower. My experience is that this only works if you know that you only need to exert your willpower for a given period of time, even if that period of time may be long. After that, willpower wears out. Willpower is finite, you just have a given amount to use. So if I have to use willpower every day to wake up at six in the morning and go out for a run, you can imagine that I may do it for a while, but that it will be very hard to keep doing it for life.  It is said that if you sustain an activity for a given amount of time, then it becomes a habit.  I think there is a little trick here. It is true that starting something new may require a lot of willpower due to the initial resistance. But the key here is that the resistance must subside at some point so that you do not need willpower, then the activity can become a habit. However, for some, resistance subsides, for others, ...

More on Dean Wesley Smith. I just find the story of this guy very interesting. You can read it on his blog. To sum up, he started writing and had an initial success, so he decided to go seriously into writing and started to read and learn about writing. Along this path, he took in a lot of myths about the writing process that really harmed him. The outcome: seven years of not being able to write or to write very little (like two short stories a year rather than a short story a week). He even took therapy for four years to overcome his mental obstacles. One day Smith read about Heinlein's rules on the business of writing and everything clicked. The business habits are: You must write. You must finish what you start. You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order. You must put it on the market. You must keep it on the market until sold. Smith develops each point in his blog (and wrote a non-fiction book about it later). The habit that shocks me the most is number 3, b...

I like this concept of setting a challenge to be accomplished in a given time frame and blogging about it. I have seen the examples set by Dean Wesley Smith on writing a novel in a given time frame. He wrote no-fiction books a fter these experiences. These challenges are a good idea because setting up a challenge publicly gives extra motivation to accomplish it, and blogging about it helps to keep a journal. Keeping a journal helps to keep track of what happened, see what worked and what did not. I wish to be able to set up this type of challenge, especially for students of the undergraduate in maths. It sounds like a lot of fun.  

This friend of mine told me something interesting today. He had heard a podcast where  a military leader states that a leader should bring emotional balance to their group. T his also happens when leading a group of researchers.  In leading research groups, there is an important part of the role that is not based on knowledge transfer or experience, but on being an emotional counterbalance: they are too excited, you have to calm them down to avoid over-motivation; they are too nervous, you have to downplay  and relativize; they are anxious, you have to stay calm; they are under-motivated, you have to show excitement and positivity; they think "they are shit", you have to show extra appreciation,... If emotions are too high, you have to bring them down; if they are down, you have to bring them up. The toughest part, though, is to not get infected by their emotional state. For example, it was hard for me to be with a student that showed high signs of anxiety. In the beginni...

I read recently a book about discovery writing by Dean Wesley Smith, "Writing into the dark". I am going to give it a go since plotting fiction has not really worked for me (even though I finished a first draft of a novel). In any case, it is very interesting the idea of writing without planning ahead. Scientific writing is completely the opposite. I used to do discovery writing as a child to write short stories, but high school destroyed that. At that time to pass the selection exam, we were taught to plan ahead every type of text. We were even requested to write the skeleton of the text (paragraph by paragraph) and include it as part of the evaluation. The structure of the texts that we were asked to write was very rigid. And writing maths has not helped in this aspect. When I try to write creatively I find it difficult because I feel like I have put a corset on my mind, motion is restricted, creativity is restricted. I think that my "critical voice", as Smith say...

I will be going to Konstanz (Germany) by the end of this month, and I will be traveling by train. The trip is around 8 hours and a half, and it costs around 270 euros (both ways). I do hope that traveling by train around Europe becomes easier, faster, and cheaper. It would be great if I could avoid taking the plane. However, an 8-hours-and-a-half trip seems a lot to me. This is the first time I try such a long trip.  My plan is to work during the trip. Let's see if that is possible and for how long.  I will post something here when the time comes.  I used to work all the time when I was commuting to London. I was working on the train (around an hour) and on the Picadilly line (around 20 minutes). And b efore Covid times, I did travel a lot. Traveling can be very tiring, but it was very important during that time that I was also able to work during the trips, because they were very time-consuming. Recently I experienced a period when I could not work during the trips (mayb...

Some years ago, I had a very tough period because of my career. It was the time of job-hunting, the time when I was trying to become independent in my research, and to get a job that could afford me that independence. And it was not easy, especially because I also wanted to be close to my husband. By "close" I mean to have a good connection like a direct flight to wherever my husband was (he is also an academic). The job applications and the interviews became a soul-killer. It is hard to explain how the process worked. It ended up eating me inside. This happens to many. It created wounds. At the moment I did not realize that. I thought that the instant I would get a decent job, I would just forget about all that and move on. That is what I do, leave the past in the past. But it did not happen that way.  I remember starting off in Vienna (actually, the second great job that I got, the first one was at the University of Sussex). In Vienna everything looked great - from the outs...

I have been changing a bit my working methodology. I pick a project and I work on it intensely, and when I see that my attention or motivation goes down (which tends to happen abruptly), I switch tasks. Sometimes I keep cycling on tasks, but I always find myself doing something that I want to do. And maybe I also find that after a short time (e.g., after half an hour or an hour), I do not want to do that anymore. It is ok, I just look at my list of tasks and I pick the one that "calls" me the most. Curiously, tasks with a coming deadline tend to be on top of my "want-to-do list". I said that ironically, of course. Deadlines are powerful motivators. But I do not pick tasks based only on deadlines. For tasks that are especially energy-consuming, like refereeing a paper, I prefer to work in short bursts, of around half an hour. A bit every day towards the deadline, rather than dedicating continuous hours close to the deadline. Honestly, it makes everything much more en...

I am not even going to try to define "intelligence". Just take the definition you like the most, and it will be good enough for this post. I want to debunk one of the most ingrained myths when studying maths (or actually, any subject): you do not have a fixed amount of intelligence. You can see that very easily on the negative side: can you think better or worse when you are tired, angry, sleepy, or drunk (or on drugs)? Can you think better or worse with a full and heavy stomach? Can you think better or worse when you are suffering from some pain, when there is some loud distracting noise, when you are anxious? I am sure that every time you where in one of those scenarios your capacity for thinking diminished. In the same way, your capacity for thinking can increase: sleeping properly, doing maths, managing your emotions, reading wholesome books, doing sports, eating healthy, having a proper place to study, having healthy self-talk, having nice people around you, speaking pol...

This is a little follow-up on the previous post . I was reading today a writer talk about how some years ago editorials would not like authors that produced "too many" books. "Too many" could mean more than one novel per year. The reason behind this is the belief that prolific authors must produce low-quality novels. Again, another harmful belief. It is not true, but if you believe that, what are the consequences? This reminds me of the sage Sadhguru when he talks about "limiting life's possibility". All the beliefs that we have about the process to do or achieve something just limit life's possibilities. Sadhguru says that we should stop dictating what is possible and what is not possible. It is not possible to produce more than one high-quality novel a year? Well, if you think it is not, you will not be able to do it.

Yesterday I watched some basketball. I realized that one of the reasons why I stopped playing basketball is because I had a very clear picture in my mind of how basketball should be played, or better said, the kind of basketball I like to play. And it is mostly team play. But to get a team to play as a team, proper training is needed, because even if individuals are very good, it does not mean that they know how to play together. It also requires that the coach has the willingness to play this way and knows how to coach this team spirit. The reality is that this rarely happens - it is difficult to achieve. The normality is to find a group of individuals that just play together where players either pass the ball, or do not pass the ball. No team plays. But this is life. I had in my picture the perfect scenario, the one I lived as a youngster and I enjoyed the most. But this picture of perfection, of how things "should be", made me stop playing because I could not meet this or ...

When I went to university to study mathematics, the knowledge gap between high-school and university seemed insurmountable. I studied at the Universitat Politecnica of Catalunya (Barcelona) and there were only 50 spots for new students. So, the people that went there were really motivated to study maths. All of them were top of their class in maths, and probably also got top marks in math on the selection exams that we had to take to access university. So, we were supposed to be the best at maths. Yet, in our first exam, only three out of fifty passed. I was devastated. Why the hell had I worked so hard through my previous education? (yes, I was one of those that worked hard) Why couldn't have been taught an adequate level of maths?  The standards of pre-university  education had  been dropping while the university was keeping its standards. That was around 20 years ago. It seems that things have gotten worse. I did not have a "transition" course to fill up the gap - but ...

I had this question in my mind (a math question), it popped yesterday in my head and I had to wait patiently until this morning to be able to examine it. I dug into it immediately after breakfast. Since I had a list of tasks planned for this morning, I decided that I would dedicate just one hour to explore the problem. But that's the issue with curiosity: one hour does not suffice. Lunchtime came, "Already? I guess I have to stop". And I had to stop, there were other things happening after lunch: meetings and admin and stuff. The morning was over. Three hours and a half had passed flying by while thinking and jotting down some computations on a page. What a nice feeling. The initial pile of work had not been reduced. I did not stick to my original schedule. But, do not blame me, from time to time, a researcher cannot help doing research.

  "Tension is who you think you should be, relaxation is who you are" - Chinese proverb

I do not know how people manage their email, but for a long time it felt like the devil itself had invented it. It felt like a source of distraction, time waste, and stress. Seeing all those messages piling up, thinking of the person behind them waiting for a response, and getting them at any time was driving me crazy. And there was the guilt. The guilt of not responding to them or if I responded to them, then the guilt of not doing something that was "more important". At times it felt that either I replied to emails or I did research, there was not enough time to do both. With emails sometimes I was frozen in the process of decision-making, "what do I do with this email?" And they would stay in my inbox and I would keep reading the subject line, again and again, every time I opened the inbox anew. What a waste of time and energy. It also hindered my capacity to take action. The solution for me came with an 'empty inbox' policy. The only thing that gives me ...