I recently realized that an important thing that I wasn’t considering during my review sessions (weekly/monthly) was “experiences”. The experiences that make me a different person than who I am last week. In this article, I argue the importance of having new experiences and tracking them.

During weekly or monthly review until now, I do things like: good things that happened, things I need to improve on, progress on the plans, plans for future, systems I need to keep in place for assisting future plans and improvements. I did not track experiences, which I think is quite important for me to grow as a person. Experiences are what differentiate you from others, these experiences give you interesting stories, experiences are the most important aspect of life. And experiences is what makes you different from your previous self. Without diverse experiences, you would be (almost) the same person you were 10-years ago; even if you get much better at a narrow topic that you’re working on, you’re be super vulnerable because the topic could turn irrelevant in the next year with new emerging technologies (and you’d be left with nothing).

And tracking experiences is the key to helping you have more diverse experiences (and not being in the illusion of doing something big). And helps you realize if you’re seeking a narrow kind of experiences for far too long.

Examples of the kinds of experiences I want to have, and which I believe could make me unique:

• Pushing myself out of my comfort zone (or doing things I’m afraid of): sleeping on the floor, striking conversations with colleagues, discussing research with much smarter people taking appointments, giving a high risk talk, asking someone out, etc.
• Studying new topics I generally don’t: law, history, etc.
• Things that you generally don’t do: hanging out with friends, showing acquiantances around, going for social events, etc.

Another way to think about this is: fail as often and in different ways. Failure serves as good experience too.

My list of dreams is actually inline with the ideas presented here. Making more experiences is equivalent to checking off more items in the dream list. I’m going to pursue them more aggresively from here on because they are as important as anything.