I classify all of human activity in three dimensions: observation, thinking, and creation. Those pretty much encapsulate everything that I need to think about.
As a physics student, I work to perfect the observation process. Every observation is handled with care, nothing is left to the wind. I learn how to see every relevant side of something, and how to take the observations that I can collect and figure out everything that I can about the system that I'm observing.
As one who writes, I spend a lot of time thinking. I don't leave my ideas alone, I handle them frequently. I throw them against walls, I feel them, I mix them, sometimes I burn them. More often than not, I end up writing them down to give them some corporeal form, some permanence in the world. Basically, I organize the observations that I've made over time in my head by forcing myself to think them over and over again, and making myself articulate them.
And then, once I've found something complex, once I've figured out how something works, I have a couple of ways that I can exploit my ideas and make stuff. I'm a drummer. I can do some computer programming. I can organize people and groups. I use my ideas and concepts as ingredients, or tools, or templates, and I craft experiences.
And of course, once you create some new structure and throw it back out into the world, you start the whole process over again. Any good life plan should make some kind of feedback loop, so that you just keep doing cool stuff and never run out of new wonders.
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