You don’t need to be a scientist to do experiments – why we all are scientists
Dont forget to play & explore like a child
I believe we are born as scientists.
Children freely play, try out, fail, play again, explore, question and engage with the world around them. Each of those actions, is an experiment by itself.
Therefore, every child has the innate qualities of a scientist: curiosity, fearlessness, questioning, and a will to explore life and learn as much as possible.
These are all essential traits for a successful scientific career.
But! They are equally essential for a general fulfilling life, whether you want to be a scientist or not.
Curiosity makes us explore all parts of life with an open mind, experience adventures & get to know new things & interesting people, even as adults.
Fearlessness will make us dare to take risks and reap their great rewards in our lives.
Questioning decisions, situations, rules, and society will make it possible for us to live a truly fulfilling life in accordance with our values.
Developing our own will to explore and learn about our surroundings and ourselves will help us become strong, reliable, and thriving people in society.
For a child, every play is an experiment they do, each interaction has an aim and a result & gets interpreted and learned from, aka. is an experiment.
As children, we collect data points and make sense of them to understand the world.
And as grown-ups, we do the exact same! At least I do :-)
For me, every interaction with a person is a datapoint about them, me and our relationship. With time and interactions accumulating, we form a relationship & develop trust & care.
Or not, because we realize, that we do not get along well.
Every time I go to dance class, I make mini-experiments when dancing with different people, noticing my improvement or what I still need to practice, at the same time I realize who I like to dance with & who I dont like as much.
I do the same when it comes to my physical body and what I eat. I used to eat everything, then I had a vegan phase, vegetarian, and now I am back at eating meat. I also avoid refined sugar and gluten, as well as processed foods.
I decided because I noticed certain ailments, the only way to see what could fix them was to do experiments with my nutrition.
Of course, I read and informed myself as well, but ultimately, it is the active actions and data points I collect about my body that result in experiments, changed behaviors and improved health.
I do the same with emotions and feelings, I observe them and see what the outcomes are.
Now, being a scientific illustrator the type of experiments I do at work changed compared to the classical lab experiments.
I experiment with art styles, different offers, and business-related moves. I also experiment and collect data points about myself.
With that, I mean my inner world, my fears, inhibitions, and limiting mindsets. They tell me a lot about who I am and what I do and don’t do.
If I look at my classical scientific and academic education, all these things that I described to you would be deemed not scientific enough, too subjective.
Because it is only one person, Daria, who is the subject and she assesses herself. So I am biased. Making all this supposedly unscientific.
I disagree big times! Because here is the thing: there is only one Daria like me in the world, and I have the life, the circumstances, the personality that I have, no one else has it. The same counts for you!
The way I live my life is very individual and highly specific. Of course I am of the species homo sapiens and a female, so I could look at specific scientific scientific studies done on only females (which are not many) and do what they recommend me to do, without questioning it.
OR, I can do my own set of individual experiments, collect datapoints and go about my life exactly the way it fits for me.
I strongly believe that we all can do the same!
And that means, you dont need to be a scientist in a white lab coat lab. No.
It means to be a bit more like the children we were in our past, curiously exploring the world, engaging with it, playing, trying, failing, and moving on.
Collecting data point after data point and building our life into whatever we want it to be!
How do you feel about all this? Do you feel you are like a scientist or child in your life? Or is there maybe more childlike, scientific curiosity possible for you?
Love,
Daria