Hello all,

Welcome back to the Thought Box! I hope that you had a great weekend.

We made it through the first month! ✅

One month ago, I just started this newsletter to write about my weekly thoughts and with the hope of providing you some value to kick-start your week!

Even though it was an extremely rough month due to the devastating earthquake that happened on February 6, with your support, we managed to survive this month. I started with 0 subscribers, and this issue will be delivered to 30 people!

I hope that you will like what I have prepared for you this week. This week was not an ordinary one, and I will start from that right away.

Let’s start, shall we?

⬆️ LOOK UP - There is Aurora Borealis in Oslo!

I am not mentioning Leonardo DiCaprio’s movie if you are expecting that. Although its title is "Don’t Look Up", I am telling you to look up — at least I did!

The week started amazing for me. On Monday, the Northern Lights decided to put on a show. Normally, Oslo is pretty far from the "true north" to be visible, as it is in Tromsø, Lapland, Longyearbyen, etc. But still, if you are prepared and lucky, you can still see it.

kahyalar

A post shared by Furkan Kahyalar (@kahyalar)

I was very lucky last year. It was maybe my second or third week in Oslo, and for the first time, I saw the Northern Lights in Oslo. But as a hobby photographer, I had no idea how to photograph the Aurora Borealis before. That’s something you can’t practice beforehand. Of course, you can watch videos for tips and tricks, but without hands-on experience, it is still pretty hard to nail it the first time. So when I was there for the first time, I setup my tripod and started shooting with my camera and also with my iPhone. When I came back home, all the images captured with the camera were completely out of focus and not usable. So I ended up with the iPhone ones.

But this time I was prepared completely:
- learned and got used to my camera
- used manual focus to capture the moon
- put a lot of exercises in focusing, measuring, composition, etc.

So when I got the news that we have a great chance to see the northern lights that night, I was fully ready and committed for it. Set up the tripod, dialed in the settings, and waited for the lady Aurora to show up — and oh boy, she did show up!

You can clearly see how sharp and detailed this image is compared to the previous one taken with the iPhone.

It was absolutely worth it.

Worth to look up!

Soon, I will be publishing a blog post about how I am tracking the Aurora Borealis in Oslo and managed to see the Aurora Borealis twice!

➡️ Looking forward to going to back to blogging!

Finally, I started doing some renovation work on my blog. I also cleaned up my dashboard and started generating some ideas to write down. Speaking about the dashboard, I use Notion to organize all the ideas and track their progress on it.

..and yes, there is an upcoming blog post about this topic as well! 🙈

I was doing some maintenance work on the blog. Soon, I will be renewing the existing titles, texts, and images. It is very hard to decide on a niche, but thanks to this newsletter, I have a better understanding of which topics make me happy to talk about. But I can show you the latest minor changes:

Firstly, I changed the profile image, rewrote the texts and added a finer shadow:

Also, I added the newsletter section both on header and footer:

Even though there is plenty of work to do, I am really looking forward to going back to blogging again. These minor changes may mean nothing for the readers, but at least they help me keep the connection alive.

I will keep you updated once the renewal operation is done!

If you have any ideas or suggestions for me to write or talk about, please let me know. I’d be happy to write about them!

⬇️ Managing through small hiccups

I am currently reading Seth Godin’s The Dip. Highly recommending it to everyone. Even though it is more focused on business, I believe that the DIP concept can be found in every part of our lives.

The Dip: Seth Godin - Book Summary & Analysis — The Dip graph from the book

As you all know, life will always create some weird problems for us to solve or overcome. For example, when you are trying to build a new habit, life always creates something to get your attention away from that habit and create that difficulty.

Lately, I have been struggling with my weight loss journey again. Mostly because of sleeping disorders and stress, but I know that I am experiencing the dip right now. If I can fight to survive the dip, I will get the desired results. I just need to push hard these days and stick to my habit for whatever it takes.

But there is a catch! As the author describes, there is another curve as well: the dead end. You need to differentiate which one applies to you. If you are at a dead end, the best thing to do is quit as soon as possible.

..and of course, the most important part is to understand which one you are experiencing right now.

⬅️ Throwback time: Top quote from last week

It was an amazing coincidence to see this quote this week. As I mentioned above, this week I was doing some work on my blog, and in order to write something, you need ideas. A LOT OF THEM. So I created a system to jot down each and every idea that popped into my head. These ideas came to me on different occasions:

While coding through the day 🧑🏻‍💻
While editing photos 📸
While writing this newsletter ✍️
While cooking—yeah, I know, weird. 🍳
and, as you might guess, while in the shower! 🚿

So the important thing is to capture all of them in one spot. Mostly I write just a title to explain the idea, but sometimes this is not enough. So I wrote down a one-liner to explain the idea behind this title.

It will be easier to fill than to remove. So in one day, I can come up with five ideas; meanwhile, I can only write about 1-2 ideas per week.

So hopefully, I will have an infinite resource of ideas to write about, both for the newsletter and the blog.

Fingers crossed! 🤞

Well, here we are. We just completed this week’s Thought Box. Thank you so much for joining me on this issue.

I really hope to see you in future issues. 🙏

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Looking forward to seeing you on the next one!

Have a great week,
Furkan

Issue #5 - Managing through small hiccups