David Kipping

I mean, if you want to become the best researcher you possibly can,

you're pushing your intellect and in a sense your body to a high level,

And so to me, I've always wanted to couple that with training of my body, training of my mind in other ways besides from just what I'm doing when I'm in the lecture room or when I'm in my office calculating something.

Focusing on your own development through whatever it is, meditation for me is often running, working out and pursuing multiple passions.

provides this almost synergistic bliss of all of them together.

So often I've had some of the best research ideas from making a YouTube video and trying to communicate an idea or interacting with my audience who've had a question that sparked a whole trail of thought that led down this wonderful intellectual rabbit hole, or maybe to a new intellectual discovery.

It can go either way sometimes with those things.

And so thinking broadly, diversely,

and always looking after yourself in this uh in this highly competitive and often extremely stressful world that we live in um is the best advice i can offer anybody and just try if you can to it's very cheesy but if you can follow your passions you'll always be happy um trying to sell out for for the quick cash out for the quick book out

can be tempting in the short term.

Looking for exomoons was never easy, but I made a career not out of discovering exomoons, but out of learning how to communicate the difficult problem and discovering all sorts of things along the way.

We shot for the sky and we discovered all this stuff along the way.

We discovered dozens of new planets using all sorts of new techniques.

We pushed this instrumentation to new places.

And I've had an extremely productive research career

I've had all sorts of ideas working on techno signatures.

Thinking innovatively pushes you into all sorts of exciting directions.

It's hard to find that passion, but you can sometimes remember it when you were a kid, what your passions were and what fascinated you as a child.

For me, as soon as I picked up a space boat when I was five years old, that was it.

I was hooked on space and I almost betrayed my passion at college.