2021 was a year of new experiences, personal growth and deepening understanding.
Upon reading through and annotating my 2020 year-end reflection, I thought it’d be cool to write this reflection to re-remember everything I did + learned this year as well as to explore the question — how did I get from there… to here?
Starting off with a rapid-fire TL;DR of what I worked on:
If you put on a pair of glasses with lens that blocked out everything except for the what you would be able to find in my portfolio, here’s what it would look like:
If you put on a smaller pair of glasses with lens that only showed times where I gave a presentation, you’d see a bunch of practice runs, and some times that I talked to an audience such as a gr.8 class of stoics-in-training, the TKShowcase, the MSEF Science Fair, a lab meeting with the xenobot founding team and the Solving the Impossible Award.
Everything that I worked on this year has taught me lessons that are now ingrained in who I am. My ocean-cleaning jellyfish project (and the Solving the Impossible competition) showed me that with a storyboard, it’s possible to put together a presentation in a day and pitch it without a script. ← And a very bad first draft + an amazing mentor + a last minute late night meeting = great storyboard + sense of direction. Having a bunch of people view my CRISPR video made me aware of just how interesting schemas towards CRISPR can be. The UN challenge taught me how instrumental autonomy, communication and good PM-ing are for team success \\ blog post. The cell-computer interface moonshot trained the skill of relentlessly reading research papers to find the one answer you need, which I carried forth to my bioelectricity review — it ultimately comes down to googling every word you don’t know and writing short summaries under copy + pasted paragraphs so you don’t lose context when reading through your notes hours later. Evolving xenobots showed me how much of a intuitive difference tutorials that get you to think and not just copy + paste code are, as well as how much a mentor can accelerate your progress. Renesas taught me how difficult it is to tell a compelling story when you don’t even fully understand the problem yourself. Early cancer detection with bioelectricity taught me what it feels like to really want to solve a global problem.
But I think main takeaway here is that lifelong lessons cannot be memorized from some how-to-be-good-at-life book, they are organic byproducts of actually going through challenging experiences. The best way to learn is not to spend all your time browsing twitter for takeaways that you may note down but never look at again, but to go out there and experience it yourself. Wisdom is knowledge in action. Just like if you’ve never had Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream in your life, no matter how many people try to explain it to you, it’ll never be the same as actually tasting the ice cream for yourself🍦.
And by all means, hmu in the comments or on twitter/ email if you would like to learn more about my experiences!
Looking back, a lot of personal growth this year didn’t come from solely working on the projects, but from the thought connections I made through conversations with friends, pieces of content and small moments through the process of it all where ideas just clicked for me.
Starting off with…
Understanding Why
At the start of 2021, I thought about who I wanted to be at the end of the year and made a list of goals to bring me there.
Through an amalgamation of life experiences, I somehow came pretty close to the Amy I wanted to become. But I cannot confidently say that I achieved most of my goals or habits._.
You know the saying that goes, “with a big enough why you can overcome any how”? Well, I think the converse is also true — without a big enough why, the how will not be realized (without external accountability).
This was also reflected in my goals. I didn’t have a lived, personalized reason for why I wanted to achieve those goals. The lack of mental clarity led me to justify my actions mimetically — subconsciously looking at what the people I perceived as successful were accomplishing and deciding to pursue those achievements so I could also become successful.
Internships, speaking opps, all are great and positive-sum, but which should be my priority? what was I optimizing for? and… why?
Along with learning and growing, I think I was also optimizing for recognition and validation. I said things I didn’t 100% understand (ex. impact billions) just to sound smart, posted resources in slack with a question that I didn’t really care about what the answer was, to give off a facade that I was thoughtful. Whenever I talked about the projects I worked on, I always felt a mild pang of uneasiness because none of them really amounted to anything, they were like trial runs of a game where I played it for a bit but it never really got anywhere, nothing real, nothing I truly believed in. It felt like I was lying to myself, that I was pretending to be someone I was not.
An analogy that immediately comes to mind is the game Fireboy and Watergirl. I was losing sight of the final goal and instead getting distracted by all the sparkly gems. I wasn’t advancing levels.
But… what was the ultimate goal?
The only thing that matters
I found the answer for myself in my current situation through this video.
Realization: nothing else matters unless you’re working on a legit project.
My friend Sofia Sanchez sent me this tweet which words it a more receptive way:
Without a meaningful project — presentations, content, winning awards, self-marking, news features, etc. wouldn’t have that much substance or contribute to a bigger picture, long term goal.
It was all so simple, and it gave me a much more clearer sense of direction in life.
Anyone can work on a project, how does one decide which project you want to spend the next several months(+) going into? How does one know what they want to do?
Reflecting on all the projects I wasn’t excited to pursue further and vice versa, I think it comes down to 3 main factors:
- I believed that there was an actual need for me and my project in this world
- I actively wanted to make it real and could logically envision it actually impacting people in the future
- I’d do it even if I’d make no money or get any recognition (although it’s best if a project is economically incentivized!)
The path to finding my project was different from my friends’ and very non-linear, and the path to finding your project will likely be as well. Instead of attempting to prescribe a formula, I’ll share my experience and maybe it’ll help provide some context or ideas. Feel free to scroll past the italicized part to skip storytime.
One day, I decided to research xenobots because non-conscious bots made of frog cells that wiggle around sounded pretty cool. A few articles in, I found out that the process by which they were born was to simulate natural evolution on a computer and pick the fittest design. Pog.
But then, but then, I stumbled upon this TED Talk by Michael Levin and I don’t think I’ve felt more physically excited in my life. It seemed like I lived my life, learning about biology, just so I could experience this moment and gain this understanding. I ranted to everyone about how gene editing is like micromanaging individual transistors in your computer but bioelectricity is like calling functions/ coding because your body has pre-existing signalling pathways ex. 1 input from us can activate the build-an-eye process in a frog, and their body, taking care of the rest, builds a perfect eye anywhere because no human is as good as being a cell as a cell is.
Bioelectricity was hella exciting but I had no clue what I could to do with it. Evolving xenobots seemed more tangible and doable at home. With my nonexistant background in AI, I tried understanding some github repos but decided after a few hours that I was completely and utterly lost. I sent a cold email to Josh Bongard — head of the evolutionary robotics side of xenobots, essentially saying, I want to evolve xenobots, I conceptually understand how it works but technically… please help me find the path, I am lost. Somehow, like the light at the end of a thunderstorm, he not only sent me a full course on how to evolve soft robots from scratch, I worked on it, asked questions and then he sent an amazing person named Caitlin Grasso to mentor me :)
A few months passed, I learned how evolve a basic soft robot, asked my mentor for some papers on bioelectricity which then I wrote a conceptual review on, presented my work to the xenobot team, tried using the more professional software to evolve soft robots with actual xenobot properties to clear plaque from arteries but since I didn’t have a supercomputer handy and google colab likes to commit self deletus when you tell it to run long simulations and then leave it alone, I wasn’t able to really meaningfully contribute to the xenobot initiative.
For reasons other than long simulation times (inability to accurately control xenobots with current-day tech and a personal lack of a clear and impactful path forward), I decided that continuing to go down this path didn’t make the most sense. However, what else could I do?
The answer came to me in one of our weekly sessions at TKS. Each week (with some exceptions), we tackle a different global problem and this week’s was cancer. Most people think that to solve cancer we need a cure, but actually, the best cure is early detection and prevention. For example, non-small cell lung cancer has a 5-year survival rate of 25% but with early detection, that number rises to 70–92%! This session helped me bridge non-obvious problem to non-obvious solution and upon this bridge I gazed out at my future ahead and decided that this was the project I wanted to spend the next few months working on and make a reality.
What project you ask? Early non-invasive detection of cancer by measuring Vmem (or bioelectricity). Follow my twitter for updates coming soon!
— End of storytime —
That was one of those moments when I finally *get* it. I’ve had several of those in my life, where a very specific, personal life experience turns a statement that everyone says and you’ve just accepted as truth (ex. “it’s the small things that matter” means nothing until you experience a small moment with overflowing joy, “your net work = your net worth” means nothing until you personally see what opportunities making a good impression on someone well connected can unlock, etc.) to something lived and that makes sense to you on a deeper level. This is also known as the moment when knowledge is converted into understanding as Naval elaborates upon in the following tweet:
But isn’t letting the world know about what I’m working on important? I talked with my friend Hannah Le about this recently. She explained that leverage = network + perception and it’s important because ⬆leverage = ⬆perceived legitness = ⬆yes’s. Leverage can be achieved through writing and helping others (speaking opps are cool but not necessary). But the real determining factor is whether or not you’re guided by a personal mission. When others truly see what your personal mission is, there’s no shortage of people willing to help you. So instead of optimizing for network + perception, optimize for relentlessly pursuing your personal mission and the rest will come organically.
A personal mission is what you want to do to make the changes you want to see in the world. This could be a specific project you’re working on or, if you’re in the exploration phase, something like “to go deep into a certain field and invent something” to provide optionality but still direction. Here’s a helpful blog post by Hannah for current explorers.
Cool quote from another annual reflection to sum everything up:
Purpose is big ideas that don’t rise above but are rather rooted in, contained within, and created and fueled by lived experience in a way that no abstract desire to solve the world’s biggest problems or impact billions ever could. — Samson Zhang
Increasing chances of experimental success in life with the scientific method
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” — David Foster Wallace
We are the young fish. Our lives is the water.
We are unaware of many problems and inaccurate patterns of thinking that exist in our life because we tend to accept them intuitively as the status quo. Personal examples below.
I once realized that during time between calls in a day, I never really got anything done because I got distracted. I thought this was a self-discipline problem and I just needed to tell myself to squeeze the most out of every spare minute. When explaining this to my mentor Michael Raspuzzi, he told me that no, it was actually a systemic problem. It’s really difficult for someone to get into a deep state of flow in 30min with the pressure of the next call and the fatigue from the previous one. My time wastage issue could be better solved by stacking my calls on top of one another with no room in between to waste.
Another example was when I was in a TKS session and we were tasked with figuring out, in teams using first principles, how to decrease the cost per kWh of batteries. My intuitive first thought was to google cost breakdown of the battery and reduce the most expensive part — which turned out to be the cathode because the materials it was made with (ex. cobalt) were very expensive. My team googled cheaper alternatives and chose the best one we found.
There were a lot of questionable parts to our approach pointed out by Nadeem Nathoo. Since it’s a fraction, to decrease the cost per kWh, we could either decrease the cost or increase the efficiency, which was the best approach? We went straight to the most expensive component, but because it was intuitive to us, other people probably probably did the same thing and because it hasn’t been solved yet, it’s likely very hard. But what if there’s a less expensive component (maybe 12% of the cost), but it’s overlooked and easy to fix? How do we know the substitute material we chose was the absolute best suited for its purpose? We could’ve understood what molecular properties a cathode needed and then a determined the perfect material from those principles instead of finding local minimums based on what was available online.
But the main takeaway I had was that I used to treat problem-solving sprints as reading as much as possible online then putting together a research summary with what we found (not that fun :/) but now, I understand that we can solve problems in a much more fulfilling way — by thinking and talking through them as a team, whiteboarding, and then filling in data and numbers later.
The thing is, in those two examples above, the first problem was that I wasn’t even aware there were problems to fix in the first place! I thought everything was normal and unchangable.
Oftentimes, the hardest part of solving a problem in your own life is being able to identify the problem in the first place. That’s why I developed a framework to be able to gain increased self awareness over my life and thinking processes — heavily based on the scientific method.
- Collect data on your day. I find that emotions are a great proxy for potential problems because when you’re feeling sad, it’s likely a sign that there’s a problem somewhere. I like collecting this data in a notebook on my desk so I can conveniently write something down without having to open new tabs/ applications on my computer that I’m likely in the middle of using for something.
- At the end of the day, I review the data and form hypotheses. Ex. Today I just did the first thing that came to mind and when evening came I found that I had achieved pretty much nothing notable :/. Hypothesis: If I timeblock the night before, I will be more intentional with how I will spend my time.
- Test your hypotheses. Re-adjust and re-evaluate if necessary. Ex. At the beginning, timeblocking worked, but now it doesn’t really because I don’t check my schedule throughout the day. \\ New hypothesis: If I timetrack throughout the day, it’ll help me be a lot aware of how I spend my time and also check my schedule more often. \\ Yay! Hypothesis = affirmative :)
Moral of the story: the scientific method is a god tier mental model that can be applied to anything in life whether it be how to learn most efficiently, team projects, cooking, etc.
Pro🦆tivity sidebar.
Productivity — a universal struggle for most ambitious people on earth. Here are some things I’ve found have really helped me take control of my time.
^^ the hack above does work. Timeblocking 3 days to a week in advance is oftentimes better than day by day to see how the days connect and distribute weekly goals. It also helps when you look back and ask yourself, what did I even do this month?
I’ve also found that going to the library or a dedicated workplace away from the same room I spend every day in helps me focus and build momentum quickly. I’m not completely sure why it works, maybe it’s because the new environment removes any triggers to become distracted, but here’s an account of one of the best days I’ve ever had at the library and the soundtrack of it all.
Lastly, some say that you can only have 3 goals per day, but I’ve found what works best for me given my current circumstances is having 1 big goal a day, starting early, and letting inertia carry me through to completion. These are also called “theme days”.
However, not one system will work for everyone so I hope you find a system that works best for you!
Back to self-awareness, sometimes I won’t be able to see all the variables or make the best hypotheses myself. That’s why talking to mentors or friends with different perspectives have helped me a lot. I used to be embarrassed to talk about our shortcomings but then I came to terms with the fact that every one is human, no one is perfect, and talking about my failures will not gravely offend the other person in any way. Self-awareness starts with honestly and it’s not actually that scary.
People & Friendships
At the end of the day, I think most of us can agree that people are what bring meaning to life.
Something I’ve really enjoyed this year was having “squads” — a person or groups of people I sync with every 1/2 weeks. As we spent more time together, we push past the barrier of professionalism and authentically talk about life happenings, struggles, questions, interesting topics we somehow land upon, and literally anything else. Life problems get solved and I get exposed to new parts of the world that I never knew existed before.
I wanted to extend boundless gratitude to the following people. I wouldn’t be where I am today without you. Thank you to:
- My day one’s, Miranda, Emma, Carrie, Ray, Reese for the adventures, conversations and always being there.
- Laura, for being alongside me throughout our TKS + non-TKS journeys. You’ve inspired, pushed and supported me when I had no one else to turn to. We have such different interests which just meant I learned so more from you and I still can’t get over this video. Let’s continue compounding upon our aspirations to achieve buff-ness 🏋️♀️.
- Khushi and Allison for being unconditional warmth when everything seemed so cold (if you’re confused about this context dm lol).
- Michael Raspuzzi, Amna and Noel for being the best Innovate directors anyone could ask for and helping me go from 0 →1.
- Michael Raspuzzi for the most accepting, thoughtful and helpful person ever. Super appreciate of all the last-minute feedback calls, opportunities and giving so much to the Activate community. Excited for what’s to come 🚀
- Navid and Nadeem for permanently changing the options I have for the future
- Christina, Laura, Oscar, Dron, Samson, Saya |Ahmed | Sofi | Sualeha | Sarah, Klara, Adara | Dickson, Robert, Aryan, Richa for making our syncs something I look forward to every week :)
- Jessica, Jibraan, Farah, although ya’ll have moved on with your lives, there are small moments we shared that I’ll cherish forever.
- Nina, Sigil, Madhav, Hannah, Izzy, Taira for your thoughtful advice and being living representations of high standards I’m inspired by every day.
- John and Esther at SynBioBeta for replying yes to my spontaneous email and providing an experience that helped me gain a better sense of direction in life.
- Michael Levin, Josh Bongard, Caitlin Grasso, Douglas Blackiston, Sam Kriegman for pioneering your fields, for being giants I could stand on the shoulders of, and the perspectives + resources you shared with me.
- Patrick Poirier for your deeply insightful weekly mentorship and for really believing & supporting all of us to solve the impossible
- AKC and Davide for the connections and opportunities you keep offering me without asking for anything in return. What a nice guy x2
- My family for your quiet support and always being there at the end of any kind of day to smile with.
- Everyone else I’ve met with and asked questions about your professional and life experience. I appreciated the advice and resources greatly then but also how you helped rewire feedback loops and helped me find confidence in myself.
To 2022 and beyond 🚀
Focus
One of my main goals for 2022 would be to focus deeply on my personal project and make weekly progress on a trajectory to be able to help people. To achieve that, I’ll set quarterly goals, weekly goals + timeblocks, timetrack every day, and send frequent updates to my mentors.
Enlightenment
Along with learning technical information, the people I’ve met this year have showed me how expansive the possible topics to be excited by are. In 2022, I’ll work on enriching my understanding of the world through making personal connections to ++ books, podcasts, blog posts, etc. and writing, art-ing and exploring.
Health
I’ve learned the hard way many times this year that without physically being at my best, nothing else can be at its best. Will prioritize working on time management to allow for consistent sleep, exercise and meaningful social interactions this year.
Let’s go get what we want out of 2022. wahoo!
