2022 Updates | 16
Synbio at NYU, best content consumed, hard unique skills, meeting my heroes, and marking the end of my "headless chicken" era
If I had to pick a word to describe the past 2022, it would be: infatuative exploration1I’ll walk you through a quick tour of some of the year’s moments–– hopefully, you’ll gain something out of my lessons and be entertained along the way :)
My main question of 2023: I need to start building up some hard unique skills. What the f*** could these be?
Random Access Memories
Starting TKS
What is TKS? Here’s an excerpt from Steven Ritchie’s Substack (he’s one of my TKS Directors!) called “Raising Unicorns” :
TKS is an Olympic-level training program for young people who want to change the world. The next entrepreneurs, innovators, and scientists come from this program. We have founders who have raised millions of dollars coming out of TKS and have produced some of the youngest interns at companies like Neurable, IBM, OpenAI, and a handful of other startups.
Did I mention we’ve only been around for 6 years?
The Innovate program that I’m helping run this year is our first-year program that is designed to expose students to emerging technologies, introduce them to some of the world’s biggest problems, and give them the mindsets and frameworks to start tackling them. It’s a time for them to learn about themselves and how they want to succeed in the world.
I finished the Longevity, BCI, and Synthetic Biology explores so far. I have yet to finish Gene Editing, AI, and Quantum Computing. I like how in TKS, talking science and deep tech isn’t just for insanely knowledgable people, but normal everyday language in our slack group. Sometimes I don’t even know what some people are talking about, but that’s where ChatGPT3 comes in handy!
My “focus” (everyone at TKS has to pick one) is going to be on Synthetic Biology, and I’m finally going through and moving forward more seriously with the process this 2023. Let’s see how everything goes!
Biggest Wins
7 months clean:
I’m 7 months clean!!! This is seriously one of my hugest achievements in my opinion. This year, I cured my nicotine addiction (it wasn’t too bad, but I was definitely a bit addicted). I quit vaping 100% cold turkey, showing myself that I could exercise restraint and execute discipline by doing something I found really hard–– which honestly made me feel quite good. I have more trust in myself. There have been a few times where I came really close to breaking, thinking “oh… just one hit probably won’t hurt”, before regaining self-control and stepping/walking away. I’m still very proud of myself for this. Not a single puff of nicotine since May.
Honestly, what helped me the most was telling people I really admired and wanted to impress that I quit completely. The thought of having to tell them that I fell off was completely out of the question and shook me awake every time. Find people who truly inspire you and believe in you–– they’re the best accountability partners (even if they only mostly live in your mind!). Those people who make you feel like you should be doing more and push you (sometimes this is a painful but positive experience)? Try your best to keep those friends.
Healthy Relationships:
Love is at a max. I am grateful for my sisters, my friends, God, and a certain special romantic interest for making this the case. I truly feel incredibly lucky and grateful for this sector of my life. It’s a blessing to know that you genuinely look up to the people you hang out with the most.
Friendships are a huge factor in this as well–– your environment and the echo chambers you allow yourself to fall into really really affect you. I’m glad that mine inspire me to work out/exercise more, set higher standards for myself, look towards bigger goals, and cultivate kindness and easy affection within our relationships. This is a HUGE jump compared to 2021–– I cut off my high school friends (who I still don’t talk to now). A year ago, I was staying up till 3 am with them almost every night (sometimes even 6 am) playing league of legends or binge-watching movies on discord. The conversation topics were still quite interesting but we just wasted so much time altogether.
It’s crazy what happens when you decide to take the plunge and make room for new people in your life. It’s cool how now, normal conversation topics surround celebration about the cool new person they got to interview on their podcast, how a project they’re working on just crossed 7 figures, how their youtube video crossed 100k views, someone’s new startup idea and giving UI feedback on their prototype websites and apps, how another’s mission to decentralize scientific publishing is going, and more. I’m grateful to be surrounded by kind, ambitious, and conscientious people.
Starting to create content:
This 2022, I started to create content. This is how it’s going:
15 newsletters published
7 youtube videos made
20 shorts
To an even more prolific 2023! To improving 1% every day.
My Pitfalls, and What You Can Learn From Them
Questioning my ambition:
I learned that it is not ambition that drives me, but love. It always has been. This has been freeing but confusing.
Now, my primary ambition lies not primarily in fulfilling external goals, but simply in the joy of the action of trying to fulfill my potential. Input goals > output goals. I’ve learned my lesson.
Replying late and communication skills:
How many good friendships or connections I must have lost from replying late or erring in my communication skills (following up, not checking up on them etc.)? Far too many. It’s inane. Developing better communication skills is really something I should work towards.
Saying yes to the wrong things:
I said yes to far too many things that didn’t align with my goals. All of which were a fun time and I don’t regret it, but enough is enough! If 2022 was the year of exploration, 2023 is the year of focus.
Distractions cut off, and sacrifices made:
To keep to my 10:30pm sharp sleeping schedule, I’ve had to quit dance. I know I’ll return to it–– it’s one of the few things that funnels pure joy to my heart and feeds my soul. But attending socials till the late AMs just wasn’t cutting it anymore.
Social Media
Instagram is a waste of time. After not using it at all for a couple months, I realized that I really do not care about the day-to-day lives of so many people. I’ve cut it out completely.
Best Content Consumed
I adopted a mantra by accident and it won’t leave me now, but it’s helped spur me into action many times over the past few months so I’m going to share it with you guys. It goes:
“Every day is an opportunity to practice virtue.”
I don’t want to put my cup in the dishwasher? “Every day is an opportunity to practice virtue.”, I want to sleep instead of going to the gym? “Every day is an opportunity to practice virtue.”
Paul Graham Essays:
I read many many Paul Graham Essays over December. I will share my takeaways with you soon.
What The Future Holds?
I only applied to one university this year–– early decision to NYU. I decided to apply here 2 days before the deadline, so I ended up submitting my old application material from a couple of years back–– back when my biggest obsession was bouldering of all things actually hahaha so my entire commonapp essay centered around this topic (I found this very funny). Thankfully, I still somehow got in and am going to be taking up Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
Why New York? Well–– for one, NYC has a great bachata and latin dance scene :) Furthermore, their biotech sector seems to be growing and I know NYC has some great Science-Art museums and galleries. From Genspace to BioBat to Biofabricate to Messaging Lab, I am psyched to explore NYC. Furthermore, I like that Tandon doesn’t look too far away of a commute/walk from any of these places. I can’t wait to take advantage of everything this city has to offer for a year. It’ll probably make for some cool youtube videos too.
The future of my youtube channel and this newsletter:
All I wanna do is just put more stuff I find interesting out there and keep going. Future topics include: a creative writing piece of how God is just playing the ultimate video game, claytronics as the book of Genesis, immortality, my rough relationship with academia, an exploration of mitochondrial myopathy, and a deep dive into cotton candy berries (aratiles).
For my youtube channel, I am stepping away from the purely self-development related content (though this was an interesting aside to dip my toes into) and focusing on creating science-art content.
Conclusion
2022 was AWESOME. But when I look back at the year as a whole, I can’t help but see myself as a headless chicken. Clucking about with different holes, only managing to fly short distances before forgetting where I’m heading and switching directions. For real!
I think I am still kind of a chicken, but I feel like I at least have a working head on my shoulders. This 2022, I saw many of my peers sprout wings so quickly and learn how to fly. I saw them turn into falcons and hawks–– soaring and bending reality, transforming the world through sheer will. Maybe this year, I transform into a baby eagle. That is what I wish to do :)
My oh my… what a whirlwind. Much bailando and enamorado. What a gap year indeed.
Within this year, I’ve also traveled to Europe for the first time ever, met my heroes, started an SMMA then dropped it, fell into tpot, worked as a receptionist at a dance studio, met latin celebrities while working marketing for a Dubai latin dance festival, walked for hundreds upon hundreds of hours through deserts, cities, and beaches, filmed bachata performances with dubai supercars, moved houses, got $ for my first art commission designing for an HR consulting boutique, thought I wanted to be a growth consultant- realized I didn’t, ate 300g raw meat, hugged 100 trees, had my first ice bath, helped make the virtual bioart exhibit for IGEM (world’s biggest genetic engineering competition), beta tested writing courses for David Perell’s WOP Liftoff (aka. dude who popularized the personal monopoly concept), explored the neobanking sector working on a consulting project with CIBC, created a blockchain for abortions for a hackathon, edited transcripts for a cool podcast, a few masquarade nights dancing rueda, glow in the dark latin parties, going completely on hermit mode for 2 months, spent early mornings in empty malls, and fell deeply in love. Just because this sticks out to me, I also got to speak to a partner at Mckinsey to ask for her assistance for a banking project and advice on our proposed solutions and it was so cool to meet someone who just said it like it was, I loved the way she explained and thought about problems, and she gave us much more help and advice than we expected. Such a girl boss. My friend Shrut and I were privately DM-ing each other on zoom, fangirling about how cool she was. Women like her are such an inspiration–– clear examples of intelligence and professionalism. Another time I felt this way was when I met Jasmina Aganovic last February (CEO of Arcaea, a startup that uses synthetic biology to create beauty products— backed by Chanel and Olaplex). She exuded such poise, power, and sophistication. Women like them are an incredible inspiration to me.
I really enjoy the insight of the writing and the point about ambition is quite relatable. I'm curious to what's the name of mentioned project about decentralizing scientific publishing?
https://twitter.com/scholarorg?s=21