June 🎧

Podcasting, a hackathon, and exploring life

Jul 01, 2023

👋Hello hello! I hope you’re doing fantastically. I’m Sasha, a 15 year old innovator based near Toronto, Canada. Welcome to my monthly newsletter, where I share what’s happened in the past month. :) With that, let’s dive in!

Podcasting

First off, I’m incredibly excited to share that Annie and I have started a podcast! 🎧This is something that many people have recommended we do, and something I’ve been thinking about for a while. It’s called A Seat at the Table, and our goal with it is to share the stories of inspiring women in STEM fields. 💪

We published our first episode a couple weeks ago, feel free to check it out here! 👀

Betacamp hackathon

Next up, Adheena and I FINALLY met in person at the Betacamp Hackathon in Toronto! 🥰This was an incredible experience, I met so many wonderful people and saw so many amazing presentations. Salman, the organizer, was such a vibe. One of my favourite hackathons for sure!

Us when we first arrived. Can you tell we were nervous about pitching? XD

Not going to lie, what we presented was pretty bad, but it was more about the experience!

Shoutout to Unmol’s team, who won the $1000 prize with their idea, Cultura, to reduce overfertilization through IOT sensors. 🔥They brought very high standards to the pitching, with a 3D printed prototype and 2 customers after just 24 hours! 🤩

My biggest takeaways were:

📈Bring high standards to everything you do.
Not going to lie, in this hackathon, I’d kinda given up right from the start. I didn’t expect to win. But that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. 😢
If I’d stayed focused and tried to make this the best hackathon project ever, and actually committed to it, my team for sure could have come out with something we were proud of.
With Unmol’s team for example, they walked in with boss mentality thinking how they could 10X this competition and exceed expectations. 😼(yep just listed like 3 TKS mindsets right there XD). There were a few other teams that did this too.
Moving forward, I’d like to try to make everything I do the best it can be. That Atomic Habits mindset, 1% better every day. 🚀
🤝Talk to everyone you meet
Networking really is everything. You can be the most cracked person in the world, but if no one knows about it, who’s gonna give you any opportunities? 🤔
In a lot of things/opportunities we want, it’s not a question of what can get me there, but who can get me there.
Plus, talking to people is fun :)
At the venue I was my most outgoing self and as a result got to talk to some amazing people and had a crazy awesome time.😁 Sitting in a corner by yourself is low key boring. (who knew?)
A lot of people, when asked what the best thing about TKS is, say the people. Out of an insane accelerator program where you learn mindsets for success, are exposed to revolutionary tech, and get to do crazy awesome challenges, they say the people. And to be fair, you have access to some of the smartest minds in the world. Or, you learn how to get access to those minds. 😼
The people are some of the most important factor in anything else too. If you’re doing something amazing with people you don’t like, or you don’t talk to, you’ve segregated yourself. You’re now stuck with your own thoughts.
Network building is probably one of the highest value things you can do.
Plus, humans rely heavily on communication, so why not take this chance to become a better communicator? Go meet people. 🚀

Finishing Grade 10

One June 27th, I wrote my last exam of grade 10, for chemistry🧪. This year was a crazy year (balancing TKS + school = 🫠 + no sleep), but also one of the best years of my life. I’m thrilled to finally be done with school and have more freedom with my time in the summer.

Overall in school, I slacked a bit for part of the year and that resulted in a bit of cramming before exams. So next year I’m planning to be a bit more consistent with school to hopefully (🤞) prevent that cramming. (But we’ll see what happens, y’know? Life gets crazy sometimes 😉)

Exploring Happiness😄

In my last newsletter I talked about peace vs happiness, and you’ll be thrilled (or annoyed) that I’m still talking about happiness! (sorry 😊)

I wrote a (very long) article on the book I practically begged you to read last time, so now you don’t really have an excuse not to check it out :))

p.s. - here’s the link 😉

And yeah I know it’s very very very long, so I plan to write a shorter article with my key takeaways later, in case you’re super busy and don’t have time to sit down and read the first one. 😁

Update on the Space Suit Textile Coating

Keerthana and I visited York University earlier this month to present our textile. We ended up securing lab space there, and plan to run the lab next week! 🤩Hoping everything comes through 🤞.

For those of you who are new, Keerthana and I have been working on a Material Science X Space Tech project involving developing a textile coating for space suits🧑‍🚀 to prevent lunar dust abrasion (scratching). 🚀It’s been a very long-going project, but is appearing to almost be at a close now!

We’ve also locked down what we’re doing, and wrote an article on it. If you’re interested in learning more about our project, feel free to check out the article here!

Quote

I’ve been thinking about obsessiveness recently because I think that I have a very obsessive personality.🙃 (me who literally spent a month thinking about nothing other than how we could grow the Ghanian agricultural sector….💀 )

Society in a way deems obsessiveness as bad, talking about things like work-life balance. And while obsessive can, in some situations, be negative, I think that it can also be incredibly useful.

"The greatest, the most beautiful aspect of human nature is becoming obsessed, of becoming exceptionally passionate, to the point where, yes, flaws are revealed, of giving yourself fully to a task. . . truly what it means to be human."

- Lex Fridman

When applied to incorrect things, it can have very negative effects. This may be why its so important to create systems for ourselves to encourage the good obsessions.

Obsessiveness creates focus. If you are obsessed about something, you will be continuously working on something, you will become 100% dedicated to making that thing the best you can. It is somewhat like an addiction.

In this day and age, attention is the most valuable thing one can have. 🪙So to have a characteristic that fuels this attention is an incredible gift in my view. The best stuff happens when you dedicate yourself fully. Someone is likely mediocre because they’re giving maybe 40% of their capacity. If they committed fully, through hard work they would be able to excel.

They're distracted - if everyone had focus and dedicated to something, they'd be cracked. Everyone from Steve Jobs to Bill Gates to Elon Musk - they commit fully to something. You know the success curve? The people on the far right of it are those who are obsessed.

However, one cannot be obsessive all the time. They would become burned out and be forced to take a break. Let's say you choose to become obsessed with coding, you can't code all day and skip school and meals. So you create systems to maintain these other aspects of life. What is the minimum viable effort/time I can put into x to achieve the desired results? (MVE.) With obsessiveness, it's about improving, getting results, and learning as fast as possible.

Obsessiveness, ad excellence, demands sacrifice. These systems minimize the effects that that sacrifices would have.

Purpose is defined as "have (something) as one's intention or objective." Apply this to life, and the way I interpret it is obsessiveness. Your purpose is what you apply your obsessiveness to. (ideally) 🙃

But applying obsessiveness to a positive, purposeful cause can be an incredibly positive thing. The concept of purpose layers particularly resonated with me. At different times in your life, you have different purposes. Different things you care about. This may be also in part why when people get to the top of the mountain they are climbing, they don't care any more. Once you complete a purpose layer, it peels away to reveal the one underneath it. I like to think of these as phases. So certain times in one's life correspond to various purposes, various targets of obsessiveness.

Hope you enjoyed that little spiel on obsessiveness :))

Media Recommendations

🎧Collimator

Have to give a shoutout to Unmol and Alex for starting this podcast a while ago. Some super interesting conversations, in everything from agtech to quantum computing to nuclear fusion. 🤩

🎧Lex Fridman Podcast

Not gonna lie, I heard about people listening to this and I’m like what’s the hype? But he has so many episodes and has a ton of interesting guests. And the episodes are REALLY long (like really, the one was 5+ hours) so its perfect for biking. 🚵