🌊November + December 23'

On becoming your ideal self, making battery videos, and finding beauty

Jan 01, 2024

👋Hello hello! I hope you’re doing fantastically. I’m Sasha, a 16 year old innovator based near Toronto, Canada. Welcome to my monthly newsletter, where I share what’s happened in the past month. :)

🎧Podcasting

First up, my cohost Annie and I have published 2 more episodes on A Seat at the Table in these past two months!

For our 7th episode, we spoke with Danielle Strachman from the 1517 Fund. Danielle is someone that I resonate deeply with, and is also one of the most easy-going people I know. We chatted about her experience helping to found the Thiel Fellowship, as well as working with some of the most ambitious young people, such as Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum🪙. Lots of insights for anyone looking to get into the startup world!

And then for our most recent episode, we sat down with Kristina Arriaga, who is on the Oversight Board at Meta. This was actually the first time she had spoken publicly about her work there! We talked a lot about her work creating ethical AI 👀, so if that sounds interesting check it out!! Kristina is a super sweet person and I really enjoyed our conversation.

I think one of the most valuable things about having a podcast is getting to learn how to ask good questions. I think my communication has also improved a ton, and so I’m super thankful to have this opportunity to talk to all these amazing people! 💖

🔋Making Batteries Last Longer

Here’s an update on my main project right now: everything comes down to math. I’m working on increasing the lifespan of lithium ion batteries, using something called battery management systems (BMS). Specifically, I’m looking at state of health estimation, which is one of the most important things a BMS does.

State of health is essentially how much the battery has aged. And so to estimate it, it’s basically a bunch of algorithms. I’m using one called Kalman Filtering, which essentially predicts the state of health, and then updates it’s prediction based on a measurement. (a lot of math XD)

I also had the chance to present this project at the TKS Activate showcase!! I really loved the process of figuring out how to explain this project to others, because it’s quite technical and can be hard to understand. 🙃I’m overall quite happy with how my presentation turned out. I also loved listening to all the other presenters talk about their projects, and seeing their passion for the problems that inspired the projects. 🤩

And finally (last thing about batteries for now I promise 😂) I made 2 videos about batteries this month. The first gave an overview of my project + the why behind it, and also dove very deep into the processes that cause batteries to age.

The second explained 3 different battery chemistries, as well as the difference between them. This was more an exploratory video, because I was hearing all these chemistries being thrown around but didn’t have a solid understanding of the difference!

💭Thoughts + Reflections

On becoming your Ideal Self

I’ve always loved building things, and understanding how things work. But I had always assumed that you had to wait to do those things. That you had to wait until you were x years old. Until you got a degree from x university. Until x person gave you permission.

But the truth is, you don’t have to wait. You can start right now. 🚀

I was struck by this about a week ago, when I was shutting down my computer. I was working on my battery state of health estimation project. I’m using an Arduino for this project, and so strewn across my desk I had a ton of wires, a voltmeter, and 2 lithium ion batteries. It looked like my Arduino kit exploded on my desk.

This may sound silly, but it was beautiful to me. The fact that I had a physical item in front of me that I was building something interesting with. And it was mine. I was free to create and experiment to my heart’s content. This was something I thought only “other people” did. But no, I was doing it.

To become who you want to be, all you have to do is start acting like that person. If you want to be a runner, go run. 💥Bam! Congrats, now you’re a runner 🏃‍♂️. I wanted to be a hardware kid. 💥Bam! Got some hardware. Now I’m a hardware kid :)

What’s something you’ve always wanted to see yourself doing/being? What can you do, today, to get 1 step closer to that identity? If you can’t think of anything, write out the identity you want 10 times on a piece of paper. This is advice I got from Michael Gibson, co-founder of the Thiel Fellowship and the 1517 Fund, so I think it’s legit.

Find beauty through storytelling

I think we don’t appreciate life’s beauty enough. That’s something else I’ve been thinking about recently. One day, I was in the car driving through downtown Toronto. It was a rainy day. The city was gray. My first thought was “oh this is a miserable scene.” 😢But I looked to my left, and I saw a beautiful scene with the sun and the clouds. Instantly my mindset shifted to “holy smokes this is absolutely amazing.”

One of my favourite mental frameworks for finding the beauty is to think about how this scene would be portrayed in a movie or book. For example, that so-called gloomy day I described would have made for an absolutely stunning picture with the right camera. Maybe it was the sunrise after a storm. The hustle and bustle of a busy city could be thought of as stressful, or you could connect it with the trademark aesthetic of New York. You can choose what lens you see the world through.

Privilege = choosing discomfort

I recently read Sofia’s newsletter. In there, she said something I’ve been thinking about all morning. Privilege is choosing discomfort. If you can choose to do cold showers, to go for a run, to do the hard things, you are privileged. 📝You are privileged because someone else might not be able to make those choices. Maybe they work 18 hour days to feed their family. Maybe they don’t have running water. Or maybe they simply haven’t been lucky enough to have even been exposed to the benefits of choosing discomfort. Remember that you are, in fact, extremely privileged if you can choose to suffer :)

The hard things are what makes life worth living

Oddly enough, I came to this on Christmas Day. You can’t truly enjoy the beauty of life if you haven’t also seen the darker, or uglier, bits. Humans are incredible at adapting, and so if you’ve only seen the most beautiful things, you will no longer appreciate that beauty for how special it is.

Let’s say you’re in a forest. A typical forest.🌲Nothing inherently special. It may not seem beautiful to you in the moment. But let’s say someone who’s been living in Antarctica (🐧) for the past 2 years is in that forest with you.

They haven’t seen a forest, or much life, for 2 years. 🤯And so that forest will be beautiful to them. This is another way I like to think about finding the beauty in life: how can I see this again for the first time? What would someone who isn’t accustomed to this see?

The problem is that it can be hard to find this perspective. I think one of the most effective ways to find it is to consciously put yourself in situations in which the beauty is less evident (aka hard things). For example, going for a run in the rain. 🏃‍♂️This isn’t obviously beautiful. But the practice of doing it has a major benefit: the rest of your life will now be easier and more beautiful, because your baseline level has been lowered (because of that uncomfortable run). That’s not to say the run isn’t inherently beautiful, it’s just harder to find.

👀Media recommendations

🎧Diary of a CEO podcast with the CEO of Airbnb

I quite enjoyed this podcast, Brian shares a lot of insights, and I didn’t find it to be repetitive (I feel like most content pieces are on some level). He also has an interesting take on creativity. I actually listened to it twice XD, to give you an idea of how much I liked it.

📕The Precipice by Toby Ord

This was recommended by 2 separate people, so I figured I needed to check it out! I will admit, the middle section wasn’t my favourite, but I think that is in part because I spread out my reading over a very long period of time, and so I don’t think I fully grasped the main ideas. However, the intro and conclusion were very interesting, and I especially loved hearing about the potential humanity has with expanding across the galaxy. And Toby also went to school at Oxford, and this is a bit funny but Oxford grads have a distinct writing style that I love XD