S🧠FIA’s top experiences and lessons in 2021
BUILD
- Speaking alongside a Netflix director of engineering… about bioengineering!
- Interviewing Josiah Zayner for the Obio podcast + visiting The Odin HQ
- Starting the first-ever iGEM international, commercial, high school team
- Interning at Grow Your Own Cloud, a DNA data storage startup
- Joining BioDojo, a community for curious and ambitious undergraduates in the life sciences fields
- Joining Perfect Day’s GenZ Sustainability and Health Council
- Going back to school in-person (2 days per week) after 1.5 years of lockdown
- Starting the Activate program at TKS and committing to a cotton project that makes me really excited
- Winning a national software development competition
- Meeting a lot of truly amazing people!
LEARN
science
This year I started to see the world through the lens of science. I believe that life is like a giant lab where everyone can be scientist testing hypotheses.
This connects to the recent fascination I’ve had about evolution. I think it’s one of the most powerful forces in the universe and using it every day as a mental model can be life-changing.
Ray Dalio talks about this in his book, Principles. Most people repeat most of their mistakes during most part of their lives. Reflecting on our mistakes involves noticing them, pointing them, making a plan to improve, and taking action on that. We can all evolve.
Thanks to Decoding the World, I also realized how inertia is present in our lives too. Physics defines it as a tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged. That sounds like me when I don’t wake up from bed after my alarm rings.
Of course, this all sounds like just a lot of theory at first. Maybe mental models are the first step. They have awakened my consciousness about the world. Now it’s time to use those insights to wake up early in the morning.
life & success
Speaking of which, in 2021 habits have become one of the most important aspects of my life. Especially 5 of them: sleeping early, reading, exercising, meditating, and waking up early.
Whenever things went wrong and I mapped out the causes of the problem, I went back to “sleeping late”. Not like I ever slept <6 hours but my body has really gotten used to getting 7.5+ to work properly during the day. So I concluded that a good day starts with a previous good night’s sleep.
In that sense, I drew another conclusion based on Maslow’s pyramid of needs: after all your basic needs are covered, happiness is totally up to you. I highlight “totally” because even when this is not true, some humans manage to make happiness a choice. In other words, I am my worst possible enemy.
Still, I’ve also realized that happiness != fulfillment. This last quarter of 2021, I lost many habits, didn’t accomplish most of my goals, and didn’t have many memorable experiences either. Yet if you asked me how I was feeling on a scale of 5, I would answer 4. Not bad at all but not thriving either.
My conclusion there was that fulfillment is crossing the gap between your dreams and action. It means to start living the life you wish you lived and stop doing the things you would regret in the future, ultimately knowing that you’re doing everything that’s in your hands to live the life that you want.
Knowing what I want was a challenge for me this year. I know I want to make an impact in the world by starting a biotech startup. And for the past 1.5 years, I’d been doing research to “find” that idea. But in late 2020 I got sick of exploring. I wanted to:
So that was my only mission for 2021. I guess I did build a couple of things. Then the problem was that I wanted so badly to commit to a single project. Thankfully, I also made that happen before the end of the year.
Focusing on my cotton project has taught me 5 main lessons:
- Use courage to follow your curiosity. Previous to cotton I was researching the gut microbiome, hot topic, seemed safe. Lab-grown cotton is unconventional, I’m one of few people working on it, and we don’t know yet if it will work.
- Be patiently impatient. I thought I’d have a proof of concept within 2 months but turns out that nature takes its time. I’ll keep on working on it and apply an abundance mindset to the time I have in this world.
- Working on real-world problems is very hard and fulfilling. I find it so exciting to know that there are no judges, teachers, or rubrics to please here. Science will judge, consumers will mark, the real world will approve.
- If the problem still exists, there’s a gap. If there’s a gap, it’s your job to fill it. Thanks to my mentor Brandon Jennings for helping me understand this when I was getting overwhelmed with biotech IP. If my clothes aren’t lab-grown yet, there’s still a lot of work to do.
- The best idea is that which you can execute.
relationships
- teams: pay more attention to those who are contributing than to those who aren’t
- organizations: don’t stop applying to opportunities that will help you achieve your mission
- school: few things in life are actually mandatory. We should either be doing things we genuinely enjoy or things that will help us get to where we want to be. Otherwise, stop doing them. Shoutout to meditation coach Steve Soto for helping me realize this
- media: ego helps with self-confidence. Feed it with things that make you proud (meet your standards) not with external recognition that doesn’t make sense
- friends and family: the closest people to you influence your thinking and behavior without you noticing
- co-workers: if you feel the tension in a relationship, talk with that person 1–1. Turn your “enemies” into friends. Compliment them and ask them questions to learn from them
GROW
They say a lot can happen in a year. I don’t feel satisfied with what I did this year. In fact, I wouldn’t say it’s been my “best year so far” in terms of achievements. However, what did happen is that I learned a lot and failed a lot.
- failed at finishing an iGEM project
- failed at balancing projects, friendships, emotions, and family time
- failed at having a proof of concept before the end of the year
Shoutout to Ananya Chadha for explaining that these are only failures because I didn’t want to continue working on them. With the last one, for example, it’s only a matter of giving myself more time.
So the last lesson I’d like to share here is: the only way of never losing is always learning. In that sense, 2021 was actually full of prizes: I now know what I want (at least for Q1 of 2022), I’ve discovered some paths to get there, and I have a better idea of how to fit that into a fulfilling life.
Ps. In 2019 I started naming each year with a single word, a word that would be the mission for that year. 2019 was GROW, 2020 was LEARN, and 2021 was BUILD. These have compounded into a personal mantra of growing, learning, and building.
Pps. Can you guess what the mission for 2022 will be…? 👀
