For Tomorrow

I’m the type of person that is outcome-driven, even though I’ve said this isn’t a good thing . I feel like this is how humans generally behave, people go on fancy dinners when they are offered jobs or have parties when they graduate. And as much as you try to acknowledge what went into this success, we inevitably end up painting a straight line from start to finish. Rarely do we acknowledge the “unproductive” days, and even afterwards we look back and think about how much faster the journey would have been if we were just more focused or dedicated or hard-working. I think it’s generally true that 20% of work leads to 80% of the outcomes, and because of this we spend a lot of time doing things that don’t yield tangible progress, but rather set up success in the future. Even the best sports players inevitably have terrible games, and I’ve talked before about how the best of the best are those that use that failure to refuel their passion . But another facet of learning from failure is re...

Everyone’s born better at some things more than others. Some people are really tall, others really smart. People usually pursue what they are best at, and this works out in a couple ways. First, people generally have unique talents, so it balances out across the human population. More importantly, following what you are best at reinforces the motivation that drives continued dedication and thus progress. I think this idea is something often associated with passion— an unreal amount of dedication is usually only possible with reinforcement through progress. By seeing that you are better than others at something, you naturally feel that a continued pursuit of that will lead to more happiness. Thus, in a broad sense, passion is a byproduct of talent. Here we define talent as any ability largely inherent to birth. Most things I can say I’m passionate about, like programming or math, I’ve had lots of success in. Don’t get me wrong, it's very misleading to say that passion is solely depe...

In high school, “success” is often based on very objective measures, like standardized tests, captaining a sports team, etc. But this isn’t true for everything, and the class that made me realize this was Dance 1. Aptitude in dance is well-defined in some loose sense, in fact my school has competitive dance teams that run merit-based, but the class offered by the school has to be different. Because of the nature of the subject, everyone comes into the class with varying levels of skill. Trying to find objective measures of skill doesn’t work anymore; it’s nearly impossible to compare a complete beginner to someone that has been dancing for 10+ years. The solution: grading effort. From a learning point of view, evaluating based on effort makes sense and it's almost the same as grading someone on how much they have grown in the subject matter. This is one of the ideas behind gradeless classrooms, the idea being it is more fair to grade someone based on the performance improvement ins...

Biologically speaking, we feel good when certain chemicals are released in our body. We typically associate artificially stimulating this release system as “getting high,” through taking drugs or smoking or whatnot. Society has done a good job, at least where I grew up, of emphasizing the stigma around these things. Life revolves around feeling these “highs,” regardless of whether we induce them artificially or they arise naturally. You could argue that our goal in life is purely to feel good, and evolution has used this motivator to get us to do things necessary for survival: eat, sleep, fall in love, be social, etc. But as humans got smarter, everything shattered.  One of the first things to fall was eating habits. Once people realized that sugar is what provides the “high” after eating, it became the center of all food. All these years later, we see the same thing happening with social media. Apps have targeted the exact part of social interactions that make them pleasurable (sp...

Through evolution, humans have become social creatures. It's beneficial to communicate and collaborate with others to achieve things that aren’t possible alone. But as the nature of groups of people changed, so did the dynamics of these groups and the people in them. Group dynamics define a significant part of our identity and our choices because it's easier to conform to an established identity than to think differently. And this can have detrimental effects for a society in the long run. Everyone holds beliefs, but an inherent part of having an opinion is disagreeing with the opposite, which is difficult without a group to support you. Humans have evolved to antagonize “out-group” individuals. This is from a primal need to protect their scarce resources from other people who are fighting for them. As human thought and technology evolved, people naturally did the same thing with ideas rather than resources. Protecting their ideas involves fighting with the mass of people that ...

I was asked by a friend if I would go into STEM olympiads if I could relive my grade school experience. I was honestly surprised by this question, mainly because the person I was talking to was the most respected “math person” at our school. They clearly had olympiad success and from various team competitions I knew they genuinely loved problem-solving and math. So when they answered the question, I wondered why they would erase such a big part of their life. I see my friend’s point, olympiads don’t give you practically applicable skills. Most people don’t practice olympiad math while looking for a job, why would you need to? And from a pure utility, “the most benefit in the least amount of time,” point of view, maybe working on hobby projects is the best way to get the most bang for your buck. Working on building a robot or writing a website relates directly to what someone might want to explore in the future. But should we really be looking to think like this as high school students?...