Growing 3x in 31 Days.
Hey everyone! Welcome to my first monthly newsletter, where I give updates on projects, mindsets, tech stuff, and things that I've learned!
I managed to grow more in 31 days than in 3 months 🤯.
Sounds crazy, right? How can someone manage to make 3x more progress in one month, than in the last 3 combined? And what exactly did I get done this month?
Here’s what happened.
The AI Hackathon 🤖
This month kicked off with an AI hackathon. And damn, was it an amazing experience.
For the last couple of months, I was working on learning more about the field of Artificial Intelligence. Up until October, I had implemented maybe 3 or 4 simple neural networks, all hard coded and without using any libraries.
I’d never actually coded a full AI from scratch.
That was all about to change when I took part in a global AI hackathon with my friends.
After researching, we found a huge problem in the nutrition sector - motivation. People wanted to eat healthy, but were stuck in the world of calorie-counts and meal planning.
We decided to make a system that would allow one to simply take a photo of their meal, get recommendations on food groups, and could then upload and share their meals on a platform called Avocado 🥑.
I was responsible for creating a prototype of an algorithm that could take in an image, and then output its food group. A huge challenge, given that I barely knew the ABC’s of creating neural networks 😅
Things I did well 🚀:
I learned how to implement a state of the art Convolutional Neural Network on real datasets.
I learned how to tune and refine a network after and during training, and some best practices.
I learned how to store, manage, and load data.
It actually worked!
Pretty good, considering I hadn’t built a proper MLP (much less a CNN) before this! But, while we put in a lot of effort, we unfortunately didn’t win.
Things we could have done better 📈:
We could have done more research on the problems, maybe finding a more impactful one.
We could have refined the solution even further - not everyone wants to take pictures of their food.
We could have 10x-d our time management and productivity.
Lessons Learned🔑:
Just because you put hard work into something, doesn’t mean you’re going to see results.
If I spent 100 hours on something and someone else spent 10, then that’s no guarantee of success. Real success comes from the intensity of your focus and the approach, the work hours are only a part of it. An insanely important lesson that this experience reinforced and expanded upon!
Doing > Thinking. Learn by doing!
Before this hackathon, I was learning ML and AI from courses. It was cool and educational, yes, but nowhere near as fast as how much I learned by doing. It would have taken me 1+ months to learn about CNNs if I’d spent the same amount of time on it as with the courses. Doing truly is the best way to learn 🔥.
80% of the results come from 20% of the work.
“What? How?” It’s true! While working on the prototype, I realized that out of my total efforts - researching, thinking, file management, read me files, folders, training, creating - only around 20% contributed to the actual prototype - training and creating. Focus on 10x-ing that 20%!
All in all, we did pretty well! There are always things to improve on.
Content Creation! 🎨
This month, I began outputting things more consistently.
First up, a 63 second intro to AI:
Then, a personal website:
Fun fact: This wasn’t the first version of my website. The first one was an absolute disaster, and I had published it without holding it up to high standards.
So, I went back and redid the entire thing over the course of 4 days.
What I Learned:
Always have high standards, no matter what you do.
I realized that to have high standards, you need to first understand what it looks like. A problem that I had with my website is that I hadn’t been exposed to high standard ones, so I kept on believing it was good even when it wasn’t. This is why feedback is so important. 🚀
Take feedback positively - it’s meant to help you grow.
Feedback is incredibly valuable, and I never quite appreciated its value until this month. After being given feedback for my site, I realized just how important it was - I would have never improved without it. So, I’ve made it a goal to be more intentional about receiving feedback and taking it positively 😁
Have a growth mindset - it’s impossible to do something perfectly the first time.
This one seems kind of obvious at first, and then deeply profound later on. It’s so easy to say that “Yeah, I know I probably won’t get it the first time” , and an entirely different experience to actually go through it. Faliure is a stepping stone to success, not the opposite of success. 🧗♀️
Mindsets + Habits. 🧠
Mindsets:
So, what’s my mind been up to?
This month, I focused a lot on the way I thought. I’m currently reading “Mind Hacking”, a book on how to gain better control of your thoughts and do hard things.
The first step (the one I’m on) is to gain awareness about what you’re thinking about. In other words, view your mind as a movie and you as the audience. These are questions that I learned to ask myself:
What’s the movie about? Why am I watching this? What benefit do I have watching it?
I also learned the importance of good feedback, and viewing it positively rather than negatively, a HUGE lesson that I kind of struggled with before.
Habits I developed:
Wake up at 5:30 am on schooldays (I know, not that impressive - but a good starting point!)
Doing this gives so much more time and clarity. By moving your workouts earlier, not only do you get a boost of energy first thing in the morning, but it also gives you a sense of accomplishment that serves as motivation. Looking forward to integrating this into my daily life!
Reading during spare time (I got through Deep Work and Atomic Habits, definitely would recommend)
Reading books is critical to success - so much knowledge packed into 300-ish pages. The amount of info that I’ve learned from 2 books is more than a lot of time just spent researching, so I’m definitely going into this more.
Daily updates (planning out the week beforehand and doing updates each day)
To stay motivated long term, you need to be able to see progress. That’s why daily updates are crucial - they show progress, how much you’re really getting done in a day. By optimizing for the best day, you automatically optimize for the next week. If you lay down a brick as perfectly as possible, then your wall will reflect that.
Key Takeaways + Next Steps. 🤔
Main Lessons from October:
Done is better than perfect - but only if your current work is high standards.
Learn by doing - it’s far more effective than learning passively.
You are not your mind - learn to take control of it and make it your best friend.
Goals for November:
Write an article on AI
Learn how recurrent neural networks learn
Replicate an AI project
Join the 5am club
Finish Reading “Mind Hacking”
Film and Upload “A 60 second intro to Space Tech”
And that, brings an end to this months newsletter! If you felt interested enough to continue being a part of my journey (and being subjected to random emojis 😅) , feel free to share and subscribe for more updates 😉.