The Journey is the Reward. 🎖
Welcome back to the third edition of Aditya's Advances! This month, I talk about a new tech project, some more mindsets, and goals for the new year :)
2020 has been wild, to say the least - a worldwide pandemic, market crashes, political tensions, and basically everything in a sci-fi movie brought to life.
Yet despite all the turmoil and mishaps, I left this year feeling better and more inspired than ever - 2020 has literally been the single greatest year of my life. And yes, that’s with a pandemic.
Up until now, I’ve been talking about projects I’ve worked on, articles I’ve written, and books/mindsets I’ve learned. This time around, the newsletter is going to be more of an update than a formal entry.
Let’s get this bread! 🍞
Making a Self Driving Car. 🚗
Because…why not?
Okay, in all seriousness - TKS has a pretty fire successful-people-approved way to learning a new skill, like Artificial Intelligence (one I’ve been working on for the last couple of months).
It’s composed of four parts: Learn, Replicate 1 (where you replicate a project), Replicate 2 (where you replicate a harder project), and Create (pretty self-explanatory).
In November, I published my learn article - concluding that segment of the process, and giving an in-depth guide about the different types of neural networks.
Now, I’m replicating an existing project: in this case, making a self driving car in Udacity’s self driving car simulator.
So far, it’s been going pretty well. The training data’s been collected, the model built, and the training complete. Now, comes the exciting part - actually getting the car to drive! I’ve already learned a lot about real-world CNN implementation doing this project, and discovered the world of servers and clients.
Look out for a video released on the project in the next ~30 days!
Creating Content 🤔
This month, I published 2 articles.
First: AI x Bacterial Classification.
I wrote this article after seeing an insane statistic - over 250k people die each year from clinical misdiagnosis, in the U.S. alone. 🤯
That literally makes clinical misdiagnosis the third leading cause of death in America - a country that’s fortunate enough to have adequate health care. Imagine just how widespread this issue would be globally!
Inspired, I looked into AI bacterial classification algorithms - commonly overlooked, but ones that have huge potential to solving this problem. So, I decided to write about it and share some of my thoughts!
Next: AI x Wildlife Preservation
Seriously - what can’t AI do? It turns out that AI might soon be breaking into wildlife preservation efforts - scouting the best locations, taking into account predators and local populations, and considering land history.
Pretty insane, and something that will be an invaluable asset in the fight against habitat loss.
I’m looking forward to making even more content to kick off the New Year - with more AI and self improvement content, of course. 😅
Books + Lessons📚
I read a LOT this month - 3 books. Pretty insane, considering my past average was ~1.5 books a month. This month, I read:
Zero to One - Notes on How to build a startup
This book was world-changing, and it’s easily the best book I’ve read in the past month. Written partially by Peter Thiel, this book talks about the 7 questions any company needs to answer:
The Engineering question - is your product 10x current technology?
The Timing question - why enter the market now?
The Monopoly question - can you make monopoly profits and innovations?
The People question - do you have the right, capable workforce?
The Distribution question - how are you going to sell/market the product?
The Durability question - will this exist 10/20 years in the future?
The Secret question - what’s your company’s shared truth?
It also goes over some of the dogmas that the business world has fallen into - mainly, that competition is good for business, and that risk taking is unadvisable. This seriously changed my perspective on creating startups and what it takes to create a successful business - teaching me that a commendable startup must have all ingredients in the right proportion to get off the ground.
Sapiens - A brief history of Humankind.
Next up, we have the history of the entire human species - from A to Z. In this book. Yuval Noah Harari goes all the way from the big bang to our modern capitalist society, all in the span of a mere 443 pages! Lessons learned:
History is not the study of the past - but rather, the study of change.
Whenever I used to think about history, I thought of 60-year-old professors going over the nitty-gritty’s of a war in the 18th century. Not exactly the most interesting class 😁
That changed after reading this book - where history was defined as change, rather than a mere study of the past. Looking at the past and comparing it to the present allows us to identify interesting trends (like science is actually an imperial endeavor rather than a philanthropic one?), and use it to predict the future! Seeing 200k + years of human progress compressed into a relatively small book allows us to see truly how far we’ve come - and what we had to do to get here.
Happiness is not wanting to be happy - but ending the chase for happiness.
In a sort of twist, the last section of this book delves into how happiness has changed over history - an important part of history that we don’t acknowledge enough. After examining a couple theories, it’s here that the book draws a line between an absence of desire and happiness - pointing out that, people 200 years ago might have been happier than us today.
How? The answer lies in how we measure happiness - not objectively, but relatively. Our happiness is a function of how we measure ourselves against our potential, or what could happen rather than what is. A medieval peasent would objectively have a poor quality of life - but subjectively, they wouldn’t know that higher quality of lives could exist. They’re isolated in their local communities because of transportation, compared to today’s open and connected world.
We have access to so many “perfect” people and ideologies of how life should be, it becomes insanely difficult to be satisfied with the present - an insane, yet worthwhile proposition!
The Trials of Apollo - The Tower of Nero
Yes, this is fiction. And yes, reading fiction does still does provide valuable insights and lessons, despite what most think.
Lessons learned: 🔑
Your output is a function of your input, and luck.
At a subconscious lesson, we all understand this - but few take the time to draw its implications, and even fewer live by this principle. Time and time again, I found myself feeling entitled - “Why is this happening to me?” “This isn’t fair.”
While I knew that everything was earned, I didn’t recognize that even things that weren’t the results of my actions were still my responsibility. By taking responsibility and putting in the work for things that weren’t my “fault”, I ended up achieving a lot more and eliminated excuses in the process.
We don’t appreciate what we have until its gone.
Important - but overlooked because of humanity’s short-term nature. This spurred me to start a gratitude habit - simply listing 3 things I was appreciative of every single day.
The result? Better levels of happiness, and just an overall satisfaction with life. Simply acknowledging the good things that have happened, rather than reminiscing over the things that aren’t going so well shifts our perspective from the negative, to the positive.
And that, brings an end to this month’s edition of Aditya’s Advances! If you want to stay updated and be a part of my journey, then smash that subscribe button to get in every step of the way!