Re: Life (July 2nd) / California Dreaming
My life condensed into variably interesting posts on the internet
Welcome to Re: Life, where I chronicle my life, thoughts, and work in biotechnology on the internet.
Why a newsletter? So that one day, a long, long time from now, aliens might find these little time capsules and put them in a museum. Now that you know my motivations are pure, let’s get started.
What I’ve been up to
:// Big update: super excited to share that I’ve been accepted to Camp Moonshot, a two week immersive experience hosted by X, the Moonshot Factory, which is now part of Alphabet. That means I’ll be in Mountain View, California this summer, which has always been a little dream of mine, and I’m sure it’ll be really fun!
Massive thank you to @Nadeem Nathoo and the team at X whose names I know, but I don’t know if I’m allowed to share out of confidentiality. Regardless, I honestly don’t even believe this is happening and appreciate that you took a chance on me.
:// Now that summer’s out, I’ve trying to build a wind turbine again. Right now, I’ve hot-glued a circular “rotor” to a janky LEGO wheel (#bescrappy), which I’ve hooked up in reverse to a DC motor with some elastic band as my transmission. Soon enough, I’d like to scale up the design, make a bunch of them, and then place a few outside my school to power an outdoor music system or a cool-looking neon sign.
:// Recently, I received a book in the mail called “How I Built This” by Guy Raz (huge thank you to my mentor Arun Anand for sending it over as a gift).
I ate that up, and also went through “Can’t Hurt Me” by David Goggins. That book was perpetually amusing and convinced me the guy was a masochist (he ran 100 miles with three days of training and with two broken shins), but it was also super inspiring.
Also! For anyone that would like a copy of these books, email me at aary.harshith@gmail.com. If you’re the first person to do that, I’ll mail one to your door. Just passing on the favour ;)
Thought of the Week
Author David Allen’s thoughts on specialization and turning a sharply honed skill into your competitive advantage.
“You can be anything, but not everything”
The world’s most helpful and impactful people are often really good at a small set of unambiguous things, rather than mediocre at a lot of loosely defined things. With deep expertise comes the power to invent, to break the rules, to work on concepts that 99.99% of people wouldn’t even take the effort to learn about.
You can’t put your limited eggs in unlimited baskets, so the only thing you can hope to do is put them into one. But as it turns out, one is often more than enough.
//: Thanks for reading! I’m Aaryan - I’m a high-schooler from Sudbury, Canada. My main work lies at the intersection between hardware and medicine, trying to build better diagnostics / imaging systems to help us treat cancer. When I’ve had enough of that, I watch the occasional episode of Silicon Valley and listen to lo-fi music. Frankly, I have no idea what I’m doing here, but that’s fine, since no one else really does anyway ;)