6 Lessons from a 16 year old
Moments from my life and what I’ve learned ft. Buzzfeed references
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When I was younger, I couldn’t wait to turn sixteen.
I’m pretty sure every kid on Earth goes through this. Who doesn’t want to be 16? You get all the independence of being a teen, without the responsibility. You can drive, hang out with friends and live it up, without the impending doom of rent or tuition (yet). It’s a sweet spot (maybe that’s why they call it a sweet 16).
Now, I am 16. I’m finally in that sweet spot!
The days around my birthday used to be the time that I was laser-focused on looking forward. How much cooler I would be, how many things I would get, and how much closer I would be to 16.
But this year, it didn't feel like “one step closer to 16” anymore. It feels like the end of an era. I have a lot of stuff I need to reflect on, and hindsight is always 20/20.
Which is why I’m doing something different. I’m taking time to look back on some highlights and learnings from throughout my life (although most of the biggest ones ended up being from the past year).
A moment from the past that stuck out to me was from summer break around 3 years ago. I’d spend most of my day scrolling through Buzzfeed, learning about the “Top 10 Moments from [Insert TV Show Here]”, and going on a self-actualization journey to figure out what Disney character I was (apparently I’m Mike Wazowski from Monster’s Inc).
During this time, I was bored. Most of my days looked the same (wake up, get ready, eat, go on Youtube/Buzzfeed the whole day, occasionally do homework, text my friends, sleep, repeat). I never went through any struggles or defining moments, and everything I needed was already given to me.
My 13 year old self needed something more, but I didn’t know it.
There was nothing too monumental about this moment, scrolling through Buzzfeed. I don’t look back on it because it defined me. I look back on it because it makes me appreciate how differently I spend my time now.
I still don’t have 1 single defining moment, but I do have tons of smaller moments which made me who I am. Including some really awesome experiences in the past year, like:
- Being a part of The Knowledge Society, the only “human accelerator” for kids ages 13–17 to learn about how to impact billions using science/technology 🧠
- Working on my first research project in Computational Biology, with the Jurisica Lab at the Krembil Research Institute 🔬
- Going to major conferences and events (ie speaking at Singularity University’s annual Canadian Summit, exploring the tech scene in Edmonton, shadowing at ACTO Technologies for a day, and creating a performance management solution for IGM Financial at a hackathon)🎤
- Building projects like machine learning models (autoencoders, CNN’s, RNN’s), molecular simulations, and ideas to combine biological systems with nanotech 🧬
- Doing business projects for companies like Walmart, Wealthsimple, Sidewalk Labs and TD💡
- Tons more!
It’s wild how without these experiences, I would still be that kid glued to my screen on Buzzfeed quizzes. Instead, now I’m learning about how to 10x my growth, and how to prevent age-related disease (but of course, I’ve still got a long way to go).
For the sake of my younger self and coming full circle, I decided to highlight 6 of my biggest learnings from these events, Buzzfeed article style 😎
1. Build Breadth and Depth in your Knowledge/Skills
If you think of a startup accelerator, it takes early stage startups with tons of potential, and gives them the resources/knowledge/skills to reach its goal, get out into the world, and impact people.
The Knowledge Society is one of the biggest things that took me from online-entertainment-fanatic to future-maker. Instead of a startup accelerator, it’s a “human” accelerator for young people who want to make an impact in the world.
I could go on for centuries about how TKS changed my worldview, and what a unique experience this was (where else in the world are 13–17 year olds learning how to be the next Elon Musk?!). But I wanted to zoom in on a key lesson:
During my first ever session there 2 years ago, I was nervous out of my mind, surrounded by a bunch of people at least 2–3 years older than me (not that big of an age difference, but it seemed like it at the time).
Navid Nathoo (director of TKS Toronto) was giving us an introductory spiel, and showed us a slide with the letter T on it. He asked, “Why is this letter important?”
I thought it was important because it was the first letter in TKS, duh.
The real reason it mattered is because the horizontal line stands for breadth, and the vertical line stands for depth.
If you want to solve problems that no one has solved before, and have unconventional success, you gotta be doing something different than everyone around you. You need unique knowledge and skills about the world as a whole, but you also need specific expertise. Building a “T” is the perfect way to do that.
Lets say you have basic knowledge of blockchain, and deeper knowledge in stem cells and artificial intelligence. By knowing blockchain at a surface level, you can conceive of possible intersections between those and other technologies, or how it can be applied to a problem. And if you have deep knowledge/experience in stem cells and AI, you can build a solution that smashes them together!
There are a bunch of experts in AI and a bunch of experts in stem cells out there, but there are wayyy fewer experts in both together. Boom, unique knowledge!
This made a ton of sense, but it really clicked for me later, in my second year of TKS. This is when I realized how little I knew about the world, and how I needed to break out of my bubble of school, Instagram and online entertainment. I got this drive to start building my T, and now mine looks a bit like this:
I’ve also been trying to make a T for skills (like coding, Excel, and storytelling) and even my opinions on topics (like political issues). The T is a literal superpower!
2. Question everything + train yourself to be curious.
As a very young kid, I would always love to read, learn, and ask questions. I didn’t play with Barbies and only watched around 1 hour of cartoons a day. Instead, I’d read books about the human body, endangered species, space, you name it. And then I’d ask my parents why we haven’t been to the moon since 1969, or why the other kids look at my weird as I recite my book about the digestive system.
I wasn’t special for doing this. The average 4 year old asks 300+ questions a day, and most kids are hungry to learn about the world. They haven’t been in it that long, and are forming their most important skills.
As I got around the middle school mark, I stopped being as curious. In school, you often read what you’re told, memorize, and regurgitate on a piece of paper. I didn’t really need to ask questions to get where I needed to be, and since I got decent grades, I felt like I knew enough.
This all changed this year, when I finally got back in touch with my curious side. I had the DOPE opportunity to work with the Jurisica Lab (at the Krembil Research Institute) on a project to:
- Build network maps of proteins, genes and other biological molecules involved with Parkinson’s disease, and interpret data to gain new insights about PD
- Build the lab’s first neurodegenerative disease database
The biggest thing I internalized was that there’s so much I don’t know. I wasn’t even close to being an expert in PD or network mapping before this. Even the smartest people in the world still have things we don’t know, like what consciousness is or how to completely cure cancer.
The only way to figure this out is to keep asking questions.
Being in an environment with people who’ve had years of experience with brain diseases and biology, I set up 5 meetings a day to just ask questions. This was the point in my life where my brain probably DOUBLED in size.
From talking to people across the biology research spectrum, from cancer research PI’s to undergrad students, I learned tons. From what a prion is, to how the eye degrades as you age, to the biggest gaps in our brain disease research.
I realized the best questions are:
- Open ended. Scratch the yes/no questions and instead ask about problems the person sees in their field, or what the biggest mistakes researchers make are. You don’t know what you don’t know, so don’t limit your questions to unique insights!
- Specific to your own situation. I got the most value by explaining a problem I had (like what questions to explore in my research, or how to have as little bias as possible), and hearing about how other researchers tackled it.
- Followed by more questions. Don’t be afraid to clarify/ask someone to go deeper.
I did this for 1.5 months, and now I can’t stop. It’s allowed me to have way more engaging conversations, understand the world better, and even question myself to see how I can improve.
Curiosity is a muscle that can be trained💪 We all do it when we’re young, but it’s helped me even more as I got older!
3. Have a bias towards action!
When you’re learning about the world of technology and research, it can be easy to get wrapped up in reading papers or getting glued to my computer screen. So I’ve also been getting out there, and attending events like:
- the Elevate Tech Fest, one of the biggest tech events in Canada
- Collision, North America’s fastest growing tech conference
- Being able to spend the day shadowing the CTO of ACTO, a cloud company for healthcare
- Getting to build a performance management solution with a team at IGM Financial
And more things that helped me learn about the world by, well, actually being out in the real world!
In April, I got to speak about human longevity at my first major conference, the Singularity University Canada Summit in Edmonton! SU was started by Peter Diamandis, a moonshot thinker and innovator I idolized before this, so I was definitely jumping for joy 😂
At the conference, I was in a room surrounded by people working on at home DNA kits, robotic arms, and the future of food. I also got to explore the tech scene in Edmonton, and meet crazy smart people from Deepmind and AMII’s AI lab and Startup Edmonton’s incubator space.
I was excited, but I always felt a bit of hesitation before going up to someone or joining a conversation. What if I say the wrong thing? What if they walk away? I would think too much before acting.
But in these situations, you gotta just do it (as Nike says). Instead of having a bias towards thought, have a bias towards taking action!
It’s a simple idea, but few people actually put it into practice. Now, whenever I hesitate to strike up a conversation or do something spontaneous, I create a mental trigger for myself. I think about how low the downside is. If (worst case scenario) this person yells at me and runs away, who cares? It’s more likely that I’ll learn a lot, and gain more data points about the world, people, and myself.
There’s so many people I would have missed out on meeting, conversations I wouldn’t have had, friends I wouldn’t have made, and things I wouldn’t have learned without a bias towards action.
4. Treat every hour like it’s worth $1000.
I always thought I would live forever.
Okay, maybe not forever, but at least a really long time. I started researching human longevity because I wanted to live long, and this idea always seeped through into what I did on a daily basis. I think a lot of young people have this idea in their head, because the impending doom of death is barely conceivable. We got time.
I’d watch cat videos on Youtube because I could go exercise or do my schoolwork later. In the grand scheme of things, spending 2 hours isn’t that bad, right?
Soon, my priorities started to shift, as I started TKS. After learning about biotech, I was hooked. It was my new obsession, and wanted to start building projects. So far, I’ve:
- Coded neural networks to understand biological data better, such as CNNs, RNNs, and autoencoders
- Learned about nanotechnology and came up with possible ideas for brain nanosensors, and drug delivery methods
- Built molecular simulations of proteins involved with epigenetics
Learning the technical knowledge wasn’t the hardest part- it was making sure I had time. Not only was I building these, but I was learning about all these topics from scratch. I couldn’t afford to waste away my time anymore, and I needed to shift my mindset instead of just rely on my own obsession.
Framing each hour as if it’s worth $1000 was helpful for me, because money is quantifiable. Would you rather spend $1000 to watch cat videos, or to build a unique project and work toward your goals?
Suddenly, I could do more with my hours. Code a machine learning algorithm in a week? Do it in 3 days.
It’s not about how much time you have. We all only have 24 hours in a day. It’s about how much $$ your time is worth to you 💸
Time flies. Not just when you’re having fun. Always.
5. To get what you want, you need to visualize it
It’s easy to be aimless as a young person, because most of the things you do are dictated by others (chores, homework, you get the idea).
They’re definitely important, but when it’s all you do, it’s hard to even conceive of other ways to spend your time. I didn’t know there were so many courses I could take to become an expert in AI when I was 12, because I didn’t know what AI was, and exploring it never crossed my mind (or my to-do list).
I remember on my last day of eighth grade, my teacher gave everyone in the class a personalized “award,” like the “Albert Einstein award” for people who liked science, or a “socialite” award. I got the Tony Robbins award. I didn’t know who he was, or why he was on my award. So my teacher told me he’s a famous life coach, and to look into his work.
A year later (in TKS), I was watching dozens of his speeches, so I could learn about his ideas about motivation and work. He said:
“Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.”
Most people set goals and deadlines, but I think there’s more. What takes goals even further is the visualization of what the highest standard looks like. That’s what makes it go from invisible to visible.
I’ve been able to consult for companies in time frames of only 3 weeks at a time:
- Sidewalk Labs: We proposed how to reduce housing costs by up to 40% by creating a sharing economy of household items, making co-living more feasible for different demographics, and allowing people to make money from fractional home ownership
- Wealthsimple: I recommended how to increase awareness about RESP’s to 1M kids over 10 years, through Whatsapp marketing
- Walmart: Reducing food waste, through a recommended partnership with Apeel Sciences (who make an edible coating for produce, and make food last longer)
At the start, we would only get a vague challenge statement, like “reduce Walmart’s store costs.”
My first ever recommendation was for TD, and it was to improve the newcomer experience. I failed that, because I took so much time to set goals about when to have things done by, when I didn’t even know what TD’s (and my) highest standards were! I couldn’t conceive of the possibilities.
Visualizing high standards means coming up with criteria, like:
- Must be feasible to implement within X years
- Needs to be implementable into X part of the system
- Needs to be validated by X, Y people
- Must solve a problem with X amount of impact, ideally a problem the organization didn’t even know they had
It also means knowing what’s possible before putting in the effort, like knowing AI exists before realizing you can take a course on it. Taking a mental picture of the system as a whole, and how to improve it.
Once I got the hang of this, I could kinda just know if an idea made sense, or if the opportunity is feasible enough. Once you visualize, it almost gets ingrained in your head 💭
The path you take to get to this vision will change. I would spend days researching about construction materials prices, only to speak to experts and realize innovations in the space are already happening, and it makes more sense to have a more unique recommendation.
But by having that visualization, you know where you’re going, and can find that optimal path to get you there. You can take this visualization, and dissect it into goals, like:
- Do high-level research into X area to understand the system by Monday
- Have called with X, Y and Z people to identify a problem/validate a solution by Thursday
- Do calculations to quantify the impact by Friday
I wouldn’t have learned as much about these industries/solutions to these huge problems, without being able to conceive of what I wanted first. If I’d made a plan, instead of a vision.
6. You won’t sweat the small stuff, if you have something bigger to care about.
When you’re living on the small scale, everything seems to matter too much.
I only got an 87% on this test? Why didn’t this person follow me back on Instagram? Ugh, someone ate the last slice of cake from the fridge! (Stereotypical, I know. But I guess some stereotypes are true).
It can seem like once you do something astronomically big (whether it’s curing cancer or becoming famous or going to space), all the small problems go away too.
The truth is, they don’t. You just don’t see them, because they don’t matter to big people. Your brain can only care about so many things at a time, and the big things take up way more room.
I’ve got a longggg way to go before I do something astronomical, but I have started to see things on the bigger scale. Things that would matter if this was my last day on Earth. Like my vision for a place where age-related disease doesn’t exist.
Once I did this, my mind just shifted. I realized that sometimes, the small things in life just don’t add up, or make sense. You do everything right, and something still goes wrong. And I could get flustered, or just laugh, learn and leave room in my brain for what matters (my three L’s😁).
This is something I continue to learn everyday, with everything I do. It’s the lesson that fills up the little, everyday moments, not just the big, exciting moments. Most of our lives are those small moments, anyway.
I’m grateful to have grown up in the 2010's
No other kid from any other part of history could have the same opportunities as a kid from this decade.
Without all of the awesome tools the decade of my childhood brought, from the democratization of the Internet to advances in biology research like CRISPR-Cas9, I wouldn’t have found out about what I’m working on now. I wouldn’t have had all these opportunities to learn. And of course, I wouldn’t have been able to go on Buzzfeed and get the idea for this article😂
There are also tons of people who I’m grateful for, just like I am for the 2010's. They’re a huge part of why I learned so much, and helped me grow just as much (if not more) than the things this decade has brought:
- Navid and Nadeem Nathoo + everyone at TKS: I’m super thankful for everything this program has taught me, every time I think about it my mind explodes 🤯 Thank you for exposing me to what’s possible, and helping me get there!
- Dr. Jurisica and everyone from Krembil/the Jurisica lab: My first lab experience was one I’ll never forget. Thanks for everything, from the technical guidance, to all the moments o learned something new!
- Kumar Erramilli and the ACTO crew: I’m so grateful I was able to hang around the ACTO space and shadow for a day! This was one of the first times I was exposed to how health-tech companies work, and I’ll remember that opportunity as one that opened my eyes, and put me on a trajectory towards getting my health-tech ideas out there.
- Andrea and everyone at SingularityU Canada: Thanks for the coolest 2 days ever! It was so awesome to be able to crash the SU Summit party and be surrounded by so many fantastic people 😊
- Everyone I’ve met at a conference, or hopped on a call with: It might have been only 15 minutes-a few hours for you, but all I’ve learned wouldn’t be possible without hearing your advice and meeting you🙏
- My parents and family: Especially thankful for all you provide for me on a daily basis, and all the laughs/guidance/support over the past 16 years. I literally wouldn’t exist without you 💕
I still haven’t lost that desire to look forward
As a young kid, I’d always be itching to experience all the fantastic things that being older would bring. I guess some things never change, because there’s a ton of things I’m jumping for joy about this year! By the beginning of next year (when hindsight really will be in 2020 😂), I plan to:
- Build my T further, and do a deep dive into neurotechnology, quantum computing, and/or nanotechnology. I also want to build breadth and depth in my technical skills like coding (to build tangible things)🧪
- Understand the world through unique experiences. I plan to travel to 5+ countries, and go to as many events as I can! I’m also looking for new internship experiences over the summer, at neuroscience or proteomics labs/companies from anywhere in North America. If you know anyone who would want to work with a curious 16 year old with tons of ideas, shoot me a message from my contact links below! 🌎
- Learn even more about myself through dozens of reflection articles like these, and train myself to create unique insights. I also plan to make a blog, and write more articles about philosophy 🧠
- Improve my storytelling skills. There’s not much point in having a bunch of ideas if I can’t convey them to the world 🎤
- I also AUTO how to drive. Seriously though. If I don’t, it’ll drive my parents crazy 🚗
I’m PUMPED for my next annual reflection!! No longer because I’m looking forward to an arbitrary date of birth, and all the jazz that comes with that. Not because there’s a big moment I’m one step closer to. But because of all the smaller moments put together, that’ll teach me even more than the past 16. If you’re reading this, thank you a thousands times for following along my journey of moments like these!
Here’s to more learning, more growing, and the occasional cat video,
-Anupra ✌
