May: A Breath of Fresh Air

Inside: Winning the TKS Moonshot Challenge, learning from the master of Moonshots, and some more exciting news!

Jun 02, 2023

Okay, I have a confession to make. I haven’t been giving these newsletters my all for quite some time now.

There’s always been procrastination of some sort, maybe something comes up and I can’t get to them, but I’d always find myself in the final few days before a newsletter was “due” to be released.

Which is insane to me - how could I do this to myself? The whole point of these newsletter issues is to track progress in all areas of my life.

Free Person Writing on Notebook While Holding Coffee Mug Stock Photo

I’ve decided to not let anything preoccupy me any longer.

No more delay. No more excuses. High-quality work that I’m actually proud of.

None of that famous last-minute tampering which I’m pretty sure I’ve trademarked at this point.

Just a solid, mostly unedited stream of conscious thought, minus the few typos here and there.

Another confession:

I’ve felt unmotivated while writing these for a while now, and I think another prominent issue embedded in that was the fact that I was chasing instant gratification. I expected to write a good first few newsletter issues and then something would happen. That’s not how it works in real life.

If it were that easy everyone’s life would look the same. We would all act the same way and be successful at whatever we attempted.

Yet for most people, it does look the same. Same path, same plan, same general outline or structure, but no goals reached. No unbelievable success. Just an average 9-5 job, and probably a mortgage.

I’m going to revisit something I mentioned in my first newsletter: unconventional thinking, which ultimately leads you down an unconventional path.

The idea is this: you can’t expect to have out-of-this-world success in your career if your life plan looks exactly like everyone else’s. That’s not success. That’s just mediocrity.

So, what is this? Why am I randomly plopping this onto the shoulders of an innocent newsletter publication, “May: A Breath of Fresh Air?”

It’s a reflection. It’s my way of looking back on the many mindsets I’ve adopted since that first newsletter issue.

So, without further ado, some of this month’s happenings:

🌈 From a Hurricane Comes a Rainbow

April showers bring May flowers indeed. 😌

March 20th was one of the best days of my life. The moment I read the message off my phone I was ecstatic. It felt like everything was finally lining up the way it was supposed to and I had worked hard for something and finally achieved it. Like the lyrics to Katy Perry’s Firework actually meant something and weren’t just meaningless feel-good fluff words to make you feel better about yourself.

March 20th was one of the best days of my life. But, if you were to ask me again, here in May, I would say you are sorely mistaken.

Confused? No worries, it‘s coming.

Now, because I want you to keep on reading, I’m not going to tell you what I was excited about quite yet. 😉 You’ll just have to continue on with this minimal piece of information: I was devastated because what I would have stamped a few months ago as “a pretty sweet opportunity” had just been canceled and smashed to pieces. Dramatic much? I’ll let you decide. 👀

While I was lingering in my disappointment, I picked up my phone and unproductively scrolled through my Instagram feed for a good hour.

Then I read a quote that said, “You should always wait one year before deciding if a major event in your life was actually a good thing or a bad thing.”

Initially glancing at it, I shrugged and continued to scroll through pointless puppy memes. Like this one.

10 Furry Funny Dog Memes | The Buddy System – The Buddy System

But that post had some truth about it, and I’ll come back to this in a sec.

📣 Now for the dramatic reveal: That thing that I was excited about? It was speaking at Web Summit in Rio de Janeiro. In front of 20 000 people. My heart was soaring and I was over the Moon. 🌙

Kim from TKS Partnerships announcing the news!

You can imagine my disappointment when I realized that my dream come true had been snatched away from me by Brazilian child labour laws…

(Don’t worry, I’m not blaming those laws entirely, I know that they’re set in place for good reasons.)

The point is that I worked for something, and it didn’t happen, and…. that kind of sucked. And there was nothing I could do about it.

At TKS, one of the biggest things we’re trained on is mindsets, among those, antifragility. So I allowed myself to be upset for a few days, and then I got to work, determined to work even harder than before.

I got back into presenting every session, finished a proposal, grew my portfolio, won a Moonshot challenge apparently?? (more about this one below 😉), and began to generate podcast episodes.

(Yes, many shameless plugs were made, okay? Keep on scrolling…)

But, anyway, all that work definitely paid off! As I’m writing this I have been invited to the Villars Symposium hosted by the Villars Institute in Switzerland! It’s also based in the Swiss Alps specifically so expect tons of mountain pictures in my new newsletter issue! 📷

Now, more on this in my next newsletter (with pictures from my trip!).

🚀 Lessons From the Master of Moonshots

I’ll get straight to the point because this is too exciting for it to be clouded under the fluff of a one-minute intro: I got to attend an AMA (Ask Me Anything) event with the Astro Teller.

No, this is not a drill! ❗

👏The.👏Astro.👏Freaking.👏Teller.👏 Of X, the Moonshot Factory!!

No clue what that is? Well, that’s on you. I even hyperlinked it above for you. C’mon, don’t be lazy - check it out.

Google X, An Introduction to The Moonshot Factory's Quest For Innovation – The Blue and White

From the website I linked above (which according to my Google activity report I visit on average about 5 times a day), you can see that X focuses on solving the world’s biggest problems with the world’s most radical technologies.

It’s my dream to work at Google’s X, the Moonshot Factory one day, and getting the opportunity to listen to Astro talk live absolutely blew me away! 🤯

Every second was inspiring - never before have I been so imbued with the confidence and knowledgeability of a human being more than in that moment.

So, to distill the thousands of thoughts racing through my mind during that meeting, here are some key takeaways and learnings:

What is Moonshot Thinking?

A big part of it is thinking 10X vs. 10%.

How do you do that?

Well, there is no blueprint for that, because, for the most part, this is uncharted territory for us. As humans, we’re not naturally trained to think about these wacky ideas.

But that’s everything that Moonshot Thinking is.

X has a moonshot game that I suggest you play around with - it makes it easier to understand things. Plus, it’s really fun to play with friends so challenge yourself and give it a whirl!

At the start of the game, they define a Moonshot project as a combination of these three things:

A huge problem. Emerging technology. Radical, crazy, there’s-absolutely-no-way-this-is-going-to-work thinking.

It sounds simple on paper, but it’s way harder than it sounds.

But when you put it all together, and it works, you get to help millions or even billions across the globe. That’s why X exists. That’s why there are thousands of people working on its projects. Impact.

So, how is X doing what it does best?

How X creates widespread, asymmetric impact faster than everyone else

“Your goal here isn't to invent a and b and c. It's to find a unique way to put them together to achieve a certain goal.”

You're not reinventing the wheel.

🚀 Astro said during the AMA, at Google X they're obsessed with efficiency.

There are probably tons of smart minds who never got their voices heard because they didn't activate anything. They just focused on research. And more research. So my key takeaway is while research is definitely important, taking action = bigger impact. ⚡

If the ultimate goal of research is impact, you don't have to write your own research to create that widespread impact!!

Just find existing research and use that. 📖 It's not a zero-sum game. Taking from someone doesn't mean they lose - it means that you're both helping to thrust humanity forward! And, what’s cooler than that? 💡

“Embrace failure.”

This phrase has been uttered across the world of entrepreneurship a number of times, but no one says it quite like X.

The concept is exactly what it sounds like.

Failure in society is often thought of as something disgraceful - something to be feared. But that’s not the case. It’s actually that fear that surrounds the topic of failure that limits the creativity and wackiness of your ideas and actions.

Something I’ve noticed is the more you tend to be drawn toward social norms, the less spontaneous you are. The less risk you take. And the less you fail.

But, the thing about that lifestyle is that your life looks like a horizontal line on a graph that hardly ever spikes. There’s hardly even anything to fail at because everything becomes so empty. Every day is the same. To me, that’s not success.

That’s a boring, consistent, “regular” life.

That’s why X is my role model here in terms of how they approach things, and you can tell from the success they’ve had that embracing and learning from your failures helps your successes shine even brighter.

🌱 Pitching ‘Terra’ to Venture Capitalists and Winning Best Overall!

I know what you’re thinking.

Why is this all the way down here? I don’t know. I truly don’t know. This month has just been loaded with meaningful events I guess this is just where it landed. 😅 Talk about good problems to have. The version of me who 4 months ago couldn’t find any ‘proper’ content for her newsletter is screaming.

Here are two words that I think sum it up pretty well: It happened!!

Though, you’re probably going to want more detail than those two plain words, don’t worry I got you covered. 😎 But real quick, here’s a short photo dump:

Now, let’s get back on track. 🎬

So, you know I just explained the ‘Moonshot Thinking’ mindset to you?

Well, at TKS they sort of mimicked X’s moonshot process and turned it into a challenge for students. How it works is a group of 3-5 people who have 4 weeks to essentially work out the Moonshot process I described above.

After these long weeks of work, I was given the opportunity to present my team’s project, Terra, to four legit VCs in the startup world. Our wonderful judges included Lyn Chen, Salimah Manji, Ricky Mehra, and Luke Brodie, MBA!

Presenting in front of all these accomplished people? Suffice to say I was nervous. This was a new, scary thing that I was diving into headfirst, and the worst part? I had chosen to present last.

This unfortunately meant sitting alone with my thoughts for a lovely three hours. (What fun!) I had been practicing my presentation for days and I still felt like I would forget every single word, despite having repeatedly uttered these exact same words 20 times in the mirror. 😅

It was terrifying, but I managed to pull myself up there, on that stage, and it must have gone pretty well because my team and I were nominated for a People’s Choice Award, and we also won Best Overall!

So without further ado, here’s what I pulled from this thrilling experience:

🔑 My first key takeaway from this experience includes doing things that make your stomach feel weird - no, not like eating a moldy sandwich off the floor, but by doing things that make you uncomfortable.

Things that make it feel like your comfort zone has been smashed to pieces, even for a second. As extreme as that sounds, there’s a reason you’re uncomfortable with it.

So, get on out there and go do that thing. I had heard it before but it’s always experiencing things firsthand that really help solidify these mindsets and principles.

🔑 My second takeaway is being intentional. Know what you want to take away from experiences, or else, in my mind, it wasn’t a very useful experience at all.

Personally, what I wanted to be intentional about was being 100% present, and living in the moment. I also wanted to distill all these thoughts racing through my mind after such an amazing event - so that’s what this post is for. 😉

🔑 And the third key takeaway: networking is key. I know I say this a lot, and I’ll say it again - 👏 NETWORKING. MATTERS. 👏

Networking is making connections with people in various industries. Simply knowing those people can be the reason you got an executive role or the reason your startup succeeded!

And I know these opportunities sound pretty crazy but isn’t that what we should all be chasing? Things that seem out of reach.

But, the idea that you can have out-of-this-world success without taking an unconventional path is unrealistic if your life plan looks just like everyone else’s. That’s not success. It’s just mediocrity.

So, build your network, be intentional, and have new experiences! It all comes down to what you choose to do. ✨

Aaaand, if you’re curious about Terra here are some resources we made during the challenge that’ll help you understand what our solar drone does:

Special thanks to my Terra team (in no particular order): Ami Shah, Jula He, Shimoi Kalra, and Shirley Yang!

You are all some of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met and I’m so lucky to have worked with each and every one of you. 💗

Aaaaand, that seems like a good place to end off for this month! Substack is currently taunting me with the classic ‘reaching email size limit’ (🙄) so that’s my cue to hop off. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next month!