Nota bene: I intentionally leave typos because I’m lazy and it proves this is not generative ai.

Here’s the story of the beginning of how I avoided a mediocre life. I say beginning and not just that I’m no longer mediocre at all because I’m only starting this journey and I’m not cocky enough neither convicted to say that a life worth living is simply the result of a choice or some event. It is a sustained effort throughout one’s entire life.

Throughout my entire life I’ve had aspirations and dreams of being somebody exceptional. I believe that every human that grows up in a loving environment and does not have extraordinary limiting constraints also possesses this mindset and is curious. This reminds me in fact of a thought exercise that Nantte, one of the FR8 coufounders, led us through, telling us to close our eyes and think about a time in our youths when we believed anything is possible and that there are no limits, and then subsequently saying to us that this infernal spirit is still inside each of us and has never died.

Notwithstanding, these aspirations that live within each of us can only be ascertained through deliberate action and grueling work. This means that unfortunately, most people fail to realize their dreams, and an extremely small percentage of the population can convincingly say they achieved what they dreamed of as a child. I, for one, am not a part of this group and still have many mountains to climb before I am remotely close.

The beautiful thing is that life is a journey, not a destination, which is an incredibly cliche thing to say, but is nevertheless true. Therefore, so long as one puts themself on a trajectory towards dream fulfillement, I believe that is sufficient to live happily, if we temporarily ignore family, realtionships and other important aspects of one’s life without which one is doomed.

So in my case, I had these brilliant ideas of being the greatest man alive and accomplishing many things for all my teenage years and into adult life without any tangible action associated with it. This isn’t to say I was miserable; I was consistently the smartest in my classes throught school, which I can only attribute to my luck on the human IQ distribution, and I also was very atheltic: winning the ahtelete of the year award in ninth grade. Atheltics and scholarship were two dominant forces in my schooling/early life and I believe that if I was more discniplined and hadn’t spent time watching so much youtube, I could have gone even farther (i.e. national competitions for math and science fairs), but this is irrelevant.

Getting back on topic, in the fall of 2024 began my deliberate orchestration of a life that I happen to rather than a life that happens to me. The trigger for this was the end of my undergraduate degree, because I had finally reached a point of my life where a bifurcation would occur. That is to say, in kindergarten to grade 12, I had no uncertainty about my future because I would just go to school, embrace my inner hedonist in the summertime and repeat. And in large part, university did not majorly affect this schedule apart from adding two extra months to summer holidays from May-June, which I fortunately filled with some activity/internship partially in the first year (1st to 2nd), and with a full experience in the years of 2nd to 3rd and 3rd to 4th instead of languishing. I did face an interesting internal battle, however, nearing the end of my undergraduate degree, which is namely whether or not I should extend to a master’s program. And I spent too much time in the application period from September to December 2024 writing applications and going through hundreds of different university programs, which eventually were abandoned because despite being accepted to master programs with full scholarships, I declined the awards because, in my view, doing a master’s program would simply be a continuation of this certain but mediocre path which I had taken up to then. And let me emphasize now that I am not at all upset nor regretful that I’ve done this conventional path up to now. It’s been formative in making me a social person and somebody that can interact with many people as opposed to some counterfactual path of being a homeschooled child who is asocial but a genius. Furthermore, my experience with my own university was ass but the ancillary opporutnites it gave me were amazing e.g. living in France for four months as a WWI monument guide.

All good things (or rather all comfortable things) must come to an end and now was the perfect time to break off the path least travelled. This sentiment was first realized through my incerased notes in remnote (my daily note taker) and recording my daily thoughts pertaining to living extraoridnarlily. Concurrently, my friends, such as Elliot were doing non-mediocre things such as dropping out to go to SF, and that certainly didn’t hurt either!

Here’s a short chronology of some of the daily notes I took since I began this journey, I highly recommend a daily note taker since it kind of archives your life and remnote is effective because each day a daily document is created automatically, which is genius since it removes the very real friction of having to create a document which will halt many from taking notes.

In November, I got into Less Wrong and Brian Johnston, even though I knew of him before, I hadn’t really seen what he’d done in detail. And even though I don’t subscribe to his beliefs fully, it’s still humbling to see somebody that puts their health that high on a pedestal. second brain thoughts

patrick collison famous post and linux/bash command tutorial recommended by simon boehm

December I made my X account with the intention to do more timelapses of my work which was a commitement to actually do shit

December 22nd, 2024 was a crazy night, I call it ainight. I have friends like Will, who taught courses at McGill University as an instructor at 21 years old, Ethan, who studeies EE and is doing an internship at Tesla, Elliot, who has millions of views in his tutorials, and Max who is 200 IQ, and the list goes on.

Things were finally going to end for me on the sure and certain path and I began prioritizing self-learning and large language model understanding over school, but not in a bad way so as to sacrifice grades. I had four courses in my final semester at university, one being an English requirement, another was a history elective, and the two computer science courses were individual study courses where you can essentially make an arbitrary course with a professor. And what this meant is that I was able to get the credits for the computer science courses with much less effort, because in these individual study courses, there’s no tests. You just need to make sure you do weekly work assigned by the professor and you’ll get a good grade (A). Well, I leveraged this to spend less time at school and more time at my desk, recording time lapses and grinding, which definitely grew my following quite nicely. And I learned all the way from attention is all you need to deepseek through this journey from January to February/March. One thing though that I do regret now that I’m at FR8 is not taking course on circuits and compilers, because this low-level knowledge is indispensable and I think I’m going to learn it anyways because… Yeah, low-level is cool shit is all I have to say, and I’ve learned that from those here.

I definitely had a few burnouts though. The first months I would say of this grinding, were fine, but then I injuried myself running in -40 C and didn’t achieve my goals during the spring reading week which burnt me out. Then the biggest one was after the semester ended in April and the month of May where I was kind of depressed and lacked motivation for most time. Starting with FR8 though in the beginning of June, the candle has been reignited and I am the evermore optimistic for the future. This program has definitely done a lot to get me into startups and this type of mentality. And I so badly want to make my own startup, but I don’t have the co-founder currently nor the idea. And those are the two critical assets, according to YC. And I believe it’s true. So the alternative that I have reached is to work at a startup instead. And that’s what I’m currently interviewing for. And I’m very excited to read this a month from now to see you where I’ll be. Because even as I write this, it’s not certain where I’ll end up a month from now. And most likely I’ll be in my hometown because the places I would like to go require a visa with a six to eight week delay. But on the whole, I think going to a startup where I can be a sponge is the best option I have.

I’m also really excited because I will hopefully be biking from Edmonton to Vancouver, upon my return to Canada. And this is like one of the bucket list things that I want to do because, of course, as a kid, we always talk about bucket list items. But then once you become an adult, it’s like, holy shit, I have to do those things now or else I’ll die and never do them (the younger you start the better, retirement is a trap). And this is one of the things that I really am excited to do and hoping to do it before winter and before I leave Canada.

One of my biggest fears results from certain points in my life where I have not been dependable and have for example let people down in group projects. This is what Jeff Bezos describes as the true result for stress, which is to say that people are not stressed by working too much, but rather from not doing work which they have to i.e. procrastinating. And this stress of inaction is much worse, and overall it’s such a shit feeling to be undependable and not proactive. This complete feeling of shit that I’ve experienced (most severly in covid when I was 17 and completely unprincipled having unlimited time to stay at home due to quarantine) is a more long-term instigator for my change in trajectory.

carpe diem!