"The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you."
Carl Jung, the influential psychiatrist, on the value of knowing yourself
So many of us define who we are by what we think others think of us. So many of us lower our ambitions just because we rarely hear how highly others think of us. Because we oh so frequently hear the criticism, skepticism, and cynicism. Yep, there's a lot we can improve on. But those who criticise us will always be fast to speak while admiration remains silent. Especially in the context of university and work.
This week I had two occasions that prompted me to write this. Two times a friend told me how she/he doubted her/his decisions, questioning their ability, asking whether (s)he is doing the right thing and whether (s)he should shoot for less. What a shame. But this is normal. We all have these thoughts. Yet hearing it twice this week was aggravating. Here’s why:
I consider myself lucky to have met a lot of inspirational people in the last few years and am lucky to have become friends with some of these people. People with one or multiple special talents that often enough they aren’t even aware of. People that get you excited about topics that you knew nothing about - or maybe even had dismissed as undesirable before - just because they can’t help but radiate excitement as they talk about them. Conversations that may start with you merely asking what they’re thinking about and they just start talking in a way that seems like they’re thinking out loud. But the more and more they get into their flow you get the perception that they’re actually looking through you, at some spot behind you that’s five years in the future, and they just know the inevitability of this being how things will be. Moments that leave you thinking: “Holy sh*t. I only understood half of what you just said, but how can I become a part of this?" You don’t spot these luminaries straight away when you meet them. It’s a side that’s hidden in them a bit. It’s only when they start talking about ‘their thing’ does this side become apparent.
This is not a matter of fighting world hunger or curing cancer. This is not about people who have it all figured out right down to a specific product or company. More often than not, it is about people who haven’t figured it all out. It is about our friends who are very clear on how a very specific part of the future should be. Often they’re oblivious to their special knowledge or special talent because it’s normal to them.
The best way to become a good runner is by running
But since my bachelor’s so many of these people get distracted and lured away from their ‘crazy ideas’. Instead of working on the actual problem they want to solve they move to other jobs. Jobs that will ostensibly prepare them better for the actual job they want to do or give them the right “toolkit” to solve their problem.
Yes, spending time at BCG, Alphabet or Goldman Sachs will definitely enrich your “skillset”. But if you’re trying to solve a specific problem then you’re better off throwing yourself right at it. A gold medal swimmer is in a pretty good position to run a marathon. But that doesn’t mean that if I want to run a marathon I should be starting at my local pool. If I want to run a marathon then I should start running as soon as possible. If you want to improve inequities in global education then your chances of doing so will be best if you try and do exactly that. Four years of strategy consulting or building DevOps tools for cloud infrastructure won’t bring you closer to realising your dream or vision. It will most likely drag you away from it.
People want you to succeed
We often ponder whether our ideas will work out and worry about what others will think of us in case we fail but we even worry along the way. It may start with something as minuscule as breaking your head over the wording of a LinkedIn post. And we go as far as to wonder whether people may doubt our success even if everything actually does work out as planned. But we forget how more often than not people want the underdog (you) to win. This is the stuff of an entire genre of movies. We often don’t want to question individual parts of these stories, because we want them to be true. People want to be inspired.
We don’t admire people for their strengths but for their weaknesses that they fight and overcome
“Do you think that it’s the things you’re the most proud of that your friends value the most about you? “
That’s a question one of my best friends asked me 18 months ago and a question I’ve frequently revisited since. Often during runs (running is a time when I process a lot of subconscious thoughts) but lately it’s been a thought coming up while listening to friends. Situations where it’s the other way around: They’re discussing doubts and concerns. Concerns that are relatable but that nevertheless leave my inner self with its mouth gaping wide open and where I’m thinking: “YOU ARE SO SENSATIONAL AT X BUT YOU ARE OBSESSING OVER Y??? THIS IS SO IRRELEVANT.” Yet it might be me a few days later worrying about something similar yet different related to myself.
Three of my current big self-doubts
So no, I’m not any better. I am speaking from comfort. I'm in the cosy spot of being five months away from finishing my master’s. And I definitely have many doubts myself. These currently are the three big ones:
Should I have tried harder to write my master’s thesis at an American university? Could it be important for whatever I want to do next?
I took too long for my master’s while other friends from my bachelor’s already have four years of work experience.
Will the path between technical and product/business skills really play out? Or might I just get caught in the middle?
Yet right now I am writing this from a moment of strong conviction. I am trying to summarise an inner belief that I feel clearer in some moments than in others. A belief that easily gets overshadowed in day-to-day life. I am probably writing this more for myself to think about in a few months than I am writing this for anybody else. This conviction is motivated and nurtured by small nuggets of past experiences. Nuggets that do not permit clear deductions, but feel to me like they’re pieces of evidence pointing in the same direction.
One of these experiences was living in Sierra Leone for five months in 2021. It was disillusioning. We had just collected and shipped 3000 hockey sticks and a hockey pitch that we were ready to build. But the sports ministry and port authorities weren’t having it. We, again and again, had to delay our flight because of container clearance issues or related to the local ministry. I had arrived with a return flight in two weeks. However, I spent half a year in the firm belief at any moment that I’d be flying back to Zurich in two, max. three weeks. If you would have asked me in the 12 months after coming back what I thought of my time in Sierra Leone, then I couldn’t have told the story without mentioning that I would have preferred spending less time in Africa and more at the ETH library. One year of my master’s left me with 11 credits to show for (all from the first semester). We hadn’t even built the pitch in those five months - the main purpose of the trip. I felt somewhat of a failure in the ETH microcosm. By now those woes have subsided and the time there is fuelling a lot of thoughts about how education - in Europe as in Africa - should be rethought.
The probably biggest nugget is my transition from business to machine learning research. I remember very vividly how in my final semester of my bachelor’s I wanted to do any kind of coding internship. However, I was convinced that nobody would want me. After all, I hadn’t studied computer science. I never would have dreamt about writing academic papers on DNA conformation in tumour cells or working on foundation models for tabular data. While I haven’t reached a specific goal it definitely feels like this gut feeling I first had when I was 19 could amount to something big; like I’m onto something and getting somewhere even though I’m far from being anywhere specific.
The grass is always greener on the other side
We live in a time of Instagram, LinkedIn, and push notifications. We read about success stories in our feeds and listen to advice on how to get there in podcasts on our commute. Success stories seem abundant. Why doesn’t it feel like we’re on track?
The grass is always greener on the other side. The people working at the four-people-NGO for climate activism or finance-democratisation startup think of their problems while they’re browsing through the insta stories of their friend’s Ibiza holiday thinking “Man I wish I at least had an employer brand to show for like my friends working at BCG or Meta”. Two weeks later the guy at BCG is sitting in his hotel room at 1 am, taking a break on LinkedIn from working on a slide deck for a company they don’t care about thinking “Wow, my friend just closed another partnership for her climate project, it must be so fulfilling to work on something that really matters like she is”. Nobody is posting a picture of them sitting at their desk trying to fix the bug in their code that they originally thought they would have surely already fixed yesterday.
We all know these stories from our friends. We know that the grass isn’t greener on the other side. We know that we should be shooting for the stars. We know that we’re most likely to regret the thing that we didn’t do. But when it comes to making our next career choice we think that this situation is different. “It just makes sense to work at [choose your favourite employer brand] for maybe just a year or two. There's so much I can learn there and it will set me up for a much better position to do [insert the thing you actually want to do] afterward.
Sticking to a belief for 5+ years has never been as undervalued as now
In today’s world, it's so easy to get a lot of attention fast (and lose it even faster) and many remarkable achievements of unknown people permeate into our feeds. This exposes a big opportunity: people neglect the paths that require grit and sustained work over longer periods of time. It’s your chance to exploit this. The really hard part about it: you need to turn off the wooly mammoth in your head that’s constantly reminding you of how you could fail and that wants to divert your attention back to your LinkedIn feed with others' flashy accomplishments while you remain passive.
How would your life plans change if you planned for 10-year cycles instead of just the next three years? If you wanted to build a product that sucks carbon out of the air, would you start by working at JP Morgan or by teaching yourself how to build components of such a product? We overestimate what we can do in a year, but underestimate what we can do in five.
In venture capital, people commonly talk about the J curve. The overall investment value of a fund typically goes down in the first 2-3 years, but 70-80% of a fund's value is typically generated in the last 25-30% of its life. It’s not that different in our personal life. But we need to make the right decisions early and stick to them. Because results take time to show. Every success has a graveyard of ideas that didn’t work out before.
“Most people succeed because they have the confidence to be successful. Many people fail because their motivation to succeed is that they are afraid of failing.” Thomas Zurbuchen, former Chief Scientist of NASA
The world has never been as levelled as it is now. It’s never been easier to do what you can’t. You can learn anything you want for free via YouTube or blogs. You don’t need any money to design with Canva, build with Figma or publish on Medium. Living in Uganda doesn’t stop you from firing up a cluster of GPUs and working in New Zealand doesn’t stop you from zooming with customers all over the world.
The only resource scarcer than ever before is the strength to pursue your ideas for multiple years without being successful while all others are comparing you with the people they see on their LinkedIn feed. But overnight success takes years of hard work.
Tell your friends how amazing they are
This was my personal take-away of the last week and the two conversations with my friends: If we admire a friend’s trait then we should tell them. Even if there isn’t a reason to bring it up. We all need to hear this from time to time. Either to get started or to keep going. Support friends with their projects, no matter if it’s by appreciating their work, telling others about their open-source project or by buying their asparagus cooking book. Make it easier for them to not play it safe.
Main thoughts:
If you have a bigger idea that you’re working towards, then it doesn’t matter if every step you take is filled with greatness as long as you’re getting closer to your goal.
The credentials game is important. But don’t mistake it for what really matters. If you want to solve a problem then start working on that problem (or a subproblem) and don’t get lost in ‘preparing yourself’ by doing other things first.
Failing at 50% on your way to something big is better than succeeding a 100% at something small.
Note: These are some raw thoughts that I wanted to share, but I acknowledge that they might need some more polishing. I am also aware that this might not be applicable to everyone, but rather for people who know that they can develop strong interests for problems and ideas. But: if you’re thinking that this could be you, then you most likely are one of these people.
Top Reads
My favourite reads and ‘wow’ moments of the week
1 - From the free church in a Swiss Mountain village to the stars: The unlikely story of the longest standing chief scientist of NASA, Thomas Zurbuchen
This was my favourite podcast of the last six months. Thomas’ story is as unlikely as it is inspiring. He was born to the minister of a free church of a village of 600 souls and dependent on donations. From October 2016 until the end of 2022, he was the longest continually running Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA overseeing missions such as Perseverance or the James Webb Telescope (Alles Gesagt [podcast, German])
2 - The man trying to suck carbon dioxide out of the air
To reach global warming targets slowing emissions is no longer sufficient. Supported with $784m in venture funding Climeworks is actively removing CO2 out of the air and pumping it hundreds of meters below earth. The CO2 removal market is tiny, but the IPCC expects six metric gigatons of CO2 per year to be “unavoidable if net zero emissions are to be achieved. The chart below illustrates how far away we are. (How I Built This [Podcast])
3 - From 1000 Facebook videos to 100+ employees building media for governments and NGOs: Nas Daily
If you grew up with Facebook during high school and bachelor’s you are quite likely to have already seen one of Nuseir’s 1-minute videos (here’s a representative one from Uganda). Nuseir is a Palestinian born in Israel. Tired of his software engineering job in 2016 he used his savings to travel. He made a video every day which grew to a huge following. A very inspiring story exemplifying 1) how doing something every day makes you great at it and 2) how you have to stick with things to see their success: Nuseir’s first year didn’t amount to much: On day 270 he had 10.000 followers. By day 600 he was making 10k in monthly revenue and by day 900 around 50k. (How I built this [podcast])
4 -This Indonesian Hobby Film Maker makes beautiful videos
He started out by making small videos out of everyday life in Jakarta and colour grading. He is now sponsored by and is collaborating with Canon. (Instagram)
5 - 30 under 30-year sentences: why so many of Forbes’ young heroes face jail
Sam Bankman Fried, Martin “Pharma Bro” Shkreli and Charlie Javice (the woman who faked 5M customers to sell her company to JP Morgan). The evidence for the article is anecdotal but I found the following lines interesting: “The problem here isn’t Forbes, of course; the problem is the vision of success that we’ve been sold and the fetishizing of youth. 30 Under 30 isn’t just a list, it’s a mentality: a pressure to achieve great things before youth slips away from you. The pressure can lead certain ambitious people to take shortcuts.” (The Guardian)
6 - Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence
In his very accessible and non-technical talk, Sebastian explains how current Foundation Models could reasonably be viewed as an early version of artificial general intelligence. He discusses the challenges ahead, including the possible need for pursuing a new paradigm that moves beyond next-word prediction. (Youtube, thank you Jan for sending)
7 - A private Japanese company crashed on the moon last week
The capsule ran out of fuel prior to landing. But most teams trying to land on the Moon fail on their first attempt. The company will try again next year and so are five other teams in the upcoming years. (Economist & ArsTechnica)
+ SpaceX’s starship could radically change space exploration - if it works (Economist)
8 - OpenAI is facing a lawsuit in Europe that it’s destined to lose
Europe defined ‚public‘ data differently than the US does. OpenAI might be banned in European countries and could be forced to delete data and models. (Tech Review)
+ China‘s AI companies will have to bear legal responsibility for their models (Economist)
+ Stability launches a language model with 3-7b parameters (Stability.ai)
+ Hugging Face releases its own version of ChatGPT (Tech Crunch)
9 - The best croissant in Paris (youtube)
What am I’ve been up to this week
I started my master’s thesis at Merantix Momentum under supervision of Johannes Otterbach where I’ll be working on building a BERT-like model for tabular data - an invaluable resource that is ubiquitous in life and business but has received limited attention (not a pun) from the AI community in recent years. Looking forward to sharing more on this soon.