Hey everyone, welcome back to my AlphaX journey. If this is your first time reading my blogs, you should definitely check out my previous blogs to better understand what AlphaX is and the Olympic Mindset that comes along with it (please 🥺).
End of Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon
This week was my last week of doing my Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon (if you have no idea what this is, check out my previous blog).
Workshop
On Monday, I had my weekly workshop. In this workshop, we focused on developing an Ikigai, a vision, and a mission. All of these are aspects of ourselves that can be used to guide or improve a masterpiece. These are also all requirements in order to graduate from Stage 1 of AlphaX. Now if you’re confused about what Stage 1 of AlphaX is, essentially, at AlphaX, there are 4 Stages to your masterpiece (I will just explain the 1st Stage for now, since I am not yet on the other ones). The 1st Stage, which is what I am currently on, involves completing a Hackathon, a Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon, as well as a personal profile. A personal profile involves developing an Ikigai, a vision, a mission, and a few other elements to show other people who you are and what you want to do.
After the workshop, I worked a little bit on my personal profile by trying to complete my Ikigai, my vision, and my mission.
Progress
Along with working on my personal profile, I finished up most of my research on Monday about astronomy. As mentioned in my previous blog, I now focused more on black holes and planets. The only thing left for me to do was to create a spiky POV (explained in previous blog).
The only issue was that I was struggling to come up with one. So, after a while of staring into space, I decided to ask the AlphaX instructor for some help. She sent me a ChatGPT link with questions to ask it for a spiky POV. Now, with a large list of spiky POVs, all I had to do was choose one that I could support with my evidence.
After reading all of the options, I landed on: “Black holes are depicted incorrectly. They are not simply dangerous and scary objects that suck in everything around them — they are gateways to new possibilities for exploration.” But I wasn’t done here. After getting some feedback on this, I changed it to: “It is incorrect to view black holes merely as threats — they’re actually crucial for making groundbreaking discoveries about the universe and the laws of physics.”
And so, with my spiky POV made on Monday, I was ready to continue with my Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon. All that was left was to create my video, which I planned to make on Tuesday and Wednesday.
But that did not happen. Unfortunately, I had a big test on Thursday, so I spent all of my time studying and doing homework instead. That left only Thursday left to finish my video and do a little more research — the Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon was due on Thursday.
I started off by writing a script to follow, to make sure that I met all the requirements, including my spiky POV, another perspective on the topic, numerous amounts of sources, explanations, proving it can be arguable, and more. I even ended up changing my spiky POV a little bit to make it more arguable: “Viewing black holes solely as threats neglects their potential to answer questions about the nature of the universe and the laws of physics.” All of this ended up taking me a while, but once I was done, I was ready to record. Or so I thought.
I was using Loom to try and record my video; except I spent around an HOUR (idk how it took me so long) trying to figure out how to include my camera and everything else while presenting a google slide. But finally, at 11:30 PM, I was ready to actually record. So, I finished in one take, and went to sleep.
Future
Now, I am done with my Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon; however, I still need to come up with an idea for my masterpiece. Since I cannot think of anything right now, I am most likely going to be doing another round of Stage 1, including a Hackathon and a Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon until I can come up with a masterpiece idea (hopefully somewhat soon, but then again I suck at coming up with ideas).
Olympic Mindset
This week, I continued to strengthen my Olympic Mindset with What I learned from researching 50 Olympic athletes (NOTE: this is a download link) by Royan Kamyar.
My main takeaways from this were three things:
- TIME DEDICATION — In order to succeed like an Olympian, one NEEDS to dedicate a lot of time towards their craft, or their masterpiece. This past week, and throughout the entirety of my AlphaX journey so far, I have spent hours — probably at least 10–15 per week working on whatever I had to work on for AlphaX, and I will continue to work hard and put in the hours hopefully for the rest of my life. With the amount of time, you put into something, not only will you improve, but you will also get more of that thing done.
- SURROUNDED BY THE BEST — Another thing I learned from this article is that in order to succeed, it is important and beneficial to surround oneself by the best, generally in similar fields/topics as them. This is because being surrounded by the best can help one to not only learn from others and their mistakes, but also can have better encouragement and influences to do better. So far, throughout my AlphaX journey, I have been surrounded (not literally, but through Slack) by other fellow AlphaX students, who were carefully selected from a previous program called BETA Camp. This allowed me to generally be surrounded by the best, or at least talented individuals, and I hope to continue to surround myself with successful/talented individuals (does not mean you have to only be surrounded by these people though).
- WILL POWER — One final thing I learned from this article, is that it is CRUCIAL to have a strong will power to succeed like an Olympian. This is because a strong will power will allow one to push past limitations, and remain persistent to reach their goals. One main reason why people fail at achieving their goals, ESPECIALLY in the startup world is due to giving up. With a strong will power, however, one can avoid this issue, and stay persistent and focused. So far, I believe that I have had a decently strong will power to remain persistent and focused throughout my AlphaX journey, and I hope to continue to strengthen this will power.
In the future, throughout the rest of my life, I will make sure to maintain and improve upon these aspects in my life to succeed. And you should do so too.