These past 3 weeks have been challenging; however, I’m up for the challenge. Along with recently starting school and having to deal with loads of work and studying, I recently started a program called AlphaX, which consists of weekly coaching sessions and mentors to help guide participants to making their Olympic level masterpieces. To create this masterpiece (whatever it may be, from a business, to even a park), one must adopt an Olympic mindset, a mindset that involves achieving more than what the average person can achieve and adopts the attitudes and behaviors of Olympian athletes.
Along the course of this next year, I am going to be working on my Olympic level masterpiece (that, to be honest, I have no idea what is going to be yet) and will be posting weekly updates on the events that occur in my life (mostly relating to my masterpiece/AlphaX experience).
This past week, I began my Hackathon, a 2-week process in which I have to create a product/service, a pitch, and this blog (I am taking heavy inspiration from this other AlphaX blog: https://medium.com/@Blue_Butterfly05/a-school-for-olympians-not-a-school-for-athletes-23b59411abe8).
The reason why I am starting out with this is because a Hackathon is designed to training yourself to be able to work fast to turn an idea into a working prototype. It also helps to find what you may be passionate about and want to ultimately create for your masterpiece. For my Hackathon, I am in the process of creating a program that can take an image of a medical condition and tell the user what they may have. For me, not having that much experience in AI or Python (the programming language I am using to create this), this is no easy task.
For the first few days of this week, it involved me looking up tutorials and following them so I could learn how to create an image classification system. This unfortunately was heavily slowed down by schoolwork and other activities. Then, for the latter half of the week, including today, I worked on (and am currently working on) finding a dataset for skin related medical conditions, as well as implementing this dataset into an image classification system.
Link to the dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/shubhamgoel27/dermnet
After trying to implement this dataset, I was hit with a barrage of errors (as usual when programming), pretty much all of which I have solved by now. Today and tomorrow, I am going to be grinding to get my service (I think that’s what it would be classified as) finished and working.
So far, by creating this service, I have honestly learned quite a bit in programming in Python as well as using AI and some of the many Python libraries. As for the future, I plan on at least creating a service that can look at an image and classify it, and to expand the number of datasets I am using so I can scan for a wider variety of medical conditions.
The entire reason why I thought of this idea is because when I was little (and even sometimes now), I would see some bump or mark on my skin and wonder what it was. This would cause me to panic sometimes and tell my parents to bring me to a doctor to see what it was. Hopefully with this service, I can prevent that process with a simple picture to determine what that mark or bump (or any other external condition) is.
By the way, if anyone reading this blog (hopefully at least one person is reading it) has some free time or wants to achieve something more than just the average person, I encourage you to follow along with me as I continue my AlphaX journey and create your own masterpiece, as this is something that I believe anyone, with the right mindset, can do.
Weekly AlphaX Experience and Takeaways
This week, as I already mentioned, I started my Hackathon. This began on the weekly Monday workshop, during which we spent around 10 minutes to quickly create an idea for our Hackathon. For my idea, I chose a system (as mentioned above) that could take in images to give a diagnosis on external medical conditions. I am still unsure if I would want to pursue this idea for my masterpiece, but it is still a great learning experience.
From the workshop, and my experiences this week, I learned how to better manage my time, as well as to not dwell on small things for too long. This will hopefully help me to be more efficient overall, and to be able to manage my schoolwork, AlphaX, and other activities at the same time.
Olympic Mindset
Along with working on my Hackathon this week, I also worked to further improve and solidify my Olympic mindset. Just as a reminder, an Olympic mindset is essentially the mindset of an Olympian, including behaviors and attitudes, that can be applied to many aspects of one’s life.
In order to solidify my Olympic mindset, I watched THE MINDSET OF A WINNER, featuring Kobe Bryant: THE MINDSET OF A WINNER | Kobe Bryant Champions Advice — YouTube. Although this video was specifically about Kobe’s journey, there were many things that I was able to learn from this video.
For example, one thing I learned to be successful (that I have tried to adopt into my Olympic mindset) is that you need to cater your point of view towards looking at everything that happens in your life to try and learn how you can use that to improve or become better at whatever you are working towards. From this, I picked up that you need to be open to learning new things, or to even just see things differently, so you can hopefully incorporate or somehow apply these things to your goals. This week, I tried to apply this by opening up my mind to any information that I could use to help me learn AI and using Python libraries and to try and apply different aspects of my knowledge to solve problems within my Hackathon project.
Another thing I noticed from this video was to be more disciplined, something I have been working towards this past year. To me, this means to not procrastinate and to give your best effort when working on/doing things.
Also, I learned that when you are working towards something, you need to give that thing your full attention. Being stressed, or worried about other aspects of your life will not help with anything (at least in most circumstances). This week, I tried to apply this to not only working on my Hackathon project but also on my homework to be more efficient and to do them better.
Additionally, I learned that sometimes it is better and necessary to see what other people do and learn from them. Oftentimes, I, for some reason, have a habit of wanting to accomplish things on my own without necessarily needing the help from others/other examples (I want to be able to figure it out on my own). However, this stubbornness is oftentimes not beneficial, as it decreases efficiency, and also, sometimes others do things better than you. This week, I applied this by looking at previous examples of code, rather than just trying to figure it out on my own (or at least mostly on my own).
Furthermore, I learned that you need to push yourself sometimes to do things that you aren’t sure you can do. This is to not only improve your skill, but to also be able to achieve whatever you want to achieve. Otherwise, you will be stuck in a mindset that is holding you back from potentially doing what you may want to do, simply because it is too difficult or confusing. This week, I applied this by taking on a project that I wasn’t sure I could do within the given time frame (and I am still not 100% sure), but I am giving it my all to do this task that is new to me.
I will also continue to utilize these aspects next week, and the weeks after so I can make sure that I am putting in my best effort to achieve the best results possible.
Not only are all of these aspects just things I learned that I could apply to my Olympic mindset, but all of these are applicable to your life and mindset too. It doesn’t take someone to be special from birth to achieve an Olympic level masterpiece or goal, all it takes is a mindset and hard work. This mindset is something that anyone can adopt, and the aspects within it are something that anyone can adopt and apply to their lives. The only thing it needs is you to take the initiative — you to take the step in adopting this mindset. Take the aspect of resilience for example. If you really want to achieve something, but you have failed to achieve this, it doesn’t matter that you failed. You can always try again and learn from your mistakes. “Successful people don’t fear failure but understand that it’s necessary to learn and grow from.” — Robert Kiyosaki. I know this is very cliche, but it’s true. Most of the time, giving up is probably the worst thing you can do (woah that rhymed).
I hope to be able to apply all of these things to my own life and future, and hope that you can do the same.