A few days ago, it was my birthday. I just turned 17, which is crazy to think about. Just one more year until I’m an adult.
Sheesh
This realization made me suddenly anxious and stressed. I had begun to think that despite being a year away from adulthood, and 2 years away from college, I hadn’t developed a strong enough resumé to get accepted into good jobs and colleges. I felt time was running out and started to regret not working harder in the past.
Additionally, as I realized I was only a year away from being an adult, I began to feel a growing obligation to my parents to do more than I already was and make up for all the trouble I caused as a kid.
It doesn’t help that I’m a bit older than my friends in my grade, due to transferring from Korea, so I felt even more pressure to have a better resumé than them.
There was just a lot of external pressure for me to be better, with college and adulthood fast approaching. This completely shifted how I viewed success.
In addition to my getting older, this past year, a lot of things didn’t go my way. I didn’t place in many competitions and I constantly had to kill my personal projects. This greatly contributed to the new mindset that I had developed, where I viewed success as the number of competitions I won or the amount of money I was able to raise for a project. I felt immense regret at myself for not working harder to win those competitions and as a result, I became incredibly stressed. I really hate wasting time, and so I think I felt like I had wasted all that time in the past.
Of course, this showed in my day-to-day life. I was becoming more distant from my family and my friends. I became sluggish, pessimistic, and just not a fun person to be around.
With my projects, due to my mindset being solely oriented on fulfilling external pressures, I was losing more and more enjoyment with things I used to love doing. It just felt like a chore to cross off my list.
The Realization
My dad noticed this, and we talked about it for a few hours one night. He was letting me know that he was really proud of everything that I was able to accomplish this year and that he doesn't think I’m a failure. He emphasized that I was still a student, with lots of time left to make mistakes and learn from them.
If I made the mistakes that I had made this year but didn’t reiterate and learn from them, THAT would be a failure. But, every time I failed to achieve something, I always did some form of self-reflection to learn where it went wrong.
For instance, I got waitlisted for a summer research program that I really wanted to attend. I blamed it on my complacency earlier in the year in regard to my project work. Although this was true, I was focusing too much on the past, saying “I should’ve…” constantly. If I didn’t do anything and kept wallowing in my pitiful sorrow, that would have been a failure. But, I stopped bitching and applied for other really cool summer opportunities like other university programs to make sure I expose myself to new concepts/ideas and continue growing as a student.
I learned from my mistakes and reiterated.
I hadn’t fully internalized what my dad was trying to tell me the first time, but after I had a chat with Rhys Lindmark, the founder of the Roote Fellowship, it clicked.
He was asking me a bunch of questions, such as why I do the things I do and what my mindset is going into day-to-day life. I responded naturally, saying that I feel pressure to be better after my failures this year and an obligation to my parents.
He then asked me what I considered to be failures, and I responded by saying the failures were not making it to the finals for competitions and killing many projects.
After listening, he asked: I’m noticing that these are external pressures that are motivating you to do the things you do. What is it that you enjoy?
This question, quite frankly took me by surprise. I realized I had strayed WAYYYY too far from the path that I intended to walk. I never wanted to be a person motivated by external pressures, whether it be college or obligations to parents.
Now, don’t get me wrong, these are still important things to consider and be aware of, but they shouldn’t be at the core of how I operate.
So, immediately after the meeting, I did some self-reflection. What is it that I enjoy?
solving big world problems. biomimicry and learning from nature. abolishing the concept of waste and introducing a circular economy. biomaterials.
These are things that I enjoy. Instead of letting external pressures drive me, this list, as well as my desire to become a better person overall, should be driving me. I need to constantly remind myself of my long-term goals, and only do things that align with these goals. Don’t get me wrong, external things like winning competitions or getting funding are still very important steps to achieving my end goals. However, they shouldn’t lie at the foundation of why I’m really doing what I’m doing.
Instead of focusing solely on these external accomplishments, bashing myself when I come short, and becoming regretful/stressed afterward, I need a shift in my mindset. I need to instead take on a more growth/constructive mindset. And I’m not making any excuses either. I failed because I was complacent, lazy, and just not motivated, and I DO need to push myself, but just in the right way and with the right mindset. Instead of pushing myself harder by just putting more brute force into my work and letting external things like college motivate me, which is leading to more stress and regret, I need to take a step back and reflect. Pushing myself harder is good, I just need to do it in the right way; I need to reflect on what went wrong the first time, and apply this new insight to the next thing I pursue, doing things that I internally enjoy and align with my goals at the same time.
I can’t be stuck in the past. Move on and do better, not for colleges or parents, but for me and what I want to do.
My year was definitely still a failure in regards to my goals, no excuses for that. However, even though I wasn’t able to win a lot of the things I set out to, I grew tremendously as a person and learned many valuable insights/lessons that will eventually help me to achieve those external things in the future, which will put me closer to achieving my goal. I’m not trying to cover up the fact that I failed with fluffy insights about personal growth. It’s not about that. It’s about detaching oneself from external pressures and doing what YOU want, not what society makes you want to do.
It’s about zooming out and being less about the failure, but about trajectory.
My Journey
All throughout summer until November, I got incredible experience in running a startup, all the way from expanding my network, working with others, and understanding new business concepts. Most importantly, my team and I killed this bioplastic startup once we realized it wasn’t going to work. So, although it would be considered a failure with my original mindset, dawning this new one would suggest that it was an incredible growth experience. I learned sooo many invaluable things, and I immediately applied it to my next project.
The main failure points came from not validating our project idea explicitly, and focusing too much on the “fluff” like applying to become an LLC or getting grants before doing the dirty work.
In this next project, I worked to decrease the manufacturing costs of aerogels. This seems simple, and that’s exactly what I thought going into it, but this was far from reality. Immediately, I dove into the technical side of this material, learning from my past mistake. I read dozens of papers and reached out to dozens of scholars to get feedback on this project at the very beginning. I had to figure out how to write a professional lab procedure, understand the industry, as well as learn to outreach to scholars for feedback. But, I had to kill this project as well. I required a lab to test my hypothesis, but even after hundreds of emails to professors and scholars, and nearby universities, I had no luck. I tried doing it at home, but the closest I got was producing a hydrogel, which was not what I was going for. The very scope of the project was way too big.
The main failure point here came from not understanding the needs of the industry. The aerogel market already uses big dryers to make the material, so incorporating my hypothesis, which would require chemical setups, was just not feasible to implement in the already rigid industry. In addition, the way I was sending those emails was just way too unprofessional, and I wasn’t being relentless enough. I was only sending 7 emails a day, when I really should have been seeing at least 20.
So, I pivoted yet again into another project. This time, I talked with my TKS director, Brandon, and narrowed the scope of the project drastically. Instead of targeting the manufacturing process itself, I went after increasing demand to utilize the economics of scale, which would decrease material costs. The specific application I looked at was desalination. Right off the bat, I reached out to scholars for feedback/guidance on this idea but restructured my message to be more concise, specific, and overall more professional.
I won’t go too much into it (here's my article if you want to learn more), but aerogels are super porous, so they are great for absorbing salt ions. I thought that the current desalination methods were WAYYYYY too expensive, and so hypothesized that this material would provide a cheaper alternative. This was a wrong assumption.
I did a cost breakdown a few weeks into the project, and what awaited me was a cruel surprise. My method was 10x more expensive than the status quo. Another project down the drain :(
The failure point here was not doing a cost breakdown early. Even if the solution works, if it doesn’t have an economic incentive, it's not going to be implemented.
So, we arrive at my current project, which looks at extracting metal ions from plastic and using plastic aggregates in concrete to provide an economic incentive for companies to collect plastics from landfills.
I immediately did a cost breakdown, and it works, partially. With just the metal extraction alone, the model achieves profit in 16 years, and this is with a very generous assumption in the operational costs. I’m currently looking at the plastic aggregates in the concrete part of the project, and if I determine that it's technically feasible, then the first thing I’m doing is a cost breakdown.
Furthermore, I’ve already meant with two scholars just 2 weeks into the project due to more rigorous outreach and more professional messages that I learned from my mistakes with my first aerogel project.
In conjunction, I was also participating in a consulting opportunity for CAE, a simulation company, as well as an Earthshot competition.
In the consulting competition, known as PIE, our team did not place in the finals, which really bummed me out. However, it was still an incredible learning experience. I was able to learn how to do cost analysis, analyze a market, and even got the experience of conducting an in-person interview.
The main failure point came from picking an uninteresting and obvious solution. Our task was to propose a new industry that CAE could go into using their simulation tech. We proposed firefighting, which was a very basic and simple market.
So, when I had the earthshots a few weeks later, I made sure to pick a very niche and non-obvious problem with a unique solution. This came in the form of extracting metals from engine exhaust waste seen in ships to prevent ocean pollution. My team didn’t get into the finals, but we had a NEAR PERFECT score, and I was able to learn so much from this experience, such as understanding customer needs, governmental regulations in the business world, and cash flow projections.
make mistakes, learn from them, and reiterate.
Sure, from a conventional POV, my experiences aren’t considered “success.” But, at the end of the day, I’m still a student, and success doesn’t come in the form of winning, but growing. This past year, I’ve grown substantially as a person, both in my skills/abilities, as well as my personal mindsets and time management.
This growth will ultimately propel me to success later on in my life in bigger endeavors. Don’t get me wrong, conventional forms of success are still very important, it's just that right now, I shouldn’t be stressing about not achieving many of those awards that I wanted. It’s the right combination of both. Fail now, learn, and succeed in the future.
And I’m not being completely fair to myself either. I have seen external success. I recently got invited to speak at the Global Material Science Conference in Paris for my work with aerogels, got accepted into super cool summer opportunities, and even won first place in a DECA business competition.
At the end of the day, success isn’t black and white. Of course, it comes in the form of awards and competitions, but it also comes from within, and the personal growth that one finds.
True failure is complacency, and not growing as a person to achieve both internal as well as external success.
Stagnancy = failure
Did I achieve my goal of winning this competition? No. Okay. What did I do wrong? What lessons can I learn to make sure that I can do better next time? This is how you grow and succeed.
Look where I am today. I started 2021 as a timid guy scared to send an email to a professor, to a guy that's sending 20 emails a day to get validation on some really cool shit. Sure, I failed along the way, there are slumps in that projection graph. But, I keep getting back up and make sure the overall trajectory is still going up.
It’s all about growth. stop bitching or regretting about failure, and start learning from it.
