Hey everyone, welcome back to my AlphaX journey. If this is your first time reading my blogs, I encourage you to read my previous ones to better understand what AlphaX is and the Olympic Mindset that comes along with it (also I spent a lot of time on them so please 🥺).
Also just note that the title of this blog is kind of like a play on words — you will see later on in this blog.
Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon
What the heck is a Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon?
For those of you that have no idea what this is, it’s essentially the process of diving deep into a topic of your choice. This involves conducting research beyond the surface level. Additionally, the sources that you use DOES NOT MATTER. You could watch YouTube videos, read articles, books, anything really. Furthermore, for AlphaX purposes, we are also required to develop a Spiky Point of View (I’m going to just use POV from now on since Point of View is a lot of letters) to go along with our Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon.
I’m guessing you also have no idea what a Spiky POV is, so I’ll explain it too. Essentially, it is a unique perspective about your topic that is somewhat controversial (not for the sake of being controversial) that you can back up with evidence from your research. This allows one to stand out, which is very helpful when trying to build something and be noticed.
Workshop
This week, I started my Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon. On Monday, I had my weekly AlphaX workshop. During this workshop, we went over what a Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon is (pretty much the first two paragraphs of this blog), how to distinguish between accurate and not accurate websites (mostly common sense — just comparing the information with common knowledge or with other websites on the same topic), and also, we went over a few tools to help with research (One great website is Consensus).
Progress
Right after the workshop, I had to think about what topic I should do my Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon on. I thought that an idea would come to me after a few hours. However, I was very wrong. At this point, it was already Tuesday night— I had to start with something. For me, the only things I knew I was interested in (at the beginning of this week) was 3D modeling and game development (some more things but this is most of it :/). However, I didn’t really want to do something on those, since I already do those things normally (I want to try something new).
Coming up with ideas is really hard sometimes. This time, it felt like I was just staring into space, and wasting time because I couldn’t think of anything. After a while of this, I realized that it might be best if I try something else to think of an idea. So, I went to Google and YouTube. I looked up “different fields”. However, this did not help that much. Then, I went on YouTube and started watching some videos to see if I would find anything I was interested in. At first, I wasn’t having much luck. UNTIL videos about astronomy started popping up. This made me remember that ever since I was little, I always found astronomy to be somewhat cool, so I went with that idea (if you are wondering why this blog is titled this way, it’s because I am doing my Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon on the topic of space).
I started with doing some light research every night, since I was being bombarded with homework this week. Most of this consisted of YouTube videos. And the more I watched, the more I realized that I was actually interested in this. By Friday, I realized that I probably should niche down my idea to be more specific. I decided that I was most interested in videos about black holes and planets, so, from then on, I ended up watching a decent number of videos and taking notes on them (to help me develop a Spiky POV, which I am still currently working on). I also found myself reading some research papers about this.
This continued on until Sunday, which is also today. As of writing this blog, I am still doing research on my topic, since I was busy studying and doing homework on Friday and Saturday (I only got to do a little bit of research on those days).
Plan
Although I am still doing research, within the next day, I plan on finishing all of my research for this Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon and coming up with my Spiky POV. It may not seem like I did that much this week, but I have been doing a lot of research.
Olympic Mindset
This week, I continued to strengthen my Olympic Mindset with a TedTalk by Aja Evans. This main takeaway from this video for me was perseverance — this would have been really helpful for me last week.
Although I didn’t face as many challenges this week as I did last week, perseverance is always EXTREMELY important (and I think I touched on this in my first two blogs too — but that just shows how important perseverance is).
One of the largest reasons people fail in whatever they are trying to achieve is because they give up after facing a large problem. However, this is probably the worst thing one can do, since one can’t just expect to do well without facing challenges. One can only improve if they face these challenges. A key difference between those who end up succeeding and those who don’t is the willingness to overcome obstacles. After all, tough times create strong men (and all other genders too!).
I will continue to apply this throughout my AlphaX journey, and even throughout the rest of my life. I promise that I will try my best and keep working through every problem I face, rather than giving up. Especially if I ever feel like I did last week (hopeless at a certain point — you should read the previous one if you haven’t already), I will overcome that feeling and that problem like I did last week. And hopefully, to whoever is reading this, you will do the same.