My Life in a Year: 2018 Recap
I'm compressing my year with pictures, thoughts, and videos, so I can look back at it later.
An aerial view of my year, suspended in time.
I wrote this for myself. We forget moments with time.
But I've been surprised by how much value posting publicly creates, so I'm also making it public.
2018 had lots of great things for me, and while I can't fit everything into this post, these are some things I don't want to forget, month by month.
Enero
My home is Cancun, Mexico, so I was there at the start of the year. Went to Tulum with my family. Hung out with the friends I've known since Kindergarten. Reflected for the new year.
The previous semester I took a Sociology class at Brown on "Knowledge Networks and Global Transformation". For our final paper, we could write essentially about anything, so I wrote about the major properties of a bitcoin-blockchain design.
While I was home I added some pictures, simplified, and posted it on Medium:
Mid-January I traveled to San Francisco. I was lucky to be invited to the Navtalent Summit: a couple of days with amazing people about to graduate from college that Navtalent , an amazing talent organization, identified were good potential startup founders. It was about 12 of us living in a house and attending back-to-back talks with famous Silicon Valley founders, CEOs, and VCs. It was fantastic.
When I was buying my ticket from Cancun to San Francisco, the cheapest one had a connection with Denver, with a 10 hour stop. It was small enough that I thought it would fun to get that flight, so I could explore Denver for a day. It was a nice decision.
From San Francisco, I flew to Hawaii with my friend Cliff.
We drove all around the Big Island — started at the North of the island and got to the Southernmost point of Hawaii — and the US
Stunning, tall cliffs. We jumped.
We went on an expedition to find lava.
We couldn't get too close to the lava with a car, so we did a long and fun bike ride to get to the active Volcano's area.
Then a much longer walk. Everywhere we looked was the Apocalypse.
We followed some helicopters and after 4 hours of walking under the sun and above hot, dry lava, we found liquid lava:
We saw an old man sitting by himself, looking at the sunset in a way that made me ask Cliff "I wonder what he's thinking".
We wondered for a while, then we asked him.
"It's nice to be free. To be outside of prison".
There was one waterfall we saw from the distance. According to the locals and Google, there is no trail to get there.
So we ventured into the jungle and followed a river we found. After 2 hours of hiking and swimming upstream, we got to this beauty. 442m (1,450 feet) tall, Hiilawe Waterfall:
Other highlights of the trip included going to thermal waters, volcanic beaches, and eating delicious Hawaiian and Japanese food in Honolulu.
One night, we drove up to the tallest mountain in the world ( cool fact we learned — this is true only if Mauna Kea's height is measured from its oceanic base).
There was a camp with telescopes — nights in Hawaii were already full of stars, but this was on another level. We slept in our car overnight and it was pretty cold, but worth it for the early morning:
Then I went back to school. It was my last semester at Brown (paradise).
I "shopped classes" (period of time just like Ice Cream tasting. You can taste as many ice creams as you want, and after that, you decide which ones you want to take).
Febrero
I ended up taking:
Histories of the Future: what futures have humans tried to predict? And how have resultss changed over history? Fascinating class. Lots of readings and insightful conversations.
Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies Grad CS Seminar: we went through a broad overview of many blockchains and cryptocurrencies — basically read and analyzed like a ton of whitepapers, presented, and discussed.
Computer Utopias (class at RISD ) : favorite class I've ever taken. There was no syllabus, it was a 5-hour-long class once a week, it was project-based, and the professor was self-proclaimed crazy (I Think he's incredible).
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" and "what future do we want to create" approximate the topic of the class. We learned about Computing History and the bleeding edge of technology and its cultural possibilities. We played with VR Headsets. Assignments from the class included "write down 100 new, different use cases for a camera" and "create a new type of computer".
Operations Research: Probabilistic Models (Applied Math): last class I had to take to complete my Computer Science and Applied Math degree.
Computer Utopias started mid-February, so after about two months into the semester, I decided to drop the Histories of the Future class so I could have more time with friends my last semester at Brown (Senior Spring!), and the other things I Like doing apart from classes. Some of them below.
Continued doing Junto :
At the beginning of my senior year, I had several amazing 1-on-1 conversations with new friends and old friends. I wanted to introduce them, but I also wanted to be part of the conversations that would happen when they met, since my Conversations with each of them were sooo good. So I messaged a group of ~10 and invited them all to my living room so we could all talk.
At the time I was also listening to a book called The Startup of You, where Reid Hoffman talks about Ben Franklin's Junto , where a group of Ben Franklin's intellectual friends met every week.
We had such a great time the first time that we decided to meet every week. The group kept growing and very quickly my living room couldn't fit more people.
For the rest of the year, we met every Saturday at 6pm.
We sat down, got comfortable, and talked about anything we thought interesting: life, books, love, ideas, questions, and lots of tangents.
Even after a bunch of us graduated, the group has kept gathering until today. New friends joined. When I visit Brown I know I can go to a Junto on Saturdays :).
We only have one rule: a single thread of conversation (only one person talking at a time).
For the previous two years at Brown, I was also a part of Rough Draft Ventures , and this was my last semester. I traveled to Boston on Mondays and had soooo much fun — got to learn from the other side of entrepreneurship — Venture Capital. I loved thinking about all aspects of the companies pitching to us — and ultimately deciding whether to back them or just give them feedback.
Learned immensely from all the other super smart friends sitting around the table and all the student entrepreneurs that came to pitch.
Hack@Brown was also in February. I have been a participant, an organizer, and a coding mentor, and thanks to Rough Draft, I even got to be a judge!
This semester I helped start the Blockchain@Brown club, where we met every week, invited some speakers, and hosted a conference.
I also continued being a Peer Entrepreneur in Residence for Brown's Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship. I held office hours every week, helping students that were starting their own startups or were just generally curious about entrepreneurship. There was a group of the same freshmen that came to My office hours every week and it was awesome.
Crazy me, I was also designing and building an app as a freelance project for a company my best friend from Mexico is starting. They needed an iOS and an Android app. I already knew iOS well but knew nothing about making Android apps. Since the app would be the same for both platforms, I decided to learn React Native so it could work on both iOS and Android with the same code (and also because React Native looked pretty cool). Also worked on the backend (processing Mexican payments & the database). This project continued until August 😱, before I handed it off to a Mexican agency so they could maintain the code/app as my friend’s startup launches.
In February, Anna (my girlfriend) and I celebrated our first year together with a Sunday in Newport.
Marzo
Buxton (the International House/community/family I’m a part of) hosted its “formal” on March 1st.
Went to Providence’s Paintbar with Anna. Didn’t think anyone apart from us would appreciate the paintings but I was highly surprised in September.
I got a Snap from a friend showing that the people who moved into my apartment used them as wall decor! We hadn’t even hung them.
Later in March, I traveled with my friends to Tulum for Spring Break.
Abril
Buxton hosted its annual Spring Weekend patio party and it was legendary (you don’t see these scale of parties at Brown). Hopefully, the community continues.
Something I love is making music playlists. Over the course of the semester, people came up to me saying they really liked them. Sometimes even four people per night! Some of the crowd favorites include Buxton Patio Vibes, Zucchini, Brain Smoothie, Saffrón, and Gatorade.
I used to publish my playlists on 8tracks, where I got to over 70,000 fans, several “platinum” and “gold” 8tracks playlist status and lots of comments from random people around the world:
Unfortunately, 8tracks almost doesn’t work anymore / is doing pretty bad as a platform. So mid-2017 I switched to Spotify.
In 2018 I “released” around 30 playlists. This is my profile if you want to taste some — there are more than 60 flavors.
Mayo
Got away in a Getaway cabin in New Hampshire.
Went to dinners, karaokes, the RISD beach, and roadtrips with friends.
Graduated.
Couldn’t be more grateful for my time at Brown. Absolutely loved it. Learned and grew incredibly, especially through Brown EP (Entrepreneurship), Startup@Brown, Hack@Brown, and the Brown CS Department (which didn’t show up much in pictures this last semester but were huge parts of my Brown experience).
Junio
I did not apply to jobs because I knew I wanted to start a startup and travel for some time.
The timing could not have been more perfect when my friend Max messaged me at the beginning of June about Co-Founding a company with him. A great team is the most important ingredient for starting a startup, and I knew we’d be an incredible team. I couldn’t be luckier.
The initial idea, which Max was already playing with, was a platform to help people find mentors for anything they want to learn. Or earn money being a mentor.
Mid-June I went to Lake Tahoe for Interact — an incredible community of technologists with a mission for positive social impact.
After Interact, I met Anna for a couple of days in SF.
Then I went home :).
Julio
For a couple of years, I had heard from many friends and people I look up to that they highly value that medicine that expands your consciousness. In July I read a couple of books (best one was How to Change Your Mind), listened to a lot of podcasts, had several conversations, read a ton of blogs, and watched a ton of videos about it. My mind passed the tipping point of “giving it a try”. I had some nice intentions and prepared well. It was an unbelievable + great experience.
Early July I went to Savannah, Georgia and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with my family.
Early-mid July I packed one backpack and traveled to Southeast Asia.
First stop was Bali.
My sister was doing a volunteer program teaching English to kids in Bali, so we hung out some mornings (school was in the afternoon) and during the weekends. Made awesome friends — stole them from my sister.
Most afternoons I just grabbed my motorbike and explored the island by myself.
More pics on my Instagram. I knew there were going to be incredible views on this trip, so I thought it would be good to “invest” in a drone — all those influencers seem to be making lots of money and getting tons of discounts anywhere they travel.
Made a recap video of my Bali trip through the lens of the drone:
Next stop was Thailand. My friend Naryan joined me. We visited Bangkok, Phuket, the Phi Phi Islands, and the Krabi Province.
Then I went to Cambodia by myself. Angkor Wat (biggest religious monument in the world — an expansive temple complex) was amazing.
My tour guide not only knew all the history of the place. He also knew all the cool spots for pictures.
Agosto
In August I went back home.
Anna came to visit!
Mid-August, when I got my Visa, I flew to SF. Slept in Max’s couch for a couple of weeks while I found an apartment nearby — and while we got funding for our startup.
Ended up moving in the same building. Perfect because we work in our building’s business center — our “office”:
Septiembre
We had a new idea for the startup (which ended up being called Symbol, more below) and also launched hundreds of new categories on Openmind, allowing students to find mentors for over 400 different subjects.
My mom signed up for a three-day retreat led by Dr. Deanna Minich in Seattle and she invited me to come with her (was during the weekend). The retreat was about FLOW, FIRE, health, and our inner artists — which sounded super cool.
I accepted my mom’s invitation and got my plane ticket. But last-minute my mom ended up not being able to go.
I found myself surrounded by around 30 beautiful women in their 50s. It was surreal. Most of them had lived more than twice as much as me and there were no other males.
It was a fantastic experience and I learned a lot from serene, wise mothers — now friends.
Had a lot of fun crafting the environment in my room. Got a floor chair, a super cool Japanese tree, black-out curtains, set up Alexa with the light, an AR-enabled artwork, wrote a motto that I’m currently digging on a blackboard and made sure that books were visible.
It wasn’t until late October that I got the teepee and officially ended the interior design process of my room.
In September, I started my Re Human project.
The project: learn 15 different things at the same time.
To tackle the complexity of keeping track and actually acting on all the areas, I’ve been using a system of daily, continuous, and weekly habits:
My co-founder Max showed me the value of documenting the learning process with his awesome Month to Master project, so I decided to also document my process. This is the Medium publication where I’ve shared every day of the process, and reflections each week.
I got a piano keyboard, a soccer ball, an iPad for digital drawing, and got to work.
I soon realized how awesome Art is, and that I hadn’t developed my artistic self much throughout my life. For a long time, I had four main life pillars in my mind: Mental, Physical, Spiritual, Social. Thanks to this concept, I’ve been conscious of not neglecting any and improving in these main dimensions.
I had thought Art could fit into one of them. But it clearly wasn’t being paid attention. So I added Art as a new pillar:
Within 2 weeks, I was already doing things I had been wanting to do all my life (or at least for a long time):
- one-handed pull-ups (without holding the other arm)
- the around the world soccer trick
Videos of both in my @re.human instagram.
And I started being consistent (not missing a single day) with meditation, writing, reading & taking notes on books, etc.
Started sending a personal weekly newsletter, a present 🎁 of the best content from the Internet I’ve ever found:
I’ve continued with this new way of life until today (as I’m writing this).
Octubre
I’ve been learning piano through Flowkey. It’s great because I get instantaneous feedback on whether I’m playing the right keys, they have a lot of songs in their library, and I can see where to put my fingers — like guitar hero.
By October, I had gone through all of their beginner piano lessons (theory and exercises) and learned a couple of their beginner intro songs. Then I started learning La La Land’s Mia & Sebastian’s theme.
With writing, I finally felt comfortable hitting the publish button — and still surprised by all the writing I’ve been doing.
I also started feeling more comfortable with Music Production, and published snippets of some songs I had been working on to Soundcloud:
In October we also launched the new idea we had — Symbol. It came from a need to assess the thousands of people that wanted to be mentors and the realization that one of the biggest problems with online education nowadays is not the content, but the signal.
Symbol was a way to create a beautiful portfolio of your work, tag it with skills, and through a peer-review process, be able to demonstrate your expertise in any skill you wanted — in a way that other people could trust and understand quickly. We built a really cool algorithm after reading tons of CS scientific papers and innovating on top of them.
The vision is to replace the old, noisy, and non-meritocratic ways of proving your skills, like degrees, job titles, and years of experience. Symbol is an evolving credential that can make opportunity universal and create a new incentive structure for society to incentivize learning, growth, and acting on it.
We loved the vision but quickly learned that people had a hard time finding the motivation to write down case studies of their work.
In October, I visited Brown for five days to see how people reacted to Symbol (more valuable than only talking to users). It was clear that people needed a big motivation, like finding a job, so we immediately shifted the focus towards helping people get jobs (instead of just ‘making a portfolio’).
While at Brown, I went to Junto :), practiced piano on real pianos, and continued doing all the Re Human activities and working on Symbol.
My co-founder Max stayed in SF to talk to companies (now that the focus was on getting people jobs). That became our focus the rest of October and November (and re-designing/building).
I was astounded by how people perceived Sadhguru — it was like witnessing a Buddha or a Jesus walking through crowds (people cried of joy and wanted to touch him).
Sadhguru taught us a pretty cool set of breathing exercises / Kriya I’ve kept doing since then.
These exercises improved my Meditation practice by a lot — experientially. Now I really look forward to my 20min meditation, something I saw as some sort of chore before.
In November it was also the first time that I went to an Intermediate Salsa Dancing class.
I also got the human flag — able to hold it for 15 seconds. My friend Cliff was surprised by the progress of my fitness and took a picture. Before Re Human I didn’t train daily — it was like an hour, 3 to 4 times per week. I switched to 20mins every day and saw great results.
Late-November I also got handstands — able to hold them for 10 seconds.
At this point I had also drawn some cool things I was finally proud of:
Went to San Diego to spend Thanksgiving with Anna and her family.
Launched the new version of Symbol, and immediately felt we had something good. We got 500 user sign-ups pretty fast.
Again, learned a ton from the launch, so as of now (mid-Jan 2019) we just started working on a new pivot.
Also met with the founders of Notion, a product I really like, and went to lunch with their whole team. It was great.
Diciembre
In December we continued to work with students and companies, making matches.
After being able to hold my handstands, within 4 days I was able to get up to 3 consecutive handstand push-ups (something that seemed so incredibly out of reach just a couple of months before! and even felt like it would be a long time from handstands). (link to instagram). Goes to show how some things are hard to predict.
In December I also started getting the La La Land song from memory.
I also felt more comfortable with Graphic Design, slowly closing the gap between my taste and my abilities.
Mid-December, went to a weekend retreat in the Redwoods by Interact (the awesome community of technologists/artists/entrepreneurs).
Late-December flew back home to Cancun. Spent time with family and friends.
Was featured in my Youtuber brother’s channel in a couple of videos, like one where he ignored us for 24 hours.
For New Years, went to the Smokey Mountains with my family. The plan was to snowboard, but it turned out there wasn’t enough snow 😂. Was still a great place for hiking and relaxing with family.
With the VR-skills I had been learning, I made a VR library of my favorite books from 2018. Averaged around 2 books per week and these were the ones I liked most / recommend. Link here (no VR headset needed).
On Dec 29, I posted an article on how I reflect for the new year and throughout the year(my top 3 exercises):
It quickly became my most popular article — both in views and in reception. Got tons of messages and comments from friends and people I hadn't interacted with in a long time saying they found it super valuable :). And somehow, two days after Posting, the best-selling author of The Third Door , Alex Banayan, started following me on Instagram.
Got messages even from people I did not know:
What's Next in 2019?
In 2019, I plan to continue spending most of my time working on the startup with Max, and continuing with my Re Human project.
Not trying to predict things, just focusing on the things I can control — process and intentions, with courage, consciousness, and freedom.
If you'd like to know when I publish posts like these, sign up for my present 🎁 newsletter . Join me on my journey on Medium and on my @re.human I nstagram.
