Back in Black
In the last few weeks, my life has changed in ways I couldn't have even imagined. Here's what happens next.
I guess I'll start with a brief precedence of changes in my personal life that set the stage for all these changes and my realization of what truly matters.
I suppose the first one would be my strengthened belief in God. I've always played with the idea and I've even considered ideas of various religions, but it doesn't really make sense to me that any group is "right" in contrast to the other ones. I went from extremely religious and figuring out how I'll follow all the rules to focusing on intention. The intent behind actions is what truly matters, and I guess that means to do good in this world and to minimize harm. In addition to that, to remember that god is the one who created us and to expand science which is how we understand how we interact with this world. A part of me argues to follow religious texts very closely but I suppose that even "strict" interpretations hold high degrees of inaccuracy I'm not yet exposed to. I suppose if we return to first principles thinking, its all about intention.
Even if I wasn't divinely ordained to do good in this world, my teacher frequently says that the value of life is to "submit to a cause greater than yourself." And to be honest, I believe that holds the greatest satisfaction of all. All you have to do is look at the issues that billionaires face in spite of all their wealth to understand that happiness isn't derived from indulgement. I suppose that's what part of "self-actualization" actually means.
Seemingly as a consequence of my belief in God, I got a girlfriend. This change was not one that I was expecting at all, much less one that I was expecting in the way we got together, but I am highly confident that we align really well together and we will be able to support each other in the long run. I guess that's what intent means, doesn't it? To support others? And now I'm getting love back for my actions.
During the formation of our relationship and especially while building it now, I've learned to openly face and struggle with emotions. Before I entered this relationship, I tended to perceive things from an entirely logical point of view and yes, frequently that did involve emotions especially when understanding why a customer or a friend may feel a certain way, I learned to experience emotions and understand how I can live with them without putting them under chains.
In fact, one of the biggest shifts I've noticed is that although my productivity is definitely maximized by working after school, I've shifted the bulk of my work to the mornings and start my work at 4:40 AM each day so I can talk to her after the day's toil is over. The intensity of my work has also decreased; rather than trying to do everything and anything, I'm focused now on the big picture changes that will actually move aquarc or codeabode forward. And at this point in time, I think that just means marketing. We definitely struggle from a lack of marketing.
For the entirety of the last two weeks, my productivity has decreased to almost zero, but that's not to say that it stopped; rather, I feel as if I am readjusting to focus on what truly matters to me.
And as for what truly matters to me, its a sense, an emotion that I felt after I taught my class this morning: I really like to watch someone grow, struggle and learn and support them along their journey. I want to live long enough to see "the student [become] the master."
My inability to do so in both my iniatives has caused me to feel alienated from my work, which is a likely cause of not getting much work done in the past week at all. What's the point of it doesn't help anyone in the long run? I guess its time to work on the aspects of aquarc that will be the most fruitful.
Upon completing the Google GenAI Course, I made a video, a blog post, and integrated AI features into my website. Our user count spiked and we even hit the ratelimit for the AI tool. After that, the users slowly decreased and aquarc crashed from its all time high of 150 users/week to 1 user/week. That's also in part due to AP season, but the complete crash in user count has taught me something about the importance of retention.
This problem doesn't exist so much in codeabode because my teaching frequently guides my students to the right answer and interests them in working on projects they are interested in. The problem is that this teaching can't be automated as easily as aquarc because I give the student the motivation to keep learning.
And so I hit upon the primary problem of self paced learning: people lose motivation. It's not like I didn't know this truth before, but rather it needed reinforcement. As I looked for problems when testing the aquarc site on users, I found that it is quite usable even without the AI features but people lack the motivation to study long term. I face this problem less now, but not everyone is going to read Atomic Habits, I guess.
I suppose that's why my friend's site MonkeyGG2 took off so easily: because it was easy to play the game whenever you want. That definitely isn't the case here, no one just casually starts SAT studying (I hope).
I guess our previous idea to build a blog isn't as useful once we put it into context. After talking to multiple people, here's what I came up for what really helps:
- Videos. Just a bunch of YouTube shorts walking people through problems, posted consistently and on a regular basis. Makes it real easy to start looking at SAT content for people that are right on the fence. Besides, growing with YouTube is an interesting challenge to take on anyway.
- Gamification. Analytics and AI features are great and all, but the biggest problem now is keeping people motivated once they start using our site. Streaks, maybe a currency, points for referring users, points for getting questions right (on the second guess!) are all incentives that make it easy to continue using our site. I think a 10 minutes a day streak is the easiest to start off with.
- Adaptive testing. I'm not sure what approach is going to work, but I guess I can try tagging questions, generating time per question based on my own practice sessions (using an LLM) and other eccentric methods to derive relationships in a really long Kaggle Notebook. I guess that's what "research" means. I'll start off with a simple weights-only random question selector that uses the average time per questions to generate question sets. And maybe completing a set and practicing in unlimited mode for 5 minutes a day is enough to maintain your "streak." Gamification at its finest.
As a huge fan of Montessori-style education, self-paced teaching IS the answer. Materials are accessible anywhere but it takes a dedicated person to go through and find things they need to learn. Not even I am dedicated enough to do that for the SAT. It's more efficient only as long as the student remains focused. That's my job now.
I guess now I have to answer the fundamental question: What happens this summer? I didn't get into any NASA internships, nor the BofA leadership program and I'm not going anywhere. I can definitely build some work-life balance but get the days work done in an effective manner. I guess its my time to start recording videos (like COVID), perhaps implementing gamification features because it is summer, and doing more research on adaptive testing.
Not exactly the kind of summer I'm looking forward to, but it's time to submit myself to a cause greater than myself.
"When the teacher is ready, the student appears."
Tags: reflection, growth, leadership