Spending My First Months @ Queens | Ahnaaf's 23rd Update | December 2023
Started building in carbon capture, living a new life at university, and training in Muay Thai.
Written in between my Chemistry and Engineering Graphics final exams.
These past 6 months have been a good mix of being fun and rewarding. I’m starting to deeply understand what I like/dislike, how I should carry myself, and who I want to be around. Obviously, I’m young and these values will evolve, but I feel that I’m getting closer to my personal truths and values.
For example, everything that I’m currently doing is driven by intrinsic motivation, unlike in high school where I was constantly checking somebody else’s boxes. I refuse to join the most prestigious design team at my university so I can have a higher chance to work at Lockheed Martin. Not because I’m anti-institution, or find the job ethically inconvenient, but because I don’t like blowing shit up.
I want to play my own games, leverage my own advantages, and chase my own definition of success! Saying that is quite easy, but actually doing that and being idiosyncratic at each turn is incredibly difficult for me.
It’s like riding a bike in Detroit, it’s better for your health and it’s more scenic (although there’s not much to see in Detroit), but there’s a car dealership every other block and there’s no bike lanes or even sidewalks. It seems like the entire world around you is optimized for one specific way of life that you don’t want to live. Of course, you can still “bike in Detroit,’ but there’s a lot of pressure to get a car.1
So far, these past 6 months have mostly been about continuing to bike daily and finding a community of other people who share the same principles.
Slowly but surely, I’m starting to live my life by my design; which I think is my happiest, and most fulfilled one.
A quick snapshot of my life since May 2023:
Started training in Muay Thai.
Joined the summer cohort for Ari Global’s “next biggest thing” program.
Built a research pitch for a profitable form of carbon capture.
Started my undergrad in Mechatronics Engineering @ Queen’s University!
Joined a carbon capture design team, led by Dr. Cao Thang Dinh.
Joined ID8, which is a node of Socratica. Basically a community of those “bikers” I was talking about earlier.
Wrote ~12 exams already (I forgot how many I wrote!)
If you're new to my update, welcome!
I'm an 18 y/o climate-tech builder and mechatronics student exploring my curiosity. In the past, I’ve interned at Muse developing their sleep neurofeedback algorithms, co-founded a neurotech x web3 startup, and spoken at tech conferences around the world.
Currently, I’m testing out different hypotheses in the carbon valorization space and understanding how to make carbon capture profitable.
If you want to stick along with me, you’d get monthly(ish) updates from me about my progress in carbon capture or any other insights that I have as I build my career.
In July, I started my Muay Thai journey.
I’ve always been a chubbier kid growing up, and playing sports was never my thing. Sure, I played basketball with my friends in high school but I was never good enough to make it onto a team.
As I wasn’t playing sports, to stay active throughout the school year I would weightlift at my local gym. However, that got boring fast as I didn’t care much about lifting heavier weights just for the sake of the number going up. I wanted a reason to lift that was more explicit than feel-good hormones, or aesthetics. So this past summer when I found out there was a Muay Thai gym near me, I wanted to give it a shot.
Looking back, the way we went about joining the gym was pretty goofy. One day I just dragged my friend with me to this gym and we kinda stood there till a coach approached us asking us who we were.
Long story short, I joined this gym and fell in love with Muay Thai. I got my ass whooped every day and I loved every second of it. Since then, it’s been a cornerstone of my day. Whenever I felt terrible, the solution was almost always to go train.
It’s hard to articulate why I love Thai boxing so much if you don’t train in any combat sports yourself. First off, there’s this incredible rush when sparring or perfecting a technique after hours of practice. There’s also a great sense of camaraderie amongst everyone in the gym as it feels like everyone is invested in your progress and they want you to level up. While the people there were competitive, the goal of the competition was to lift you up and show you how you could improve, rather than kick you down into mediocrity.
But by far, my favourite part about Muay Thai is that it’s an individual sport. You can directly see how much you are improving day-by-day, week-by-week, and month-by-month. There’s no team to blame, no refs to get pissed at. If you lost, it’s just because the opponent was better/stronger than you and that’s all there is to it.
By training more, I realized how poor my health was as Muay Thai magnified each of my weaknesses during sparring. Having weak hips will weaken your kicks, being stiff/rigid doesn’t let you kick high, and having bad cardio doesn't let you survive more than 4 rounds of sparring.
I’m 18 right now, and my goal is to fight middleweight when I’m 20.2
With that in mind, I have a reason to work out, stretch in the morning, eat healthy, and lift weights. It’s because I want to fight, and I need to be in the best shape to do so.3
The time will pass anyway, so I might as well take it to become my best self in all aspects.
By the way, if you’re ever in the Kingston/Toronto area and you would like to spar, hit me up! I’d be happy to train with you and get lunch afterwards.4
In August, I was building the next biggest thing in climate tech with Ari Global.
During the first 2 weeks of August, I joined Ari Global’s “next biggest thing in climate tech” program where we did 10 research sprints across different verticals in climate tech. The program culminated in yet another research sprint where the end goal was to pitch the next biggest thing in climate tech to different judges in VC and industry.
My final pitch was on carbon valorization, and how we could make carbon capture profitable. Overall, I’m really happy with the project quality for the time that we had. Those hours spent in Ari Global are worth 3 hours spent alone.
I’ve already written a longer-form reflection on my time there and how my life looked during the program above so I won’t rewrite the same content here.
To summarize the reflection:
During this time, I figured out all the components of my happiness equation and maximized them: interesting work, family time, social time, cool & ambitious people, physical activity, and very little clutter.
In September, I joined QueensU as a Mechatronics Engineering Undergrad.
About a year ago now, I had a call with Anush (ex-cofounder) a couple months or so after we sunset NeuraDAO. At that point, he had just won a prize at an international science fair for his work in neuromorphic computing and we had a lot to jam about.
He told me about a conversation that he had with a CEO who owned a multi-million dollar company and was simultaneously a professor at a top engineering school in Canada. When Anush asked him why he was still a professor when he could’ve retired years ago, I’ll never forget what Anush told me he said.
“Most people go to university for all the wrong reasons. 95% of people go because they’re chasing a high-earning job, their parents want them to go, or they’re just coasting and doing whatever society tells them to do. However, the remaining 5% of students who truly deserve, and want to be at university are the most interesting, curious, and ambitious people you’ll ever meet. Those 5% of students are the reason that I’m still a professor.”
—The CEO/Professor that Anush met.
Anyone who knows me knows I have no intention of being bucketed with those 95%. Not that there’s anything wrong with those people, that’s just not me. When I came to Queen’s, I resolved that I would do everything in my power to become the most interesting, curious, and ambitious version of myself. If I wasn’t becoming a part of those 5%, I told myself that I would drop out.
After being at Queen’s for about 3 months now I’ve learned a lot about the culture here and how it differs from other Canadian schools. To state the obvious, Queen’s isn’t a school where people go to build side-projects like people would at other schools. It’s also a lot less internally competitive compared to the other top schools in the country.
What’s not obvious is that the people building side projects have a strong community and are building in every field; not just in engineering but in the arts as well. The vibe here is structured so that it’s about lifting each other as your engineering discipline is guaranteed at Queen’s and internships are mainly sourced from cold outreaching and not their Co-op board. There’s no real reason to compete against your classmates unless you’re an asshole (for which the rest of the world doesn’t have a solution for that problem). There’s a lot more to the culture here, but in short, everyone around you genuinely cares about you and wants to help you succeed (sometimes in ways that you don’t notice).
Being a part of that culture has made my university life a lot more interesting and the transition to living alone a lot smoother. I’m having a stupid amount of fun at Queen’s, even when things don’t go right. I’ve had teammates for my design projects drop out of the program, got some terrible grades (by high school standards), and ate some pretty shitty food. But I still love my time here and wouldn’t change anything about it.
Of course, I’m still expanding my ambitions and curiosity through the resources on campus. What that looks like week to week is implementing new habits that help me improve 1% each day.
Something that I’ve been doing recently is borrowing a new book from the campus library every week or two. Every day I pick a new book to take along with me based on how I’m feeling. So far it’s been really fun picking up new books and new perspectives along with it. Right now I’m reading these books:
Shoe Dog - Phil Knight
That Will Never Work - Marc Randolph
Pimp - Iceberg Slim
The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Alex Haley
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx
Zero to One - Peter Thiel
Technological Slavery - Ted Kaczynski
I picked up most of these books on a whim, or because I read something about the author and wanted to read more about their story.5
If you have any book recommendations, send them my way!
I’ve also been more intentional about my health by tracking my calories while consistently working out.6 Currently, my goal is to get my body fat down from 22% to 12% in 12 months. That’s pretty tough to do, I’m not gonna lie I have no idea if that’s possible while at school but I’m still enjoying the process regardless of the results that it brings. Having friends who recently went through a weight loss journey has been a major boost in confidence and inspiration as well. They’ve shared with me their stories of cutting fat and what their journey was like so I know what to expect and so that I know that it’s entirely possible. If these guys can do it just by staying consistent and being patient, then I can do it too.
A couple of weeks into the first semester, I decided to revisit Velocity with a friend.
Back when I was in TKS, there was this accelerated program within it called Velocity where you would have additional weekly requirements to double down on becoming the best version of yourself and force yourself to make progress. Each week would have a different theme based on a life principle or philosophy as well as a notable person to learn about. The idea was that by learning about how successful people learn and think, we would be able to cultivate that success ourselves.
However when I was 15, a lot of those principles didn’t sink in as well as I would’ve liked and I wanted to revisit them. Not for nostalgia, but as a reminder for the type of person that I want to be while at university. The issue though is that Velocity isn’t a single-player game, you need at least 1 other person (preferably a total of 4 people but whatever) to keep yourself accountable and to talk about the mindsets with. So over lunch at a diner on campus, I pitched the idea to my friend Ethan and gave him the whole spiel of TKS, Velocity, self-improvement, and all that. To my surprise, he resonated with the concepts that I was talking about and he was pretty much all-in.
After a couple of weeks of Velocity, it’s been eye-opening to see what I’ve internalized subconsciously and what has slipped my mind recently. For example, I’ve internalized the idea of being a polymath and why that’s so valuable to me. That’s actually why I’m in mechatronics engineering and not in computer science as I value being able to have the tools to solve any problem. However, I completely stopped celebrating others while at school as I was overthinking the optics of it (which is so high school of me).
It’s also been interesting to see how some content has resonated far more with me at 18 than when I first listened to it at 15. The first week of Velocity has a famous podcast with Naval Ravikant on The Knowledge Project where he talks about his meaning of life and how he developed his reading habits. Throughout the podcast, I realized that incredibly smart people just read a lot and that Naval is one of those people. At 15, that flew over my head, but at 18 I listened to this podcast and immediately went to my library to borrow several books; hence the new reading habit I talked about above.
In later weeks I listened to a podcast with Tom Bilyeu and Vusi Thembekwayo where they talk about how you can hold yourself back by reinforcing the identity that society gives you. Vusi hit me with some hard lines like “Your excuses are valid, but you’re still not making progress,” and “Which one will you have? Emotion, or progress?”. There’s no stronger pre-workout than Vusi’s words echoing through my head every time I don’t want to work out or study.7 But at 15, when I first listened to the podcast, the lessons that Vusi was talking about just didn’t stick as I didn’t see where those lessons applied to my life (even though they did at the time) and what I could do to grow.
As a side note, taking notes when listening to podcasts even if they’re minimal is incredibly helpful for your future self as you remind yourself of values that you want to keep or change over time. Michael said it best, normally students take notes for an upcoming exam, but it’s rare for people to take notes for their future selves so they can level up.
In November, I joined ID8 and met a really dope community of builders
ID8 is a branch of Socratica at Queen’s which is a weekly co-working space where people work on their passion projects and have a brunch or supper thing afterwards. It’s a lot of fun and has been something that I look forward to each Sunday.
Having a space on campus to build passion projects was the last thing that I was missing from my life back home so in the coming updates I’ll have more technical progress and not just life updates.
What’s next for me?
At the time of writing, I’m procrastinating studying for my Engineering Graphics exam because I don’t want to draw parts anymore. After exams I’ll be more free I think to write on some more interesting topics like Carbon Conversion and maybe even some electrochemistry. Be on the lookout for technical blogs on my other Substack and for whatever new builds I’m cooking up.
I’ll also be reading a lot throughout the winter break and maybe publishing a review/reflection blog on one of the books that I read.
See you next update!
—AK
There’s nothing wrong with driving a car, I just don’t want to. Also, sorry for the people that live in Detroit! The city caught a stray ngl but man the unsustainable and outdated infrastructure there makes me want to pull my hair out.
I just met a coach who’s been training for 18 years and is incredibly skilled. I’m not sure if I can reach his level, but I can sure try. It’s crazy to me that this guy has been training since I was born.
I didn’t go over this goal with my mom yet. I have no idea how on board she will be with this.
That might be the first time I’ve asked to fight one of my readers. It’s a bit unorthodox, but the offer still stands though!
I am now realizing that I’m reading a lot about radicalized political figures right now. Why that’s mixed with entrepreneurship? I don’t know.
Although during exam season that somewhat went to shit, after finishing up my chemistry exam I’m back on that grind!
Sometimes when I’m feeling down and I’m laying in bed, I think “mom would be sad,” and I jolt up outta bed like nothing happened.