“Most people can handle one or two priorities at a time. A TKS kid can handle three,” says Nadeem. TKS elitism aside – take it as a proxy for basic intentionality – I find this...

“Being black should not influence a political view,” reads one prompt in Jubilee’s “Black Liberals vs Black Conservatives” video. All three conservatives step forward in agreem...

The CEO of a startup I worked for as a Product Manager asked me for one last contribution in the last week of my job: a write-up on how to make the team a high-performance one. ...

A week ago, I had an amazing conversation with Brennan and a few others at Edyfi. You know the type: it went on for hours, flowing powerfully from Taleb’s essays about black swa...

Brennan struggles to turn his beautiful tangles of thoughts into writing. Why? we inquire. Brennan expresses his admiration for my drive to just do – I had written an article a...

Brennan’s vision for a reformed education system: teach kids the skills and mindsets they need to succeed in life – finances, networking, exponential growth, and other basic kno...

We remember the beginnings and ends of things best. The meaning I was compelled by to write in this moment belongs to this moment, and not the year 2020, or its events. Yet, ...

“My name is Samson. I’m part of a program called TKS, a human accelerator that trains high schoolers to impact billions. The first year of the program focuses on emerging techno...

Cold reachouts are an important skill to have. When thinking about learning and careers, it’s easy to get caught up in classes, qualifications, and applications. But the most po...

I didn’t understand mental health until this year. My parents didn’t teach me about mental health. I haven’t thought too much about the roots of their parenting philosophies an...

Physical space doesn’t exist; it is only a construct of the mind, created out of experience. Time doesn’t exist either. It is also a construct of the mind, arising from collect...

7 PM tonight was an important time for a friend of mine. This was someone who was very college-oriented, but also straight up the smartest person who I’m close friends with, wh...

Browsing through music in Spotify — unsatisfied by a racing Mendelssohn piano piece — I find my way to a playlist of Chinese EXO songs (inspired to search for by Riku having Jay...

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I should think and act to steer my life in a purposeful direction — “maximize the potential of your life,” as TKS co-founder Nadeem ...

“How are you feeling?” I asked a senior friend around this time last year. “Everything has an added weight to it,” he replied. “Heavy with the thought that everything I do might...

I’ve been working through the serverless-stack.com tutorial. It’s awesome, teaching you how to set up an AWS backend, React front-end, and now is going through CI/CD through See...

Thick foam. Support — pedestal for a statue. On a webpage, a store shelf; a box, a bag, a shoe rack, a pair of feet. Rubber soles. Carpet, concrete, asphalt, grass, gravel. Win...

or, How To Break Through And Create Amazing Graphics / or, intuition derived from my jank design journey that many designer friends don’t have / or, Gesalt Principles, Purpose-B...

Talking with a friend about how things are falling apart, how we might not be able to return to campus for the rest of the term; me realizing just how many opportunities are van...

Talking about Coronavirus, confrontation with the possibility of death or the death of a loved one, and the emotional pain caused by having higher desires and ambitions ripped a...

I sat on the floor of my room, eyes closed. My brain was filled with noise, with random thoughts and anxieties throwing themselves all around. “Clear, clear,” I thought, trying ...

A label Tessa and Kelly came up with for me, because I have so many platonic one-night stands.1 Sure enough, I had platonically “fucked,” without entering into a close social r...

I: Ben Platt Yesterday, I read this New York Times feature on “Dear Evan Hansen” star Ben Platt. It discusses Platt’s background immersed in musical theater, growing up in Beve...

Searching for a study space with sight of the clear afternoon sun, Maxwell and I end up in the back stairwell of the library. Tucked between the furthest back study rooms, the s...

There’s a simple joy to folding clothes. At 2 AM, I descended to my room only to find the pile of unfolded laundry I had left on my bed. I was dismayed at not being able to slee...

Sitting in a coach bus — “the nicest I’ve ever seen,” says Christina — my relphil reading on my lap in front of me, wearing sleek purple-blue Nordic gear up top down to ugly swe...

An apology through email holds up as an admission of guilt in a court of law. As soon as you apologize, it’s over. I spent the whole time fighting. I didn’t apologize because ...

Hi, welcome to my blog! I’ve wanted to build a blog for a while. Over the summer I remade my entire website and now I’ve finally added a blog to it. I have a variety of objectiv...