Focus on the Opportunity not the Obligation | March 2022
Creating content, consulting challnege alongside Walmart, and more!
Hey, I’m Bagavan Marakathalingasivam 👋🏽
A 15 y/o ML enthusiast, currrently developing a better understanding of our brains and how we can leverage BCIs (brain-computer interfaces) to optimize the quality of life.
🔑 Opportunity > Obligation
This month was a bit overwhelming, with the TKS Global Challenge wrapping up, content creation, building projects, etc., sometimes I would get to a point where I lost motivation to do anything. The biggest reason for this was that I was looking at what I was doing as an obligation, and forgetting the opportunity (the outcome of completing that task). For example, at the beginning of the month, I kept pushing back writing an article because I kept seeing it as an obligation (“I have to sit down and write this article”), instead of going back to the opportunity → publishing this article will help me optimize for serendipity and help build a better brand for myself. Shifting to this mindset was helpful and allowed me to make a lot more progress on projects I was working on.
If you’re not disciplined to create the actions you need to complete a goal, it’s probably becuase you’re focusing on the obligation instead of the opportunity you’ll get
After realizing this, I tried to spend a lot more time focusing on the opportunity so… let’s see what I did this month!
Reinventing the Retail Stores of the Future Alongside Walmart
TKS Global Challenge 💪
If you’ve read my previous newsletter you’d know that I’ve been working on a Challenge alongside Walmart through a program called The Knowledge Society. We were given 4 weeks to propose a recommendation to a company that tackles the challenge statement they provided.
In case you forgot, here’s what we had to do:
Walmart is reinventing the retail store of the future for 2030. How do we recreate the physical store environment to be exciting and engaging for customers, by offering new services and experiences?
After grinding for 4 weeks, we finally build our recommendation deck to be reviewed. As soon as I get the green light, I’ll be sharing our deck with you guys so make sure you’re subscribed if you want to check it out.
While we wait, here are some of my biggest learnings from this challenge:
The team dynamic is everything - if your team isn’t aligned with each other or if people are not getting things done, you have to call them out and build that trust within each other.
Have a detailed timeline in the beginning - having a goal is meaningless if you don’t have a plan to get there. In our challenge, we built a very vague plan for how we wanted to tackle the challenge but then didn’t go that in-depth → led to a lack of clarification on what needed to get done
Expert Validation is key - outreaching out to industry experts to validate your idea is important for anything. It’s always important to start outreaching out as early as possible (it takes a while for people to get back to you)
Shoutout to Manaal Lakhani, Jaedon Visva and Harisson Kessel for being such amazing teammates and pulling through at the end 🌯🥳
What I’ve been working on in the BCI Space
I wrote an article on a BCI project I worked on
As some of you may know, recently I built a project that lets me use brian-computer interfaces to create music from just my brainwaves. To wrap up this project, I decided to write an article going deeper into the code and how I build it!
I know I was supposed to put out two articles, but I kinda procrastinated on this one so I didn’t have time to finish the second one - going to be posting it within the first couple of weeks of April so make sure to check that out!
Going deeper into Computational Neuroscience
A while ago I came across this great course from Neuromatch Academy on computational neuroscience, but never really got around to doing it. That’s why this month I was taking the time to review this course and complete some of the modules to get a better understanding of the computational neuroscience space. I spent most of the time learning/reviewing the math needed for the course - linear algebra, calculus and statistics - which is important when understanding these concepts.
One thing I’m going to be doing is transforming my notes from this course into articles to also validate my understanding of these concepts.
Emotion Recognition from EEG Data using Graph Neural Networks
One thing I’ve been looking into recently is graph neural networks, and how we can leverage them for better EEG signal classification. I just came across this a couple of days ago, so there isn't any real progress yet, but I’m planning on going deeper into the theory behind how this will work (and maybe even make an article about it 👀).
🚀 What to expect for next month
I know that I have a lot of plans for April, but I won’t be able to do that much as I’m going to be taking part in a Moonshot challenge at TKS - if you’ve been subscribed for a while you probably know what I’m talking about. Will give more updates about this project in my next newsletter, but here’s what else you should expect from me next month 👇
Content Creation - publish one article every other week
Read for 20-30 minutes a day - I didn’t prioritize this last month which is why I’m going to be developing this habit in April
Waking and Sleeping Early - Going to sleep before 11 pm, and waking up at 6 am consistently
Daily Updates - continue time blocking + sending daily updates to people to keep me accountable
Go deeper into Comp. Neuroscience - continuing the Neuromatch course as well as building mini projects