November: Learning, Failing and Learning
Hey! I’m Neha, a 16 year old student. Right now, I’m working in the field of brain computer interfaces. Some of my other hobbies include painting, drawing, riding my bike, knitting, baking etc. etc. In short, I love getting interested in pretty much anything I find cool!
Reading
This month, I tried to fit reading into my schedule, even though I had loads of tests. This month’s book is Almond by Sohn Won-pyung. It was an easy choice to read in busy times because it’s small and much more approachable.
Without spoilers, it’s a book about a boy who finds it difficult to feel emotions. Written from the point of view of the boy, I absolutely loved getting drawn into the book. However, I often stopped myself to think of what I was feeling at that moment. I frequently found myself feeling pitiful towards the boy, or finding everything that he described as lifeless, and hence sad. It made me question, is lifelessness necessarily a bad thing?
Perhaps not everything needs to be characterised as a “good thing” or a “bad thing” and some things are just what they are. I think this reflects what I read recently that humans try to put meaning to everything, make stories out of everything, but sometimes what happens is just what happens. It doesn’t mean anything else but what it truly is.
This approach is definitely something that helped me recover from unideal situations really well and quickly. That’s not to say emotions are a bad thing. Emotions are the beautiful, abstract things that push humanity together - it’s just important to be able to regulate them.
Podcasts
Spotify Wrapped is out! My most listened to podcast this year was The Knowledge Project. While this comes to no surprise to me, it helped me really put into perspective how I’ve changed. Listening to this podcast has been so useful for me recently, since it allows me to learn lessons from people from all different types of careers with all different types of lifestyles and stories.
Of course, I don’t take on every piece of advice I hear, but being exposed to more ideas has helped me think more critically about myself, allowing me to become intentional in a larger percentage of the things that I do.
Although it’s hard to choose one, I’d say one of the most important lessons I’ve learnt is to remove absolute terms from my vocabulary, such as always and never. Nothing is ever absolute, good or bad, so it’s important to be aware of this, as it will affect the decisions you make greatly.
Some other ones are: success is the number of failures you’ve had, live in the present moment and turn off your “monkey mind” (not suppress it).
Brain Computer Interfaces
Although I don’t want to spoil too much, I can share that I’ve been working on some reallyyyy cool projects with BCIs and can’t wait to show you my work! Here’s my latest article about them. Working on something I really care about and love has been so exhilarating and I look forward to the time I can work with them everyday.
That being said though, there were 3 weeks of “failures” before even one “success”. The first “failure” began with trying to figure out how to do the project without a headset. Because of my research on the OpenBCI website, I believed that I would have to drop around £1000 on the hardware for my project. There was no way I was about to do that, so I decided that my best bet was datasets. After a week of waiting for my first dataset to come, I see an email stating that I filled out the form wrong. I think the biggest part of that was the fact that I was still a student and couldn’t fill out some of the fields.
While this was happening, I decided to find datasets I didn’t have to wait for a week to receive access to. This led me to finding a wonderful repository on Github with one. After spending around 5 hours figuring out each little problem with my code (a lot of them were just installations that didn’t work with my version of Python, which changing was a whole task of its own), I realise that the dataset in itself is flawed. I learnt a very important lesson of checking the dataset against the dataset description if given before starting anything.
While all of this was happening, however, I found a muse headband on eBay for just £120! You can be assured when it finally came, although I faced at least 2000 other challenges, or at least what felt like it, after a few days of research, I figured out methods to make the headband do what I wanted!
What I’ve learned is that failure is not a bad thing at all and in the end, failure might result in an even better success. The most important thing is that you enjoy the failures, because that’s what’s gonna make up a lot of the process!
Mindsets
My favourite mindset of this month is definitely Nth Order Thinking! It transformed the way I do a lot of things greatly. It’s the idea of thinking “And then what?” whenever you do somethig. Like when I was gonna pick up my phone because I was frustrated with the errors I was getting, I opted to just close my eyes and listen to some calm music to relax instead. Small changes like this have definitely made me feel much much better, and hence become a better person.
Concert
This month I also went to a concert. As excited I was to go to the concert, I was a teeny tiny bit nervous of going by myself. However, I had nothing to worry about because on the way there, I heard some other people talking about the concert and asked them if they were going and if I could tag along as they went. It was really fun talking to totally new people who shared similar interests and it was honestly such an amazing decision because the trains were delayed, and I wouldn’t have known what to do without them!
After we entered the venue we had to part ways, but that’s ok because I made some new friends at my seat. It was really fun to meet so many new people from different ages and it was amazing how everyone was so friendly!
Celebration evening
In my school, we had a celebration evening. Meeting people I hadn’t seen in ages was extremely fun and I loved talking to them after a long time. It definitely felt nice to feel celebrated for the work that I put into doing my GCSEs.
Also, I won the tutor award, which reminded me of the importance of community. When you’re really busy and are always working towards something, it’s easy to push relationships to the side, and it’s often an afterthought. However, I have learnt to value my relationships with people much more deeply and show my gratitude for them more recently.
Social media
I created an instagram account to track my learnings and how I’m improving myself. Super excited to start building in public! Follow me @nehaadapala!
Thanks for reading. If you are interested or have any questions, please email me at neha.adapala@gmail.com
Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neha-adapala-7b2a56231/