Rejection Is Proof You Stopped Hesitating

Several years back I got rejected from MIT.

It was for a spot in a lab deeply aligned with my passion for studying the human mind.

I’ll actually share with you the letter I wrote to the head of the lab before I applied,

Shit I’ll share with you my application at the end of this too if you’re interested.

But before my mind blasts off in a million directions because of my passion surrounding this topic, let me make sure I walk you through this story linearly…

(I’m an engineer and scientist who is extremely curious and can dive deep on a myriad of topics, so I have to make sure I point my attention in the right direction. I’m sure you understand)

The human brain has always fascinated me.

It’s filled with cells called neurons that create a flow of electrical signals called action potentials around our brains through electrical imbalances created from the opening and closing of holes in each cell that allow for the movement of charged molecules in and out of each cell.

In a very loose analogy, if you smile and compliment your friend you allow for positive energy to flow to that friend and in doing so maybe excite them to go and pay a compliment to someone else.

Maybe they even compliment many people afterwards, sending that positivity far and wide.

Sometimes that compliment get’s paid to a grump who shuts down and stops that flow of excitement (what a douche).

In university I learned how to look at this signal both with physical circuitry but also through programs that modeled it

I built schematics for my own electroencephalogram (which are the electrodes that measure brainwaves) that got me interviews at some cool opportunities.

I used a power supply that I thought was the correct voltage in my university basement but because it was archaic the number was slightly rubbed off and it was I think it provided 10 times the amount of power as I thought it would and I melted the fuck out of the board I was building and turned it straight to smoke.

It was… shocking 😉

So anyways I’m frolicking around the earth at this point with 8 inches of hair studying electrical engineering (an absolutely chick-magnet as you can imagine) and falling in love with where my studies intersect with human physiology.

I’m sending handwritten letters to top professors whose books I read that I can almost guarantee you threw them directly in the trash, if they even got to the professors.

I’m doing extra work on tests and assignments and auditing a class on computational neuroscience because of this fascination

(I quite literally got extra credit on an exam in my upper level medical signals class that wasn’t even offered – I just kept working past the problem being finished and the teacher was like “yeah, that was cool, why don’t you have some extra credit”. Further establishing my role in university at the top of the social hierarchy by acing an exam everyone else failed. Yes, I know, I’m basically Ryan Reynolds in that movie where he never leaves college.)

And I want to be clear, I wasn’t even a stellar student in every class, I’m not some prodigy or anything like that, I am an extremely regular intelligence dude who was just working really hard and super passionate about certain things.

I genuinely believe anyone could study electrical engineering, the only thing that’s really making people not do it is the people who do pursue that field and tell everyone else not to because its soooo hard in order to stroke their own ego and feel better about themselves.

Anyways – this fascination turns to medical school after university, because I’m so passionate about the brain right?

Maybe neurosurgery?

So I go off on this tangent,

I read all these books, shadow doctors in the operating room, volunteer in hospice care, take the MCAT surrounded by all these kids whose moms are basically holding their hands into the exam room.

Which was weird.

I press submit on the MCAT and realize, oh, fuck, it’s not the brain I’m most interested in.

(I am still interested in it and it’s physiology, just recognizing something important in this moment)

It’s the human mind.

For my entire life, as far as I have loved being on my own and doing my own thing, I also absolutely love the social world.

My 8th grade teacher told me I should turn the “n” in my name to an “r”

Which spells “Flirt” for those of you not following

That was my 8th grade teacher.

And to his credit, he was certainly not wrong.

Chubby pale lil 8th grade me trying to flirt to girls is a comical and real memory.

But much more than this I just genuinely enjoy intimacy with other people.

And get your mind out of the gutter – Intimacy simply means genuine connection.

If I am in a coffee shop or walking on the beach and you’re reading a book I think has an interesting cover, I’m going to ask you about it and within 5 minutes we likely will be talking about the insights you pulled from it, the inspirations you’re feeling in life right now, the largest obstacles you’ve faced over the last year, etc.

I just absolutely love that shit.

I’ve met and had conversations with old men who fought in far off wars and old women who worked in the first machine learning labs in the world, etc.

People whom I will never talk to again or likely even ever remember their names.

I’ve had so many wonderful, positive interactions

(Interspersed with the less than positive one – for example it turns out that if you ask a girl as you’re passing by – truly just passing by – “you get a good one?” While she’s taking a selfie, she will in fact either smile and laugh at the joke as you walk on by or give you a genuine glare of death to mind your own business. That’s okay, it happens.)

To my point however, what is it that makes people smile?

Frown?

Feel supported?

Attacked?

Proud?

Stressed?

Fulfilled?

There are clear physiological stressors and stimuli that have predictable results for each of these.

But at the same time everyone is unique.

Well.. for now… it appears that the more everyone scrolls the same content and shares their problems and gets advice from ChatGPT they’re all turning into a homogenous blob with a lack of focus, personality, and interests, but that’s a topic for another time.

The thing is, your mind and the way it’s been conditioned, even if similar to your best friend or brother, is very different from theirs.

You have your own core memories and triggers and urges and inspirations.

And that’s wonderful.

More than wonderful is that it presents for an absolutely INCREDIBLE field of study.

One piece of that field is that of Affective Computing, which is the name of the lab I got rejected at at MIT.

That field deals with the computational analysis of human emotions.

How can you write programs that understand and interpret and respond with emotion?

How do you study emotions?

You can’t measure them like temperature with a thermometer.

You can’t just measure the electrical signals of the brain and with 100% certainty deduce what emotion is being felt (let alone why?)

It’s a layer abstract from the physical experience.

This is one manifestation of the hard problem of consciousness.

It is part of one part of my underlying mission in life, to research and help in this field.

Partly because I find it so genuinely interesting.

Partly because this world is advancing quite rapidly and there a bunch of horrible fucking people on this planet who will want to and are already trying to use these technologies to take advantage of other humans and I want to be a part of the group on the good side of history that tells them to shove it up their fucking ass.

This passion leads me to 2am in the morning on a red-eye to Boston and the affective computing conference at MIT with luggage falling out of the bins above us while we fly through what appears to be a tornado.

The woman next to me was actually tucked into the futile position below her chair.

I put my hand on her shoulder and said,

“It’s going to be okay, ma’am.”

To which she responded,

“No, we’re going to die.”

Fortunately, she was incorrect.

Unfortunately, this did lead to a delusional sleep-deprived version of me walking into the Media Lab on the MIT campus, suit on, bags under my eyes.

I quickly perked up as I wandered around and struck up conversations.

I learned about what was going on.

I talked with some of the smartest minds in the field, many of which looked at my name tag and said “what’s iAlign?”

“Oh it’s the business I’m starting”

To this, I wouldn’t say they rolled their eyes, but I could tell I moved in their perception from “possible prospective grad-student/slave in my lab” or “other esteemed scholar” to “some shmuck who wants my attention”

I’m being a bit facetious, I did make many wonderful connections.

I learned a lot.

I got to talk to the head of the lab who would eventually reject me.

(This is the third time I bring it up this rejection only for humorous effect, I have no negative feelings toward it)

The reality that I was finding as I walked around that conference, was that in this moment…

We’re in a similar moment to when the internet was going widespread or when new social media platforms like Facebook were just going viral.

Meaning, there’s tons of potential in this world and lots of wonderful research… but it’s also still the wild west where most of this potential is just theoretical and not experiential yet.

And what that meant, for me at least, is that if I wanted to pursue this dream of building technology that understands and supports humans, I had to build it.

Unfortunately, and Hemingway said it best,

“The first time you do anything is shit.”

Yeah.

So I learned software engineering from a friend of mine who recently exited from a successful app-development consulting businesses in my free time.

Enough of it at least to get a software that would text you and listen to your responses and send simple check ins based on your core values, interpret patterns, do some little statistical analyses, and learn a bit about you from your quick, 60 second of less check ins.

But the product was kinda shit.

I can admit that.

My friends could too. 😂

I am still building this software behind the scenes, it will come back, but I had to pivot away form it to make sure I was actually building the right thing, not just what I wanted to.

I took the core value based system that I had developed in my own life for creating high-level performance and baked that into a methodology others could use.

I support clients individually and in groups right now in order to implement that system while in the shadows behind the scenes I work on my larger, many-decades long mission.

Building.

While you’re reading this, that’s what I’m doing.

I’m writing, learning, talking, exploring, adventuring, and building.

Sometimes it’s really intimidating.

I have a vision that I can barely put into words it’s so large.

Sometimes it’s fucking frustrating.

I have to learn and implement certain skills like marketing and advertising, which I now think are interesting and cool, but had no experience in beforehand and I also know will never be my expertise, and aren’t how I want to be spending my time.

I’m also not good at them, which sucks.

Because I want to spend my time doing the things I’m good at.

Sometimes it’s exhausting.

I still take on contracts in the data science world to keep my programming and engineering skills sharp for when I get back into the heavier research and engineering/science world of this mission.

Sometimes it makes me feel pretty small.

Because I’m constantly taking on new roles and projects and doing new things that I have no experience in and the first 10 or 100 times I do it I just do it poorly because I don’t know what I’m doing.

Sometimes it triggers my insecurity.

I could have just taken a “secure” or “steady” role as an engineer or scientist at some big company or startup and had a nice little salary with a nice little apartment and smiled on the outside while I allowed my personal dreams and goals to slowly go silent.

And I do all of this while constantly being battered by the distractions of the world and self, just like you.

I’m truly not special or perfect at all.

I just figured out how to eliminate lots of noise in this world from many of the common triggers like social media, porn, news, guilt traps, relationships, etc. and turn that time into focused work toward my mission.

I just make consistent progress, regardless of the outcome that awaits me on this journey.

That’s what I support people to do using their core values as their central grounding post.

And in doing so, while build the foundation of this chapter of my life where I support remarkable individuals to overcome the negative feedback loops of distraction and procrastination and self doubt into positive ones of consistent action, focus, clarity, and confidence, I found freedom.

I spend my time the way I want.

I face the risks of the world and of going my way the best I can,

I wake up early and keep going.

Because I am so genuinely passionate about what I am doing.

While I explore the world I want my life to be immersed in the physiology and psychology and sociology and neuroscience and signals and patterns of the human experience.

I want to both support and study the lives of millions if not billions of people on this planet in a way that puts a wall between them and those that want to use these technologies for harm.

My core values gave me the freedom to pursue these goals with a level of passion that I only read about in books and saw in movies.

And your core values can give you the same freedom.

To take consistent action toward your value-aligned goals regardless of the risks.

So that you can look back at the rejections you face and the shit first drafts of projects you build and laugh because they led to the success and final editions of the goals you did achieve and masterpieces you did create.

So that you can live life your own way through consistent action and confidence in yourself and freedom.