TKS Review
Hi, I’m Seher
Growing up I always believed I was destined for averageness. My grades were okay, a little above the median average at best and I had a few extracurriculars that I didn’t really care about and did for the sake of looking better, but nothing that was considered recognizable.
My grades and perception of myself fully controlled what I believed I was capable of — I would hear things like “the easiest path to making impact and changing things is to study hard so you can get into the university you want and after you graduate then it’s finally time to make a change.”
While this statement might may have some partial truths, for a 16 year old who hates school with a passion it’s pretty discouraging to hear that I can’t make tangible change because of what my grades look like.
This fully convinced me that I would have to live an average life; getting a degree that I may not necessarily want but provides security and a job that I dread everyday but pays the bills. From here, work to the next vacation, the next weekend, the next bonus to save up for pension and then boom — dead.
Pretty pessimistic right? Well I had this vision of my life for so many years that I honestly just decided it was time to get comfortable with it, and weirdly enough I actually grew content with this vision until I started my TKS journey.
Joining TKS
Now to be fully honest with you guys I joined TKS just as another extracurricular to put on my university application to get closer to this average life I thought I needed to lead.
Because of this all of the mindsets and messages sounded like jargon
- Impact Billions
- Find your passion
- Be a Unicorn
- Be a red dot
How could I do any of these things if my grades were average, I didn’t know the ins and outs of Python, and the last book I read by choice was Geronimo Stilton in grade 4?
The messages sounded like unrealistic, optimistic thinking to me because school had shaped me into assuming the impact I could make in the world was defined by my grades.
Where did things start changing?
Within TKS there’s a free secondary program called velocity. Now instead of the classic emerging tech, in velocity you focus on personal growth to build strong internal foundations.
How velocity works is if you opt in, you spend 30 minutes to an hour before every session to engage in an accountability container for all your habits.
Things like information diets, our actual diets, and systems to keep in place for exponential growth.
What’s interesting is that I had absolutely no intentions to join velocity. I told myself that I had no time because I needed to raise my grades. But 20 minutes before the deadline to apply I had a random thought “why not?” If I had the chance to improve my life in some sort of way, why wouldn’t I do this? This leap of faith totally changed my life
Now velocity is really where things started clicking for me, listening to the podcasts, understanding the mindsets, and reaching out to professionals were all things that finally felt doable.
In most cases, whenever I’d join the harder or more accelerated program keeping up with the tasks and actually excelling felt almost impossible, but for some reason I was able to stay on my tasks and actually enjoy it? Crazy.
Through Velocity is also where I met my tribe. Just a group of kids who get along on every level — my lifelong friends.
Meeting my Mentor
Through the velocity reach outs is actually where I met my now mentor Dave.
Now Dave is the Chief Innovations Officer at a Brain Computer Interface company called Naqi Logix. Naqi focuses on creating neural earbuds for paraplegics to control wheelchairs — and are venturing into so many more spaces now.
At the time, Naqi was earning so many accolades so I thought “why would someone so big in the industry respond to a random 16 year old on Linkedin.” But I had the same thought here as I had when joining velocity “why not?” The worst that could happen is I just get no response.
To my luck, Dave responded the next morning I had sent my intial message.
My first meeting with Dave really opened up my curiosity toward BCI. In all honesty, I had picked BCI just because it seemed like the easiest emerging tech to understand. But Dave validated so many of my thoughts, opinions, and ideas in the field — I had never felt this type of validation before; validation in the way I think. Now because of this I started feeling a little ignition to feeling confident with myself and thoughts. If someone so big in the industry was interested in me, maybe I did have some sort of intellectual value.
It then came time to actually go hands on and start building with BCI. We call this first project the replicate 1 because it’s simply replicating something that’s already been done.
I decided to use a Muse 2 headband to detect blinks and control and key on my keyboard. (Check out my article for this!)
Now this is where the identity I had of myself really got in the way. When encountering roadblocks I would stay stuck and blame my perceived lack of intellect, rather than reaching out fore help and using the resources around me.
When I did finally start asking for help, everything became 1000000x easier. I was even able to gain more friendships and connections while getting help with my own projects!
The Google Challenge
From here, it was time for the first TKS challenge. You would never guess what company we were working with as our first experience — Google, literally insane.
We were given a prompt to solve a specific issue their company was facing and meant to create a recommendation to aid this.
This is where I found one of my passions; leading projects.
Looking back on my state of mind at the time, I don’t even know how or why I was put into this role but I’m beyond grateful for my team putting me there.
How I really knew that leading projects was a passion for me was just my sheer ability to spend countless hours working on it without the work feeling like a chore or a burden. With school, I could probably do a spend an hour doing my homework before I needed a “short” break (3.5 hours at minimum).
My team and I were able to whip up a pretty cool recommendation with a prototype. Slowly but surely my confidence started to build.
Replicate 2
Learning my lessons from the replicate 1, I was able to finish my replicate 2 much more rapidly.
Here I decided to use that same Muse 2 headband to create a tug of war style game inspired by my local Science World.
How this works is there are two players who ideally have on the Muse headband — however I wasn’t able to acquire two Muse headbands at the time so my second player would just use the normal keys; meaning the rope/ball would roll toward them based on tapping speed.
Right away I ran into issues with this, my replicate 2 wasn’t a full replicate there were some parts I had to figure out on my own. I was super lucky here because I had so many people at TKS that were willing to help and stayed on call helping me with code for hours. But now that I reached out for help right away I came to the realization that my intellect wasn’t the issue it was the mindset I created that stopped me from being proactive right away.
From here, I was able to mix my curiosity in BCI and my passion for leading projects to create a Moonshot project: NeuroConnect
Neuroconnect in a nutshell is a new and improved Stephen Hawking speech generation device sold for a fraction of the cost. We aim to create an easy-to-use device (non-invasive)that enables people who cannot speak to communicate effectively while making eye contact, allowing for natural, person-to-person interaction.
We do this by mixing two main technologies: Brain Computer Interfaces and Augmented reality.
I’m super excited to be continuing this project after TKS.
The Future
Now, I don’t want to lie to everyone reading and say my life is all sunshines and rainbows now. That my grades have suddenly hit an average of 99 percent and I know exactly what I want to do in the future, I’m still very unsure of what my future may look like. But I am sure that I have the ability to choose what this may be instead of being forced to get comfortable with what I thought was predisposed to me
My biggest piece of advice for anyone who feels like they are in a similar situation:
Take those leaps of faith, because you truly don’t know what you’re capable of unless you try.
