TKS is a year-round program that trains high schoolers into unicorn tech people: the Steve Jobs, Elon Musks, and Jeff Bezos of the world, who impact billions and help push humanity forwards. There's no magic bullet for making this kind of impact, or substitutes for hard work and personal ambition, but TKS provides valuable guidance, resources, and community to give students exposure and steer them in the right direction.

Being on the older side and with some past tech/entrepreneurship experience, I directly joined the second-year program, attending first-year sessions at the same time. I'm a month in now, getting a grasp on some of TKS' fundamental philosophies and gearing up for some really exciting projects. To quickly throw a few out here:

• Participating in a consulting competition for gene sequencing giant Illumina, with two incredible biotech enthusiasts on my team 🤩
  
• Learning rapidly about emerging technologies like genomics, blockchain, and quantum computing (more on this later)
• Hearing explicit statements and examples for various mindsets: curiosity, unconventional paths, high performance...
• Meeting dozens of ambitious high schoolers in TKS programs around the world

StartupTree powers the entrepreneurship ecosystems of MIT, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and 100+ other schools and institutions. I got to know the CEO over the summer, in September joining StartupTree's eight-person team as a UX researcher, designer, and software builder (I just go by PM :P). I'll be building solutions to empower student entrepreneurs on the platform, increasing user engagement and driving exponential growth as the company moves from a B2B SaaS to B2C model.

1. Do what you want. It sounds stupid simple, but most of the time most of us aren't actually doing what we want. High-achieving people especially tend to try to be good at everything they encounter, because they know they have the potential and probably the resources to be so. The first step to finding your passion is to isolate possibilities and external pressures, instead honing in on your priorities and living by them. Learn to say no, a lot. You'll learn a lot more and go a lot farther if you pick a direction and dive into it than mulling over what direction to pick.

2. Continuously and honestly assess your experiences. Entrepreneur James Cole compares the process of personal self-discovery to that of refining a business strategy. In a TKS Q&A, James offered this example: say you open an ice cream shop and only sell chocolate ice cream. If you adverise that you have lots of flavors of ice cream, you'll attract more customers, but they will be disappointed and not leave you any useful insights about your business. If you advertise honestly and customers show up, you can ask them what they like about your ice cream. If they tell you the chocolate chips are the best part, you can now optimize, maybe by selling a flavor with more chocolate chips. By being honest with yourself and continuously building experience, you'll whittle all the possibilities down to something much sharper, honing in on fulfilling passions over time.

TKS alum Izzy Grandic likened this way of thinking to being a free-body diagram. As opposed to a systems diagram, showing all the objects that act on each other, a free-body diagram represents these objects only as forces on a single object. If such diagrams represent your life, you are the central object, with various structures and entities exerting forces on you. Your motivations and priorities make up forces pushing back against them.

The state of "finding your passion" can be represented as your internal forces aligning with the external forces around you: a fulfilling project, career, or relationships. Extending the analogy, imagine furthermore that this object is in a high-dimensional force field. Your internal forces determine where you move in this force field. If your internal forces point in mutliple directions, the magnitude of each one will be smaller, and you won't experience as much variance in the force field. But if you direct your internal forces strongly in one or two directions at a time, you'll keep accelerating and discover much more of the force field, giving you a lot more data to determine what direction to point your internal forces in too.