Soaring through the year. This is what I've learned so far.
The first fourth of the year in review, my learnings, cool projects and more
Hello Pegasi, I’ve missed posting my newsletter the for march, but I’m here now.
If you are new here, welcome. I’m Mats, just a random guy in the world with ambitious goals and an obsession with trying to save the ocean🌊
What’s happened?
The first part og this year has been a rollercoaster and there’s no other way to describe it. From being lucky enough to meet so many amazing people and being given the chance to work on amazing projects, but also work on myself. To getting sick almost every month, slacking on my goals and failing to succeed in my day to day life.
It’s been quite a journey.
January: started strong by going to the gym, crushing my weekly goals and didn’t give up as obstacles came in my way, until I got sick. Truly, the biggest problem I’ve faced this year isn’t actually the sickness itself, but the laziness that follows. If there’s one specific thing I’ve brought with me after that month then it would be the realisation I had towards the end. A quote said by many and which Ive held with me tightly during my failures and it goes something like this:
You’re the only person that is with you 100% of the day, the journey and your life. No other person will come to save you except yourself. - Said by someone
February + March: was the part of the rollercoaster that drops your stomach to the floor. Honestly, it was a soup of chaos. Taking steps forward and holding myself accountable for my failures by making a social contract with my brother and actually making progress on my goals. Then ripping the contract in two as march started and spiralled down into a rabbit hole of bad decisions. Having a positive outlook on things and trying to keep my state of mind as stoic as possible helped me get through these trials and tribulations, thank you Marcus Aurelius🙏 Going forward I’ll be taking with me a couple of teachings from these failures:
Don’t expect others to hold you accountable unless they’ve agreed to do so. Exception put on others has only made me loose focus on myself and my own expectations for myself.
Stumble, fall, but don’t stay down. A weak person will eventually get up, but won’t have learned why they fell. A strong person will stay down, reflect on why they fell, take it into account and when they get up, they will have learned from it.
Adapting to the stoic mindset I’ve come to realise I haven’t been an honest person, now all I can think of is Marcus saying: “If it is not true, do not say it. If it’s wrong to do, then do not do it”. I’ll become a more honest person.
April = the turning point. I took all of my learnings from the past months and put them all together. I broke myself down, went into my life philosophies, and then made a structure going forward. Habits being a big motivator in my day to day life, needed to be done. I made a new habit contract (social contract) and this time I swore to myself and my new philosophies that whenever something comes up, I won’t give up after trying three times… MINIMUM! The last month has really been the month where I turned the tables and got my ass back on track, I truly am grateful for everyone in my life that have been supporting me thus far.
Skills and projects
With reflecting done, here’s the skills/projects I’ve been done so far:
Along with TKS (The Knowledge Society) I’ve had the chance to be a part of four challenges (two of which I’m still working on). The first one I did was with an amazing group of four where we were tasked by Meta to make their platforms safer to use. With that me and my group worked on…
We didn’t win, but what counted for me was the pitching, video and presentation skills that I got from it, but also being able to communicate and link up with other people my age with the same interests.
During my bad mindset march I put up a group of three including me for the Spring Challenge at TKS where me and the group chose to help out WEF (World Economic Forum)! Our task was:
Challenge: "How do we utilise modern tools for education to help students understand global challenges and problems that exist in the world?”
With this we brainstormed and came up with a very specific target demographic. High school students in Poland were spending hours of their curriculum to learn outdated and unusable skills (for most). So by using WEF’s already working learning platform we wanted to teach these folks about one of the largest issues that Poland faces to date. That being the Energy Deficiency and lack of Renewable Energies.
Again, we didn’t win and reason for that was me being a big slacker for the rest of the team. I couldn’t have finished it without the others and I’m truly grateful for the experience I got with them.
Then there is my own personal project being “Carbon Capture in The Ocean Through Marine Technology/Biology”. Which is still a work in progress, but my personal website will be up and running by end of May. So you’ll be able to check it out then👍 And lastly along with a crew of three I’m doing my own Moonshot! We’re looking into how hydrokinetic energy can be used to remove carbon emissions from bulk carriers in the Indian Ocean, but also an algae dispersion system that will be released along with it to remove already infused carbon in the warm oceans. Exciting isn’t it😎
Smaller skills
Storytelling, both through playing D&D with friends, but also through pitching ideas through projects.
Blender/3D modelling (far from being anything I feel is worth showing here).
Waking up at 5 am. It’s harder than I thought, but I’m slowly but surely becoming more consistent with the routines.
Anyways, that’s all I’ve got for now! Thank you so much for reading.
Stay stoic.