Vol. 8; Modern Life Skills

Table of Contents

• Mindset: Cringe Mountain

• Life Skill: Think Critically, Build Projects

• Career Advice: Request for Startups

• This is Cool: Computers That Can Smell

• Bonus: Free 2025 Habit Calendar

MINDSET OF THE WEEK
Cringe Mountain

I’ve found that phrases like fail forward or fail fast don’t always resonate with the typical high school student audience. 

To be fair, they don’t have a lot of opportunities within the classroom to fail. There are always exceptions to the rule, but broadly speaking, failure in school is not a desired outcome. You can’t fail forward to a 4.0 gpa.

So, I use different language. Especially when incentivizing students to let go of their perfectionism.  

I like to explain that in order to be good at anything, you first have to be cringe.

With enough reps (and reflection), you begin to improve, and become less cringe. But we all start out cringe; even Ed Sheeran. 

I learned this concept from Shaan Puri (video below). He calls it Cringe Mountain. 

Every time you look at someone who is crushing it, it’s helpful to understand that they too had to climb cringe mountain. 

Climbing cringe mountain is more about quantity than quality. It doesn’t matter how much room for improvement there was in that first rep, it matters that you got started. That mountain ain’t gonna climb itself.  

The next time you’re about to tackle something new and hard with your students, don’t tell them to fail forward, tell them to climb cringe mountain.

I actually show this specific video. Since it’s TikTok it immediately gets their attention. Know your audience.

@shaanvp

My first tiktok up #cringemountain #fyp #entrepreneurship #motivation wearing my press publish lid by @Colin and Samir

LIFE SKILLS
Think Critically, Build Projects

Eric Schmidt is most well known for being president of Google during a pretty historic run, helping them transition from a company that earned many millions in revenue, to several billions. 

Most recently, he and his wife have been investing heavily in philanthropic efforts through Schmidt Futures; “a charitable organization that finds and connects talented people across fields, generations, and geographies to harness their collective skills for public benefit”.

Many of those talented people are young people. A few of the students I coached at TKS went on to become Rise Challenge winners which essentially equates to a blank cheque for academic and startup related expenses. It’s legit. 

Eric talks a lot about his optimism for the future. Thankfully he also puts his money where his mouth is.

Their latest venture is Schmidt Sciences.

Another win for humanity.

Eric is the kind of thinker who has not only been there done that, but has repeatedly proven he understands better than most where the puck is going.  

So when Steven Bartlett, the host of the Diary of a CEO podcast asked him what knowledge an 18 year old today should acquire to best set themself up for success in 2025 and beyond, my ears perked up. 

The tl;dr is Eric recommended two things.

1 - more generally, he said the most important thing is for a young person to develop analytical, critical thinking skills. It doesn’t matter how, but it’s imperative that you have the reasoning ability to question assumptions and the skills to figure out fact from fiction independently.

2 - build projects. Not only as a vehicle for developing those critical thinking skills, but as a way to self-discover something they’re interested in vs. being told what to pursue, and as a way to add value to the world.

He specifically suggested learning Python as it’s the programming language of AI. Despite the fact that these LLMs are now getting better at writing code themselves, learning Python will give you the ability to better understand how to communicate with their APIs to build projects of your own. 

• For anyone with students looking for AI projects to build with Python, here’s a playlist of 40+ tutorials on Youtube.  

• And here is the timestamped clip of Eric speaking to these points if you want some more context on his responses.

CAREER ADVICE
Request for Startups

Speaking of knowing where the puck is going, Y Combinator has a pretty good track record at investing in companies that end up changing the world.

Stripe, Airbnb, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Ginkgo Bioworks, Reddit, and a whole bunch more that you’ve probably never heard of have all come out of YC.

It’s an infamous incubator and community for tech startups in San Francisco. Getting accepted to YC is a status symbol at this point.

And for good reasons; you’re now part of an exclusive club. I asked Claude to compare the acceptance rates of YC applications to the acceptance rates of Harvard undergrad applications.

This was the prompt in Claude. It also included some information about its sources that isn’t included in the image above:

create a table that compares the published acceptance rates over the last 5 years comparing the % of students who are accepted to undergraduate studies at Harvard to the % of companies that get accepted to Y combinator

Getting accepted doesn’t guarantee success, but it helps. Environment matters. Who you surround yourself with matters.

YC invests in the earliest stages of a company, so they get it wrong a lot too. But at this point, they’ve earned their street cred. YC ships winners.

So when they publish a Request for Startups, people listen.

A what?

Here are the categories from this most recent RFS.

Each one has a little explainer and youtube short to introduce the concept.

💡 Use this as a launchpad activity with your students.

For example, have your students explore some of the listed topics that they’re interested in, or have never heard of before.

None of these ideas are so novel that haven’t been touched before, so it’s a great place for students to make it real, by researching related companies, and the roles that exist there.

Take spatial computing as an example. A term that many of them might not be familiar with. It’s okay if you haven’t either, you can do this alongside of them.

After learning about the concept high level on the RFS page, you could ask them to:

• Summarize and explain what Spatial Computing is

• Find 3 companies that are working in that space

• Find 3 job titles that currently exist at each of those companies

• Research the main roles and responsibilities that exist for each of those titles

• Present that information back to the class in a 3min presentation.

This is all easily doable within a single block of time, in a class setting, using Google and LLMs alone. Make it a habit of ensuring they include the sources that Google or these tools got the information from.

Perplexity does this by default, but with Claude or ChatGPT, depending on the version you’re using, you may need to ask it to include the sources.

Remember to explain to students why researching these industries, companies, and roles is relevant.

These are real world problems that need solving. And if YC (who has a revenue model where they make money when the companies they invest in make money) is recommending it, they likely believe there is money to be made in this space.

THIS IS COOL
Computers that can smell

It’s a known fact; whoever smelt it, dealt it. Even if that who was a computer.

Because thanks to Osmo, computers can now smell. Kind of.

It’s essentially print on demand, for smells. That’s cool.

Okay. But so what? Where would this tech actually find a use case?

These will be some of the first general applications, according to Osmo.

• Consumer Brands: Creating novel, safe, and sustainable fragrances

• Health: Developing insect control ingredients to improve human health and food production

• Government: 10x better sensor systems to passively detect, track and trace threats for public safety and defense

• Industrial: Supply chain monitoring to mitigate fraud and ensure product quality

• Entertainment & Retail: Providing immersive experiences with scent displays

I can personally see immersive experiences utilizing this. We have surround sound, why not surround smell?

It will feel that much more real if I can smell the freshly cut grass of the soccer pitch through my VR headset.

Or imagine smell based ads? The McDonalds advertisement before the movie starts that’s accompanied by a wafting smell of freshly cooked fries? Now, that’s trouble.

BONUS
Earn Your FREE 2025 Habit Tracking Calendar

We’ve moved from concept to reality.

I mentioned before how transformative the 2024 version of this calendar was for me as a daily habit tracker. It was the best investment I made this year.

Crushing goals on my own is fun, but doing it with friends is way better. I want you to have this calendar in your life too.

And now you can earn it for free. Through referrals.

Assuming I set things up properly, you should see your referral link below.

• 5 referrals earns you the pdf version of the calendar so you can print it on your own

• 10 referrals earns you the physical calendar shipped directly to your home

Want to just buy the calendar instead?

I get that. It makes a great Xmas gift for anyone looking to make 2025 their best year yet.

I’ll have a link ready to go for next Wednesday where you can just buy it outright, and have it well before Santa shows up.

Below is your custom referral link. You’ll only see it if you’re reading this in your email, aka subscribed.

When you share it with a friend and they sign up, it will recognize that sign up came from your efforts and track it for you.

Curious to hear how you would describe the newsletter to a friend, but if you want some copy to use, here’s how I would position it: