before the awakening: who i was in may 2025

this is a snapshot from a school reflection exercise, about two months before the signal-processing-workflow that changed everything. reading it now is like reading someone else's writing.

the answers

who are you? "i am a student that is passionate about learning."

what do you want out of your life? "happiness, and to feel a lot of pleasure through interactions with others, achievement, and completeness."

long term goals? "to continuously learn about the world and its functions, and use my knowledge to make change."

where do you see yourself in ten years? "after college, looking for a job (or already with a job)."

what do you know for sure about yourself? [blank]

what's striking in retrospect

the person writing these answers had just discovered that change was possible. the big insight at the time: "change came with effort, and if you put in effort, it was easy." the evidence was small things — helping friends win tennis matches, breaking a youtube addiction, independent study of math.

the beliefs: "working hard is the biggest cause of success. people can change. the meaning of life is pleasure."

all of these would get complicated by the summer. the meaning of life shifted from pleasure to something closer to "growth" and "beauty" after conversations about humanism and rationalism. the simplistic view of hard work got nuanced by ideas about prioritization and the-stocks-metaphor. the confidence about change got stress-tested by actually trying to change fast under pressure.

the pre-awakening strengths

what i listed: fast learner, very analytical, likes to optimize, controlled and calm, athletic.

what i should have listed: curiosity, willingness to change, social energy, pattern recognition.

the things i wanted to change: "being more controlled, sometimes feel like i am out of control. sometimes probably too pushy on others." — both of these would become features, not bugs, at the startup.

the goals

short term: sustain social relationships
1 year: learn STEM skills
2 years: figure out what i want to do
long term: build cool things

the 2-year goal ("figure out what i want to do") is the one that actually mattered. and it took about 2 months, not 2 years — because someone at a startup sat me down and had the agency-talk with me.

why this matters

keeping this snapshot is important because it's easy to retroactively think i was always like this. i wasn't. two months before the internship, i was writing "the meaning of life is pleasure" and imagining myself "looking for a job after college." the transformation was real but it needed a catalyst.

a cofounder would later describe me as having "just woke up a couple of months ago, now is half awake." this document is what "before waking up" looked like.