Life your live fully

Live your live fully. Become the best version of yourself. Own your life because that will make you feel good. It gives you purpose and confidence to go forward.

Let’s see how these ideas apply to some of the major choices in life: studies and career.

What is the purpose of university? I see a couple major points. First, this is a huge transition. For many people, this is the first time they move away from their families, they reach legal age, might even start earning money, and thus many new opportunities open up. It would be a real shame if you failed to seize these opportunities. Think about it. Up till now, your understanding of the world has been mostly shaped by your closest family, friends, school environment, and the broader cultural context that you encounter in media. You don’t want to remain this look up table where all your beliefs and opinions are just a repetition of what others toold you was true. No. This is your chance to see it for yourself, try different things, stupid things, make poor choices – and good choices.

By doing so, you want to find your own, authetic narrative that weaves together your life experiences and other people experiences into something that is true to you. There is nothing more boring that talking to somebody who hasn’t got much to say. What is worse, as you grow older, you will start being boring to yourself as there won’t be this external stimulation, these new experience anymore to keep you busy. And that’s not a great place to be.

Becoming yourself means, first and foremost, breaking ties with your family. Not literally, of course, but really outgrowing their opinions on how you should live your life. It’s good to have someone to talk to, but decisions are now yours to make. So rebel! Test your limits! You just don’t know what’s out there yet and you need to take risks in order to discover. Of course, this means you’ll have to overcome yourself, but remember that this is your only life so there is nothing really to be embarrased about.

That means exploring a lot. After all, a university is supposed to provide you will universal knowledge. Take various classes, if you can, participate in lots of activities, do internships. The more experiences you get, the more informed decisions you can make when the time comes. At MIT where I did my undergrad, they have this great organization that you do not study any particular major initially. You are free to choose classes, and in fact they even require you to learn many different things. So even though I graduated with a double degree in math and physics, I took a lot of classes in theater arts, in neuroscience, in humanities, and so on.

The main thing you want to gain from these experiences is the core principles how things work, forming your intuitions. A good way to learn is to try and reproduce what others have done. It will force you to think through problems in the deepest way and will form a solid foundation which you can later use to tackle more complex problems. Find the essence of a problem, attack it step by step, constantly checking if whatever you’re doing matches your intuitions and if they don’t, that will indicate to you that something has been overlooked. You want to achieve that clarity of thinking where you go step by step without any logical gaps. You also want to learn how to articulate your thoughts in a clear, logical, and convincing manner. That is very hard to achieve and you’ll have to be stay focused, but ultimately that is what it means to really understand things and be able to perform.

One thing I didn’t do enough was going outside my comfort zone. For the most part, I stayed within the familiar realm of pure sciences, those abstract ideas, and later within the digital realm when I got involved in machine learning. But I never thought about learning hard skills, that is, something to do with the physical world. I never took classes in engineering, for instance. But this real world is where we live, this is where the real problems occur, yet having only these generic programing skills I am unable to contribute towards developing more efficient batteries, building factories, or restructuring societies. So I would encourage you to become good at something that has to do with the physical world.

This idea important more broadly. A university is not just about training your mind. You need to train your body, your senses as well. I often overlook this point myself, but you need to take care of yourself. Eating healthy food, sleeping, exercising is a good first step, and it will become more important as you grow older and start noticing how your body is no longer as strong and robust anymore. Learning these habits early on will help you later.

But don’t just stop there. Push your body so that you learn how it behaves when tired or under pressure. It will also prepare your mind to stay sharp and focused even if you’re about to give up or are in danger. You’ll soon see how empowering it feels to be able to endure. You will grow your competitive spirit, which is essential if you want to achieve your biggest dreams.

And then also learn to deal with your emotions. Whether you like it or now, emotions is the major driving force in your life and they can help you vastly if you learn to acknowledge and cherrish them. Being in love, taking care of others, completing a task and delivering it will fill you with confidence and joy. Seek for those experiences! When I feel I’m onto something, I’m bursting with energy and can work tirelessly. That is my typical state of existence and boy do I recommend it to you! On the other hand, most things in the world will not go as planned though, leaving you angry and helpless. But it is your choice to not engage with these destructive emotions, only give them space to rise and fall.

Finally, I encourage you to find a good mentor: a professor, a manager, or a psychotherapist. I was very fortunate to have multiple mentors in my life, because they showed me by example how I could think or act differently and who I could eventually become. But for this to work you also need to be very honest with yourself and with your mentor. Find what bothers you and where you’re struggling to find answers and then ask. And the listen. Learn to listen. It is not always to allow other people’s viewpoints to engage with your mind, but that is a great way to grow.

Now as you start getting closer to the end of your studies, you’ll start thinking about your career. And that’s another major event in your life! Now you’ll have to make some big choices who you want to be: a researcher, an employee at a company, or maybe a businessperson, or a politician, or contribute to arts and culture. I went for a research path, so I first want to talk about that choice.

I always liked research and thus saw myself in academia. This was also partially because there are many academics in my family. But never really knew what I wanted to work on. Having spent a lot of time at a neuroscience lab at MIT, I convinced myself that investigating brain was interesting – after all, what is more complicated in the universe that our brain! So I did my PhD on that. But that led me to constantly question myself and others why I was working on a specific project. I think by their second year, a lot of PhD students quickly realize that they don’t really know what they are doing and why. This is very depressing. It becomes not a very romantic endeavor! And then there is this expectation that you will publish papers. But as I kept pushing out papers, I struggled to see the point of it either. If I publish a paper and nobody reads it, was it worth the effort?

These doubts and struggles just keep accumulating as you keep going. The pressure to publish is increasing because you need papers to get a postdoc, a grant, a tenure. Publishing is good overall, it is a part of the scientific endeavor to communicate clearly what you found out, but unfortunately it also becomes this competition where you publish, which lab you are working at, who your professor is, and so on. It is important to realize that this is part of the deal that you must accept for going into academia. An academic is a beggar: you ask for money to retain your freedom to do what you want. That is not a very insipiring lifestyle though!

There are a few things you could do about it. I think you should really start by asking what the biggest outstanding problems in your field of interest are, and the identify the key labs that are working on directly addressing these problems. You may also spend a few years in industry, understand what knowledge you are missing, and do a PhD to specifically gain knowledge from the experts. That way, you will know why you are working on them and be surrounded by people who are engaged in those same problems. I cannot overemphasize how good it is to have strong colleagues and mentors by your side! Working at a well-known institution will also help to be more heard.

For instance, AI is a really flourishing field and there is a lot of enthusiasm there. There are so many people and so many ideas being tested every day! I am very optimistic about progress here and I don’t see it slowing down any time soon. One big outstanding question is generalization: how you train on one dataset and get an adequate performance on another one. That relates to the whole Explainable AI angle and safety, but also to efficiency as you may not always be able to obtain enough data, especially in real world scenarios. Connecting to real world is another big issue, both in robotics and in natural language understanding where I’m guessing some understanding of the physical reality would really help those models to make more sense. I think we need to think a lot how to get more abstract representations, temporal abstractions and how to use them efficiently with external memory systems. And even go as far as symbolic representations, so that neural networks would not only operate well in sort of sensory domains but would also extend to more rational thinking type of abilities. And we know we should be able to do it because we – our brain – are the living examples of such capabilities. We would then be able to engage these systems in the whole scientific discovery pipeline. I am realy looking forward to seeing how AI could transform material sciences, helping us to discover materials withdesired properties much much faster. And yes, I do think at that point there is no stopping to AI but it is hard to predict what will happen. I am not keen on discussing these things but I do think it is important to think about the whole picture already.

But I eventually realized that academia was not my path. I realized that I thought I liked research because I liked the creative part of it. I like connecting the dots. That is innovation. But innovation can happen at many different places, not just academia. I think of innovation as this multistage process. At first, artists, philosophers are intuitively trying to capture novel ideas, to articulate them in words, so that we can start seeing them too. At that point scientists get engaged and try to really understand how these ideas work. They formalize these ideas and make them available for applications in industry. Industry then tries to find how to make those ideas useful. And as more and more applications come out, these technologies become better understood and mature. That is when your ideas have finally made an impact.

So realizing that, I decided to start my own startup and really work on this whole innovation process. Academia is really not a great place for working on such integrative projects because you are constantly short in cash, funding does not increase substantially even for accomplished researchers, and you are still judged by your contribution to research, while my goal was to deliver a working product and be judged by its impact. In contrast, industry offers this opportunity to accumulate capital and build larger structures that will enable you to achieve your biggest dreams.

Except that innovation is a very long process, spanning decades, so it is virtually impossible to bootstrap a business if you start with a true moonshot idea. And that was a very important lesson for me. Innovation is about connecting the dots – but the dots must exist. If you want to build a house and there are no bricks, you do not go about inventing them. You want to build houses so you better go find other building materials. When bricks become available, you can leverage your know-how and capital in building houses to quickly adopt this new technology.

Take AI, for instance. I am much more pessimistic about AI in industry than I was for academia. It seems that the largest gains of using AI in industry come from applications where classical methods just don’t work – for instance, object recognition or translation. But in many cases in industry you want robust, efficient, and cheap solutions – and neural networks are rarely a good choice then. On top of that, don’t forget the first prerequisite for any machine learning – data. If you’re an IT company, you probably have lots of data, but for many more traditional businesses digitalization still hasn’t happened. This is why there is a lot of talk about Industry 4.0 or Industry 5.0. Companies first need to start accumulating data, and with that data they will be able to build digital copies of their processes – the so-called digital twins. Now that’s where AI can really kick in and start optimizing these processes because when you have a simulator, you can use all your fancy tools to find the most optimal solution and control policy without ever touching the physical thing.

Innovation in business means spotting such opportunities to construct something of value by ingenuously combining existing components into a working solution. It requires an acute sense of what is lacking, an ability to see what the world could be like, and an ambition to get there. Do I know yet which opportunities I should bet on to pull off a profitable business? Nope. Am I scared? Hell yeah! You know, I even wrote this whole motivational speech for myself how to learn to take risks and live your life fully. Thank you for reading it!