We're back! Took a break because I got sick, then felt guilty for taking the break so wanted to write a ton of blogs in one day summarizing all other days, then felt daunted by the magnitude of that task, which resulted in procrastinating the task for now a week and a half, which caused guilt to build and build. That was a mistake. Guilt is not real, and thus cannot accumulate in that fashion, and I definitely shouldn't have let the myth of cumulative guilt stop me from writing these blogs (which I do truly enjoy doing btw). However, I decided that I will be making some changes to the way I write these. I will give myself 20 minutes, flat. I find that a lot of the time spent writing these blogs is used to try to come up with literary quirks to try to show off the uniqueness of my situation. This is dumb. The whole point of these blogs is to be raw encapsulations of what my days are like. The time pressure should help sort this out.

Another semi-adjacent idea I've been thinking about recently as midterms passed is the idea of grinding as hard as you can on any particular task. This is not the move. The effort vs. result graph of any task almost always starts to plateau very quickly. In other words, it is much more optimal to study 2 hours to get a 94 than to study 20 hours to get a 99. Do not maximize effort, find the optimal amount of effort which will achieve the maximum result. The calculus of hard work extends faaaar beyond just exams, but they are a uniquely quantifiable example of this phenomenon.

Okay, now, I'll summarize the cool stuff I've done since my last blog. Went to NYC to speak to the founder of Sonar, AI Private Equity diligence company. Super interesting guy, and awesome short term and long term value propositions. Got a job working at Dr. Raghav Sundar's lab at the Yale School of Medicine using machine learning for drug efficacy analysis. Spoke to SWE at Google about his experiences as a teacher before becoming a Googler. In Washington DC right now to eat Thanksgiving dinner with my suitemates family.

Ok, running out of time, lesson of the week is to not let guilt rule your life; a lot of the time that we feel the accumulation of guilt, we are only one step away from getting back on track.