Autodidactic. I cannot stop learning, and I love youtube and other similar tools for exactly that. One of the main reasons I am at MIT right now is because I went down a rabbit hole of learning about functional programming, category theory, and system design generally during my time building out products at my startup. I was always eager to figure out how we could do things better, and my philosophical perspective always had me pursuing underlying ideas. I was experimenting with meeting schedules, trying to understand what made was the optimal way to run a team, a company, build a product. I was never just a builder, I needed to always dig deeper. But that hasn’t been unique only to tech and category theory. It’s also with art, I’ve always wanted to understand music and film. I began teaching myself guitar a few years ago, picked up back up on the piano, and even got a banjo to start learning after visiting Ireland. I have been growing my knowledge of music theory. Even with more hobbyist interests like film, I’ve wanted to dig deeper: I love this movie, what are this director’s favorite movies? What are the different methodologies and schools of cinematography and composition? etc etc. It’s this craving for learning that convinced me I should dive into learning full-time again and go back to school.

Improvement. I am, to a fault, obsessed with optimization and impact. For myself, I am always trying to understand what the best balance is so that I can be most productive and do the best work I can (e.g. balancing diffuse and focused modes of work, writing a lot to make sure that my ideas don’t get lost, etc). But socially especially, I am obsessed with understanding how we can do the most good, and how I can specifically make the greatest marginal impact possible. If I work at a company that’s doing great work, but I am a cog in a machine where my value over my hypothetical replacement is negligible, then I’m not really contributing that much marginal impact. I’m the kind of person who wants to see the calculations behind whether I should be donating bed nets to save lives today, or donating to malaria vaccine lab to save some expected number of lives in the future.

Humility. It is ironic, of course, to say that one of the traits you most embody is humility. But fundamentally, I am not the smartest guy around. Everything I care about is built out of curiosity, and a willingness to listen and try to understand. Any skill I have is for thinking in systems, trying to see the forest and the trees at the same time. But at the end of the day I know I have so much I can learn from others. A lot of the personal growth I’ve experienced over the last few years after leaving my work with Hive was finding the humility to learn from others that are younger than you or less experienced in other ways. With time, I have become better at being willing to sound and look stupid for the sake of understanding things better. And while I still have a long way to go in that regard, I think it’s a critical trait towards being a life-long learner.