How I'm setting up the next phase of my life

My priorities, interests, and motivations are all changing and my last few months have been a lot of figuring that out.

Hey, I’m Tehseen

I am a 17-year-old from Toronto interested in technology’s potential (specifically blockchain and machine learning) to do great work for the world. Here is my portfolio of things I’ve done to contribute to this mission.

But beyond all those buzzwords I’m just a dude tryna do cool stuff with fun people

Here are the cliff notes from this edition:

1. Twelve lessons learned from the past few months

2. How I am training to solve a trillion-dollar problem

3. Building a tool to accelerate the growth of young people

4. Highlights from seeing the world

5. Favorite pieces of content over the last few months

Moving forward I am going to include more insights and reflections rather than just updates. It should be more fun — lmk if it’s not.

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But first, check out my last newsletter if you haven’t already.

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12 Lessons learned over the past few months:

Rather than starting with an update, I’ll give you some takeaways right off the bat.

Through trying new projects, daily routines, and meeting new people I’ve learned the following lessons and have been trying hard to change my habits surrounding these lessons. You should too.

1. Respond to messages quickly

   1. Half-swiping instilled bad habits in our generation

2. Write very few words when communicating

3. Look at people’s eyes when they are speaking

   1. You learn what they are actually saying

4. A full calendar is not an indicator of doing a lot of work

5. Get comfortable with being overwhelmed

6. Read to understand, not to finish

7. Follow up on every single message — it’s so easy to forget things

8. Take extreme ownership of the things you propose — tie all loose knots yourself

9. Intentionally catch up with old friends regularly

10. If you want to do something quick, do it immediately

11. Submit things wayyyyy before the deadline

12. If you can’t clearly articulate why you are doing something, stop

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Starting a journey to change the lives of three billion people

In my last newsletter, I introduced the social and financial implications of the digital divide and wrote an article on the problem itself and how I was looking to solve it.

Well towards the end of 2023, I dove headfirst into learning about the backbone of the Internet — Border Gateway Protocol — and looked at ways to optimize this old software that underpins how information is distributed around the world.

In following this rabbit hole, I explored three different technical tracks

1. The Algorithms Behind Electricity Smart Grids

2. The fundamental mechanics of a few machine learning models

3. The primary Internet networking protocols

This journey involved a lot of figuring out concepts on which I had no prior knowledge.

The most helpful insight I had through this journey is to validate every assumption you make with an expert.

I did a lot of reading and watching videos to learn myself, but 30-minute calls with experts in the three fields above taught me more than days of research. They provided me with direction and filled my knowledge gaps that would likely never have been filled otherwise.

Looking into Electricity Smart Grids

Coming from a background in blockchain and distributed networks, I often crossed paths with projects like “decentralized electricity grids” and “blockchain-based carbon credit markets.” I found these projects fascinating because of how complex these networks could get, but found the current state of blockchain technology just was not ready (slow and expensive) to handle such complex data transfers.

So when exploring Internet networks and machine learning, I became very interested in how machine learning is already used in electricity smart grids today. To get my feet wet, I took a deep dive into electricity demand prediction. Check out my detailed article below.

Exploring new machine learning models

This pathway led me to explore a few different machine learning models and try to truly understand the math and architecture behind how they work. After testing the efficacy of a few, I chose XGBoost.

Applying them to optimizing Internet networks

After months of research, I came up with a thesis.

Internet Smart Grids

This pitch below is an introduction to my idea and what needs to be true for me to make this real. Check it out.

Now I am working on running simulations with this algorithm to test how cost-effective it is and if it can be implemented to actually solve this problem in rural North America (to start).

I won a $1,000 grant from the 1517 fund to make this real!

A huge shoutout to Michael Gibson and the 1517 team for this support! I am looking to use this money to run simulations with existing Internet routing algorithms to test the efficacy of my thesis in the real world. Progress to come soon…

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Accelerating the potential for young people to be great

My biggest insight from working on this incredibly difficult Internet networking project is that speaking with experts is the most effective way to learn and grow.

Mentorship can change people’s lives by giving them access to insights from people who have walked their path before, failed, and learned.

But,

According to MentorLoop, 76% of people think mentors are important, but only 37% of people have one.

This gap is why Krishiv Thakuria and I built LinkedIn Mentor.

LinkedIn Mentor is a platform that helps users find experts in specific niches to help address specific problems they may be facing. However, finding mentors is only half the problem. The platform also allows for these users to directly contact their “mentors” through InMail ensuring users can reap the benefits of having access to a world of professionals on LinkedIn.

We are in the process of pitching this product to LinkedIn to build this out and make it real.

You can check out our detailed case study and implementation plan here:

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Highlights from seeing the world beyond my bubble

Dallas: Football in Texas really is big

Costa Rica: Water is so much more dangerous than we give it credit

Morocco: Dance is the crux of African culture

North Carolina: The greatest salespeople are elderly ladies from the South

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Content that slaps

Podcasts

Articles

• Techno-industrial revolution

• Education in the Internet Age — Balaji Srinivasan

• The Ukraine War is Ultimately about Poland

• Cool essay about the growth of the Stanley water bottle

• How AI impacts employee layoffs

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This is how I want to live the next few months of my life:

“Right or wrong, it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time”

―Fyodor Dostoevsky

Thanks for tuning in!

Feel free to share this with whomever you think may find this interesting. The next newsletter will include.

1. Update on LinkedIn and Internet networking project

2. A new project I’m working on in the climate tech space

3. A decision for what I am doing with my life in the next few years

The only way to check these out is to check out my next edition.