TKS Session 2: Impact Billions
After the first kickoff session last week, this session was way more hands-on, getting more technical and building out different ideas. The session was focused on how we can impact billions by identifying and solving the world’s biggest problems.
We started the session with 2 rounds of speed braindates so we could meet more people in our cohort (which are the smaller groups of Activate students compared to last week, when we had everyone in Activate on one call for the kickoff session). It was good to start our session by meeting people because it sets us up for working with them again in the future, or can spark a connection. I ended up being put into the same group for the activities in session with 2 people I had met in the speed braindate sessions beforehand.
Instead of a MotW, we looked at a kind of philosophy that Aristotle is known for, which centers around being virtuous and achieving eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is the state of living well and fulfilling your potential. We looked at what his philosophy was and how it has been able to withstand the test of time. His ideas were that nature has it coded for us to be virtuous, and that it’s a skill that we can develop and acquire through practice. Virtue is the perfect medium between too much and too little. A good example of the golden zone of being virtuous is the virtue of courage. If you see someone who is in danger and needs help, what is the courageous thing to do? Most people would say that putting yourself in harm’s way to save a person is courageous. But, to be courageous is to be brave enough to do what you’re capable of, even if it scares you. What if that person was being attacked by someone really big? What if they were about to fall off a building? You need to be able to first assess the situation and then determine what the smartest thing is to do. The smartest thing to do is whatever you are capable of succeeding at (that does not mean it’s a guarantee you will) to increase your chances of actually helping the person in danger. Whether that would mean confronting the situation head-on because there is a sizable chance you can succeed, or calling in someone else whom you know can succeed, being courageous means that you need to be brave enough to do whatever is smart.
The idea is that virtues like courage can be learned, and you can learn the happy medium for each of those virtues as well. That’s the first part of his philosophy. The second part then leads into how you can use these “idealistic virtues” to reach eudaimonia, which is different for everyone. I personally think the reason that his philosophy has been able to still impact people to this day is because of a couple of things:
He presents these virtues as something that can be learned, which makes it attainable. It gives people who believe in his philosophy the opportunity to achieve what he talks about and embody it through trial and error and learning
His virtues and the broad idea of eudaimonia can be personalized based on who you are and the context of your situation. Eudaimonia is going to be different for everyone; it’s not a specific situation that needs to be achieved for you to have reached that state. It depends on your goals, your aspirations, your interests, and whatever is going to ultimately make you happy. This gives people the chance to tailor their philosophy to what they want to accomplish, not to take on an entirely new goal to reach. The virtues themselves are also contextual, which makes them easy to learn and apply to different situations.
It’s interesting to go through different philosophies and frameworks because it helps you to learn more about the different ideas around you and take bits and pieces from different frameworks to develop your own.
After going over Aristotle’s philosophy, which switched gears to how we can connect eudaimonia to why some of us are here at TKS. You can assume that some of us are here because our end goal is to have a big impact. A way to have a big impact is to solve a problem that affects a lot of people. And that’s how we connected it to exploring and understanding the world’s biggest problems.
Our first exercise was to figure out how to find problems that need solving. We know about climate change and world hunger, but those are overarching problems. What are specific problems that are caused by specific things that contribute to bigger problems?
We learned about this lesson that a teacher had taught his students. The teacher brought in a dead fish and showed it to the class. He asked his students to tell him about the fish. His students described the fish and what they saw. The teacher did the same thing the next day in class, and the students gave the same answers. He did it another day, and the students started getting more specific and descriptive with their answers. The teacher came in with the dead fish again and asked the same question. The idea behind the lesson was that everyone was talking about the fish at the surface level, but not one person had thought about “digging deeper” by, for example, dissecting the fish to be able to talk more about it and explain it better. This ties to how we see a lot of problems daily at the surface level, but how many times do we stop to analyze these problems and actually dissect them?
So, our activity was to use AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) to find out about some problems that people are impacted by today.
For my prompt, I had given some parameters to ChatGPT by specifying things like:
Problems that impact over 10 million people
Geographically bound to the USA/Canada
Nothing too obvious, like climate change or world hunger, can be more technical problems
The prompt gave me a few different problems, but one that stood out to me was computer vision syndrome (CVS), which impacts roughly 50-70% of people in Canada/USA. CVS is caused by overuse of screens and long durations of screen time, along with unhealthy habits. The main symptom of CVS is poor eyesight and eye strain, which is not only caused by the blue light emitted from the screens, but also by poor lighting, less frequent breaks of screen time, and not blinking enough due to screens. Other symptoms that can arise include physical discomfort, sleep disruption, mental drain, work and school struggles, and social spillover (changes in mood and energy). And these symptoms can then branch off into worse problems, affecting your entire well-being and the way you function.
After finding a problem and working with tools like AI to identify it, we then learned about the basics of creating memos. Memos are a way to communicate thoughts or ideas concisely and easily without unnecessary information. Memos sound boring, but they can be very useful in getting an idea or thought across as an attachment in an email or as a way to get a meeting or opportunity with someone. So, we practiced creating memos about anything we wanted. For me, I chose to create a memo detailing the problem I researched in the session, CVS. Below you can see how my memo turned out:
This is a pretty basic memo I wrote, trying to detail the importance of focusing on the problem CVS is and its causes. Some good qualities of a memo include:
Short text
Visually easy to follow
Gets to the point
Data for the problem
Full info needed is provided
Makes it easy to follow up or take action
In my memo about CVS, I include a lot of statistics and talk about how CVS impacts different parts of Americans beyond just their health, but also the performance of businesses and the country’s economy.
Some kids made memos more tailored to their focus or something they want to research more into or meet with someone about. We can actually use these memos and send them to people to have meetings with them or learn more about our memo’s topic.
To finish off this session, we were given a little look at October and some of the action items for next week. In October, the 3-week Ignition challenge starts, and we will learn more about what the challenge entails soon. But we will get to work in teams and also with a sponsor company to dive deeper into problems. So, this week we need to start thinking about who we will want to team up with for this challenge. We also have our weekly coaching with our directors to schedule, and we also have our second focus/personal project to decide on by Oct. 20th. So there are a few things coming up, and I’m really looking forward to the exciting projects and challenges to start picking up!
