Summon Your Luck

Posted on Sep 19, 2024 by Alex Alvarez

I met this guy Felix Sosa who’s a phd at Harvard because I randomly emailed him one day asking for advice. He’s from a Cuban family and he did undergrad at UCF with a really bad gpa (something like 2.5). Now he does bleeding-edge AI research at both MIT and Harvard.

The reason he got into Ivy League schools is because he started teaching free AI classes at UCF under some “AI Club” that he created because he thought the AI class at UCF was dog shit. He then emailed his new curriculum to a bunch of schools, including MIT, who saw the curriculum and invited him to teach at one of the MIT STEM summer camps.

He then asked a professor at UCF (Dr. Kenneth Stanley, creator of NEAT) over and over to be in his lab. After being rejected several times, the professor finally let him in and Felix went above and beyond what an undergraduate researcher would typically do.

The moral of the story is that yes, Felix had a tangible passion for AI and neuroscience that people at Harvard and MIT could sense despite his bad GPA but also that he forced his way through and molded the world around him to his liking and not the other way around.

You have to stubbornly force your way through life, constantly creating (and not waiting for) opportunities by reaching out to people in a genuine way or providing value to others (like the AI class) and you have to do this relentlessly, often trying several times (like Felix asking to be in Kenneth Stanley’s lab).

Once you attain the opportunity, it’s imperative that you go beyond anyone’s expectations. You have to under-promise and over-deliver in such a way that people are distinctively impressed with you. Everyone wants to help the person who they think will surely succeed. This cycle is often self-reinforcing.