October's Reverbs

The Knowledge Society, Rhythm's 30-Day Revamp, IHSMUN and perfectionism.

Oct 30, 2022

Hey there 👋

My name is Rhythm Doshi and I am a 15-year-old that lives in Dubai ✨ I am obsessed with self-development & growth, It has transitioned to becoming an ideal/principle that is firmly etched and woven into the fabric of my life’s principles.

⚡My natural inclinations revolve around:

blockchain, cryptocurrencies, & decentralization of the future.
astrophysics and space tech.
philosophy & philosophical frameworks.
consciousness, meditation, and enlightenment.
neuroscience and psychology
psychedelics & ego-dissolution.
building startups and products, economics & business.

Some of my hobbies include writing blog posts, doodling, cooking gourmet meals & talking to people/socializing. I play a lot of sports including Tennis, Football, Cricket, and Badminton. I am super into Formula One Racing, my favorite driver is definitely Max Verstappen👀

here’s one of my doodles:

Now that you know who I am, let’s dive into the cool shit I did in October.

In Dubai, October usually sees a huge change in the weather, the temperatures drop, and it’s pleasant all the time, but with the weather, this month saw a huge change in me and my character, let me explain how.

💪 Rhythm’s 30-Day Revamp:

For a long time now I’ve been pushing certain habits and things that I’ve always wished of doing but procrastination has stopped me from practicing/doing them every single time, I came across this video by Leon Hendrix titled, “How to stop wasting your life.” and that video really changed me, he warned the viewers in the start about how this video can lead to drastic changes in your life, and it did. I thought to myself about what I was doing with my life, about how I was wasting my potential and wasn’t using it to its core, and how the world of social media had destroyed my “self-agency” (shoutout to Navid for introducing this concept to me). I was triggered, there was this voice in my head that was telling me to start doing sh*t that I’ve always told myself I’d do but never did.

I planned a 30-day challenge to completely revamp myself, I cut off almost all social media, wrote down a list of habits that I want to inculcate, kept a track of all the bad habits I’m trying to get rid of and more stuff to re-gain my self-agency. I have been documenting the entire process on camera and will be publishing videos on YouTube very soon, stay tuned.

Today is Day 18 💪 and here’s how I am feeling:

I’ve re-gained self-control, and self-agency and have the ability to dictate my moods, behaviors, and feelings.
I am experiencing mental clarity.
→ mental clarity ∝ productivity.
A cluttered mind can lead to a decrease in productivity levels, I’ve been meditating every day and from first-hand experience, It has definitely been instrumental in clearing my mind of unnecessary junk, that has been depriving me of doing things I’m passionate about.

pro-tip: if you are planning to get into meditation, try this out:-
→ sit comfortably, close your eyes and activate your imagination.
→ imagine you sitting on a hill, and you see a stream of water flowing down.
→ you see lily pads flowing down with the flow of the water, except you exchange these lily pads with things that are running in your head (eg: an incident that happened in school today.)
→ do not involve any bias, watch these thoughts flow down the stream of water without participating in them, make sure to dissolve your ego, and watch them as if you were not yourself and were just a casual spectator.
→ once you feel like you don’t have anything in your head left, you will feel fresh and ready to go, it hardly takes 2 minutes, do it ;)

ps: If you tried the meditation technique, do hit me up and share your experience!

🚀 The Knowledge Society

This month @ The Knowledge Society has been absolutely phenomenal, this is all that I did in October:

Internalized Mindsets like:
→ Unconventional Thinking
→ Appreciation
→ Bias for Action
→ Curiosity
→ Courage
→ Done > Perfect
Started focusing on blockchain, had a wonderful session with TKS Alum - Adam Majmudar on Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs).
Started writing a detailed technical article on blockchain and its implications in various other industries.
explored areas like Human Longevity, Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, & Connectomics!

Sessions at The Knowledge Society have been life-changing, over the past month I’ve learned stuff about science, tech, and life, like never before. I’ve had Insightful conversations with directors, and other students, attended engaging sessions with structured and deep discussions on various topics, emotionally connected with the community, absorbed content on various emerging technologies/science fields, and most importantly, acquired skills that my past self would be left shocked with 🤯.

in short, my experience has been CRAZY 🚀

here’s a picture from one of the sessions!!

IHSMUNC’22

Serving the role of Convenor and Head Chair of UNHRC alongside my sec team and Krutika my co-chair has been a crazy experience. Organizing a MUN with over 230+ Delegates was a hell of a ride, we worked day in and day out to organize this MUN which I’m glad was a success in the end :) The three days of intense debate, hectic crises, and tons of action have been nothing short of memorable.

conference captures:

🤔 October’s Deep Reverb:

This section of my newsletter is going to be devoted to discussing various emotions that I’m feeling and my thoughts/opinions and takeaways from learning more about them as part of my internal project to find out who truly I am. I hope this section will relate to a few people out there.

This month I’ve grown a lot. October to me was all about taking a step back and really noticing the emotions I feel, increasing my awareness to spectate these feelings without bias, and really just digging deep into my thoughts/emotions.

😶‍🌫️ Perfectionism:

This month’s deep reverb/reflection would be me realizing the fact that I am a perfectionist procrastinator, this is something that has gone unnoticed for a long time, and after loads of introspection and contemplation, I found out that I am a perfectionist and it has been holding me back from doing things that I have always wanted to do.

After some deep internal reflection over the period of this month, here are my takeaways:

Motivation follows action. Do I want to be someone that lets perfectionism get in the way? or do I want to be someone that takes action regardless? I ask these questions to myself every time perfectionism creeps in and acts like a hindrance, these questions help in achieving this mental clarity to actually get shit done.
“Perfectionism is a twenty-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it’s the thing that’s really preventing us from taking flight.”
~ Brené Brown
To overcome perfectionism I’ve internalized this mindset of:
Done > Perfect
Done is always better than perfect; After catching myself trying to be perfect and consciously applying this mindset every time I procrastinate just because I’m not doing something perfectly has been life-changing.

It takes time. It is hard at the start but the more you practice it consciously, the faster you uproot this belief that has been firmly anchored to the ground or in this case your brain. It gets wired in your belief system. It slips into your unconscious mind and eventually, It becomes effortless.

👀 Content Consumption:

According to a report by the University of California, San Diego, Humans consume about 34 GB of Data every day, to put that in perspective, that’s about 100,000 words or about how many words J.R.R Tolkien’s The Hobbit has 🤯, that led to me contemplating about how much of that content I actually retained and to my surprise it was hardly anything. We listen to so many podcasts, read multiple newsletters, watch tons of YouTube videos, scroll mindlessly through heaps of reels/tiktoks, read through loads of articles and so much more;

but how much of it do we actually internalize? how much of that information do we really use in our lives? Is there a way we can make the most out of the content?

After asking these questions to my TKS Directors, and other fellow TKSers, I came up with a solution to this problem.

💡The Solution: Set Action Items

POV: You open YouTube, you see a Matt D’Avella/Ali Abdaal video on your recommended page, you click on the video that talks about how you can become a productivity guru, 10 videos down the line you’ve consumed a lot of content and you have this sudden burst of motivation that goes away in mere hours.

If you introspect, you will actually be shocked to find out that you’ve hardly retained any information from these videos and you’ve not really put them to action and haven’t picked out something that you want to apply to your life.

Guess what? I’ve been through this and here’s how you can make the most out of all this digital gold.

Setting at least one action item after every piece of content that you consume can be game-changing.
Writing down one thing to internalize & to take “action” on really helps in engaging with the content and sort of forces your brain to apply the knowledge.
this is key 🗝️ when it comes to actually applying the information in your day-to-day life.
Talk about it. Go over to someone and just explain what you found interesting or what piqued your curiosity, having a conversation with someone on that particular topic helps in the internalization of the concept.

To put these tips into action, here are some of my favorite pieces of content and my takeaways from it!

❓The Art of Powerful Questions:

here’s the link to the mini-book:

The Art of Powerful Questions

💪 Takeaways:

Optimize for the dataset.
→ put in the work and the effort to learn, research, and atleast so you can ask better questions.
Know briefly what you want from the answer.

“Questions are keys to treasure chests of knowledge in the other person’s brain”
~ Navid Nathoo

→ identify the treasure chest you want to open. if you can’t unlock it using one key, use another one.

Powerful Questions:
→ ignite curiosity in the listener.
→ encourage thoughtful, deep and meaningful conversations/discussions.
→ exposes pre-conceived notions/assumptions.
→ leaves a person contemplating/thinking about it.
→ fosters more questions & inquiry.

🤑 The Angel Philosopher: Naval Ravikant

One of the best podcast episodes I’ve ever listened to. Naval goes in-depth about his thoughts on happiness, habits, the education system, and the mental models/ frameworks that encapsulate his life’s principles, ideals, and values. Listening to him was a deep dive into a deep thinker’s brain.

💪 Takeaways:

Don’t read something that everyone is, you want to be reading that opposes pre-conceived notions, this gives room for thought and reasoning.
Strengthen your basics, your foundational knowledge of a subject is extremely important and it is at the core of growing/leveling up in that particular area.
Your mind should be your servant, not the master, it shouldn’t be something that is controlling me and driving me 24/7. Breaking the habit of uncontrolled thinking is
Running your brain in debugging mode is beneficial for happiness. Our brains tend to run off into future fantasy planning mode or keep thinking about the incidents that happen in the past but we never seem to be living in the present.
The mind itself is a muscle, it can be trained and conditioned. It has haphazardly been influenced by society out of our control and if you look at it with awareness and intent 24/7, then you can really unpack your mind, thoughts, and reactions, and you can start reconfiguring & rewriting the program to what you want.
If we can’t do it 24/7, do it at least 10 minutes a day by meditation, Habits compound over time, be consistent.

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Achievements this month:

Bagged the 🥇 Gold Award for my essay entry in the Queens Commonwealth Essay Writing Competition! I wrote my essay on Pujya Gurudevshri Rakeshbhai Jhaveri who is my beloved ❤️ guru and the essay was about the widespread impact he has had on millions of lives all around the world!

😍 The Favorites Wall:

here is a list of my favorite tidbits of internet content that I came across in October!

💭 Favorite Quote of the Month:

“It’s what we do when we don’t want to that shows us who we really are. It’s easy to do it on our good days. It’s hard to do it on our bad days. And that’s where we get a chance to decide what kind of person we want to be.”
~ Steven Ritchie