The Innovation Club │ March/April Newsletter 🗞️

Celebrating With Friends

Lattes in Portugal

Receiving an Acceptance From the USC Iovine and Young Academy!

Imagine this: You applied to your dream program, you wait 4 months to hear back and not a day goes by where you don’t think about the program.

I came home from school on Friday, March 22 and just ran into bed and loaded up Netflix. I had to distract my mind no matter what. I watched Murder Mubarak (a little slow but still a good watch). I was chilling with my dad when the email came: “There has been an update in your admissions portal.” I didn’t want to move. I just froze up and couldn’t accept the fact that I could load up my admissions portal and ACTUALLY view whether I got in or not (damn this is starting to sound like a Common App essay).

And then I went downstairs, my dad was so eager to open up the admissions portal and my entire family gathered around the fireplace. And then… A bunch of ribbons popped up and without reading anything I knew, I knew that I had got in.

The Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy is a 50-person cohort where human experience fuels purpose-driven technology and business innovation via building projects.

(If you are currently in TKS and are starting the college application process I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend that you check it out)

USC Iovine and Young Academy Welcome Experience

I blasted y’all with a bunch of pics, now to get into something I love writing about, TEENAGE LESSONS.

Teenage Lessons

“Plan and set goals for a weekly basis, not daily.”

I was setting up daily goals everyday in a Notion template. And then I went on vaca for one week and for some random reason I did my habit-tracking a little differently. Instead of setting goals on a daily basis, I did it on a weekly basis. And boom!

I noticed that I had achieved a higher percentage of goals than I ever had before. And the reason was that I set goals for a weekly basis. And it kinda makes sense.

So many random things can happen in a day that can affect your ability to go-through with your daily goals. But the amount of randomized events occurring shoots down from a weekly lens. So I set actionable steps each day to achieve my set goal by the end of the week. If I don’t hit all my goals for Tuesday, that’s fine because I can cover up on Wednesday. All is good as long as I don’t break the broken rule: All set goals that are listed for the EOTW must be hit! On top of that, if you feel that you didn’t achieve everything that you wanted to achieve in a day, it mentally makes you feel less satisfied at the end of the day.

“Don’t try to be extreme with hitting goals. Be relaxed, let your efforts naturally arise.”

Basically, things become a lot easier when you shift your perspective and view things from a passionate lens. Try to find the fun in stuff. Because you will naturally work for longer hours if you are passionate about something whereas forcing yourself to do something via discipline.

“Observe expressions, learn from what people do as an actor.”

(For all actors)

I’m an actor and I learned this from a Bollywood actor. Observe what type of expressions people make when they experience certain feelings. For example, Amir Khan discovered that when someone experiences pain they might have a shocked expression on their face as they weren’t expecting something to hurt to such an extent. Pick up what you can from real-life events and incorporate them in your acting.

“When you feel low, some stuff is lingering—so go do it right away.”

A lot of the times when I wasn’t feeling my best I realized that I had a lot of outstanding tasks, so I would just go them and it would make me feel much much better.

Beneficial Reads

If you haven’t heard of this read/podcast than you are living under a rock.

My First Million: https://www.youtube.com/@MyFirstMillionPod

Opportunities

Slope is a micro-grant program designed to give ambitious builders resources as they pursue compelling projects.

Apply here: https://slopegrants.com/

And that’s all! Until next time 😊.