Happy Tuesday, from San Francisco!

Many people were surprised about my psychology research internship this summer. I've always been a CS major who does personal development stuff on the side, so a tech internship was more likely than psychology research.

I'll admit, though: This pivot created a lot of self-doubt. Applying my framework on conquering self-doubt helped, but I still felt like an imposter.

I realized that I was still harboring unhelpful mindsets that were creating fear.

I've adopted 3 mindsets over the past 5 weeks to resolve that:

1. Start with abundance

You don't have to start from scratch.

You're never starting from scratch—unless you allow yourself to.

No one can take away the skills and knowledge you've gained—until you lie to yourself that they're not transferrable.

If you need technical help, you can reach out to:

• Friends
• Mentors
• Colleagues
• Experts on the Internet

...unless you convince yourself that asking for help makes you "look weak" and you're not "worthy" enough to contact people who seem to know what they're doing.

Start from abundance: The belief that you have all the skills, knowledge, and connections to accomplish what you want to do.

2. Strive for high-quality output

You're judged by the quality of your work: People eventually trust you not because you can get things done, but because you can get things done properly.

They'll love you even more if you can get things done well.

This is why I think the fastest way to make oneself replaceable in the AI revolution is to:

1. Copy-paste AI outputs into your work to get things done "efficiently"
2. Focus on "prompt engineering" without thinking about underlying principles

Your superiors might not notice when you use AI in your work, but you're still depriving yourself of opportunities to practice:

• Thinking critically about problems and decisions
• Developing an intuition for your field

...which will show a few years into your career in your quality of work.

You have 100% control over the quality of your work. Cherish that control by building the habits, skills, and knowledge needed for producing high-quality work.

3. Stretch your failure rate

Growing up, I noticed that the "smart people" in my class rarely asked questions.

I started associating "asking questions" with "looking dumb", and stopped clarifying my doubts.

While my results kept dropping, the results of my "smarter" classmates kept improving. I later discovered that my "smarter" classmates were simply asking their questions in private.

Asking questions, clarifying doubts, taking on new projects all involve risk. Without risk, however, there is usually no meaningful reward.

We all know failure is feedback, and we can agree that feedback is knowledge, and as the cliché asserts, knowledge is power.

Therefore, failure is power, and if you want to increase your chances of success, you must increase your failure rate.

— Steven Bartlett, The Diary of a CEO

Applying these mindsets to my internship

1. Starting with abundance: Before starting on a task, I took a closer look at the work of previous interns and identified what can and cannot be built upon for the current task. For things that can be repurposed, I identified areas for improvement; for things that cannot be re-used, I identified what was missing, and then got to work. This process helped plug my knowledge gaps quickly.

2. Strive for high-quality output: Producing high-quality work has become a habit after years of practice. The main challenge of being in a new field is:

1. Finding out what "high quality" means to others
2. Finding ways to exceed that socially-accepted standard
3. Recalibrating my work habits and processes to exceed that standard every time.

3. Stretch your failure rate: During team meetings, I listen more than I talk. This helped me learn more about my field, especially as a beginner. However, I am comfortable raising my hand to speak up—usually to clarify my doubts or to provide more context to my proposals.

Give these 3 mindsets a try, and let me know whether it worked for you or not! Feel free to DM me on LinkedIn or reply to this email :D

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