In a Life of Assigned Seats, Try to Think About What Fits You - 2024 YEFer

Before the YEF Journey

I’m Lin Rui-Lin, a senior in Electrical Engineering at National Chiao Tung University. I always end up starting a new project a few days before midterms or finals - exactly when I should not be doing “other chores.”

In freshman year, I joined ATCC, which kicked off my cross-disciplinary life between management consulting and electrical engineering; sophomore year brought TEDx, student government, micro-entrepreneurship, and blockchain experiments, and by junior year I was curating an arts festival. Like a musical score, I kept inserting my own breaths into the movement of my EE major.

Before YEF, I always felt those “breaths” - whether running art events or joining hackathons, attempts that made my EE track less monotonous - did not really affect my future. What still waited for me was two years of graduate school and maybe an unknown job in tech, because objectively that felt like the friendliest and lowest-risk path.

Young Entrepreneurs of the Future (YEF)

If you are trying to confirm whether you are a good fit before joining, I would suggest you just apply, because YEF is not about “fit” - it is a competition where people with different personalities sharpen each other.

Young Entrepreneurs of the Future (YEF) is a competition that lasts six to seven months. In the process, you start from the very beginning - a person full of entrepreneurial passion and a blank sheet - and begin your YEF journey. Next, you are matched into teams with participants who have different talents and have grown through different fields, and you build your own startup team. After countless rounds of advice and questioning from industry judges, and countless pivots of your team’s topic, you complete nearly half a year of a startup process. In the end, eight participants are selected to represent the Epoch Foundation and engage in discussions across technology and other fields with academia and industry abroad.

I was fortunate to work with the Flyer I team. Our different experiences meant each pivot never felt like an endless idea pit. Thank you to everyone who spent time and energy on the topic ARtisan.

The best advice I can give at this stage is:

“Do not believe what you see others show; pay attention to the fields and experiences they are willing to keep investing time in.”

In YEF, the point is not to make your own opinions the most prominent. It is to find teammates whose mental models can shape each other during team formation. For example, two weeks before we submitted our report, we still doubted the current topic and could not come up with an executable plan. So we chose to sit down calmly and explain the domains we had been interested in or explored before. As we slowly understood each other, we unexpectedly found many new ideas that were both innovative and practical. That was the crystallization after everyone’s mental models had been refined.

Note: Mental Model: Through their experiences, everyone can hold different views and angles about the same thing. The “unique perspective” built from childhood is your mental model.

Boston Trip 2024

Bottom line first: after this trip, I became less anxious, and even busier every day.

Every day in Boston, whether MIT professors, Harvard entrepreneurship advisors, or a startup engineer just getting started, they all looked like - at least to me - the “dream picture” I had been striving to become. But I found it was not what I had imagined.

They love what they do: “We were stressed, but not depressed.”

They found the field they were willing to commit to when they were young - our age - and kept going deeper. Looking back on my college years, I realized many of my doubts and confusion, even repression, were because I did not know where I should go, not how to move forward. What truly makes me lost is direction, not method.

”Their lives reset my sense of priorities: find the right direction before charging forward.”

Many times, when you want to reach certain quantifiable goals, you can execute solutions with full motivation. For example, if I want to reach an annual income of 5 million, I can start grinding in the tech industry and getting promoted. The direction is there and very clear. But if your goal is to become impactful - to be a researcher at a cutting-edge AI lab and hope your inventions or startup products make a real impact on the world - that is not simple.

They did it. They were certainly smart and had many resources, but what set them apart the most was commitment to their professional field.

Those commitments let them invest more time and keep going compared with others who are equally smart and equally resourced. Failures in research or entrepreneurship are also easier to recover from because of these mental conditions. That is their persistence in a field, and what I believe was the common thread I saw on this journey.

Perseverance does not necessarily bring success directly, but it is inseparable from building influence.

“Having Perspectives."

"What job do you want in the future?"

"Which specialty will you choose?"

"What do you like to do?”

I believe those of us in college are very familiar with these three questions. But in an environment with more and more choices, answering them has become harder and harder.

When we visited Harvard Innovation Lab this time, we asked the host and advisor Jorge Cortell:

“What advice would you give to people our age (20-22)?”

“At this age, we cannot effectively invest toward long-term goals, so the most important thing is that you must have perspectives.” - Jorge Cortell

From the YEF process or from earlier academic life, we are often asked these kinds of “big questions”: “How should you choose a specialty?” or “How should your startup exit?” In fact, everyone can answer these questions logically if we judge by monetary returns. But once these questions meet feelings, it is another matter.

What Jorge Cortell wanted to tell us is that at this stage, we should know when we need rest, when we get tired, what we are interested in, and what kinds of things and states make us suffer. At this age, you do not have to do too many deep explorations, but you can place yourself in many states and environments, stay attentive, and get to know yourself. Then those “big questions” naturally dissolve.

“Everything is signal with noise”

In the last few days at C10 Labs, they were trying to de-noise AI startups. They firmly believe that everything is signal with noise, helping startups stay committed to the methods they need to stick to and do their best.

At the end of this journey, my biggest takeaway was this process of de-noising. They showed me that I should slow down, stop forcing myself into assigned seats, and stop choosing other people’s lives as my future template. Instead, I should stay attentive to my surroundings, understand myself, slowly find the field that fits me, and keep cultivating it.

You do not need pointless anxiety. As long as each attempt is made with full effort, that is enough.

Conclusion

Because of this journey, I realized that my cross-disciplinary attempts, while very unconventional and also keeping my grades from being perfect, were the experiences that let me know what kinds of situations I truly respond to. I am very grateful to my freshman-year self who stayed up late with friends, and to my junior-year self who joined YEF without hesitation. Thank you for being brave, for letting me challenge and understand my own thoughts in limited time, and for making my picture of the future at this age more concrete… and something I long for.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Shipeng for the lifesaving MIT meal vouchers; that curry fish was really good.

Thank you to Yuting for the unconditional support.

Thanks to the entire Flyer I team for the companionship, to Zhiling, Xiuhui, and Tingyun for not giving up the night before the final round and for the final presentation.

Thanks to mentors Patrick and Casper for every late night after tiring days of work, and for the chats in Tokyo - they meant a lot to me.

Thanks to Moutian and Pinyu for the recommendation and support.

Thanks to the other 16 delegates for the companionship. You were the best friends for this long journey.

Thanks to the Epoch Foundation for all the effort and this opportunity to grow.

Special thanks to Josephine for her guidance and sharing.

Lastly, thank you to my family for the support.

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/icelincv/

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