Hi! 👋 Nice to meet you/see you again! My name’s Tobias, I’m currently working on a new method to produce carbon-neutral diesel. Previous to this I was researching batteries and building cleantech projects outside of school. In this newsletter, I quickly share what I’m working on and what I’m learning along the way. Thank you for taking the time to read and for being a part of the journey 🚀
Here’s the menu for this update (4 mins):
Progress on my diesel project
Annual reflection (link and takeaways)
Understanding why things miraculously click
Diesel: Way-finding down the problem of expensive feedstock 🪴
At the stage I am now with my diesel project (see previous newsletter), most progress doesn’t look like progress. Most progress is in the form of way-finding; I started with X, realized I should have been doing Y, then understood that Z would take 20 years to be feasible and pivoted to Q. Working problem-down is analogous to working a bunch of jobs you hate to find what you love.
Here’s what I got done:
Found the highest productivity strain of autotrophic bacteria to extracellularly secrete fatty acids (FA) after two weeks of ineffective research.
What I learned here is that reading papers without knowing what you’re looking for is the biggest waste of time possible. Without knowing what success looks like (in terms of bacterial productivity), any numbers look the same when reading—150mg/L vs 100g/L mean the same thing to you if you don’t know what you need.
Made an economic model of the $/kg of producing fatty acids with this strain
In that model, I broke $/kg of FA down to first principles. The operational costs consisted of:
Energy (for light)
Culture medium
Even with only operational costs, the productivity of the bacteria is so low that the ratio of culture medium to FAs produced is extremely costly. So I’m looking into the first principles of growing cyanobacteria. It’s looking like it’s just CO2, nitrogen, phosphorus, and small concentrations of metals; that can’t be that expensive to come across.
Evidently it becomes hard to set goals for the next month when you don’t know what roadblocks you’ll hit, but if I do hit dead ends, I hope that I hit them as fast as possible. This is the plan:
Find a way to get the nutrients for growing cyanobacteria basically for free
Add on the capital costs and if those are too expensive, innovate a new type of bioreactor. If that hits a dead end, I’ll look for the next strain of bacteria that might be more productive.
Then lastly if the above doesn’t work, I’ll switch processes altogether to #2 of 7 and re-begin down that journey.
If you have feedback on my thinking or know someone working with bioreactors, I’d love to connect!
Reflection: I spent the first week of this month synthesizing the best insights I had in 2022 💡
One of my first violin teachers used to tell me, “If you practice it wrong once, it’s a mistake. If you practice it wrong twice, you’re practicing a different piece.” 1 bad day is never just a bad day. Don’t practice the piece you don’t want to play.
In my annual reflection, I broke down the different ways of interacting with the world into three dualisms: the invisible line, the Unknown and the Known, and Cain and Abel.
You can read it here:
“Why do things click all of a sudden?” 🏃💨
Sometimes things just click and you have more momentum than ever before. One question I’ve been thinking about is “Why can’t one just decide to be in their prime at any moment?” I’ve never tried doing that, but I bet if I tried, it wouldn’t work. How is it that things just miraculously click after months of them feeling arduous?
The answer I’ve come to relates to the model of activation energy in chemistry: your reaction is capped to the level of energy that you input. In other words, your level of progress and momentum is capped to degree of pain you’re willing to endure. The solution is to make “pain the name of the game”. Often, a reason for stopping an activity, work, etc. is because “it shouldn’t feel this hard”. But when you get rid of that mindset and are solely thinking of “how can I feel more pain today than I did yesterday?” you start to break through.
One great way to instantly feel more pain is to make the decision that what you’re doing is going to be excellent.
It’s a completely different game when you’ve decided you’re going to win VS being undecided about if you’re going to win. When you don’t decide you’re going to win, you don’t decide you’re going to lose, but you’re actively choosing not to be fully accountable because it takes a lot of pain to do so. I estimate the work takes about 6x+ more pain when you’ve decided you’re going to win than staying undecided, and the reward when you win is tenfold.
If you’re simply optimizing for the scale of the reward and pain is out of the equation (because you’ve decided it’s the name of the game), then that’s a worthwhile deal. But without that decision, it’s not obviously worth it because pain is more emotionally potent than praise.
Regardless of your preference, I think the pain/reward takeaway is important to bring up to remind ourselves that passiveness is an active choice. In day-to-day life, it’s easy to avoid the key question of passiveness. To make it clearer for ourselves, perhaps we should treat each new day like getting to your turn at the poker table, where one is forced to decide between “Fold”, and “All-in.”
What makes sense for you?
I’m really looking forward to all the exciting work I have going this next month and can’t wait to share more :)
To adventure and fellowship,
Tobias