Messages I've gotten from TKS alum since writing this piece:
"this was so beautifully written laura. over the years I’ve had the same conversation with others many times and yet everyone stayed afraid to actually voice it out publicly in fear of still being wrong because it was against what tks preached. wishing only the best for you!!" -- astha, tks 20-21
"I could talk for hours about this!! I literally got this feeling the first day and u described it perfectly. TKS does feel exclusive in the sense that they want u to cut out ppl who are not deemed to have an “unconventional” mindset when I’ve learned that you can learn anything from anyone and that a true impacted is someone who does not distinguish ppl begin between 'conventional' and 'unconventional.'" -- anon, tks 20-22
"read this and started tearing up. no one has articulated how i felt so perfectly laura" -- anon, tks 20-22
"they always talk to us like this, reading this gives me mega flashbacks. i blocked the gaslighting out of my head. at face value we were told not to question them and blindly obey and they absolutely manipulated us with guilt omg. it's crazy how writing this is bringing back stuff u didn't remember. like i totally forgot about alllll of this." -- tks 20-22
"If we can train Olympic level athletes from a young age, why can't we train Olympic level CEOs and innovators?"
like my thoughts on this are something like:
- a huge, huge amount of children who are reared from a young age for anything world-class - in this case, athletics - are straight-up mistreated. sure, a lot of them really love whatever sport they are doing, but in a lot of cases that's parents living vicariously thru their children
- for every olympic level athlete who comes out of getting trained like this at a young age sound and healthy, there are hundreds of failure stories we haven't heard of (survivorship bias!)
like you cannot be SERIOUS. how is "we can train olympic level athletes from a young age" a thing that is GOOD to compare tks to?! no, we freaking can't! this works for like 0.1% of the people trained in this way and causes immense damage to many others, like, do we have any idea how risky and silly that is? how many people trained to be the best in some sport that due to biological limitations CAN'T BE, burn out, and lose out on some other potentially much more rewarding career? how many artists, poets, mathematicians, physicists have we sacrificed to the altar of childhood sports? how many merely GOOD tennis players who could've been GREAT basketball players if they'd been given more time to explore, etc. like god damn
literally almost instantly gave me strong chills / reflexive ugh gtfo this is WRONG and YOU'RE INDOCTRINATING ME vibes
many props
imagine if a "fervor proponent of a genuine society" coerced people to thinking that being genuine is the only good virtue and almost all other virtues are subordinated by and inferior to it - will any actual good quality genuineness come out of this society? i think not, likely just all fake genuineness motivated by social status gaming, i think the analogy is clear enough
give em some fucking freedom to think for themselves, instead of yelling at them "tHiNk fOr YoUrSeLvEs RAHHHH", ugh
absolutely love how this was written. ngl made me feel a tad bit emotional - especially as a current director on the team.
your experience is quite valid, and i’d be lying if if i said i didn’t notice undertones of all of what you’ve said when i first joined the tks team.
at the root of it all, as you put it, i do believe directors are well intentioned. directors only take this job because we love helping young people succeed in the world.
coaching young impressionable teens requires an extra layer of intention and thought, especially in how we deliver the tools and mindsets. and it sounds like in your case, it wasn’t handled with a high standard. and i’m sorry you had that experience.
my hope is that our culture has shifted significantly in the last 2 years. this is largely because almost everyone on the director team is fresh (i’m currently one of the two longest standing directors that’s still on the director team). plus, now there’s a lot more focus on building projects that drive personal fulfilment and understanding vs doing projects just for the sake of playing status games and “changing the world”
when we talk about “in order to achieve unconventional success, you must take an unconventional path”, kids sometimes misunderstand this as “i have to do unconventional things”
it’s actually quite the opposite. actual legit people that do unconventional things are just ones that were obsessed with an outcome and had to do unconventional things to get there.
so our hope now is to simply coach kids to truly love and be obsessed with an outcome that they get personal fulfilment from. for some kids that outcome is doing something about cancer. for others it’s just building simple apps to add to their portfolio. really depends on what intrinsically drives them.
as aatik also put it, always love to jam on this. open invite to any alumni that wants to jam on any of this! find me on slack :)
Wow, this brought tears to my eyes. Thank you for sharing your experience with us - your vulnerability is so admirable. Shining light on these topics is so important, as it curtails the proliferation of these problems.
I stopped engaging halfway through activate because it felt wrong that we were being psychologically influenced to such an extent. I felt like my childhood ended, like I grew up way too fast, and it's still something I am deeply upset by today. I felt guilty spending time with friends in a "non-intellectual way," guilty shopping and dressing up, guilty travelling for purposes outside of conferences, for reading fiction books, for putting on makeup, for playing piano, for spending time with my family, for taking time off of work during the most horrible parts of my personal life. I didn't have a single close girl friend, I was having mental breakdowns every week, and had an awful romantic relationship in TKS that existed only because he made me feel understood and accepted. I don't believe that TKS or the founders are at fault; I can imagine them not having thought through this outcome of the program. Or at least not to such an extreme. Unfortunately, most of my conversations with TKS alumni about TKS end up circling the topics in your writing.
One aspect that I would also like to emphasize is the existence of a boys' club, just with a female presence, in TKS. I've heard from several girls that if they weren't attractive, they felt extremely excluded. Instances of 20-22-year-old guys "mentoring" 14-year-old girls. I think that there is a reason that minors are so psychologically, physically, and financially protected in our society. And it's unfortunate that TKS looks past that.
Thank you again for sharing. You and your writing are incredible.
Elizabeth, I'm so sorry to hear all that trauma you went through. This all sounds incredibly real. I felt guilty for many similar things. I did not know that it wasn't morally bad to just be a normal teenage girl, to prioritize my mental health, and to want to look beautiful. I stopped talking to my girl best friends.
Your comment is so powerful. Thank you for sharing your experience as well, for your vulnerability. I imagine it is hard to talk about these things. Especially for bringing to light the last bit about the boys' club -- that is absolutely diabolical for all those young girls. I hope that combined, our message can get the directors to re-evaluate.
SO incredibly proud of you for writing this!! i always find value in debriefing these experiences with you many years after the fact, but reading this felt like i was living through laura's 2022 year in review live (but now on the flipside of the coin lol). it's healing to hear you reflect not only on "what happened to you" but reverse engineer why these ideas had such a strong hold on us, and how "saving ourselves" didn't really mean what we thought it did at all
"Nuance. The world is woven from webs of nuance. If something feels clean-cut, black-and-white, it is probably missing a crucial piece. Growth is messy and illogical and full of contradictions. Growth often doesn’t feel like growth.
Be skeptical of those who talk in binaries. You will encounter many such people in TKS. Don’t be so quick to implement any advice and make it your entire worldview. Don’t implement advice solely because you cannot refute it. If it feels wrong, it is often for a reason. Sit with your feelings; let them mellow. You cannot speedrun growth. Nuance."
this is my favorite part—learning isn't just about gaining crystallized knowledge or the sheer replication of "expertise." there is no right order, no right amount of discipline, and no correct order of "how to become an expert." i don't think this environment fed us these ideas intentionally, but the byproduct of exposing so many of it's core ideologies to us in very generalized ways was losing the nuance of how to learn, define your core values, live a meaningful life. no five year plan, level of supposed "mastery," or stoicism will teach you those things. i love that you provide your perspective on not only being skeptical about what society feeds you, but also what the organization that tells you that you have the potential to escape these norms feeds you, in order to find your own definitions of right & wrong
I love u so much 💕💕 talking about this with you has allowed me to see so many of these feelings that I couldn’t see before. UR SO RIGHT about how they give us these ideologies in such a generalized way. Like omg that’s exactly what they did. and it erases all the humanity and the specifics of how this ideology should be applied to YOU (which is different for every person!!) I’m so glad we are both healing and moving on
Excellently done Laura! I appreciate how careful and mature this reflection is written.
Institutions that request a lot of vulnerability from its participants ought to be engaged with carefully-- it's hard to do so when you're young and haven't developed strong self-defense mechanisms.
there's a proverb in chinese: 拔苗助长 – when translated it means something like "you pull the sapling to help it grow", which is meant to criticise how attempting to push people on accelerated tracks will often damage them. the nuances you put are incredibly mature – it's right! you're so incredibly cracked and so much of your current life i can imagine is attributable to tks. but also, when you pull on a seedling without allowing it to take root, of course it will suffer! and work counterproductively!
this is delivered so fairly and gently. i think the writing of this piece deserves highlighting in and of itself – you're honest, well-researched, and capture cutting observations concisely.
i have said this before and i will say it again a thousand times because it is true: i'm so proud of you. it's really really so crazy how far we've come since that atlas session. you're a flower who has finally taken proper root, and it's been an honour to witness you bloom <3 i love you
janet!! omg i love the proverb. my chinese nickname is 苗苗 (my mom gave it to me!), and i was definitely a 苗 without proper roots haha. thank you for sharing your beautiful reflection with us. you have a way with words.
it was the time of my life getting to bloom alongside you! i love you so much and i was so happy to see you thrive at hack. we have both evolved so much <3
2018 cohort here — definitely gave me a case of impostor syndrome, considering the multitude of incredible, intelligent people that came out of that group. Something I still deal with today, 6 years later! But also, inspirational & foundational to who I am today, setting me on a path I might not be on otherwise. As you’ve said, nuance.
Thank you for sharing this, and having the courage to be so vulnerable.
i've heard a couple things about tks before, but never from an insider's perspective. thank you SO MUCH for this post, this was probably the most nuanced and insightful thing i've read this week :))
Beautifully written post! I was never particularly involved with groups such as TKS. However, I admit that I have become swept up with discovering the "unconventional" path, as referenced throughout your text. Target universities combined with discovering the effective altruism movement will do that to you. It's a fine line to tread and a real emotional rollercoaster. That part is very clear in your writing.
These circles frequently encourage unhealthy shifts in outlooks on working life. Learning where your boundaries are and what is worthwhile to you is a very personal journey. Not one to be rushed, and definitely not forced by others with a personal agenda. I often wonder how these people developed such an unhealthy belief system to begin with. Simply providing the opportunity for exploration and education will always be the answer. Efforts to overcomplicate this are futile in my opinion.
Reflections aside, thank you for the insight on a current interest of mine! Also Andrew sent me. Also definitely cult vibes.
I'm so proud of you Laura! You've grown so so much since we've first met and it's been super exciting and inspirational to see. I'd love to catch up sometime ❤️
Messages I've gotten from TKS alum since writing this piece:
"this was so beautifully written laura. over the years I’ve had the same conversation with others many times and yet everyone stayed afraid to actually voice it out publicly in fear of still being wrong because it was against what tks preached. wishing only the best for you!!" -- astha, tks 20-21
"I could talk for hours about this!! I literally got this feeling the first day and u described it perfectly. TKS does feel exclusive in the sense that they want u to cut out ppl who are not deemed to have an “unconventional” mindset when I’ve learned that you can learn anything from anyone and that a true impacted is someone who does not distinguish ppl begin between 'conventional' and 'unconventional.'" -- anon, tks 20-22
"read this and started tearing up. no one has articulated how i felt so perfectly laura" -- anon, tks 20-22
"they always talk to us like this, reading this gives me mega flashbacks. i blocked the gaslighting out of my head. at face value we were told not to question them and blindly obey and they absolutely manipulated us with guilt omg. it's crazy how writing this is bringing back stuff u didn't remember. like i totally forgot about alllll of this." -- tks 20-22
and a dozen more!
love this post, so so so proud & glad for you, and looking forward to the next chapter : )
wanted to add a thought. i found this quote from a tks director (found at the end of the link here) pretty unbelievable:
https://www.tks.world/story
"If we can train Olympic level athletes from a young age, why can't we train Olympic level CEOs and innovators?"
like my thoughts on this are something like:
- a huge, huge amount of children who are reared from a young age for anything world-class - in this case, athletics - are straight-up mistreated. sure, a lot of them really love whatever sport they are doing, but in a lot of cases that's parents living vicariously thru their children
- for every olympic level athlete who comes out of getting trained like this at a young age sound and healthy, there are hundreds of failure stories we haven't heard of (survivorship bias!)
like you cannot be SERIOUS. how is "we can train olympic level athletes from a young age" a thing that is GOOD to compare tks to?! no, we freaking can't! this works for like 0.1% of the people trained in this way and causes immense damage to many others, like, do we have any idea how risky and silly that is? how many people trained to be the best in some sport that due to biological limitations CAN'T BE, burn out, and lose out on some other potentially much more rewarding career? how many artists, poets, mathematicians, physicists have we sacrificed to the altar of childhood sports? how many merely GOOD tennis players who could've been GREAT basketball players if they'd been given more time to explore, etc. like god damn
andrew you're the best. thanks for all your support always
what an absolute BANGER of a post
wow, i could feel the trauma from like here
literally almost instantly gave me strong chills / reflexive ugh gtfo this is WRONG and YOU'RE INDOCTRINATING ME vibes
many props
imagine if a "fervor proponent of a genuine society" coerced people to thinking that being genuine is the only good virtue and almost all other virtues are subordinated by and inferior to it - will any actual good quality genuineness come out of this society? i think not, likely just all fake genuineness motivated by social status gaming, i think the analogy is clear enough
give em some fucking freedom to think for themselves, instead of yelling at them "tHiNk fOr YoUrSeLvEs RAHHHH", ugh
wow thank you for reading and for your genuine-ness. your analogy is on point. <3
!!!!
absolutely love how this was written. ngl made me feel a tad bit emotional - especially as a current director on the team.
your experience is quite valid, and i’d be lying if if i said i didn’t notice undertones of all of what you’ve said when i first joined the tks team.
at the root of it all, as you put it, i do believe directors are well intentioned. directors only take this job because we love helping young people succeed in the world.
coaching young impressionable teens requires an extra layer of intention and thought, especially in how we deliver the tools and mindsets. and it sounds like in your case, it wasn’t handled with a high standard. and i’m sorry you had that experience.
my hope is that our culture has shifted significantly in the last 2 years. this is largely because almost everyone on the director team is fresh (i’m currently one of the two longest standing directors that’s still on the director team). plus, now there’s a lot more focus on building projects that drive personal fulfilment and understanding vs doing projects just for the sake of playing status games and “changing the world”
when we talk about “in order to achieve unconventional success, you must take an unconventional path”, kids sometimes misunderstand this as “i have to do unconventional things”
it’s actually quite the opposite. actual legit people that do unconventional things are just ones that were obsessed with an outcome and had to do unconventional things to get there.
so our hope now is to simply coach kids to truly love and be obsessed with an outcome that they get personal fulfilment from. for some kids that outcome is doing something about cancer. for others it’s just building simple apps to add to their portfolio. really depends on what intrinsically drives them.
as aatik also put it, always love to jam on this. open invite to any alumni that wants to jam on any of this! find me on slack :)
Wow, this brought tears to my eyes. Thank you for sharing your experience with us - your vulnerability is so admirable. Shining light on these topics is so important, as it curtails the proliferation of these problems.
I stopped engaging halfway through activate because it felt wrong that we were being psychologically influenced to such an extent. I felt like my childhood ended, like I grew up way too fast, and it's still something I am deeply upset by today. I felt guilty spending time with friends in a "non-intellectual way," guilty shopping and dressing up, guilty travelling for purposes outside of conferences, for reading fiction books, for putting on makeup, for playing piano, for spending time with my family, for taking time off of work during the most horrible parts of my personal life. I didn't have a single close girl friend, I was having mental breakdowns every week, and had an awful romantic relationship in TKS that existed only because he made me feel understood and accepted. I don't believe that TKS or the founders are at fault; I can imagine them not having thought through this outcome of the program. Or at least not to such an extreme. Unfortunately, most of my conversations with TKS alumni about TKS end up circling the topics in your writing.
One aspect that I would also like to emphasize is the existence of a boys' club, just with a female presence, in TKS. I've heard from several girls that if they weren't attractive, they felt extremely excluded. Instances of 20-22-year-old guys "mentoring" 14-year-old girls. I think that there is a reason that minors are so psychologically, physically, and financially protected in our society. And it's unfortunate that TKS looks past that.
Thank you again for sharing. You and your writing are incredible.
Elizabeth, I'm so sorry to hear all that trauma you went through. This all sounds incredibly real. I felt guilty for many similar things. I did not know that it wasn't morally bad to just be a normal teenage girl, to prioritize my mental health, and to want to look beautiful. I stopped talking to my girl best friends.
Your comment is so powerful. Thank you for sharing your experience as well, for your vulnerability. I imagine it is hard to talk about these things. Especially for bringing to light the last bit about the boys' club -- that is absolutely diabolical for all those young girls. I hope that combined, our message can get the directors to re-evaluate.
SO incredibly proud of you for writing this!! i always find value in debriefing these experiences with you many years after the fact, but reading this felt like i was living through laura's 2022 year in review live (but now on the flipside of the coin lol). it's healing to hear you reflect not only on "what happened to you" but reverse engineer why these ideas had such a strong hold on us, and how "saving ourselves" didn't really mean what we thought it did at all
"Nuance. The world is woven from webs of nuance. If something feels clean-cut, black-and-white, it is probably missing a crucial piece. Growth is messy and illogical and full of contradictions. Growth often doesn’t feel like growth.
Be skeptical of those who talk in binaries. You will encounter many such people in TKS. Don’t be so quick to implement any advice and make it your entire worldview. Don’t implement advice solely because you cannot refute it. If it feels wrong, it is often for a reason. Sit with your feelings; let them mellow. You cannot speedrun growth. Nuance."
this is my favorite part—learning isn't just about gaining crystallized knowledge or the sheer replication of "expertise." there is no right order, no right amount of discipline, and no correct order of "how to become an expert." i don't think this environment fed us these ideas intentionally, but the byproduct of exposing so many of it's core ideologies to us in very generalized ways was losing the nuance of how to learn, define your core values, live a meaningful life. no five year plan, level of supposed "mastery," or stoicism will teach you those things. i love that you provide your perspective on not only being skeptical about what society feeds you, but also what the organization that tells you that you have the potential to escape these norms feeds you, in order to find your own definitions of right & wrong
I love u so much 💕💕 talking about this with you has allowed me to see so many of these feelings that I couldn’t see before. UR SO RIGHT about how they give us these ideologies in such a generalized way. Like omg that’s exactly what they did. and it erases all the humanity and the specifics of how this ideology should be applied to YOU (which is different for every person!!) I’m so glad we are both healing and moving on
TKS 2018 10/10 would recommend haha
Agreed on cringe aesthetics, but the positive parts were really good for me
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Liam! Good to see you here
hi idt we've met but nice post
(also sigil wen being the default example of tks kid is so funny)
hi vincent!
Excellently done Laura! I appreciate how careful and mature this reflection is written.
Institutions that request a lot of vulnerability from its participants ought to be engaged with carefully-- it's hard to do so when you're young and haven't developed strong self-defense mechanisms.
Crystal! you are one the first people that got me thinking critically about these institutions. thank you for reading <3
there's a proverb in chinese: 拔苗助长 – when translated it means something like "you pull the sapling to help it grow", which is meant to criticise how attempting to push people on accelerated tracks will often damage them. the nuances you put are incredibly mature – it's right! you're so incredibly cracked and so much of your current life i can imagine is attributable to tks. but also, when you pull on a seedling without allowing it to take root, of course it will suffer! and work counterproductively!
this is delivered so fairly and gently. i think the writing of this piece deserves highlighting in and of itself – you're honest, well-researched, and capture cutting observations concisely.
i have said this before and i will say it again a thousand times because it is true: i'm so proud of you. it's really really so crazy how far we've come since that atlas session. you're a flower who has finally taken proper root, and it's been an honour to witness you bloom <3 i love you
janet!! omg i love the proverb. my chinese nickname is 苗苗 (my mom gave it to me!), and i was definitely a 苗 without proper roots haha. thank you for sharing your beautiful reflection with us. you have a way with words.
it was the time of my life getting to bloom alongside you! i love you so much and i was so happy to see you thrive at hack. we have both evolved so much <3
2018 cohort here — definitely gave me a case of impostor syndrome, considering the multitude of incredible, intelligent people that came out of that group. Something I still deal with today, 6 years later! But also, inspirational & foundational to who I am today, setting me on a path I might not be on otherwise. As you’ve said, nuance.
Thank you for sharing this, and having the courage to be so vulnerable.
Wow, thanks for sharing ❤️ You will figure it out with time, I know it ;)
i've heard a couple things about tks before, but never from an insider's perspective. thank you SO MUCH for this post, this was probably the most nuanced and insightful thing i've read this week :))
AWW THANK YOU 🫶🥺
really excellent post laura. great writing and important points. thank you!
Beautifully written post! I was never particularly involved with groups such as TKS. However, I admit that I have become swept up with discovering the "unconventional" path, as referenced throughout your text. Target universities combined with discovering the effective altruism movement will do that to you. It's a fine line to tread and a real emotional rollercoaster. That part is very clear in your writing.
These circles frequently encourage unhealthy shifts in outlooks on working life. Learning where your boundaries are and what is worthwhile to you is a very personal journey. Not one to be rushed, and definitely not forced by others with a personal agenda. I often wonder how these people developed such an unhealthy belief system to begin with. Simply providing the opportunity for exploration and education will always be the answer. Efforts to overcomplicate this are futile in my opinion.
Reflections aside, thank you for the insight on a current interest of mine! Also Andrew sent me. Also definitely cult vibes.
I'm so proud of you Laura! You've grown so so much since we've first met and it's been super exciting and inspirational to see. I'd love to catch up sometime ❤️
❤️❤️❤️