18 Feb 2026
i am taking an innovation course at harvard to learn how to be innovative. my initial goal is to learn how one person could build an institution in order to bring amazing impact to the world.
now that we are three weeks in this journey, i have realized that the best way to innovate is to get my hands dirty. the course is wonderful because i am able to talk to amazing experts who are kind, knowledgeable, and supportive. i also learnt that startups that followed the hypothesis driven approach survives more than those that did not do enough research on the way.
nevertheless, taking a course on innovation does not directly help you innovate. just like how reading math book does not directly teach you how to prove therems.
the only way to innovate is to identify a problem, validate to check it’s real, and then solve it. similarly, the only way to learn math is to start sucking at understanding and using the notations and logics; the only way to do research is to clean data and fit models; the only way to get healthy is to eat, sleep, and exercise well.