I. Personal Challenges

1. Tuning into Your Deepest Curiosity
   • Developing sensitivity and finding your own true path
   • Difficulty in focusing on what really matters in fields and sorting out the meaningful from the superfluous
2. Self-Doubt and Confidence
   • Not knowing whether to believe in themselves
   • Not realizing their unique potential and needs. (Getting sucked into standard paths like being a programmer at a shitty startup.)
   • Overcoming self-doubt and maintaining confidence amidst challenges and setbacks
   • Managing the fine line between confidence and overconfidence.
3. Balancing Idealism and Practicality
   • Striving to maintain vision and ideals while dealing with practical constraints and realities
4. Sustaining Motivation
   • Keeping up the drive amidst challenges and setbacks

II. Social Challenges

1. Finding Mentors and Reality Checks
   • Being paired with mentors or advisors who do not understand or support their unique journey and aspirations
   • Difficulty in finding role models or examples who have navigated similar paths successfully
   • Turtles Need Four Kinds of Supporters
2. Rejecting External Influence
   • Susceptibility to external pressures from peers, authority figures, or institutional norms that may not align with their true selves
   • Struggling to reject advice that doesn't align with what they know in their heart
3. Finding Like-Minded Peers
   • Difficulty in finding a community or peers who share similar values and understand their unique journey
   • Feeling isolated due to the uniqueness of their path
   • Encouragement and reality-checks without undue influence

III. Structural Challenges

1. Most Fields are Garbage

   In many fields of endeavor, it’s hard to focus on what really matters. We struggle to sort it out for ourselves: What is a deep, potent investigation, and what is ultimately superfluous, a misguided distraction? Plus, most fields have strayed from their essential questions and investigations. That makes this sorting harder and more solitary. We need to ask: what in my field is the seed of something beautiful and true? What is worth my devotion, and honorable and meaningful? What sliver, within current practice, deserves to be rescued? And how do we cut out all of the other crap?

   It’s hard to look clearly. It takes discipline to make a shrewd analysis of what is actually meaningful in any field — of what's really worthy of a human life. To look soberly. To do the sorting.

   It can be anti-social. You’re likely to admit (at least to yourself) that many of your peers/professors/etc have strayed far from what’s important.

2. Navigating Institutions

   • Dealing with bureaucracy, politics, and rigid structures that may not accommodate unique paths

3. Lack of Societal Support for Unconventional Paths

   • The world mostly supports simple career choices, making it hard to keep pushing financially and spiritually

4. Financial Struggles

   • Finding funding or support for projects and endeavors, especially those that don't fit conventional categories

     <aside> ℹ️ We will take on these challenges as we are able. Many common challenges (e.g., financial help) will have to wait.

     </aside>

<aside> 🚧 NOTE

The following is an incomplete list. It can be extended (and should be) just by asking our turtles - what were hard moments in your turtle path?

</aside>