A Dash of Mok: Pancakes, Planes, and Plans
Thoughts, reads, and things on my mind this week — Week of April 30, 2025
Opening Drizzle
- A light pour of what’s on my mind this week
Busy traveling but also taking time to prepare for exams– thinking about my time spent in Tennessee.
More of a waffle guy, but Banana Bread Pancakes from The Farmstead made me fall in love with pancakes again.
What’s Stirring in the Pot
- What I’m reading, listening to, or watching
Premier League: Liverpool versus Tottenham
Good to see an American-owned football club win the Premier League. Go Red White and Blue. Sad to not find Son Heung-min on the pitch, seems like his team needed him.
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
Recently picked up this read from a local bookstore by Atul Gawande. It’s off to a slow start, but I know it’s going to be a good read. I’ve read and do appreciate his other works.
Simmering Projects
- Updates from what I’m cooking up in work, research, or ideas
I’m onboarding with Cathartic Health, a nonprofit that redistributes essential health and hygiene products to under-resourced communities. I’ll be launching a Berkeley chapter to build connections between local suppliers and communities who need these goods most.
Balancing acid-base reactions one day, wrestling with thermodynamics the next. Getting reminded that electrons behave like waves until you look at them—then they decide to act like particles. Observation shifts reality.
Wrapping up current projects, planning for improvements by restructuring the club model. Retention might be the problem 99% of the time.
One Spicy Thing (or “One Flavorful Find”)
- A tool, quote, or random gem I had to share
“Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.”
— Proverbs 16:32
The default in business is speed and domination—move fast, grab market share, scale aggressively. In academia, it’s prestige: publish, get cited, win funding. That’s what gets celebrated. That’s what's seen on LinkedIn.
But this verse flips it. It says the harder, rarer battle isn’t out there, it’s from looking inward. Mastery of self > mastery of systems.
You can replicate a business model. You can scale a lab. But you can’t fake self-control. Most companies, teams, and institutions don’t fall apart because the ideas were bad—they fall apart because the people at the top never learned to govern themselves.
A leader whose steady when things go sideways, principled when tension hits, and doesn’t let ego set the tone. That is someone I would want to work with. That’s someone people want to build with. And that type of influence doesn’t come from title or authority. It comes from discipline. Restraint. Integrity.
Self-rule doesn’t go viral. But it lasts. When everyone’s chasing scale, the rare few are building foundations. And that’s what actually holds.
Final Splash
Starting to look into different types of hackathons and am interested in what they have to offer. If anything stirred the pot for you this week, I’d love to hear about it!