Personal | Sajag Swami

Muses

Kobe Bryant

“Everything negative - pressure, challenges - is all an opportunity for me to rise.”

When I got a poor JEE Main result in January 2019, I was pretty disheartened.

Around that time I read about Kobe's struggles during the 1996 playoffs and how he responded to them (shutting himself in the gym and shooting all day), and I started treating the next few months the same way.

I worked almost obsessively for the next three months. I'd watch preparation videos while eating and revise inorganic chemistry at the gym; even during the commute I'd be memorising formulas.

I went from around the 95th percentile in January to 99.45 percentile in April.

What stayed with me wasn't really the score. It was the idea that a bad result doesn't have to be the end of the tale, this mentality has helped me time and again since.

Maryam Mirzakhani

“The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.”

What I find inspiring about Maryam Mirzakhani isn't just the fact that she became the first woman to win the Fields Medal.

It's that she dedicated herself to problems that were genuinely, ridiculously difficult.

The idea of spending a large part of your life working on something you don't fully understand yet is something I find quite courageous.

Michael Jordan

“Limits, like fears, are often just an illusion.”

I've felt underrated at different points in my life.

What I admire about Jordan is the way he seemed to turn that feeling into fuel rather than letting it become an excuse.

I don't necessarily think being underestimated is objectively a good thing. But if it happens, I'd rather use it.

Also, his slightly manic competitive nature is weirdly close to Vegeta in my head. But I digress.

Hobbies

Coding

I like coding because it lets me turn abstract ideas into something concrete: a product, an experiment, a simulation, or sometimes just a strange little quantitative question.

Japanese

I grew up consuming Indian, American, and Japanese media, so Japanese was always somewhere in the background. I'm learning it partly because I enjoy languages and partly because I think learning another language is a good way to challenge my brain.

Reading

I mostly read books about finance, economics, statistics, and behavioral science. Sometimes I read Japanese short stories and manga. A lot of the experiments on this website started with something I read somewhere.

Football / Futsal

I started playing because back in the day (circa 2012), football gave you some street cred at schools in Bangalore. I kept playing because it's probably the most fun form of cardio I've found, and because playing with other people is one of the easiest ways I've found to connect with them. I've made some great friends courtesy of the beautiful game. There's something iconic about communicating without speaking the same language (I've played with people without really understanding their language and just knowing their names). I've also been fortunate to play with people from across the world.

Cooking

I like cooking because I get to make something I can immediately share with other people. A lot of what I cook is essentially my mother's cooking, so it is also my favourite way of sharing a little bit of home with people who didn't grow up with the same food.

Running

I like numbers. I've run roughly 4,300 km since 2024, and I still keep track. I'd like to run a marathon some day, and probably an ultra too. I'm a very lazy runner though, most of my runs are <140BPM as I'm not really training for anything specific. I do run sub 3:50 min km once a blue moon when a good metal song comes on the playlist.