Photograph courtesy of Arash Sabet, Illustration by Sam Wiley
The inventing started in first grade, when Arash Sabet made a motorized car out of a tissue box. In fifth grade, he scavenged wood and parts from a junkyard and made a remote-controlled robotic arm with five degrees of freedom. At Parkway West High School, he and friends made a Rube Goldberg apparatus that brewed coffee, mixed in cream and sugar, stirred the coffee, and reheated it. Oh, and he motorized a mummy so it would rise from its coffin on a homecoming float.
At Washington University, Sabet got a little more serious—but he continued to follow his imagination’s beckonings. When he found out the university’s Dining Services threw leftovers away, he started a program called Feed St. Louis to distribute the food to area shelters. Then he co-founded St. Louis Dancing Classrooms, rocking the world of fifth-graders in the St. Louis Public Schools by teaching them ballroom dance. And as he mastered design and biomechanics, he invented novel surgical and medical equipment; voice-controlled management systems for operating rooms; a portable, cheap alternative power source for impoverished countries…
He earned an MBA and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Wash. U., where he won a succession of awards and was named a research fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Kauffman Global Scholar. Now he’s 29, a dancer, entrepreneur, scientist, designer, and triathlete fluent in English, Spanish, Turkish, and Farsi. Born in Iran and raised in St. Louis, he’s currently in Seattle, working for a startup medical device company that’s doing clinical trials in Australia. His favorite advice? Joseph Campbell’s simple directive: “Follow your bliss.”
