Hey everyone 👋🏽 I haven't posted on here in a while, so this is a bit of a catch up.
Second semester was long. It ran past what we expected, and light issues. I had to go somewhere else to charge my devices for the entire semester. Every week. If you've ever planned your day around where your phone and laptop could get power, you know how that feels 😭
Still, I kept working with my team, and we applied to several hackathons. Then we got shortlisted for two of them, one day apart. I honestly had to read the emails twice 🤯
What gets me is how different this feels from a year ago. Back then, I would not have believed I could build a product that people take seriously enough to shortlist. Now I'm preparing to pitch one.
I'm still learning and still figuring things out, but I wanted to write this down for anyone who's in the "I don't think I can do this" stage. You probably can. It just takes a lot of showing up, even when you have to show up at someone else's house to charge your laptop 😅
I'll share more as things develop.
Top comments (1)
Charging your laptop at someone else's house every week and still landing two shortlists a day apart. That is huge. And that line about not believing a year ago you could build something people take seriously? That was never a skill gap. Your subconscious decides how safe you are through a filter called the RAS. It was trained on a lot of "I don't think I can do this," so it kept surfacing reasons you weren't the type. Every week you showed up anyway was new data overwriting the old.
Pitching is the next room, and the filter will try to clamp again up there. That is normal, not a sign you are out of your depth. So train outside the hackathon too. Genuine compliment to a stranger this week. When that is easy, add a bit of conversation. Does not matter how it lands. The action is the win, not the score from the judges. When one room gets easy, find a harder one. That is how you walk into the pitch already loose. Good luck on both.