Less talking, more action - October 2022
Jumping right into October with a Bias towards Action mindset!
Welcome back! I hope your October was fun, fulfilling, and a brand new experience. This month, I was focused on taking action on my goals. When your life starts getting busy, it’s important to do instead of plan to actually make progress. Let’s see what I got up to this month.
But first, if you didn’t catch my September recap, you can read about it here.
I got to explore my interests a lot this month with attending my first ever Hackathon being the most notable. October brought a ton of new learning opportunities that added new perspectives to my repertoire. I am excited to share them with you today!
We solved Voter Fraud, Access to Clean Water, and Forest Fires!!
This month brought my first Hackathon experience!!! I never realized a) how much fun these were and b) the magnitude of global problems people were willing to solve.
Now we didn’t actually solve the world’s biggest problems, but we devised Proof-of-Concept solutions to tackle them. For example, my group wanted to increase voter participation rates and eliminate voter fraud around the world. So we got to the root of the problem.
The inaccuracy in voting process stems from two root causes: lack of access to voting centers (lower participation rates) and lack of transparency in how votes are processed (fraudulent counting processes).
So we got to brainstorming.
We could create a service for votes to be collected and counted using a Smart Contract on the Blockchain. People would use their unique Metamask IDs to send in votes on their mobile device instead of having to come into a voting center. The problem with this solution is that people can have multiple Metamask IDs. So how can we ensure each individual gets only one vote?
Introducing mEyeVote:
We are using Biometric Identification and the Blockchain to ensure votes are handled in a secure fashion, while allowing people to still vote from wherever they want to be. When a voter decides to send a vote in, our application scans their Irises (middle of the eye), creates a unique hash from the patterns in their Irises and assigns this hash to their MetaMask Wallet.
Then using a concept called Zero-Knowledge Proofs, verifiers of this Blockchain can ensure that each vote that comes in is from a unique individual, without knowing who sent the vote in, or whom they voted for.
My Takeaways from this experience
People want visuals. The top presentations from this Hackathon used design software really well to convey their product to the judges/audience. Without prototypes, your solution doesn’t feel real and feels out of reach for our society. An action item for the next Hackathon would be to learn to use Figma (or another software) effectively beforehand so you can make a nice prototype quickly during the Hackathon.
Practicing the presentation > making speaker’s notes. An ok idea with an excellent presentation will impact the audience more than an amazing idea with a crappy delivery. A problem my group had was spending too much time on the content of the presentation and not enough time to practice the pitch and iterate with feedback. Leaving time for this step can take an ok pitch to an amazing one.
Nothing trumps a coherent team. While this first Hackathon was relatively short, Hackathons are notorious for being long, tiring days with a group of people. It is important you like everyone in your group, but more importantly it is important you guys work well together. An action item for future Hackathons would be to continue meeting new people, but instead of small talk, really try to understand people’s work styles and values so you can decide who you can work well with.
Stay grounded. This was probably my most important takeaway from the entire process. No matter how good you may think your idea is, you have to recognize that you are competing amongst other groups and you may not get the outcome you were expecting or the one you feel you deserve. It is so important to stay humble and celebrate others’ success even when you feel let down.
Check out our rough notes to get a better grasp of our solution:
The Angel Philosopher - Naval Ravikant
If people are willing to write a 244-page book about someone they’ve never met, this guy has to be legit. Everyday this month I’ve been listening to or reading about Naval. I’ve never been super interested in philosophy because I found it a little outdated and theoretical, but Naval’s approach to philosophy has opened my eyes to a modern philosophical structure.
Naval talks about the philosophy of business and decision making and how a few fundamental frameworks have helped him become successful in business and, more importantly, live a fulfilling life.
Eric Jorgensen, a Naval fanatic, has developed this 244-page “almanac” of all of Naval’s tweets and quotes as well as the explanation behind them. The book is split in two parts, wealth and happiness, and has been my favorite content to read this month. I strongly suggest you give this book a skim and I’d love to hear your opinions.
How is November going to be better than October?
Over the next few months, I will be honing my technical skills to be able to work with web3.0 software platforms like Solidity and Circom (for ZKP development). I am super excited for this learning journey and I will keep you posted on my progress.
Through the latter part of November, I will be working on a huge project with a leading company in its industry. Tune into next month’s edition to learn more!!!
That’s all for October. I can’t wait for what November has in store… but you won’t know about it unless you subscribe.