Week Three - A Long Way to Go

During this week's class, we had a talk about Growth Hacking, and a little sharing/Q&A with Bjorn and WenXiang from Zopim (Zendesk). They were Awesome. With a capital A, because lowercase isn't enough to describe their awesomeness. The stories they shared were every aspect of inspirational: they dared to try to start something new, struggled through financial and technical difficulties, and even succeeded in getting acquired. The fact that they succeeded make the option of doing/joining a startup seem much more realistic, and I am extremely thankful that I took down notes during the class. I'm sure I will refer to them for the years to come, be it for motivation or direction.

While the class was awesome, the rest of the week was much less so. Right now, my group 1 is lagging behind in many areas, and I'm not even sure if the slide deck for my second group has been sent out. For both groups we had something like a lack of direction, albeit in different ways. In the first assignment we wanted to do stuff, but we just weren't clear on how to go about it. We have a clearer impression now, after the feedback and seeing other groups' pages. The second group was more of a lack of leadership, initiative and responsiveness. We almost never had any idea on who would do what, what to prepare before meetings, and we didn't even start on actual work until Wednesday, 2.5 days before slide deck submission. We have some pretty legit (imo) pecha-kucha slides now, but I'll wait until Monday before saying anything about whether "it all worked out fine".

Regarding the assignments, I'll admit that everyone was probably busy, because it was very much so for me. Yet, I can't help but feel that we could have done better -- I should have done better. Every now and then I feel this sense of regret, in myself and in the choices I made. Did my group focus too much on building features for assignment 1? Could I have been more proactive in interacting with classmates and forming groups? Can I really manage the workload? Should I have just tried out web development on my own, instead of taking a graded module where my freedom is somewhat restricted by groups and grades? Is it even possible for someone like me to become like Bjorn or WenXiang?

I don't mean to be depressive (really!); I'm just an honest typist. I'd like to think that honestly reflecting on my sub-par performance here will imprint in my mind the need to step up and try harder.

I still have a long way to go, and I suppose the only way to get there in time is to step it up.