an ant's strength is still worth an ant's strength 🐜
the least obvious contributor teammate can always contribute or help in even the smallest way. This shouldn’t be looked down upon or ignored, as sometimes it makes a big difference.
I describe it with an ant analogy from reading somewhere about acknowledging that a small animal is still going to put forth something. Or sparking off, “A person’s a person, no matter how small” from Dr. Seuss’s book, Horton Hears a Who!
context
From hacking with 132+ different people, I’ve encountered a wide spectrum of skill-levels and competencies in people. Beyond hackathons – in army, uni, and the workplace too.
There are always teammates that are less or not obviously suitable to tasks at hand, perhaps:
- an unsuitable skillset
- a newbie lacking experience
- an unconfident mindset
- a difference in ways of working
- past trauma influencing communication and work
- or a combination
Some teammates contribute in a big way. Some in a small way. Frankly, it’s all important.
The difference between 1st and 2nd place can be minimal and yet, with drastic reward differences. Once my team placed 2nd in a hackathon, behind 1st place by one point out of thirty. We won 7500 USD while 1st won 15000 USD – for being 3% better, they got 100% more reward.
Hence, sometimes you need that ant’s strength to carry your team over the finish line.
Midway through a hackathon, it’s tempting to discount the ‘small’ teammates. Perhaps, they seem to do less work and deliver less results. Perhaps, it takes more effort and time to engage them.
I found that even the ‘smallest’ person, can be applied to contribute at least an ant’s strength.
Now, whether it’s worth your time and energy to facilitate that person and bring that ant’s strength worth of contribution into the fold – is for another time. seed Sometimes it’s more trouble than it’s worth. It’s not always clear or obvious.
example - using an ant’s strength
tl;dr apply the ant’s strength in its place of greatest leverage
In MIT RealityHack 2023, I found myself in a cobbled together team – for lack of better words – we were all leftovers, one of the last teams to form late in the night.
One person, I’ll call Pito (Person I’m Thinking Of), joined the team while admitting they didn’t know much about XR development or software development in general as a relatively fresh student. While my intuition was ringing reservations about having this person, another member generously said “That’s fine! You can learn on-the-go.”. And as someone who was joining the team rather than forming one, I didn’t feel right to voice my reservations that could hinder another in joining.
That generous member later admitted in our post-hack feedback session that it was a bad call from them to just let Pito in. They overestimated Pito’s abilities and underestimated the difficulty in bringing in a pure newbie considering we wanted to win.
Nonetheless, once the team is set – you play ball. You own that risk.
By midway through, we all implicitly realised Pito wasn’t able to deliver on tasks assigned to them without significant hand-holding. We started lowering the complexity of tasks and expectations towards them.
Essentially, Pito was the ant of the team. We’ve all been there – but we simply did not have the time to hand-hold in the hours remaining.
Then ArcTop (a Brain Computing Interface company), announced a new hackathon challenge as a sponsor track. I smelt a somewhat low-hanging fruit opportunity here. I had quickly thought of a decent idea from understanding their challenge and tech. However, I learnt the danger of laying eggs in two baskets when leading the team in my 5th hackathon.
Feature-wise for an MVP, it was basic and simple. All I needed for us to make a decent submission for this challenge was to reach the end of the ‘Getting Started’ stage with one of their devkits for a demo, I could handle the rest and integration.
The fastest way to do so was to grab one of their company reps to onboard us directly – but learning an unrelated new tech would still side-track my main tasks. While Pito was doing some graphic design for our main project.
I realised: I could takeover Pito’s current tasks and finish them more efficiently, while staying on track with my tasks towards our main project. While Pito could do the pre-work needed for this greenfield and self-contained side-project.
In other words, apply an ant’s strength in the best place of leverage possible.
So, I brought it up with them and they agreed. I told them what we needed, what they could do, what’s the best way to achieve it and what it meant if we could do it. I.e. the what, why, how.
Pito took a fair chunk of time learning, onboarding and familiarising with this new tech, while I continued hacking away at the main project. When they were ready, I integrated their features and made a demo video with it.
We managed to submit both our main project for other tracks, and this other smaller project towards this sponsor track.
We won in this sponsor track in the end!
We would not have been able to submit both without Pito. If I had dropped my tasks to chase this low-hanging fruit – I could have let my main responsibilities down.
It was possible, because there existed an ant’s worth of strength available.
(there’s another story where I continued hacking at our smaller project from 3am to 6am after returning to the hotel from the hackathon after-party, when ArcTop announced they were extending the deadline) seed it’s not over till it’s over
example - me bringing an ant’s strength
tl;dr Sometimes the ant is you, and you need to find the best place to apply your ant’s strength.
Refer toBlockfund the first US hackathon I did at Stanford’s TreeHacks. I felt way out of my league, I had no idea what React was.
I’ll tell the full story in another piece. seed
Essentially, I was the ant of my team.
By midway, I had contributed no actual features to our webapp – whether it was frontend or backend. However, I understood the why of what we were doing. Scott introduced the problem and solution to us (DAO for real-life communities). And I realised it could be rolled into an old idea I had to solve a more relatable set of problems and become a better solution.
I looked at what sponsor tech we had available, identified ArcGIS (a mapping software company) as suitable. I pulled an all-nighter to learn their SDK and tech to build out a few features for our webapp. Then crafted the narrative and clarified the usecase to our product.
When we had our next sync-up and I demo’d my features, my team was kinda in disbelief
- Elaine was like: “You did this?”
- Scott was like: “So every time I sleep, we finish more features? I need to sleep more.”
To be honest, I was also in a bit of disbelief – I thought I was going to be kinda useless since I had no experience in modern webapp or web3 development at the time.
Sometimes the ant is you, and you need to find the place to apply your ant’s strength.
We won the Most Impactful Hack prize (essentially 2nd place prestige, and 1st in Impact scoring).