TKS Session 15: Challenge 2/2 + Velocity Session 6
Today’s session was really project-oriented and helped us get some more progress done in the challenge. It was a great opportunity to work in-person with our groups and get some real-time feedback from our director.
For velocity today, we did a short recap of the PotW, Sebastian Thrun, who was the Founder of Udacity, a company offering open online courses to make learning accessible to everyone. He is working with revolutionizing self-driving cars, while even doing work in flying cars! A few key takeaways/action items were highlighted during this session after doing the learnings about him this week. One thing we highlighted was how Sebastian had to face a lot of failures and setbacks throughout his career. But, the reason why this didn’t stop him was because he had resilience, and he was able to accept failures and be at peace with them. Most people dwell on their mistakes but forget that they are natural, and it’s how you deal with the mistakes that matter. One thing I want to get better at is realizing that making mistakes is part of being human and that I need to accept them in order to keep making progress and learning from them.
Another thing we talked about was how Sebastian took a lot of risks in his career. He launched a bunch of other online courses before founding his company Udacity, and all those were total flops. He even left his career working with self-driving cars at Google to go work at a small startup. Those two examples, along with many others, took risks. But, even though there was risk involved, he had to do those things to gain more experience and reach new heights. He now has successful work in the field of self-driving and flying cars. He was able to think up crazy ideas that made science fiction possible. Udacity is successful because he was able to make a pivot and re-align his goals, and most importantly, come back from a huge failure.
Before getting into the work portion of this session, we talked about the MotW, which is anti-entitlement. Entitlement is when someone feels they are owed/deserve something because they have something else. Anti-entitlement is realizing that just because you have something, you still need to put in effort and have the work ethic to get the results you’re looking for. One way to prevent entitlement is by terminating the use of something you take for granted. That’s why, this week, everyone in velocity needs to give up something that they take for granted. I am going to give up using my pillow this week. It’s simple enough, but it could have an effect on my comfort and quality of sleep during the night, which is something that I take for granted.
The rest of today’s session was getting to work in our groups and making more progress on our challenge. In my group with Sophia Dhami and Arissai Filleul, we created the skeleton for our stand-alone deck that needs to be submitted at the end of this week, which is when the challenge ends. We also got to organize the information we had collected over the past week so that we could decide what was more important and what would be worth mentioning in our stand-alone deck. Lastly, we reviewed what we will be doing for the validation/prototyping phases that we are currently in.
When creating the skeleton for our stand-alone deck, we had 4 main components for a strong recommendation that we referenced back to a lot. Those 4 components are:
Qualitative Support -> Real Stories
Data-Driven -> Analysis, Facts, Numbers
Evidence-Based -> Case studies
Demonstrate -> Mokcups, Implementation, Partnerships
These four main components help build a strong and sound recommendation that presents a well-researched idea with backed data and statistics to prove its potential.
That’s basically it for this session. It’s a pretty short post, but it was a really productive day. I’m really looking forward to the end of this challenge and seeing what product our team will finish with!
