do not fight to keep people, fight to realize the vision. No one will ever be more invested in your thing than you. So invest in whatever that is, because if everyone else understands your vision, there is nothing to waste time talking about
i had that realization recently after a rather disappointing let down. In late November of 2023, my primary focus was Clearvote, which had been in development for months. My personal energy was being sapped by a breakup. I was in the middle of the worst slump in my academic performance, despite putting in my best effort. I also vowed to myself at the start of the school year to prioritize a rigourous wellness routine; a pattern I kept up for almost two months until burnout hit
Clearvote had launched as a student organization. In my mind, Clearvote was a great idea, and it would just need a community around it to safeguard it and keep the fire going. That was a mistake
bringing in new people just made things worse. The people who joined on the project were jumping into a volunteer driven, elaborate tech stack. We tried to get everyone set up on the technical side. But despite spending several hours trying to make that happen, there wasn’t much return on the effort we put into getting people engaged in the project, and it was demoralizing for us
we lost an opportunity working with a startup incubator because the administration for Clearvote had become so taxing that we couldn’t keep up with the schedule for it, and we ended up forgetting about the interview until seconds before it was supposed to happen
the long story
Anaya and I had also just brought on a new UX designer, David, who was adamant that the product should come first. I think we needed to hear that. But I made the mistake of not looking into what Dubhacks Next could have actually meant for our project; the new life it could have breathed into it. Funding, connections, a dedicated work space, the whole shabang. I made the decision to leave it with Majid and a few of the others who seemed interested in the idea. I got an email a few weeks later that we had been accepted into the first round of interviews. Anaya, David and I were too busy figuring out the best way to restructure the organization so we could develop more effectively as a small team, while allowing the growing number of students less invested in the project to stay in the loop. We intended to lay out these plans in a subsequent meeting, but it was finals week, and people were already starting to feel burnt out from weekly meetings where little significant progress was being made. We decided to wait to tell everyone about the changes until after the last day of the quarter. We sat on this void in expectations between us and the rest of the team for almost two weeks.
And then, during that grueling two week period of homework, final projects, and final exams, the interview hit. Completely by surprise, too. At 7:57, I woke up and opened up my laptop and was met with a discord ping. “Is anybody coming?” Majid posted.
Coming to what? I looked back through some messages. There was a zoom link. It was… an interview with Dubhacks Next. Shit. I threw on a bathrobe. I didn’t even have time to leave my bedroom. I clicked on the zoom link, signed in, and there we were. I didn’t even want to turn on my camera. I was completely blindsided.
The zoom meeting was just Majid and I in a room with a person from the organization who asked us questions about our leadership structure. A thing that had, in that very moment, been more volatile than at any other point in our groups existence. And now, 3 minutes into the start of my day, I was being asked how responsibilities were delegated to different members of a team that was being barely held together by my supposed leadership. What the fuck was I doing?
The meeting didn’t go well. I didn’t have my camera on. Nobody else showed up. Majid and I had different responses to the same questions. We didn’t have a slide deck pulled up to explain our project (despite having one). We didn’t talk about our long term vision for the project or how we intended to fund it.
Just a week later, things would take a turn for the better. I dropped an announcement about the new organizational changes. Anaya, David, and I would start laying the groundwork for a new front-end design, a database schema, and a more efficient means of collecting data on the candidates we intended to inform users about. Over winter break, we made a ton of progress on the technical side. We designed a new logo, bought out some better domain names, and realigned our vision for the coming two quarters. We had a destination, concrete roles and duties, and a plan to get there