Beating The Odds
(Not) your typical David & Goliath story
odds • /ädz/ • noun
superiority in strength, power, or resources; advantage. E.g : “she clung to the lead against all the odds”
In modern context, David & Goliath is often used as a metaphor for “an improbable victory or underdog story”. Although there are many misconceptions — David actually never saw himself as an underdog and fighting Goliath would lead to absolute (not even improbable) victory for him — this story has a great influence on the concept of superiority in our society. But well, that example of misconception is the reason why this story is neither similar nor the adaptation of David and Goliath. This is a story of how we, a group of students from Indonesia, who felt unseeded since the beginning, beating the odds by winning a competition that we thought we could never win.
The Battle
The Grow Asia Hackathon 2019 is a regional hackathon initiated by Grow Asia — a multi-stakeholder partnership platform established by the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Secretariat, focusing on solutions that can positively impact the lives of smallholder farmers in South East Asia.
This competition was open to the public. AgriTech startups, tech innovators and agripreneurs were more than welcomed to join and collaborate in this competition. This competition was held in 2 places, Jakarta and Singapore. From each city, 5 teams would be selected to deliver their final pitch in Singapore on July 22nd. Winning teams would receive a pilot opportunity with Grow Asia corporate partners, to develop and implement their solution for real-world impact.
The Why
First Why: Why did I write this story?
An inferiority complex consists of feelings of not measuring up to standards, a doubt and uncertainty about oneself, and a lack of self-esteem. It is often subconscious and is thought to drive afflicted individuals to overcompensate, resulting either in spectacular achievement or extremely asocial behavior
At one time or another, many of us feel inferior compared to our peers. In this competitive environment where every individual is required to excel, many of us are at high risk of suffering from an inferiority complex. The problem of inferiority complex is that it can hamper one’s growth. When an inferiority complex is in full effect, it may impact the performance of an individual as well as an individual’s self-esteem. Unconscious psychological and emotional processes can disrupt students’ cognitive learning, and negatively “charged” feeling-toned memory associations can derail the learning process. The awareness of this issue is what I want to raise through this story. Hopefully people who read it can be inspired and finally can overcome their feeling of inferiority.
Second Why: Why did we feel inferior and unseeded?
There was one big question that popped into our head when we were told that we were qualified for the hackathon: Why?
- If you look at the history of this competition, many bright ideas were born from this event, and the ideas we submitted at the application form for shortlisting proposal stage were certainly very far from that. Our ideas were still immature and looked not feasible to be implemented — at least from our own perspectives.
- We had minimal knowledge about business, especially agribusiness (4 of us were CS Students, and one was a Chemical Engineering student).
This inferior feeling intensified on the day of the hackathon when we saw many agripreneurs and startups were also participating in this competition. This inferior feeling may be rooted in the stereotype of Indonesian society towards younger people.
“You’re just a student from a third world country. What can you do?” — My inner self at that time
These concerns turned out to be common in various settings in life. It can be experienced by fresh graduates who have to compete with experienced workers for positions in a company, new students who just entered college, software engineer who just passed his probation, and many more.
The How
First How: Embrace It and Listen
“I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.” — Socrates
Realizing that we didn’t know anything and really needed to learn a lot, we tried to make the best use of subject matter expert consultations. We listened, noted, and heeded every advice from subject matter experts and used it as a means of validating our ideas. We iterated quickly and pivoted a lot. We realized that our ideas were not that perfect so we embraced every suggestion with open arms and acted upon it. Slowly but sure we found our missing pieces to complete the puzzle.
Over-confidence can really plunge. It makes us resistant to new information and be saturated with it. This usually becomes a common pitfall for those who always feel superior to their competitors, just like Goliath.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability.
Second How: Knowing Your Advantages
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom” — Aristotle
I’m a firm believer that even in a difficult position, you always have the advantage. Even if your winning chance is one in 14,000,605 possible settings, you still have one.
We saw that our background, all of whom came from small villages in Indonesia, could be one of the advantages. We all have experience interacting directly with farmers and really understanding their problems. Moreover, some of our family members and relatives worked as farmers. This advantage enabled us to solve the right problem instead of making it up to fit the solution.
We had also adjusted our problem theme selection with the ability and knowledge of our team member. Because of our shallow knowledge of the palm oil business and drone technology, we chose finance. We chose finance also because it was the most familiar and related to our lives. Some of us also have the experience of building fintech applications.
Inferior feelings often make us lose direction and forget to see the advantages that we have. It makes us see that this competition is just a zero-sum game, and choose to give up before trying. In that condition, stop for a minute and look inside. Fight and use the perceived disadvantages to push ourselves to greatness.
Last How: Ask for Feedbacks
“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”
– Ken Blanchard
No matter how good you think you are, the people around you will have all kinds of ideas for how you can get better. One of the most fundamental things about building a product is having the humility to continue to get feedback and to try to get better.
Finally, I learned that there ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough, and ain’t no river wide enough to keep us from reaching our full potential.
The “odds” are up to them but the end result is absolutely up to you.
We were featured by MONEY FM 89.3. For more information about the competition and our idea, check this out: https://www.moneyfm893.sg/guest/futurefarmer-grow-asia-hackathon-2019-winners/.
