🛠 Hackathon Goal Setting Workshop - Alec D'Alelio

[Applause] [Music] hey everybody um we are joined by some pretty cool people today um excited to see uh alec from mochi joining us here for a really really informative presentation uh on how to set goals for your hackathon and how to get the most out of your hackathon experience we will be taking questions at the end so please uh definitely just hang on to those and put them in the chat um while you're thinking about them we do need your interaction we do need your participation but definitely hold on to those so that everything can run smoothly without further ado though alec for mochi uh game protocol we would love to hear more about what what it means to to set goals for for a hackathon take it away all right thank you guys for the intro i'm super excited to to be here i'm a long time fan of zora and i spend a lot of my time thinking and uh engaging with on-chain creative technology the stuff that we're all here to build and talk about so very excited to be here thank you to zora for for having us um this is going to be a little bit of a different session i imagine than a lot of what has happened so far this is kind of an opportunity to take a step back and think critically about the goals that we're actually setting for the coming days in the coming weeks for those of you who choose to take your projects beyond the scope of the hackathon itself so i'm really appreciative that you guys have taken the time to be here i'm sure you're eager to start building some of you have probably already started building uh your projects but i personally and we at mochi think that it's really important to set aside some time to uh you know engage critically with with goal setting in order to be the most effective at achieving whatever it is that you're you're here to achieve so thank you for being here again my name is alec i'm a core contributor at mochi i focus mainly on partnerships and dao success and i'll tell you a little bit about mochi a little bit more about mochi later but the tldr is that we are an agile coordination game to help remote teams decentralized communities creative collectives and everything in between to stick together our motto is to dream big start small and stick together so a little bit about me personally before we get into um the the goal setting i have been in and out of the web 3 blockchain space since 2017 my introduction to the space was this book that you see here on the left called everything in its right place i helped put together this manuscript and publish this book on how blockchain technology would create a more transparent music industry so while many people i think come into web3 crypto through the lens of money and finance um i came into it through the lens of rights management rights management royalty streaming um things like that artist and fan relationships and i've kind of kept that focus ever since a lot of what i've done over the past couple of years has been focused on the down nft space i minted my first music nft on zora back in march 2021 about the same time i minted this adorable little moon cat here um i was also a founding member of beat style which is a collective that was born out of the euler beats project one of the earliest examples of generative music on the blockchain we've worked with snoop dogg's team to do a couple of their drops uh we've worked with quantum we did one of their genesis drops and nyan cat and some others and around the same time as all of that about may of last year i started working on mochi so the work that we do now is focused on supporting dao supporting decentralized communities of all different shapes sizes and flavors to stick together build culture through the act of setting and tracking goals and then lastly i've done i've done my fair share of transacting i don't know at this point whether to wear this is like a badge of honor or a shame uh that i've done so many transactions with so much gway but um i've been i've been here for just a little while so what is mochi i hope that you know many of you in here are already aware of what mochi is mochi being the snack in this case because it's delicious but for those of you who are not aware mochi is a japanese rice cake made of short grain rice and usually other ingredients like corn starch water and sugar it's pounded into a paste and molded into different shapes here as you can see these guys are pounding some mochi i think that they're actually the fastest they have like the record for uh fastest mochi production um so just like this process helps thousands of little grains of rice stick together to create something sweet and tangible and cohesive we try to do the same for decentralized communities so again that's what inspires us we work to keep communities stuck together through a combination of token incentives agile principles and of course tamagotchi style kawaii cute mochi companions who essentially serve as a living indicator of your accountability to your goals so um now i want to get into a little bit of uh goal theory some of the goal theory that actually inspired mochi and that continues to inspire the work that we're doing uh now i'm gonna talk through some of that theory and then we're gonna do a couple quick exercises um to help you guys set some some clear actionable goals for this week and hopefully establish some goal-setting practices that you can take into future projects future hackathons uh and hopefully even into your your personal lives and personal goals so a couple just terms just to make sure that we're aligned on definitions here we're defining goal setting as the act of charting measurable measurable steps to propel you toward a desired outcome over a predetermined period of time so a couple a couple of things here you'll see that measurable uh is emphasized i'm going to get into that a bit more later but this is kind of a key point right if you're setting the goal of i want to read more i want to become an avid reader that's going to be a lot less effective than something like i'm going to read every morning before work 10 pages or more right just the act of having a goal be be measurable and being clear about your desired outcome and being clear about the scope or the amount of the period of time during which you're going to actually work towards your goal makes goals more effective so a couple more kind of mochi specific terms uh a journey right ideally effective goals are not ones that you are going to be working toward forever right most goals should be reassessed at a certain point either because you've made you know considerable progress toward them maybe you've even completed them but we believe that goals should be continually reassessed and so a journey is a period of time during which one tracks a goal ideally with a small team of people who kind of serve as accountability buddies um this is another core thing right where you're more likely to actually be accountable to a goal if you have folks other than yourself um holding you accountable right reminding you there's there's an added incentive there so um eight weeks is kind of a standard amount of time for this uh from our perspective right we we have built our system around agile principles for all the developers and and technically-minded product-minded folks in the room you're probably aware of um agile and scrum but basically it's this idea of breaking up work into into chunks of different different amounts of time and scope so eight weeks or two months is traditionally an agile epic where you would maybe work on a specific feature those eight-week epics are broken into two-week sprints where you set smaller goals and then those uh sprints are split up into daily stand-up meetings so this daily stand-up right it's a bit difficult to do this kind of thing if you are a distributed remote team um so you know we understand that it's not always easy for people to meet at the same time every day but that being said it's still important to be tracking your progress on your goals so that's where these pearls of wisdom as we call them come in or proof of work right which is essentially a daily check-in or progress update on your goal that could be a journal entry it could be a mochi report um or you know a voice note whatever whatever it may be so this is what a pearl of wisdom looks like in mochi where you actually are completing a quick progress update on your goal in discord or in slack earning tokens for doing so and hopefully developing a streak we got a zorb there if you know you know and just to give a quick example of how this has been used in a creative context campfire is one organization um an artist union of sorts of about a hundred folks people who are releasing music on the blockchain who are working with organizations that that are working to elevate on chain creative tooling so this this group was essentially spawned from this tweet a couple months ago and when the group was formed um they decided to use mochi at the very inception to keep folks working toward common goals so we had about 20 people working on goals like songwriting recording vocal exercises things like that and we found that people who set small measurable goals like performing a 30-minute vocal warm-up every day we're really successful in achieving that while actually making some new friends in the process so that's just a quick overview of uh of the mochi terminology and how our system works i'd like to get into a little bit more um specifics around goal theory and some best practices for setting goals now um so the framework that we are going to use today to talk about our goals and reflect on on our goals for the coming days and weeks is called smart goal setting so this is an acronym as you may have noticed and it is specific measurable attainable relevant and time-bound so it's good when setting goals to kind of go through a mental checklist of is this a goal that is specific is it a goal that's measurable is it actually attainable or is it super lofty is it relevant to the context in which you're setting the goal and is it timeout so specific i think this one is pretty self-explanatory the more descriptive that you are with your goal the easier it will be to track your progress and to actually report and reflect on the goal uh measurable this is i kind of alluded to before with the example of reading if you are working toward a goal of becoming an avid reader okay that's great but how are you actually assessing and measuring your progress toward that goal right so something like uh in order to become an active reader i will read 10 pages or more every day before work something like that is going to be a lot easier to actually check in on and to accomplish and that goes into the next point the goal should be attainable right all of us here i assume are uh if you find yourself in this room at this hackathon i assume that you're an ambitious person right we all want to affect change um in in this space but a curse of being ambitious is that you might be more prone to setting over ambitious goals right and the problem with setting over ambitious goals is that you're you're setting yourself up potentially for disappointment um you're setting yourself up to become demotivated you're potentially setting yourself up to sour um relationships with the people you're working with so this is a really important one right goals should be attainable uh they should not be too lofty you should set yourself up to to actually outperform your goals if anything right we i personally hear this a lot in in the space right that the best teams are those who um under promise and over deliver right so i think that that's a helpful way to think about this under maybe under promise and over deliver with yourself so that if you set the goal of reading 10 pages and you read 20 you're going to feel great about it right but if you set the goal of i'm going to read 100 pages a day and then you only read 60 sure reading 60 pages is great but you might be disappointed um so i think that one's really important and then the last two relevant we're all here as i mentioned before to effect some change to build the next generation of on-chain um creative tooling right so it maybe it goes without saying that any goals that we're setting in the context of this hackathon should be relevant to that aim and then finally time-bound goals right we don't want to set goals that that we're going to be working on forever ideally we're setting goals that have an end date that we can reassess um because if you're looking to go 0 to 100 right the goal that's going to take you from 0 to 20 might be distinct from the goal that would take you from 20 to 50 in 50 to 70 and 70 to 100 so the idea is that we're continually reflecting on and reassessing our goals so that they can be as targeted as possible to the stage that we're at in the development of our project or our personal habit or whatever it is that we're trying to work towards so this is a really good framework it's kind of a classic one and it's going to be kind of like a measuring stick that we're going to use for for the goals that we set today so using this as a framework i want to provide a couple of examples and we're actually going to want to work on these live together so here's an example of a not so clear goal right i want to write more okay great but how are you going to measure that progress how how are you actually going to achieve that so i'd like to take a couple minutes now um for for you guys to actually rework this goal right using the smart framework come up with a more descriptive way to um to write this same goal that would be more effective in actually achieving it so leave a couple minutes here um and invite anybody to share uh your goal i've already done this um and so the next slide has has my personal uh reworked goal but curious to see what you guys come up with here so just gonna put a timer on for two minutes and see what we come up with i was going to play some music but i had to full screen my presentation so i can't let me see if i can pull it up here all right timer's running low five beats to study to here we go lo-fi beats to goal set two i'm sorry [Music] one more minute [Music] all right start finishing up your goals we're gonna do this one more time so no worries if uh we're not quite done yet but i would love to invite anybody uh who is willing to unmute share how you would rework this goal um with this smart framework i think we can do like raised hands right just one to two sentences i can't see if anybody is raising hands or in the chat but um luke are you able to be able to assist on this yeah derek um derek's raising his hand right now if you want to come off and meet real quick yeah can you hear me loud and clear okay cool so i would write it um more specific like according to the your guidelines and say something like i will have a one-hour writing session every day at 10 a.m solid yeah yeah that's great i have a one-hour writing session every day at 10 a.m so one thing that you might be able to uh improve to make that a little bit more descriptive is like what is the what is the intended outcome like maybe in order to x y and z i will perform a one hour writing session at this time but i think that's really good um okay that makes sense because it would be more measurable that way right yeah okay awesome yeah i know but that's solid thanks for sharing um want to do one one more of these oh this was uh this is my example right in order to better process my thoughts and publish my first mirror article i will spend 10 minutes on creative writing every morning before starting work so that's just one example obviously there's hundreds of ways you could rewrite the school but this is something that maybe i would work on over an eight week journey so we're going to do this one more time i want to get in shape how how could we re reconfigure this goal so again we'll do we'll do a quick two minutes i actually just kept the lo-fi on this whole time i'll just turn it up uh but i'm gonna put another quick timer on [Music] so all right one more minute [Music] so all right we're coming up on two minutes you guys want to wrap up your goals and one brave soul wants to raise your hand and share what you came up with the floor is yours there really there really are no wrong answers go on months going twice we can we can vibe out to lo-fi here all day okay last chance last chance if someone wants to share if not i'll go ahead and share my interpretation so so here's here's how i reworked this one i'll stretch every morning before starting work um and we'll complete one round of exercise per day before dinner and so again this is keeping with that time bound the idea of having the goals be really time-bound um and being really specific right thinking about well when actually would be the most effective time on a regular basis for me to complete this practice of of exercising what kind of exercise am i actually doing right for how long am i able to exercise right and again this this comes back to the idea of being able to continually reassess your goals because maybe this changes over time maybe you start out with a goal like this and then as you build your strength maybe you are increasing the amount of time that you're spending working out or you're increasing the intensity of your workouts um and the same thing could be said of uh of coding of um writing of pretty much anything i think right that if you're reassessing over time as you make incremental progress toward um the desired outcome hopefully uh you're able to take on slightly more ambitious goals right the idea is that you're not starting with the super ambitious goal so um here's a couple examples hope this was helpful and and uh thinking through [Music] how to apply some of this stuff and um now i want to get to the potentially more exciting piece of this which is actually goal setting for the hackathon itself so i would love if everybody now uh based on this smart framework based on uh some of what i've shared based on what derek shared let's apply this to a goal for the hackathon itself right what is something that you actually hope to achieve um over the coming days here um so an invitation to use this uh prompt of in order to do something i will in order to achieve something i will do something that was uh this one here in order to publish my mirror article i will do this writing practice um so what what is it that you actually want to achieve here and what is the the practice that will get you there um also an invitation to uh write a why statement like why do you actually feel called to contribute why do you feel called to be here and to help build the next generation of on-chain creative tooling um and then those those two things ideally should line up right the goal that you're setting should line up with uh your reason for being here um and all both of them should uh align with those smart principles uh to some degree so we'll take a few minutes for this and then we'd love to invite folks to share uh share their goals for the hackathon and we can uh provide some feedback to each other on on the goals that we're working on uh between now and the end of the hackathon so i'm gonna put on another timer we'll give a couple extra minutes this time um and yeah we'll come back in a couple minutes uh four minutes this time sorry first actually before we do this i would like to open um for questions just in case i can clarify anything feel free to raise your hand if you have a question if not i'll go ahead and start the timer awesome [Music] okay feel free to type this out write it out with pen and paper if you prefer however however you prefer to actually get it in writing it's up to you [Music] so my [Music] ah oh [Music] one more minute on the clock [Music] so so [Music] all right if everybody could uh do your best to wrap up your goal um and no pressure right this is something that um ideally you're going to continue to iterate on and we're all going to provide feedback to each other now so no pressure it's not perfect but that that is time um so uh i was gonna actually do breakout rooms but i think we're a relatively small group so we can we can actually just do this um as an entire group if anybody would like to uh kick things off by sharing the goal that you came up with go ahead and raise your hand the floor is yours and i would encourage i'm here to provide feedback as well but i would encourage you guys to actually provide feedback to each other so once we get someone up here to share your goal if anybody else wants to provide feedback feel free to raise your hands as well all right we've got losing my ego the floor is yours yeah um gm so my goal that i wrote for this was in order to finish coding the front end for our app i will bucket my time into two hour work periods um instead of just like working continuously because i know i'm more productive in like two hour buckets and then uh [Music] for the second like the why statement um [Music] i guess i feel called to contribute to next-gen on-chin tools uh because of my desire to contribute to open source communities and build for autonomy i guess yeah yeah absolutely and did you um did you give your goal like the the smart test would you mind actually dropping it in the chat so that we can all uh like for reference cool yeah in order to finish the coding the front end yeah i think that this is well actually i'd like to open this up if anyone else would like to um provide some feedback you are more than welcome to do so cool well from my perspective this is a very good goal um i know that niche has a bit of an advantage here because she's completed quite a few mochi journeys and set quite a few mochi goals in the past but i think that this is a really good um really solid goal is pretty specific in terms of the desired outcome of finishing coding the front end of the app that's something that's gonna that's gonna need to get done um and the scope of it in order to finish coding the front end of the app before the end of the hackathon maybe you could specify uh like maybe in order to finish coding the front end with a day or two advance so that like you can do testing or something like that maybe maybe that's a consideration oh yeah but other than that i think that this is a really clear measurable goal um relevant time-bound seems totally attainable i think it's yeah it's time-bound sam i saw your question is it time-bound um i think that the specification of two hour work periods um that's a good nod to like a time-bound goal but maybe having a clear like deadline of what i had mentioned before like maybe you want to finish coding the front end with a day or two of in advance so that you have time to like prepare uh like a presentation do some testing etc but other than that i think this is a really good um actionable goal so nice work uh derek i saw you had your hand up as well would you like to share what you wrote yeah sure um so i'm just here uh you know my first hackathon and um there's a good i mean i might not get anything um actually uh published but i'm sure to learn so my um my goal is in order to learn as much as i can during this hackathon i will participate in all the all the presentations and watch all the videos further also i'll work on building something new four hours tonight and eight hours tomorrow which is saturday and um sunday i will rewrite a long-term goal which will last two weeks because i really want to take what i learned here and and um and run with it so that's my goal nice so it almost feels like your goal is like over the next few days to get as much as you can out of this initial experience so that you're more prepared come sunday to set a more um because it sounds like you have different goals for today versus yeah this is for sunday yeah with the intention of getting to the point where you maybe can set a more like clear goal for moving forward is that right that's exactly yeah i definitely want to take what i learned here and build something but set a goal to build something to get it uh to get it published is uh maybe a little unrealistic like i said i'm here to learn first hackathon so yeah what you said is sums it up pretty well yeah cool well shout out to you for being here hope it's a positive first hackathon experience um one thing i would say right just on the attainable front um eight hours is quite a long time and as as is four hours um so maybe maybe you would say like for at least two hours i will i will show up and work on on something so that you're again setting yourself up to to over deliver on on your own expectations um but i think otherwise you think you seem to be thinking about this in a really uh really healthy way so awesome yeah thank you i like the idea actually i'm gonna steal losing my ego's idea and split it up so if it's not eight hours maybe it'll be definitely be pieces buckets because eight hours is a long time to be sitting working on something but splitting it up is a great idea for sure for sure um does anyone else have any any feedback or any thoughts they want to share or a goal that you want to share i guess floors floor is open we're coming up on time but we have a few more minutes cool well i am going to oh sam wise it said curious to know what derek's project is derek are you um are you open to share a little bit about what you're planning to work on yeah i came in really open-minded um looking to uh really focused on um building a a dow a tool for a dowels to use like a blanket tool that any dowel can use for um creating a structure and um creating the organization um the more i get into it i mean and this is really um i see that the hackathon is really focused on and of teas and music so i actually might go in another direction would but but i definitely um my long-term goal i want to uh create dial tools that dallas can use to create structure in the organization awesome definitely would love to tap in with you beyond the scope of this meeting because that's a lot of what what i'm doing and what we're doing at mochi losing my ego would you like to share a little bit about your project yes all right i couldn't find it i couldn't find the mute that's okay um yeah uh we're focusing on [Music] music nfts um and collective curation um kind of we found that there is a gap in the market uh currently with music platforms in the web 3 space where bringing your own contract isn't fully supported um and so that's something we're working on the ability to for a collective or group of like-minded individuals to decide to um join essentially like an allow list together and curate specific pieces that they have minted wherever they wanted um and to display them together so that's kind of our idea nice nice that's really cool i'm excited to see what comes of of both of your projects and everyone else in here as well um we are coming up like we have just a couple minutes left so i want to wrap this up um but you're all invited to track these goals using mochi if you'd like to um we're like i mentioned before we have a system where this is all kind of the the daily reporting um the reflection this is all automated with our system it integrates with discord so we'd love to invite anybody who's interested uh to join us in our discord um and and complete track your goals with the mochi journey we're offering uh extra token rewards and we're gonna do a limited edition poep as well for those who are interested so um luke actually would you mind dropping dropping that invite link here i'm not able to open the chat right now but i know i had uh i put it in there earlier thank you and uh for those who are interested to learn more about mochi um and hang out and just chat with us definitely uh tap in with us here um bond with mochi is our twitter um again we're tracking personal development goals in our discord all day every day not all day every day really it's more like a couple minutes every day but um we'd love to see some of y'all in there and we'd love to chat more with some of y'all uh outside of of the hackathon but again thank you so much to everyone for being here wishing everyone the best of luck in the coming days and this is just a call to uh you know dream big start small stick together with your teams and uh reflect on what you're doing right take time to to reflect on what you're doing and to be critical about um the goals that that power uh the outcomes you're looking to achieve here so thank you guys so much again my name is alec and we are at time if we have a couple minutes for questions i'm happy to take them but i'm not sure that we do so thanks for an incredible presentation there alec i know everyone benefited from that um we will be ending the session here um we do have one more session coming up right at the top of the hour so head on over there and enjoy that but alex thank you so much for this i i really really think that a lot of people got some value out of this today thank you cheers take care everyone happy friday you