Building your moonshot: the story of the Hack Western 6 theme

Hackathons are about more than building technical & creative moonshots — we want you to leave our event with a moonshot mindset towards life. Here’s a where the ‘moonshot’ term came from and how hackathons can push your out of your personal comfort zone.

by Erica Yarmol-Matusiak

Moonshot entered the lexicon when JFK announced that the US should commit itself to getting a man on the moon in the next decade. Literally — a MOON SHOT: a challenging or costly task with a significant result.

Today’s business and tech words have embraced the phrase and evolved its meaning: moonshots are now big goals you set and drive an organization towards for the future. Notably, Alphabet has a subsidiary called Google X, “the moonshot factory”, whose goal is to “create radical new technologies to solve some of the world’s hardest problems”. Waymo (self-driving cars), Project Loon (network of internet balloons), and Verily (data science & health devices) all came out of this group.

Great moonshots are inspiring, credible, and imaginative. HBR’s What a Good Moonshot Is Really For talks about moonshots as an important part of a “future-back” approach to business strategy rather than reacting to the present.

But beyond setting moonshots for organizations, what does a bold, visionary moonshot look like for future-state you?

On a day-to-day basis, personal growth usually feels like you’re making incremental steps, even if you have a mindset of exponential growth and compounding yourself. Though this daily improvement is key, reflecting on my past few years I think back to times when I feel like I’ve learned a ton in a really short time.

I ask myself: “How can I bring this idea of moonshots into my personal life to magnify my learning or my impact?”

Hack Western 4, winning a prize with this fantastic team for our project about IoT-enabled maintenance sensors

Hackathons have played a huge role getting me into a mindset of setting personal moonshots. They pull me into a space of radical creativity, returning me to a child-like imaginative state where anything is possible. They bring together people of different backgrounds to build, design, and create to your heart’s content. They’re periods of time away from the daily grind where you can creatively approach a problem, build a scrappy minimum viable product, test, fail, and learn quickly. Your output and project may not always work the way you intended, but I’ve found I always get better at asking the right questions about how to build a project.

After going to 20+ hackathons in a two and a half year timespan, I’ve found that there’s a lot of concepts I started to carry into my daily life. The most noticeable was getting better at setting big personal goals (i.e. in working out reading, language learning, career) and not being afraid to do things more outside my comfort zone. I also found a better system for breaking down daunting tasks into hypothesis-driven, testable chunks, asking myself, “what needs to happen to make this true or for me to understand this concept?”

The last big change in my mindset was developing a sense of agility and resilience when things didn’t go as expected. Being able to pivot at hackathons helped me get better at being able to pivot in other life circumstances. Challenging tasks mean I felt like I was failing a significant portion of the time, but I found that mentors, resources, and a determined mindset helped me keep pushing forwards to my moonshot.

Throwing it back further to Hack Western 3, the second hackathon I ever attended when I had just discovered what tech was

At Hack Western 6, our team would love for you to come build your moonshot over the weekend. Moonshots should be personal and therefore different for everyone — maybe it’s building a first website, designing the user interface for a program, creating a full-stack web app, or something completely unexplored with a new dataset. Whatever your moonshot is, we want you to take that leap of faith and go for it!

We’d also like for you to take a lot more away from the weekend than some new technical or design skills. We hope you meet new friends and mentors and learn how to access resources to build something new.

I also encourage to think about how you can be more ‘hacky’ in your life, and apply hackathon principles to envision, build, and launch your personal moonshots.

To infinity and beyond — Hack Western 6 applications are OPEN NOW until October 10th: apply here!