february + march's reverbs

doing a harvard business case study, working w/ amazon alexa, giving my board exams & much more.

Apr 06, 2023

Hey there 👋

My name is Rhythm Doshi and I am a 16 y/o that lives in Dubai 🌆 who is working on some pretty legit stuff in the blockchain + web3 space. I’m obsessed with self-development & growth, It has transitioned to becoming an ideal/principle that is firmly etched and woven into the fabric of my life’s principles.

⚡My natural inclinations revolve around:

blockchain, web3, crypto, & decentralization of the future.
space technologies.
philosophy & philosophical frameworks.
consciousness, meditation, and enlightenment.
neuroscience and psychology.
psychedelics & ego-dissolution.
building startups + products, economics & business.

🎨 doodle check:

doodling is my way of escaping reality, I feel extremely present when I’m doodling & it’s one of the best mindfulness exercises in my opinion, here’s what I worked on:

💴 simulating a harvard business case study:

February started off with a bang! last week of January was hardcore, I was studying a harvard business case study & was reading every word with full attention. I was scrutinizing & carefully taking into each and every important detail & numeric metric.

I absolutely enjoyed analyzing, making calculations, highlight & absorbing the important information of the case and was ready to dive into the session where discussed the case Harvard style but little did I know, shit was going to carry out way different that I would have ever thought.

The cold call had been initiated and the fast-paced session had begun, I found myself with all the important information but no questions to ask/to strike a discussion. This was quite the experience. The case study was based on Starbucks’ strategy to manage growth by innovating in China. We had to figure out a way to launch a specific number of licensed & company operated stores to achieve a growth of 3x by the last quarter of 2019.

Takeaways:

⚠️ Attention to detail: Attempting a case study like this requires a really strong ability to observe the tiniest details because those are the ones that impact the understanding of the case in-general. Tiny details carry a lot of value, paying attention to them is an added advantage that stacks up to build a solid foundation of your knowledge.
❓ Asking good questions: Asking good questions is an art that decides the course of your entire case. Good questions are like key to treasures & have the potential to acquire so much gold & in this case information. Good questions open up the doors to clarity & detailed understanding of the case to better tackle it by gathering the valuable data points to move further. Asking good questions can be perfected by being curious to know more which perfectly segues into my next takeaway.
🧐 Genuine curiosity: Be genuinely curious to know things, going into cases with the mindset of being curious and generally just having that urge/hunger to know more by asking more questions & exceeding expectations by calculating your own numbers, etc & doing things to genuinely understand & learn more. Curiosity is valuable, imbibing the mindset has proven to be valuable.

💪 building & innovating w/ amazon alexa:

Stop rubbing your eyes cause yes you read that exactly how I typed it;

I worked with Amazon Alexa in the month of February and it was a crazy experience. This was the global business challenge at TKS and the whole month was us ideating & brainstorming using various different mental frameworks, tools & looking at the things with a hundred different perspectives.

here was the challenge prompt:

Alexa has a wide array of products but are looking to create the next big thing. What product would Gen Z use daily and how can Alexa be integral in the experience?

We spent two weeks hopping on calls, scribbling on a whiteboard, researching & talking to loads of people to work on something genuinely unique, cool & something that would enhance the lives of GenZ.

check out our deck to learn more about our solution:

Amazon Alexa Recommendation Deck

Takeaways:

🪙 Perspectives are gold mines:
- Talking to people gives room for thought, it enables you to think in ways more than one, it allows unique perspectives to influence the way you think & in general helps in incorporating more ideas, thoughts & opinions that solidify each other even more.
- Throughout the challenge we did go through a period where we were coming up with the same stagnant ideas but one conversation with someone else gave us 10x ideas than our regular ideation. Fresh perspectives are insanely profitable.
⚙️ Proof-of-Use:
- Rather than explaining what the product is in theory, explain it by delivering/showing a proof-of-use, expressing tangible ways using visuals, testimonies, signatures, etc that people would use it along with the ‘why’ & ‘how’ they would use it is super key. It gives a more realistic insight apart from the usual data, numbers & text.
- Working prototypes of the product are super valuable too because nothing is more exciting than getting to try things hands-on.
🤔 Nth order thinking:
- This mental model has been a driver in the way we thought about ‘what’s next.’ Nth order thinking allowed us to better predict the long-term consequences of this product on a consumer's life and how it’s conveniency can increase or decrease over time.
- There were several times as a result of this mental model, we were able to identify the ‘nth’ result & directed us away from being enthused with an attractive idea.
Huge shoutout to Neelmani, Jiya & Kanha, it was more than a pleasure to be working with y’all, absolutely loved the late night grinds ;)
team capture <

📚 board exams lol:

If you study in the Indian Education system or know anything about, you would know that the Board Exam is the holy grail of exams, It’s the pinnacle of every exam a kid in this educations system writes. It’s an exam that makes most households gloomy & sets this absurd tone of fear.

The perceived value it carries doubles, no triples the pressure on the students writing the exam. The calm before the storm is the best way to put the last few days before the exam, but my board exams didn’t go according to anything I described earlier.

They went crazy good.

They were pretty chill & in-general was a unique experience going to another school to write a bunch of exams that were shipped to Dubai just for us lol.

Takeaways:

⚖️ There was simply no time for Distractions, Balancing is key:
- Researching for amazon alexa, building & shipping personal projects & studying for exams, all of it was happening at the same time & if there’s one thing that I mastered during board exams, it’s definitely the art of balancing everything.
- I saw myself prioritizing each minute so I could just get shit done. This allowed me to be ahead of my game + didn’t backtrack me anywhere.
- I think distractions are everywhere in this day & age but if you’re priorities are rock f*****g solid and if you have a level of mental clarity where you know what, why & how you want to achieve something, then even distractions become dust & settle.
😓 Stress management = 😁 success:
- Stress management has become a skill in the 20th century, with the stress increasing on us day by day, year by year, the way we tackle it has become so important for our mental & physical health.
- I wouldn’t say I mastered stress management but I definitely achieved a level of good stress management. I saw myself rather calm & collected than being extremely nervous, anxious & stress for my exams. someone wise once said:
“It’s all in the f*****g mind”
- It’s about the mindset & about how we approach things, if we can train ourselves to think differently, we can become great at managing your stress.
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🤝 meeting really cool people:

February & march was full of meeting really interesting people who are building & shipping some of the most coolest things ever. These two months saw a rise in my twitter presence.

I loved what one of my friend’s said:

“The value that you get out of scrolling through Twitter is exponentially higher than the value you get out of Insta.”
~ Mia Aiyana

This stuck to me. I really like this mindset cause it made it effortless for me to just start using it.

Twitter really exposed me to such cool people & took my cold-messaging skills to another level. I hustled meetings with Alec & Farhaj from buildspace (s/o to you guys, y’all are so lit), met with the Legend shivsak himself who is building a YC-backed company and worked with google previously .

I also met with one of the most collected humans I know — Kevin Varend (s/o to Navid & Kevin) at JBR in Dubai. I absolutely loved the convo & got crazy value out of it.

Overall, it was super duper valuable meeting with such interesting & cool people & if there’s one thing that I learnt by cold messaging people, it’s:

Want to optimize for serendipity? go out & talk to people.

⚒️ 30 days of building-in-public: building DApps, growing on Twitter & so much more.

March 17th is when I stopped over-thinking and took the first step to committing to building 30 days in public (huge s/o Steven, my director at TKS for inspiring me to take up on this challenge) and I’ve reached the half-way mark of the 30 days.

follow me on twitter to follow my journey 👀

It is day 17 when I’m writing this newsletter & here are my takeaways + ships + things I want to ship till now:

🚀 What I shipped in 17 days:

Counter DApp: It was a pretty simple project that incremented numbers as you clicked on the “Increment Number” button which called the smart contract & so on and so forth.
Tweet DApp: This DApp took links of tweets from the user & called the smart contract which deployed the link onto the blockchain & posted it on the website for others to view along with the wallet address of the user who posted it!
Crowdfunding DApp: This was a DApp that let users create their own campaign to raise money.

🎯 What I’m aiming to ship next:

Diamond Supply Chain DApp: I've been digging into how Diamonds are sourced and their supply chain specifically in the African continent (as they are rich in diamond reserves) and I found out that it's an extremely messed up industry with an oblique supply chain filled with miner exploitation, corruption, mismanagement & lack of transparency in ethical mining practice/labor laws. I plan on developing a DApp that puts the entire supply chain on the blockchain to increase the transparency and impact/improvise the lives of African Labor.
LabourDAO: The FIFA World Cup 2022 that took place last year got me surfing on YouTube and I watched a documentary by Vox shedding light on to the Human Rights Violations that had incurred in the making of the World Cup from 2010 - 2022. I found out that 6,500+ laborers had died due to the massive infrastructure that took place in Qatar tied in with No Fixed Wage Cycles, Low Wages, Bad Living Conditions & The Kafala System. This got me thinking, I started brainstorming on ideas to leverage blockchain technologies to generate unique labor identities with parameters like their wage cycle, wages etc on the blockchain.
Web3 Twitter Clone: pretty self explanatory lol

here’s what I learnt by building-in-public:

1. 🗣️ stuck? reach out to people:
- people are ready to help, you just gotta take the first step by asking for it, there are so many incredible people who have built crazy things & possess valuable experience.
- it's upto you to leverage it for growth. I found my first mentor to help me with the technical side of my projects in one week 🤯
- yea, shit is crazier than you think.

2. 📈 consistency or failure:
- Notice how I didn't say success or failure, but used the word consistency?

because consistent = success.

- being consistent is 🗝️, don't focus on if people are viewing your stuff or not, be clear on the fact that you have to post everyday no matter what.
- didn't make progress? tell people. It's okay, but be consistent.

3. 📹 show people what tf you’re building:
- I cannot stress more on the fact that showing > telling.
- filming videos, make demo vids of what you're building, etc exceeds expectations & in-general helps you achieve a reach + a connection w/ people following your journey & gives you that boost to keep doing cool stuff.
- People like visuals, give it to them ;) It's also a neat way to spice up & present the cool shit you're building!

🛶 being present-minded: kayaking in hatta.

Being present is lowkey addictive. I’ve noticed the fact that the moments where we’ve been more present, we naturally tend to remember that memory more vividly and I really like the sweetness of nostalgia & hence being present is kind of addictive. Sounds absurd but after my board exams I really wanted to rejuvenate & recover from all the stress & studying that I had done & really wanted to take my pace at which I was moving a notch down.

Towards the end of March I went Kayaking with my family and had incredible fun, Just being out there in the naturing moving around with no thoughts is the best feeling ever.

Being present is what enables core memories. We rowed the kayaks for an hour and went out to this really vibey location where we sat next to a bon-fire & had some really good Arabic food along with some Karak chai.

It was a simple yet an extremely fulfilling day and I genuinely had a lot of fun. I really want to start being present in all aspects of my life to soak up life’s peak memories. Not the best at being present everywhere because life’s can get monotonous and we forget about it but being out in nature really helps because it breaks that monotony.

moral of the story: be present-minded, make sandwiches with mom, go kayaking, hang-out with dad & the way you re-energize after something stressful defines your next week - so spend your time rejuvenating correctly.