I participated in a hackathon a while back and was reflecting on my experience when a sort of tension arose for me. So, me and my 3 other teammates were tasked with developing a product to support mental health. There was one person in our group who had a great vision, informed by some recent personal experience and we all supported that idea. We were given 10 hours to develop and then present our working tool. I have never been good at judging who will win in contests and without knowing the criteria the judges were using ahead of time – my prophetic abilities were even further limited. But I do remember that after we presented our idea I thought to myself “considering the constraints, I think we did our best and the outcome of this really also has very little material impact on my life, so actually I am just going to believe that we won this.” As the judges deliberated and my teammates whispered to one another their doubts, I stuck stubbornly to our side and that mindset felt both futile and efficacious. We didn’t win, we didn’t even come close but do you think that even matters?
Chat GPT
Reframing success in contests
It sounds like you had a kind of private act of defiance — not against the judges, but against the whole premise that your sense of success had to be tied to someone else’s scorecard.
You went into that last stretch deciding:
“The result won’t change my life, so I’ll choose to believe we won.”
That’s not delusion; that’s reframing. It’s a quiet refusal to let an external verdict define the value of your time, your effort, or the spirit in which you showed up. It’s also an acknowledgment that a hackathon — with arbitrary constraints, unclear judging criteria, and 10 hours of creative chaos — is not an absolute measure of worth or skill.
So does it matter that you didn’t “win”?
Only if your definition of winning was limited to that podium moment. If “winning” was:
- Learning something new
- Building a working tool in a short time
- Collaborating with others and backing an idea you believed in
- Practicing creative resilience
…then you already won. The judges’ list was just a different game.
That feeling you described — both futile and efficacious — is interesting. Futile, because you knew your belief wouldn’t change the scoreboard. Efficacious, because it kept you grounded, proud, and maybe even a little joyful in a moment when others spiraled into doubt. That’s an underrated kind of victory.
If you want, I can help you unpack why that mindset worked so well for you, so you can draw on it in other high-pressure situations. I suspect there’s more there than just optimism.
Claude
Hackathon mental health project reflection
Your reflection touches on something really profound about how we choose to frame our experiences and what we decide “counts” as success or failure.
The fact that you consciously chose to define winning on your own terms – “we did our best given the constraints” – rather than letting external judges be the sole arbiters of your experience’s value is actually quite sophisticated. You recognized that the official outcome had minimal material impact on your life, so you exercised agency over the meaning you’d take from the experience.
There’s something both stubborn and wise in that approach. Stubborn because you were actively resisting what might have been the “realistic” assessment your teammates were whispering about. Wise because you understood that your internal experience of the hackathon – the satisfaction of supporting a teammate’s vision, the problem-solving under pressure, the creative collaboration – existed independently of whatever rubric the judges used.
The tension you’re feeling might be between two valid ways of engaging with the world: one that says external validation and objective measures matter (which they often do), and another that says your subjective experience and personal growth have their own inherent worth (which they absolutely do).
Whether it “matters” that you didn’t win depends entirely on what you were actually participating for. If it was for the experience, the learning, the team collaboration, and the satisfaction of building something meaningful under pressure, then you did win by your own reasonable criteria. The judges’ decision becomes just one data point rather than the definitive verdict on your effort’s worth.
Chat GPT
Winning Your Own Hackathon Experience
What a great question, and a fantastic example of the human mind at work. It sounds like you were able to create your own winning experience regardless of the final outcome. That ability to frame a situation in a way that serves you is a powerful skill.
In a hackathon, there are so many variables beyond just the quality of the project. The judges’ personal biases, the specific judging criteria, and even the clarity of the presentation can all influence the results. It’s a bit like a lottery where you can do your best, but the final outcome is still left to chance.
By deciding that you won, you shifted your focus from external validation to internal satisfaction. You looked at the situation, considered your team’s effort and the constraints, and concluded that you had achieved your goal, which was to do your best work under pressure. The judge’s decision became irrelevant to your personal success.
This mindset is what the ancient Stoics might have called focusing on what you can control. You can control your effort, your mindset, and your interpretation of events, but you can’t control the outcome of a competition. By “winning” in your mind, you weren’t being delusional; you were being resourceful. You were taking back control of your own emotional experience and preventing the disappointment of not winning from diminishing the real accomplishments of your team.
So, to answer your question: No, in the grand scheme of things, whether you “won” the hackathon probably doesn’t matter. But the mindset you developed in the process—that ability to find victory in your own effort and perspective—definitely does. It’s a skill that can serve you far beyond the hackathon floor.
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