Alumni Spotlight – Erik Hartker

Learn to Start is proud to be working with the next generation of lower, middle, and high school students in reimagining what the 21st-century education system should look like. Hear from one of LTS’s incredible alumni, Erik Hartker, as he shares how LTS has impacted his personal and professional life since graduating from the program.

Confidence

How has being in Learn To Start impacted your confidence as a person? I remember getting up in the front of the classroom at Learn to Start for the first time. I was as nervous as I had ever been, and all I had to do was give a presentation on a famous entrepreneur to people that I had been going to school with since I was three. Fast-forward to the end of the year, and I led a presentation of a startup concept of me and my group’s creation in front of a panel of judges and a whole audience of adults and peers alike at Rollins College—a pitch competition that my group ended up winning (well, three-way tie). 

Learn to Start forced me to break myself down in order to build myself back up. My weak points would get challenged in a presentation, and I was forced to take a good hard look at what I was doing wrong, or risk facing the same failure again. What resulted from weekly presentations, feedback sessions, and team-based work, was an examination of who I was as a person and what I needed to do to improve. This process of breaking and rebuilding helped me build a stronger foundation. My confidence didn’t end up stemming from what I hoped I had, but from what I knew I had because I had built it myself and it had withstood critique. Each week my team and I improved our startup concept, I also felt like I was improving myself. I built experience that no one could take away from me, and I carried that into all aspects of my life. 

Each year I participated in LTS, my presentation skills became better, and my capacity for dealing with failure as well as my confidence improved. Now that it is all over, the experiences that came from the class are still things I draw upon when I am in need of motivation and belief.

Preparedness

Learn To Start: How has Learn To Start defined or redefined preparedness for you in your personal and professional life?  LTS forced me to reconsider preparedness and how seriously I approached it through experience. I remember giving a presentation in my second year of LTS about the importance of story. I had not prepared at all. I had a rough idea in my head of what I wanted to execute, and was hoping that it would come together as I improvised the presentation. Instead, while I attempted to tell a falsified story to engage my classmates, and then use their engagement to tell the importance of story, I was called deceptive by one of my classmates when I asked them to describe me in a word. Not only was my presentation ill-prepared and ill-executed, but my character was called into question as well. Fortunately, I was given a chance to present again the next day, and after such a failure, I was determined to do better. This time, I put effort into preparing for the presentation, and prerecorded a video that I would interact with in real time, requiring me to prepare and have the timing down in advance. I was able to execute this iteration of the presentation well, and the experience became a valuable lesson in the importance of preparedness in both personal and professional life. Preparedness impacts how you are able to deliver a message, and going the extra mile to understand your material will not only save you from embarrassment, but provide a more enriching experience to those you are creating for.

Receiving Feedback

How has LTS impacted your ability to receive feedback? What was your experience with feedback prior to the program? Prior to the LTS program, feedback was something that I actively avoided. Feedback gives rise to the possibility of something wrong with your work or your person.  Much of my identity and self-worth was tied to the fact that I was academically excellent; feedback seemed to serve the purpose of exposing the fact that I was not as intelligent as I presented myself. It was more important for me to be perceived as right than to improve. 

LTS helped to redefine what it meant for me to succeed. Every week in LTS we had to present something. Whether that was for a startup concept, a business plan analysis, or another concept learned in class, we had to get up in front of everyone and present. At first, it was extremely uncomfortable, standing in front of everyone and having their eyes on you critically—the feedback sessions were the worst part too. Your presentation would get torn apart if it deserved it, punches weren’t pulled. Mr. Conroy tended to be the most honest critic as well, I remember being the most scared of his feedback because of how devastating it could be. But, after weeks and weeks of putting myself out there in front of the class, my mentality towards presentations became less about fear of failure, and more about seeking improvement. When I received negative feedback about something, I would make sure that if anything was better about my next presentation, it would be that one thing. Slowly, feedback became not a hindrance, but a tool with which I could make myself and my product better. The opinions of others did not serve to expose my lack of intelligence, but instead, were the things that would allow me to become a more intelligent, complete individual. 

If I had not experienced the trial by fire that is Learn to Start, then I never would’ve broken out of that shell that I had coming in. Failure to me would still be something that needed to be avoided, and success would be the absence of failure. Now I know that these two things are intertwined, it is failure that gives rise to the valuable insights that lead to success.