Great Success…Through Effective Thinking
Hello and welcome to my first blog post on PGP in a long time. This project has been themed around self-improvement, which has provided me with a lot of useful tips and advice that I will incorporate now and into my future. Tips such as making great resumes, listening to guest speakers about their career and university life, and reading books that promote the art of self-improvement. In this project, we were tasked to chose a book in the “self-help” genre, create an artifact to represent it and present it to the other grade 12s at our school.
What do I need to know to move forward with lifelong learning and active citizenship?
I decided to read “The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking”, a book that arguably gives you the ultimate key to success in anything and everything. I was quite fond of the book for the most part, and had quite a few takeaways that I’ll certainly remember for a long time. One piece of advice that I took back came from the element called “following the flow of ideas”. This described an ability to step back in your thoughts, and come up with a number of ideas and themes that you want to ensure are addressed in your essay. Only once you have determined these ideas, you start to craft the essay. This allows you to come up with a good essay, perhaps even better, in a faster amount of time.
Now before even starting to read the book, we were tasked to create author biographies, which actually allowed me to make more sense of the contents of the book. It was written by Michael Starbird and Edward Burger, both of which who are professors in mathematics but who’s witty personalities even come out in their writing. Edward is CEO of the St David’s Foundation that advocates for health equity in central Texas, and Michael is chair of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers and uses his position to advocate for the use of inquiry-based learning methods. This shows how much they truly care about making a difference in the world, outside of forming the young minds of students. I believe this knowledge also contributed to more success when it came to my final presentation, as the audience could tell how much I truly knew about the book and the authors.
I decided to base my artifact off of a metaphor that the authors mention in the book. They argue that using the 5 elements allows you to think with your “eyes open”, which essentially means excelling to your full potential. These elements are meant to make your life easier with very little additional work, as doing any task with your eyes open is much easier than doing it with your eyes closed. To represent this metaphor I created two boards, one titled “eyes open” and another “eyes closed”. I asked the audience to pick one of the elements from a list and write it down with their eyes closed and then again with their eyes open. By the end of the presentation, I expected to have a board that was very messy and disorganized, and another that was much better looking. This outcome would support the author’s argument in a simple and engaging way as well as hopefully get a few audience members interested in the concept.
In the end, the execution of my artifact and presentation was quite successful. The audience was generally engaged in my presentation and thoroughly enjoyed seeing how badly they could write with their eyes closed. I not only made it fun and interactive, but had great knowledge and evidence to back up the metaphor it represented, which allowed me to have insightful conversations with audience members including teachers. Finally, I was happy that I was able to establish a personal connection to each assignment and activity, as I believe that it is an essential pathway to success in the course. I always brought things back to my “calling in life”, and how I hope to affect the world through my future career aspirations in the form of healthcare. The book I read expressed that success is not something you attain, it’s something you’re constantly aiming for and this a piece of advice that will certainly allow me to move forward with lifelong learning.