Driving question:

“what do I need to know to move forward with lifelong learning and active citizenship.”

Self improvement is a journey. That is something that I have always been told and while it is true I don’t like it. Life would be much easier if you could have a check list of all the things that you should do to be a great person and be done with it. To have a continued journey rather than a destination means that there will be ups and downs and places where you fall short. And, unfortunately, with self improvement there is really no right answer as to how to do things because every person is different and unique. Many people have, however, made guides to try and make this process easier. Aka; Self improvement books.

It’s interesting that we were asked to read self improvement books for this project because if you had asked me to read one 2 or 3 years ago I would have shut it down very quickly. I had a very biased view of self improvement books because they always sounded very performative to me and that made me uncomfortable. You never feel inclined to listen to someone who sounds like they’re talking down to you, so I never gave them a chance.  And then with the pandemic and Covid my viewpoint shifted. Self improvement books didn’t come into my line of thought until this course however looking back on these past few years I was much more conscious of my mental health and had recently been making strides in order to improve it. The book that I ended up reading was Start With Why by Simon Sinek. He proposed the idea that how you communicate changes how you are perceived and how you connect with people. 

The goal of this project was to take something from our books that resonated with us and create an artifact that we could showcase to the other students in our grade. I ended up looking into the start with why method and how it connects to the Neo cortex and Limbic brain. Personally, I was really fascinated in the way the brain works and dictates how you communicate with others. The artifact that I made was used to show the diagram and to train the different aspects of the brain. The end product was a makeshift arcade game that people really enjoyed playing. Unfortunately, because of the way that I made my artifact, most of the people who came to talk to me at the exhibition didn’t listen to what I had to say and just wanted to play my game.

One regret that I had from this project is the book I chose. Simon Sinek wrote many books and one I ended up reading happened to be the introduction to the Start with WHY method. The entire book was advocating for why you should find your “WHY” and how you can use it once you find it. However no where in the book does it talk about how you can find your WHY in the first place. That guidebook comes in the form of a second book, “Find your WHY”.

My answer to the driving question of this project is to, rather than implementing an entirely new system into my life, simply take some improvements to the ones I had. Ive been working on not apologizing for things if it’s not necessary which makes you appear more confident and trustworthy. Time blocking using calendar allows me to remember dates and follow through on things relating to time management. These small improvements and practices are what build up and create the habits that support the you who you want to be.

To end this post off I’d like to leave you all with a quote from Simon Sinek;

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.”