March 6th, Karen and I made a decision which ended with bad consequences. We messed up, and when we went to own up to it, we were greeted with "you can't make decisions based on assumptions." At that moment of extreme guilt I agreed, but there was something about that phrase that wouldn't go away; those seven words kept nagging at me, stuck at the back of my head. I had agreed with them in the moment, but I started to question them later that day. Was that RIGHT? Can I really NOT make decisions based on assumptions? It did not feel correct. I started to reflect back on the the year in the IA and things that we had done based mostly on assumptions. Our business pitches, one of our first assignments, were based almost 100% on assumptions. According to Pedro, people would gladly welcome an on-campus importing store; DD believed that fro-yo would be an awesome asset to the campus; Babi and Stangl believed that smoothies would hit the spot. These were ideas created based on assumptions from talking with a couple of friends and hearing their opinions on what our school needed. Although a couple of people were not the whole school and not the complete target audience, they were good enough to assume that smoothies were what we wanted. Low and behold, BlendZ was born, and it has become very successful. Recently, I also made the decision to start my own donut business: Glazed Donut Co. This was a decision made because I don't like the donuts that Dunkin Donuts sells and supposed I wasn't the only one. Before I even had finalized recipes and figured out prices, I was already excitingly posting pictures on Instagram and Facebook of my donuts, gaging the reactions and excitement from my peers aka my target audience. Since the reactions were positive and excitement high, I created a Facebook page. In just a day and a half, I had reached almost 100 likes (I honestly wasn't expecting this). Again, this was based on the assumption that there were people like me that didn't like Dunking Donuts and would gladly welcome am alternative to them. But let's go back to when Karen and I messed up. We explained our situation and agreed to present the following Friday what we had skipped out on the previous one. This time, we were greeted with an excited 9th grade class and not the mocking jeers that the juniors had received us with, a positive start to our brief presentation. We switched up our speech and I tried to make it more exciting. This time it was a reminder that Habla Roosevelt was starting the day after, we needed volunteers who wanted to spend six Saturday mornings of the semester teaching English and that it was going to be fun, rewarding and a learning experience, celebrated with fun activities on the last day of classes. This time, there was more interest and the atmosphere felt more positive and alert. As soon as one hand came up wanting a paper with more information, so did several more. In the end, yes, we messed up and skipped on something that we shouldn't have, giving off the wrong kind of energy and vibe that we wanted Habla Roosevelt to have. But in the end, it wasn't all negative. Making decisions based on assumptions can have both its positive and negative reactions, but when executed perfectly, there is no reason as to why those choices have to end negatively.
1 Comment
Corey Topf
3/18/2015 12:37:28 am
Like I wrote to you the other day, assumptions are similar to hopes and dreams, except that assumptions are based more on patterns from the past that help us predict the future. Should we make assumptions? That's probably the wrong question.
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Author"Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light." Archives
June 2015
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