Every day we find ourselves being slowed down by speed bumps or stopped by roadblocks, but this is no reason to stop what we're doing and give up, especially if you have a great team backing you up. This week, I've found myself even more challenged than before and I realized the importance of having great people to help you out.
The reason why I say this week has been more challenging than others is because my phone was stolen. Yes, it might seem weird I'm saying this, you might find it superficial and you probably don't see how or why it's relevant. But it is. The thing is, my phone was just another part of me, like a third hand, and it feels like it was chopped off for no reason and without any warning. I had everything on it, from the basic pictures, chats and emails, to the most important: my homework planner app and Asana. With these 2 apps, I was able to plan everything I had to do for BlendZ and for homework in general; without them, I felt like a lost lamb without it's herder. But the importance of this anecdote is not that my phone was stolen but that I had great people behind me helping me, consoling me and figuring out ways to work around this "amputation". There simply are times that I cannot be more grateful for the friends and parents I have (shoutout to Karen and my parents!) and this is one of them. Karen was with me when my phone was stolen and she saw how I went from happy-go-lucky to crying, in hysterics and having a panic attack in a matter of seconds. She did everything in her power to try to calm me down: called my parents, talked to the sales associates in the store and fed me after we were basically pushed aside by the sales associates. It was an awful evening and I know I would have done something irrational if it weren't for her. I also have my parents to thank. The Sunday after the incident we went back to the store and we talked to the manager, to see if she could do anything (it turns out she couldn't if we didn't go talk to the police). My parents also helped me in any possible way when I couldn't open my iCloud Photo Stream on my laptop to access the pictures I took at Hiraoka when I went to look at blenders that Thursday. I was being challenged and I would not have been able to demolish this roadblock if it weren't for my team. The point of this is that although I had a hit a pothole in the road, I was able to work around it because of the great people behind me, backing me up. Now lets look at what has happened in BlendZ this week: We've been getting ready for our next sale! It has been fun, but definitely challenging. I had to come up with a new recipe in around 36 hours, figure out how much fruit we needed to order for Thursday and cut and freeze everything we had ordered by Sunday afternoon. It might not seem like much to accomplish in 3 days but it was challenging. In order to invent a new recipe, I had to rely on my parents to be able to buy fruit to experiment with. They were fine with this (at least for the most part I think) and I know I could not have done it without them considering they bought the fruit, yogurt and tried the recipe after I had spent a long time in the kitchen. This week I also had to test my math skills, something I am kind of lacking. I needed to order the fruit, but before I did that I had to calculate how much fruit I was going to need. I had the recipes figured out and all I needed to do was figure out how much fruit we would need for all 300 smoothies we were planning on making. But thank goodness I had Pedro to help me. I know that I would have royally messed up if I didn't ask him for help and I would have been a lot less confident about the amount of fruit that we were ordering. He was willing to help, check and re-check that we had done all calculations correctly, all for the greater good. The last big challenged I faced this week was cutting the fruit. We ended up ordering around 100 kg of fruit and without having a willing team like the one that IA'15 is, we would not have accomplished much by our deadline. Thursday morning up to lunch time was spent washing, disinfecting and cutting fruit. Thursday afternoon was spent cutting fruit and so was any other free time we had. We even ended up going to school for 3 hours today to finish cutting and setting up everything to kickstart the week with a BlendZ sale. It may seem obvious to some, but it really does make a difference to have a team that is willing to sacrifice a precious afternoon with family and friends in order to cut fruit with their second family. This is the importance of having great people behind us to back us up. I know I couldn't have accomplished half as much as I did this week without my friends, my parents and my team. All my examples and anecdotes seem really different when simply read, but they all have the same essence: the importance of having great people and teams to help you out in times of need. This might seem like a week where I might not have learned as much as others, but it definitely was one where I realized some very important things. I've always refrained about writing posts about anything other than school, but then my mom asked me "Why don't you write about other experiences, you've learned from them and that's what matters". And she is right on so many levels. My learnings don't come only from experiences in the IA, they also come from what has happened to me outside of the classroom in the past week and a half. Just because what I learned hasn't been completely confined to inside the classroom and Blendz and entrepreneurship, it doesn't mean that I can't take my experiences and apply them to the classroom. In the end, learning is learning, no matter how or where it happens.
1 Comment
Corey Topf
9/25/2014 10:00:48 pm
This is an important lesson for all of us: "The point of this is that although I had a hit a pothole in the road, I was able to work around it because of the great people behind me, backing me up." I think we're all less likely to feel stressed if we know there will be people to support us.
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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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