How to Care About Whether or Not You Care (And How DI Relates to That).

This title doesn’t make a lot of sense until you fully understand it. It’s probably not even worded very well. But the point I’m going to make to you will change your life. Destination Imagination has unintentionally taught me a skill that has proven to be more important than any of the skills that DI supposedly teaches you. That skill being how you manage what you care about.

In this post I will explain everything I know, and have learnt about managing how you chose where to put your time and energy. There is something extremely powerful about knowing that every moment of your time, and every bit of your energy is helping you in some way. For a lot of people, either choosing to say no to things that don’t help them, or saying yes to things that do, are among the hardest skills to master in life. But being able to choose what you care about will help in so many ways that I feel the need to share it with you. But first, I’d like to say a few things about Destination Imagination itself.

A few things about DI.

I’d just like to say that I have no problem whatsoever with DI. I think that it’s an amazing program, that can help kids develop lots of useful skills, as well as deepen passions. The only problem I have is the way PLP ran it this year. The problem with mixed-grade random groups is that you can never have a full group of people who actually wants to be there. The reason the best DI teams succeed is because they’re passionate about solving their solution. It’s cause they care about completing it. The problem with the groups we were placed in is that there is always going to be at least one or two people in each group that isn’t passionate about it. The idea of having a team, is that everyone has a somewhat similar vision in mind. (in this case being creating a solution that everyone’s proud of). But if there are people who don’t have that vision, (especially when it’s over 80% of the group) DI just doesn’t work. DI is built on the idea that everyone is involved, so if there are people that aren’t involved, it literally just doesn’t work. Its just not designed that way. Its not a class group presentation where one member can compensate for the other members slacking of. The DI challenges are designed to be solved as a team. Not a group, a team.

Here is the difference:

Definition of a Group:

Definition of a Team:

Now, I do understand the idea of mixing grades and making random groups in the pursuit of building leadership and collaboration skills. But that only works in an environment with less stakes. Quite a lot of the grade 10s physically do not have time to lead and teach a 4-5 member team of grade 9s. Especially when almost all of the grade 9’s don’t want to be there. Personally, I have studying, a job, sports, and hobbies taking up quite a lot of my time, and this is not an unreasonable lifestyle. In fact, it’s probably the most optimal lifestyle to be living in grade 10, as it sets you up for academic, employment, and social success. But this just doesn’t work well with the short amount of time we had in order to not only complete, but lead this.

The way these groups work also takes advantage of the most experienced members. For example, I just don’t physically have time to have taught and supervised other group members when building our team’s Modular Device. If we had like 6 months to do this, I could have organized a way for my group members to learn about building machines, and have all of our group build it together. That way we could have actually done DI the way its intended, together as a team. But because we had 3 weeks of class time, a large portion of which was spent on DI work that was not related to building our solution, I had to choose between two options: Either do the whole thing myself, or not have a modular device. Neither of those two options lead to a successful DI solution. I just think that running DI this way just doesn’t work very well for grade 10 students, as we just don’t have the necessary time on our hands to make the leadership that was expected of us possible.

Overall DI is a wonderful program, but due to the way it was run in PLP, it created an environment that was not set up for success from the very beginning. I understand that the PLP teachers spent a lot of time and effort putting this together, and I’m grateful for that. It’s definitely not easy running a program like this. But as a student, I just felt that shedding light on some of the students perspectives will allow DI to run more smoothly next year.

The Power in Not Caring

I’ve always been a perfectionist. Everything I’ve ever done had to make me proud, or else I felt like I was letting the world down. But you can’t do everything perfectly. It’s a self-defeating lifestyle. There’s always something that you won’t be the best at, and if you don’t accept that, you’ll never be happy with yourself. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try your best and push yourself whenever possible. If you care about absolutely everything, you wont be happy. But if you don’t care about enough, you wont be either.

Finding that perfect balance is split up into two main skills:

-Being able what to care about things.

-Being able to not care about things.

Most people are somewhere on one or the other side of this spectrum, due to lacking one or the other of these skills. Personally, I’ve always struggled with being able to not care about things. But I’ve also seen countless others struggle with not caring about enough.

Here are some more specific problems that I have noticed that lacking these skills can cause. Note that not everyone is the same, and that some of these may apply more than others. Some people may be on the extreme end, while some may inhabit only a few of these traits unnoticeably. Please do not use any of the information in this post to diagnose other people. I am a highschool student making observations about myself and the world around me, not a doctor, psychologist or professor.

Not caring enough can cause you to:

-Not having enough meaningful hobbies/interest’s, which can lead to you thinking badly of yourself.

-An unawareness of your problems, and how you affect/come across to others. For example

-The idea that you can’t change things about yourself because it’s “not your fault” or because it “doesn’t matter”.

-Being very judgemental. This is caused by subconsciously being attuned to not putting the effort into understanding other perspectives.

Not caring enough can be commonly caused by not being very good and lots of important things. You start to subconsciously think that thats out of your control, and eventually fall into a mindset where nothing matters to you at all. Often people who struggle with this will have very specific things that they are good at, leading them to think that only the things they are good at matter. This can cause them to associate the things few they care about as the only things that matter, and lose an understanding of other peoples perspectives on what matters.

I’ve seen countless times people who aren’t good at school completely stop trying because they think it’s their destiny to fail. I’ve also seen people who are really smart at a certain subject, but lose sight of the social world because they think that knowing information is the only measure of human success and achievement. I can’t fret enough how important it is to understand that there is more to the world than whats going on in your life right now. It’s easy to get sucked in, and hard to get out.

Caring to much can cause you to:

-Compare yourself to others an unhealthy amount. (It’s not a bad thing to critique yourself, but theres a fine line between self-critique and viewing everyone else as above you.)

-Never be proud of your work.

-Be influenced more easily by other people. For example being unsure about your choices due to someone else making different ones.

-An obsession with doing everything perfectly.

-Have trouble pushing away people who don’t make you happy/help you.

Caring to much is something that doesn’t show nearly as much as not caring about enough. I’m willing to bet everyone reading this has met someone who doesn’t care about enough. Whether it be a classmate or co-worker who never seems to do anything productive, or whether it be a friend who doesn’t care about anything except an obsession with their political views. But caring too much is hard to point out, and when solving it, it’s easy to move too far in the other direction and stop caring enough.

Finding the Balance

The best way to find your perfect balance is to do things you’re not sure about, and then reflect on the outcome. For example, with doing DI, I realized that exerting myself to compensate for the rest of my groups low effort wasn’t actually going to help me in any way. But I was still emotionally attached to the idea of trying to ace both studying and DI, when in reality I could only choose one. At first it felt kinda weird. It felt like I was just being lazy. But after a while it started to sink into my brain. I started realizing that I was the most optimal choice, not just in my thoughts but in my emotions. After the tournament, I was still proud that I had done the best work I could have done given the circumstances, but I was also proud that I hadn’t sacrificed myself in the process. To be honest I was a little jealous when I saw so many other solutions that were more thought-out and successful, but then I stoped to think about what I would have actually gained if I had won DI. The only thing I’d be winning is pride. After I reflected on the few weeks I had spent on DI, I was able to see and experience how this strategy affects me. I was able to practice it in real time. The best way to improve at anything is to practise, even for skills like this.

It’s always temping to try and be the best at everything, and thats because there’s always going to be someone better than you at everything there is to do. But a lot of the time you wont be able to change that. You can physically get better at whatever it is you’ve newly became interested in, but that then takes time away from the other things you need, or want to do. Your time and energy are fixed, so use it wisely. A lot of the time, I get distracted by the life choices other people make. I see other people playing a different sport than me, and I wonder if that means I should join it. I see my friends play a video game, and I think that thats something I should then be spending my time on. Those things may be beneficial to them. It may bring them happiness, or help them achieve their goals. But it’s important to understand that that doesn’t mean that those things do the same to you. Being able to separate happiness from something in your mind is really freaking hard. But it’s actually incredible once you’ve done it.

Personal Experiences

The following text is reflective on my own experiences.

Music

Throughout the 15 years I’ve been alive on this planet, I’ve constantly listened to music. I’ve enjoyed it, played Piano, danced to it, sang to it, joined both concert and jazz band at school, and it’s always been a part of me. Around this January, I started to make a realization about how music controls my mood. I started to see that listening to music while at home was a product of me being uncomfortable with silence, as well as consistently being bored. After attempting to not listen to music for whole days at a time, I actually started noticing incredible changes in how that made me feel. But this started to become a problem because I ended up developing a guilty-association with listening to music. I felt bad about listening to it because it felt like I was harming myself in some way, which was very destructive and made me feel extremely unsure about my choices. It was hard to give up something that had been a part of me for so long, but it was also hard to not feel guilty about doing so.

When you’ve relied on something in order to feel happy for so long, you can’t just get rid of it. You need to replace it. So in order to stop feeling guilty about listening to music, I needed to stop wanting to listen to it in the first place. I knew what caused myself to want to listen to music, and so I knew how to solve my problem. If it was being bored that made me want to listen to music, I needed to make myself less bored. I started doing more activities on weekends, opting to hang out with friends instead of staying at home, and in result I started feeling less bored. I no longer had the urge to pop my headphones on and lay on the couch. I stopped feeling guilty for listening to music, because listening to it no longer affected me in a negative way. I still listened to it, but not as often.

The end result of this ordeal is that I no longer care about whether or not I listen to music. It no longer affects me, and so I can do it without caring about it. And not caring about it has made me measurably happier than when I did.

Faulted Friendships

A lot of people have been friends with someone who they don’t like. Either you thought they were a nice person when you first started being friends with them, but now realize otherwise, or they simply changed over time. Sometimes you’re able to just gently distance yourself from someone, and you’ll eventually grow apart. But that’s not always the case, especially if you’ve been friends with that person for a very long time.

I’ve always struggled with standing my ground, because I’ve always been more concerned about how other people will think of me, than how I’m being taken advantage of. Recently, I’ve been really struggling with this with a friend who I’ve known since elementary school. We used to be really good friends, but over the years he’s become so close minded that it makes it extremely difficult to be around. I had been very vocal when he does things that I don’t like (in a friendly way), but he refused to take any accountability. Being nice to him wasn’t working, but I couldn’t bring myself to be stern with him because I was afraid I would hurt his feelings. What if people that don’t know what’s happening think I’m bullying him? What if my friends choose his side and stop being friends with me? What if instead of him realizing that what he’s doing is pushing people away, he starts thinking that I’m the one being a jerk?

It took a while to realize that all those things are external. I cared to much about what other people thought of me, and in result I was being taken advantage of. If I wanted to start standing up for myself I had to stop over-caring about the backlash. Understanding your impact on others is important, but you can’t just walk around feeling miserable all your life because you’re catering to everyone else’s feelings. So I started practicing being stern with people. I progressively started defending myself, and over time I’ve been finding my balance between kind and defiant, and not caving into other peoples harmful practices. I’m nowhere near perfect with this, sometimes I’m too soft, and sometimes I’m too harsh. But as long as I keep trying to get better, I’ll grow closer the person I want to be in the future.

My Advise

My experiences may be completely different than your’s, and thats okay. Everyone is different. But if there is one thing you could take away from everything you’ve read today, it would be to try things you’re unsure about, and reflect on them afterwards. If you struggle caring about things, try taking the next sport you join seriously. Look at how it makes you feel. Look at how it affects the world around you. If you struggle with caring too much about things, try doing a new activity, but this time stop worrying about how good you are, and do it purely for enjoyment. Look at how it makes you feel. Look at how it affects the world around you. Even if you find out that doing whatever it is you’re doing is making you feel worse, or is having a worse impact than when you started, don’t worry, because if you’re aware enough that what your doing is making things worse, you that means you learned something.

All experiences are good ones, given you learned from it.

The Actual Criteria for This Post

Before we wrap things I just have one last thing to talk about. I do understand that this post was a school assignment, and so I just wanted to touch on some of the requirements that I haven’t already.

Our group was able to pull through and get our solution (somewhat) working very shortly before the regional tournament. We had to improvise a lot of our solution, and I think that that was what we did best. Even though we weren’t fully prepared, we were able to pull through and make it work.

Before DI provincials, we will be rebuilding our team’s modular device (it broke at regionals). The thing that kept us from getting points was that a lot of our solution was not checked very well against the criteria of the challenge. A lot of elements in our story and modular device didn’t meet the criteria, and so we lost a lot of points for that. Going into Provincials, we’ll be looking at it more carefully, and will go through each element of our solution and make sure it’s in a state that will gain us points.

My role in my team was frankly hard to describe, as I was responsible for a large part (if not all) of the work put into all our solutions elements. I wrote the story, built our machine, filled out all the forms, managed our team’s tasks, and (tried my best) to make sure everyone was doing their assigned tasks. Next time I’m in a un-even group setting such as this one, I’m going to try my best to hold people accountable to their tasks, that way I won’t have to take on so much extra work all by myself.

Here are the links to my team members blogs, so you can check out all the hard work they’ve been doing in PLP: Susan, Sebastian, Lucas M, Francis, and Aidan.

That’s all for now, stay tuned for another (and hopefully shorter) post after DI provincials1