When an Unseen Purpose Meets an Untempered Passion

You’ve probably heard the expression “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” before. Its fairly common, and it makes sense. If something works, it works. It doesn’t need fixing, so best use your time elsewhere. But what if I told you that most of the greatest changes in our society have been caused by the people that reject that notion entirely.

There are some people in this world who believe that that statement is holding the world back. They see problems that the rest of us don’t, they see solutions to those problems in places that we don’t dare to look, or even not notice entirely. In this project titled “Cray Cray Yay Yay” we explored those exact kind of people, and how it takes people like them to change the world.

“Why does it take a crazy person to change the world?”

I wrote a essay explaining why it takes a crazy person to change the world in this previous post:

A Rather Crazy Sneak Peek

Real World Examples

Instead of just reading, googling, or learning about examples of “crazy people” changing the world from lectures, we actually got to see them for ourselves. In this project we took a five-day trip to Seattle where we witnessed first-hand the crazy ideas that have changed the world we live in.

We saw the full view of Seattle from atop the Space Needle:

We studied musical relics at the Museum of Pop Culture.

We gazed in wonder at the dazzling glass sculptures on display in the Dale Chihuly Art Gallery.

We witnessed first-hand what an athlete experiences when playing in the Climate Pledge Arena.

These examples weren’t just fun experiences on a school trip. They were real world proof of what we were learning about. Being able to witness the power in the ideas made this project real in a way that can’t be gained from just the classroom alone. For five full days, everywhere we stepped, ate, and glanced our eyes had something to do with the driving question, making our answers much much more meaningful.

Even the fact that we had to take our own pictures for final product of this project made every little bit of our learning personal. It was entirely our own experiences, and entirely our own learning.

Communicating a Greater Understanding

This project was actually a bit different than a lot of the projects I’ve done previously in PLP. During most other projects, I’ve usually only really answered the driving question at the very end, either when creating my final product, or sometimes as late as writing the blog post. But in Cray Cray Yay Yay, I had a fully fledged answer to the driving question by the time we had hit the halfway point. Once we came home from Seattle, there was no more thinking about the what the driving question, or how one might answer it. We were fully focused on how we can effectively deliver our answer to not just a live audience, but the world.

The Magnum Opus of Cray Cray Yay was a 6-minute-and-40-second-long presentation, called a Pecha Kucha. It’s a script less presentation in which you have 20 supporting images, autoplaying behind you at a rate of 20 seconds per image. This forced me to not just be able to write about how it takes a crazy person to change the world, but explain it live in a conversational setting. I had to know exactly what I was talking about. Our presentations were given during a public evening where our parents, as well as random people were invited to listen, and having developed an answer to the driving question so early in the project made this presentation much more successful.

My group presented first during the evening, and overall I believe it was a huge success. Our group presented clearly, projected well, and were able to keep talking even when we stumbled. We practiced our presentation many many times, which I think was the key to our success. Our presentation told a clear story, which was a struggle to achieve at first, but we kept trying new ideas and eventually we were able to craft the presentation that we are proud of. It took a lot of revisions and hard work, but I’m happy to say that I’m really proud of me and my groups work. Check our my group members blogs here: Kira, Silas, and Jessie.

The one thing that I really think I could have done differently in my Pecha Kucha was the way our group answered the driving question. Looking back, we mainly focused on what qualities drives changes in the world, but I feel like we could have extended a little bit and talked about why our topic matters to the audience. I watch all the groups present, and they all did an amazing job of explaining why it takes a crazy person to change the world, but no group explained why that knowledge matters. Why does understanding what kind of people change the world mean anything to our everyday lives? It’s a question I hadn’t thought about at all until after the Pecha Kucha night was over.

Why Does Any of This Matter?

Okay, so we know that it takes a crazy person to change the world. We know why it takes a crazy person to change the world. But how does knowing this help us? Well, to simply put it, it makes us more open-minded. We’re so used to seeing conventional success that it clouds both our perspectives on the world around us, and how we express ourselves. Whether thats a good thing or a bad thing is up for debate. I can’t draw the line between functional and dysfunctional un-convention because it’s blurred by our different ideas of what function is.

But I do know this: we will never know if something un-conventional is functional or not, regardless of our definition of function, if we don’t try it. Regardless of if you think function means efficiency like the factories that our society is built off of, or if it refers to abstract beauty that brings new meaning into an otherwise mundane life, somethings function will not be discovered until we chose to discover it.

The choice of how much of a discoverer you want to be is up to you. There is no one answer to how much you choose to express yourself unfiltered by other people’s values, or which values you choose versus the ones that are judged around you. But there is a right answer to yourself, and you can only find the answer that best fits you by experimenting. Whether or not you change the world, you can still find yourself, so make your story interesting.