🏎️ How do we become the best versions of ourselves? 🏎️

Project overview/what I will go over in this post

In this blog post, I will talk about where this project starts, where it ends, and what we did to get there. As for a little bit of background information, we read a book, made a character analysis on the book, made a viral video, made a silent film, made a video about the 10 essentials in life (featuring the public), and lastly, the answer to our driving question!

Banner in the Sky

To start things off, we read the book “Banner in the Sky” by James Ramsey, this book was the kickstart to our project and gave us a feel of what reaching your peak potential can be like. The book is all about a 16 year old boy named Rudi who wants to climb the Matterhorn, and through determination and perseverance (reaching peak potential) summits the mountain. Throughout this book we took notes, made 3 topics for each chapter, and answered discussion questions with our groups. After reading the book and getting more familiar with the characters in the book, we were all randomly assigned a character from the book on whom we would research. Once we knew who we were researching, we had to make note of the ways they: spoke, thought, had effects on others, acted, looked, desired, feared, and also just general traits of them. I ended up with Teo Zurbriggen, an old fellow who suffered a mountaineering accident, now working at a hotel where Rudi also works. You can read everything I researched about Teo right here!

Answering the Driving Question

This project, our driving question was “How do we become the best versions of ourselves?” Through the Alberta field study (where would we do a lot of hiking) the only way you can expect results is if you are putting in effort, you can become the best version of yourself by challenging yourself and stepping out of your comfort zone, doing things when you don’t feel like doing them, and trying new things. How did I reach my peak potential on this field study? Well, I reached my peak potential mostly on the hikes, there was one hike that I particularly felt that I had gotten closest to reaching my peak potential, on that day I was tired from hiking the days before, but I did something when I didn’t feel like it. This was one of the best decisions I had made on the trip! I got to see the beautiful larch valley and alpine lakes (while it snowed sideways) with my friends! (If you were wondering: here’s how it looked)

How this Project has Helped me Grow

This project has helped me grow immensely in more than a few ways, first that comes to mind would be how it helped me grow in terms of responsible learning. Being one of the core competencies of this project, responsible learning is obviously something we focussed on in the project, because of this I think I did quite well at balancing my time schedule with work. While reading “Banner in the Sky” we were set to have read certain chapters before a due date, expected to be completed outside of school time. This is something that got us more warmed up to the concept of responsible learning in the peak potential project as a whole. Another way I demonstrated responsible learning would be through our schedule on the Alberta trip, it was expected for everybody to be awake by (time) and then to meet at (place) by (time), but this wasn’t really a hard thing to do when the reason you are waking up is to go see some beautiful scenery! Throughout the field study, we had to collect and gather interviews, b-roll, viral videos, and scenes for a choreographed silent film. We would have to collect these on our own, without a designated time. (except for the silent film.)

Video and Film

This is my 10 essentials video! It is made in IMovie, with the subtitles done in CapCut. The video should explain everything you have to know about the 10 essentials. Take a listen! (For some reason the title screens didn’t export with the text centred, so they lean a bit to the right. They look fine in the app but when exporting it did this.)

View my 10 essentials video through this link!

Conclusion

All in all, this project has been the most interesting to me, it has taught me quite a few life lessons, made a lot of memories, and has been a great experience in general. Though I stepped out of my comfort zone, it is probably the reason I learned so much, without taking that risk I never would’ve so much good advice from the interviewees, or seen so many beautiful views!