Today my group was with Joel, doing his first non-food challenge. It was the perseverance challenge. The idea of the challenge was to push ourselves to learn a new skill that we didn’t know before. Joel was assigned by us to practice makeup, and we helped our fellow group members decide what they wanted to do. I decided to learn to sing a song. Katie M. also decided to sing. Joe decided to learn to play “Let it Be” on guitar, and Gill and Katia decided to practice their painting and drawing skills respectively.
After we had worked on our projects for about 50 minutes we took a 10 minute break to discuss our progress with each other. We repeated this cycle and then broke for 30 minutes of lunch. After lunch, we did 2 more hour-long cycles, after which we were done with the core challenge. During the evening presentation, Katie M. and I sang our songs. We were both fairly happy with our finished products. Joe’s guitar playing improved drastically throughout the day. Gill and Katia both produced beautiful artwork that impressed us all. Overall I think group success was fairly high during this adventure.
Joel and his makeup skills also had great success throughout the day. He went from looking like a pice of charcoal exploded on his face to looking like he was an expert cosmetologist. I know speaking for myself personally, that I refreshed in my mind some singing techniques that I had learned in singing lessons before I came here. We all at some point of the day had struggles with frustration and being bogged down by the repetition. This challenge forced us to focus and put effort into something even when we thought it was going nowhere. In the end I was glad of this aspect of the challenge, specifically because it showed me how hard work could really pull off in a way I hadn’t seen in a while. Even at the really frustrating and grueling parts, I was forced to not redirect my focus to something that might have actually worked better in the long run, like I’ve done in many of the other challenges so far at the Adventure Semester.
In the end, I am definitely very glad I did this challenge. It will be one of the more memorable challenges in the long run. I didn’t really learn anything new, more that I was reminded of work ethics that I thought didn’t work, and was reminded how really pushing through definitely works. I am sincerely grateful for having done this challenge.
1 comment
Comment by Paulned
Paulned Nov 1, 2015 at 9:59 pm
What a great post to read! Congratulations on your perseverance!
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