‘More power, more responsibilities.’ Jason Wong, Howard and Michael Fung are here to talk about the importance of responsibilities with experiences within Days 1 to 7. Even though we were not in the same vehicle until Day 7, we will still try our best to explain responsibility and its importance in shaping perfect leadership with one thousand five hundred words.
Firstly, we are here to declare that we are barely as powerful as Batman, who receives the aforementioned advisory quote in the movie. Yet, we all have responsibilities since we are born. We need to go to school on time and receive proper education; we need to brush our teeth and shower daily to keep up our personal hygiene; we have tons of responsibilities. But, the size of responsibilities as well as their qualities vary along with our power. Michael Fung is one of the leaderships within Days 1 to 7. According to his rank and abilities, he should have enormous or gigantic responsibilities. For example, he needs to be in charge of the After Action Report, communication between cooks and navigators, discipline and morale of the Alpha team, meals, cleanups and organization of the three teams’ activities. To underscore the genuine fact about power and responsibility, we will borrow Billy as another example. He was the person in-charge of the 14-day Alpha course. He needed to plan and cook the meals for more than twenty students, arrange accommodations and activities for them, fuel, inventory, safety, lectures, all those stuffs. Basically there were almost no any other instructors who had a chance to share the responsibilities with him merely because he has the ability to suck them up. For the Arctic Expedition, he also did the plans beforehand and keeps on driving for us as the leading car. Yet, he also seemed to have himself laid back and unleash part of the responsibilities to the leaderships and the students. As a matter of fact, most of the leaderships felt somehow unexpectedly exhausted, even though there were six of them sharing only part of Billy’s sole job.
Well, benefiting from hindsight, we thought that it is natural to have such phenomenon emerging out for the first seven days. All the leaderships have the potential to be good leaders, yet what differentiates between them and Billy is experience. Billy has been a medic for almost 20 years. He received trainings for military actions, medications, psychological operations, cooking, camping, hiking, driving, biking, management… almost anything you could name. Those trainings and experiences make him become naturally the Chief Instructor of Monticle (or in other words, the ‘Monticle God’), a military medic and one of the seniors of Lampo. Before we departed as a group for the Arctic Expedition from the HQ, he did not even have a single minute of sleep or rest because he was busy on handling administrations and safety for all thirty of us. He also had his wife, his dog, equipments, sprinters, trailer, maps, so on so forth to be in charge of. Comparatively, we are just students who usually have the responsibilities of going to school, complete exams and homework, not watching televisions and playing video games in an uncontrolled manner etc. Technically, we are green in the realm of cooking, navigating, safety and all other jobs that are mandatory and fundamental in this expedition. Before the summer, some of us (including Michael) have domestic helpers to do the job for us. In other words, they do not need to wash the clothes and dishes by themselves, cook for themselves, do inventory for themselves etc. Basically we sometimes rely too much upon them. We do not even need to worry about school fees, tuition fees, the fee for this trip, the fee for accommodations, for fuels, terms and conditions of insurance, vehicles and books. We feel that we also have a back up because we are young. But that should not be the way how we are nurtured.
Like wild animals, we should be trained to be familiar with the lifestyle of living upon oneself. Any predators are born and nurtured by their mothers (some of them are taken care by their fathers). They get breast milk and then food from their parents when they are still young. Yet, when reaching to maturity, they receive preliminary trainings such as having them hunt by themselves. They are given room for their brain’s region of creativity to burst out brilliant and perhaps unprecedented ideas and solutions. The surviving ones are basically those who are capable of producing and/or applying appropriate (not necessarily brilliant, but the more brilliant the better) ideas. Similarly, as we are reaching maturity, we should be given room to experiment our abilities and ideas. That is exactly what Monticle is doing. In this trip, we are spontaneously doing time management (for example, dealing with the assemble and dissemble of 6 tents altogether), preserving discipline and orders, as well as planning for meals and pit stops. We really feel that we did not have any safety nets when Billy announced that he would let the leaderships do the planning and see if they really work. Unless the plans are almost non-workable, Billy would not interfere much.
Responsibility is usually determined by your abilities. Based on our observation, Ryan is not one of the six leaderships, yet he is one of the most prominent and capable members for handling tents. Therefore, the leaderships made him the person in-charge of dealing with tent matters. In fact, under his guidance and tutorials (together with Jason the junior), setting up and dissembling the tents were unexpectedly efficient. More importantly, their instructions were made so clearly and definitely, hence everybody (including the English-as-second-language students) was able to perceive the message so quickly and accurately and get the job done. Rains and thunderstorms made the tents so cumbersome to be set up and down. Yet, we could still be able to complete the task of dissembling 3 Algonquin tents and 1 root tents within an hour and 15 minutes. This proves not only that the power you have, the more responsibilities you carry, but also the fact that you carry the responsibilities according to your abilities.
How about abandoning your responsibilities? Do you think the team could still survive if we are not carrying any responsibilities? What are the consequences of abandoning them? To what extent should we abandon them?
Literally we agree that the team could still survive given that only a minority of us are abandoning our responsibilities. Sloth or laziness is one of the seven sins of human beings. In other words, it is usually inevitable. Yet, we three reach a consensus about laziness and responsibility – it is alright to have an insignificant range of laziness while performing our tasks and responsibilities. This is because we are all human beings and we all need rests and reliefs. A very simple but frank example of such is that Billy could drive 39 hours non-stop, and Billy has the responsibility to drive the Sprinter from HQ to Arctic Circle, and from there back to HQ. However, he is not able to drive us 24-hour non-stop to Arctic Circle, right? (that is why we have more than three drivers instead of three for three vehicles – this arrangement allows drivers to take turns and drive well. As long as the progress is on track, then why not give some room and some easy-offs for them?) Hence, I wish any reader of this essay to take everything easy for a bit. It is not a wise idea to put yourself under stress for your whole life, we guess?
What if we just take another perspective to view about taking rest? For instance, let’s say that taking rest is also a responsibility of a driver. Does it sound less guilty and less related to laziness? Try to learn the trick of viewing or interpreting responsibilities in an alternative or positive way (or even in an out-of-the-box way) if you can. But still, we are suggesting you to also take another complimentary responsibility when you suddenly have an idea of taking a rest – the responsibility of telling other drivers about your idea.
Communicating clearly with others is considered another vitally important responsibility. People with great powers do have great amount of responsibilities, but they can not handle everything on their own. President Obama, just like many other leaders of any dynasty, have their own privy council, who help them. However, working with others is much harder than working by yourself. Thus, it is the responsibility of the leader to communicate with his followers in order to get a task done.
To conclude, we have discussed about the direct relationship between responsibility and power. Monticle, so as many other schools and universities, are microcosms of the real society. Any student or a member of these educational organizations and institutions should cherish their opportunities to enjoy how to know their responsibilities and handle them properly. Thank you for your attention.
No comments:
Post a Comment