#assignment9

My favorite show to date is Say Something Bunny. The audience are all assigned characters and sat around a table with a script in front of them. Even though audience members are assigned characters they aren't required to speak or perform, but rather, are gestured to when they speak their roles. Assigning these roles dramatically helped bring audience members closer into the story, in my experience. Talking to other audience members after the show, it seemed that we all felt particularly drawn to our character and invested in the story for that reason. The show was also so incredible because of the multi media used. Alison uses props, real voice recordings, and photos to further the narrative. She manages to make the story feel as if it’s a mystery to be solved with the audience, and she's presenting you with evidence along the way. An incredible show! I highly recommend it. 

Today, in class, we watched 2 Ted Talk videos on how to be successful. Both videos talked about the same concept of how grit, passion, and perseverance are the main driving forces behind success. It also talks about how people who have been through hard times react better to failure and can endure worse conditions because they have experienced and learned from their past. The speaker of the first video emphasized on grit and how some of her less intelligent did better on tests than her more intelligent ones because they seemed to have more grit. I agree with her argument, but only to some extent. I think that test scores only prove intelligence to some extent and don’t necessarily reflect on how successful someone is going to be in the future. For example, many of the most successful people in the world such as Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs are actually college dropouts. However, it is important to know that it is not because they dropped out and had grit that they succeeded, but rather because they already had the passion and were persevered to fulfill their goals. Steve Jobs once said that it is really important to have passion “because it is so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up”. This is very true because to succeed, you have to do something so an extended period of time and it is really hard to not give up something that you are not very passionate about. The second video was more about comparing the differences between people who are ‘silver spoons’ and ‘scrappers’. Silver spoons are people who think that they area under all the right circumstances to succeed and follow the existing system and follow the ‘safe road’. Scrappers are people who fight their way through and therefore are better with enduring hard times. She says that people should be scrappers because they are the ones that succeed. I think her argument is only somewhat valid because there are also many scrappers who don’t succeed. I think that when scrappers do succeed, they succeed largely, but also when they fail, they fail hard. However, the people who she considers ‘silver spoons’ take a safer road and have a higher chance of succeeding although they may not be extremely successful. Frankly, I feel that I am more of a silver spoon than a scrapper. I think that, although I don’t want to be a complete scrapper, I should take more risks and get involved in new experiences. After watching the videos we began our University research. The university that I chose was UC Berkeley because it is among the less expensive out of the top engineering schools in the world. Also, it is in California which is where I would like to go for university. Making the poster based on the university was the most challenging and took the most amount of work. I didn’t necessarily enjoy doing the research for it, but did learn lots about UC Berkeley because I had to probe to lots and lots of different websites to gain the necessary information. Overall, the assignment was very strenuous and probably the most taxing moment of Planning 10, but because of this I feel that I also gained a lot of insight.