Deadly Information 

https://www.wevideo.com/view/1655356227

If you’ve never listened to one you may still have heard of them as they have picked up a great deal of popularity over the years. Podcasts. Podcasts are ways of giving people information in a fun way without using a screen meaning it’s just people talking. Usually there’s a guest on the podcast, most likely a professional at the topic at hand. I’ll give you an overview, a famous person such as an actor or millionaire comes on the podcast, introduces himself and the guest. An example of famous podcasts hosts is Joe Rogan. Some famous people are even the guests such as Dwayne Johnson. Not every person who is a guest is a professional, they may just have a very important story about something that happened in their life.

Podcasts have a really unique way of giving you the information. The thing about podcasts in this day and age is that there is a standard app on your phone when you buy it. That means that you already have instant access to the 800,000 podcasters and the 54 million episodes that they offer. But that’s not the only thing that makes podcasts special compared to documentaries; you can listen to them everywhere. When you go to the gym, you can listen to it there, on the train, in your house, in the car, at work, while you study(not recommended). And with the average podcast being 43 minutes long, if you’re interested in the topic there’s thousands of others that explore deeper into it. In my experience and through my own research about a topic quite dear to myself, I’ve learned a good chunk about my topic through podcasts.

Speaking of my topic, concussions in football. Each day an estimated 153 people die because of a TBI(traumatic brain injury), or as we know it to be, a concussion. That is one of many horrifying statistics about concussions. One of the scarier statistics would have to be that there are approximately 67,000 diagnosed concussions in high school football every year. According to research by The New York Times, at least 50 youth football players (high school or younger) from 20 different states have died or sustained serious head injuries on the field since 1997. Now I’m not going against the football community saying that the sport is too dangerous because I myself am a football player and I can vouch for the game by saying that it’s safer now than it’s ever been. And even though there’s all this safety, 2017 was actually the worst year in NFL history for a grand total of 281. One of the most stomach retching effects of those concussions is CTE. 

CTE stands for Chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE in a nutshell is when the brain begins to deteriorate due to it undergoing so much physical stress. As you can see in the image below, the brain on the left is obviously a healthy, well taken care of, functioning brain, and then there’s the brain on the right. That brain has clearly seen better days, it looks like a soggy waffle that you put in the microwave instead of the toaster and now it’s just a floppy disappointment. This is a case of CTE that has been developing for a very long time, most cases of CTE usually only have wider gaps in the brain leading to irregularity in the person’s behavior. This brain from the looks of it, transformed into an entirely different person with the amount of damage that they sustained.CTE link

In design studio today we made a table filled with failures separated with a door in the middle. The door represents the border between growth and fixed mindset. The fixed mindset half of the table was filled with the past failures that we hated and never wanted to see again. The other side was filled with the same failures but fixed in the ways that we envisioned for them to work. My failure, for example, was supposed to be a chair, that would be suspended in the air, hanging from a rope, in the end, it was four popsicle sticks hot glued together, to look like a mountain with stabilizers. It would have worked, had I had enough time to nurture the idea and turn it into a reality. That didn’t happen. Instead, it was a catastrophic failure, and it won’t ever be fixed. That kind of thinking is a fixed mindset, a growth mindset is basically the opposite, saying next time, I’ll manage my time more wisely and fix my mistakes and improve, I’ve seen this play out time and again throughout my life, my favorite was the time I decided to try to play baseball.

My favorite failure was last year, 2017, I was in 7th grade. It was the first time I had ever played baseball. My parents gave me a choice, baseball or football(I never played football before so I didn’t know how fun it was). I thought baseball was going to be easier physically, whereas football would be physically grueling, and now that I’ve done both, I was right. So I chose baseball. Long story short, I was awful at it, but my parents saw the potential for success. So they put me in a camp with another kid I knew from school. His name was Jordan Fehr. 

The only thing that sold me on baseball was batting. That’s the only thing I knew how to do; swing a bat. The first season I played baseball, I was on a team with players that were all one grade above me so I thought it didn’t matter if I was good since they would just carry and pull my weight with theirs. Long story short, we lost every game except one, we faced that team twice and we lost to them the second time. We sucked. When I went back to school after the summer, I met a kid named Jordan Fehr. We both liked baseball except this kid was good, crazy good. I asked him how he got so good, and he told me that he went to a camp that met three days a week at a place called “The Batting Cages”. I told my mom about it and we agreed to do it. I went on the first day and I was lost. There were baseball culture and activities everywhere. It was mesmerizing, there were three individual batting cages, the constant smell of hot dogs, sports games on at all times on three TVs at central points throughout the place. It was small with a big personality. The trainer that seemed to be the head of the camp that I was attending was named CJ, I did not know this at the time, but it turns out the CJ was a former player for MLB team, Toronto Blue Jays. CJ mentored me for three camps in a row that summer, and all through the winter, and I got good, really good. Before CJ, I was afraid of the ball, I couldn’t hit, I was decent at catching the ball. I was the first baseman all my first year. After a year with CJ, I was a closer pitcher, and a starting first baseman, and the hardest hitter on the team.

Fast forward to spring. I thought that I would just be the same as last year, a failure, I only knew a fraction of my abilities when I came out of those camps. When I stepped out on that field for the first game of the season, I was terrified, my family was there, and I was fourth at-bat. There were two people on base and I was on deck. The person in the batter’s box, was good at getting on base because they had a very good eye for when the ball is a strike and what is a ball. He got walked and I was up to bat. It felt like an eternity before the pitcher wound up. Finally, he did, felt a sudden surge of calm, I saw the ball coming and everything that I had learned at camp just came rushing through my brain as if my life had flashed before my eyes. The ball seemed to be moving slower and slower until it was within 5 feet of my bat. It got right into the sweet spot, and I hit it, the first game of the season, my first ‘at-bat.’ and the ball went within 10 feet of the fence. An infield grand slam. 

I’ve never felt more successful in all my life.

What I took away from this experience was that, if there is help available from professionals, use it. They know more than me, and they know how to make me better beyond my wildest dreams.

October 14th, 2019 myself and the members of the Innovation Lab went to the 9/11 memorial and museum to ‘celebrate’ the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in New York City. And partially to get inspiration for our memorial park that we are building for the history of Germany. The most meaningful part of my trip to the 9/11 Museum was the room with all of the names and photos of the victims. It was 4 falls top to bottom with all faces and names of every casualty. There was also a room in the middle of all the faces that had a continuous loop going on of this voice narrating what these people were doing that day, and what their jobs were, and why they were on that plane, or why they were in the building. Sometimes there would be a family member speaking or a close friend.

The “In Memoriam” exhibit what the most ‘effective’ you could say in drawing the viewers in closer. The room had the best quality videos of the planes crashing into the buildings, it had pieces of the planes, trinkets from the buildings, like phones, watches, printers, computers, etc… What I found cool was the FBI most wanted poster of Bin Laden with a $5M reward for whoever killed him(with inflation that’s worth about $7.9M today). This just befuddles me; the drastic measures that the US government put into killing this man.

The “In Memoriam” room again is going to be a critical part of our Memorial park. What was so inspiring of it was the minute by minute of what happened. So in our park, we decided to and achievement by achievement wall that will wrap around the park, littered with information about what happened in our era of German history. We were also inspired by the standing beam covered in graffiti, and we decided to do something similar. We chose to take the spire of the Berlin TV Tower, and cover the top in some kind of red ink, to represent the blood and iron speech given by Otto Von Bismark.

The reason these memorials are important is that if we don’t memorialize history, then certain people and certain aspects will be forgotten. If we don’t memorialize these kinds of events, then people generations from now will only hear rumors of a plane that ‘apparently’ flew off course and hit a building. With these memorials, not a single soul will forget that day ever.

The chair that worked the best was the cardboard, even though I didn’t finish it, it was the most fun, and I had the most flexibility with them. For Neil, he has this big spacesuit that would get in the way sometimes depending on the chair, plus he flies around in space with zero gravity, so he would need a system to hold him down. The description also said something about him needing to drink his Tang, so he needed some way to kick back and relax with a nice cool tang or a warm tang, I don’t know what Tang is. 

Recently, in the design studio we each had to choose a character from the Simpsons, either Bart, Homer, Marge, Lisa, or Neil Armstrong, I chose to do Neil Armstrong. The way it worked was, we all came ups choose who we wanted and there was a description of their characteristics and how they would need the chair to be constructed. We then had to sketch out a chair on construction paper, then we moved to cardboard, which was the easiest, then popsicle sticks which failed miserably, then clay, which I didn’t even have time for, then pipe cleaners which was also a miserable failure. 

When I chose Neil, I had a few ideas in mind but one stuck out the most was one of those floating egg chairs with a few modifications. although I didn’t get around to finishing it, or even creating the chair part of the chair, I completed the frame and ran out of time. 

In a nutshell, it was a colossal failure, which is a good thing, because failures are learning experiences, and I have learned that I need either more time or a well thought out plan, with the materials right at my disposal, already prepped. I had neither of those. 

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

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