Member of the Month: Emily Mak

by Julia Cherkassky @ Terminal City Club

Fri Feb 02 09:52:04 PST 2018

From a young age, Ms. Emily Mak’s parents could already tell that she had the chops to be a lawyer. “I was opinionated, stubborn, and I liked to debate,” she says. “It’s funny now, because I really did become a lawyer, and I married a lawyer, too!” Born and raised in Vancouver, Ms. Mak studied urban geography at UBC. “I’ve Read More

The post Member of the Month: Emily Mak appeared first on Terminal City Club.

GOALS - Part 1 By Jason Wang, Alvin, & Mickey

by noreply@blogger.com (monticleleadership) @ _

Fri Oct 04 13:17:00 PDT 2013

Goals.

The first step of success, is setting out goals.

Imagine a world without goals, people without direction, people who are living on this world without consideration of their future. A world where there is no self reflection, no self discipline and no self direction. But simply a spiritless person who only cares about the temporary comfort. Someone who can survive by living in a virtual video game for the feeling of success.

What is a goal? A goal is a statement or noted action that should be taken in the future. For example, a certain amount of weight loss, a grade to achieve, to finish something in a certain amount of time. Well, at least this definition is what we conccluded with so far. 

Your going on a long boat ride, all you have is a compass, a pen, a notebook, a map, and a bright mind. You have 1 hour to figure out where you want to go, or your map would be blown away or your compass would break. You take out a the pen and notebook briefly write down what you would think is nessesary:
   
    Reach XXX island by noon.
    Finish deck cleaning by 3:00
    Come up with a route to escape the wrath of time wastment.
    Etc.

You then come up with a way to achieve it, no matter smart or not. As long as you finish everything by the noted time. This is how you get things done. This is how you move on without stopping for stupid and unnessesary breaks. This is how you grow closer and closer to what may be considered the “big” and “success”’ goal. 

Over the past seven days we went through many many drills involving goal setting, target planning and simple time management drills.

Day1, people begin to crowd in. New people that we’ve never met before begins to flood the HQ. New members, new ice to break. Its 9:30 in the morning, you have finish certain tasks by the end of the day in order to leave the HQ the next day. We then needed to think of ways to accomplish the many navigation tasks in time. How are we going to do things like such? Why? All considerations made when setting goals.

Day2, We have a testing day, we have a list of things needed to accomplish before the day ends, we have a full 24 hours to do so. As everyone has a paper and a pen, people began to plan time. We have to finish XXX by XXX within XXX minutes. Etc. That was the day delays began to pile in. We received small failures, hour delays, logistic issues, mostly delays. Problems begin to occur, if we delay so much, are we going to be able to reach the artic in time?

Day3,  we headed to the campsite. We arrived at approximately 6:00 and began to set up the tents. It took up 2:30 hours, cooking alone took 2 hours. Our entire time management plan failed. All because we didn’t set the rules staright or plan the goals. We didn’t set goals. Leading to unefficient timings, schedule delays, and so on so forth. We then learnt the importance of planning and time management. To stay on task, to work hard as a team to accomplish the goals set. But how do we enforce it? How do we keep the plan going? We’ll needd time to figure out.

Day 4, We continued on our journey with several navigational hiccups. Where were the pitstops, how long were we going to stay, why etc. We also encountered meal problems, running overtime. All because we didn’t have reinforced goals. How do we improve, what do we improve? The team just sat down with their notebooks out, and began to plan.

    We have to reach Alberta by XXX
    We have to pass Regina by XXX
    We need the XXX by XXX to do XXX
These goals guide us to our planned destination. In our case, to reach the Arctic.


Day 5, Far away gas stations, planning failure, we begin to get on track and farmilliarize with the different scenarios going through our minds constantly. We are farmilliar with the variables, the possibilities, the “reality” of things to make a relatively close judgement.  We begin to get on track and learn from our mistakes. Things change into a somewhat good start. We know the drills, we know the daily needs, the daily requirements the daily goals. Its all about self dicipline. You need to dicipline yourself to know the requirements, the expectations.

Day 6, the big challenge. With the main goal of reaching the arctic, we come up with small goals to gradually build up to the big goal. The ideal example would be day 6. The day we reached 1000 kilometers. We set a goal of 1400, but we try our best to reach it. We may not be capable of reaching the goal, but we can try our best. Asreality crept forward, we noticed that 1400 isn’t a realistic distance and decided to come up with a plan B. We got to the nearest civilization and stopped to find motels, keeping in mind that our goals would be Edmonton, west edmonton mall to be precise. We found the nearest carpark and spent the night there, without heisitation or further consideration. We have a goal, and no matter what, we have to reach it.

Day 7, we came up with a goal of reaching BC in time, while Calvins family nicely treated us to dinner and a extremely comfortable shelter. When you have a goal, and you’ve done nothing but pressuring yourself to reach it, its appropriate for you to have a nice shelter, or simply treating yourself to a nice dinner, you deserve it. If you know better. Communication between goals are also important. Imagine a board of members. One cook, one navigator, one math genius, one art freak, and one language snob. Would you question the math genius’s calculations? Would you question the art freak’s sense of taste? This is all regarding the idea of comminicating to come up with the ultimate judgement, the judgment made by many of the experties, all simply to reach the goal, and make the goal appropriate. You have to learn to push the envelope, yet not burst it. Because being a leader is like a rubber band, you can push real hard, but you can decline real small. It all about flexibility and adaptbility.

Overall, we’ve learnt several realistic judgements along the way. How is it going to help you? How is goals going to help you and guide you to your destination? That a question we just answered. As you follow the assigned tasks, you gradually build yourself up to  standard not far from the target. For example, we began in tonronto, then targeted thunderbay, then Winnipeg, then Regina, and so on so forth. We gradually get closer to our ultimate goal, the Arctic. How? Because we had goals. The pace and efficiency between goals increases over experience, we learn from the failures, the mistakes, but continue to push on as we already have a basic data base located within our brains. Just as people say, practice makes perfect, experience brings wisdom, and knowledge guides us to our destined land with the help of goals.

Self dicipline, self direction and self awareness is the key, you see what youre  doing, why you’re doing it and see how you can improve. Maybe from the point of view as a follower or a leader. Goals, is so important to the human race that without them our world can hardly function. Everyday you see presidents, Concierge, leaders of our world stand out and talk about what they would do to help, why they would do so to help. This is because they want to tell you that they have goals, goals and a direction they want to follow, so that you would agree and help them to it.

Over the years, the presidents and leaders of our world start their job, their oath is all about the goals in their future. How they will accomplish it, why they would accomplish it, and maybe how they will accomplish it. Their self dicipline guides them along the way, their self direction, and their self awareness. Is it completely nessesary to do such thing, is what I’m doing beneficial to the team, so on so forth. Etc.

The first step of success, is setting out goals.

Imagine a world without goals, people without direction, people who are living on this world without consideersation of their future. A world there is no self reflection, no self discipline, no self direction. But simply a spiritless person who only cares about the temporary comfort. Someone who can survive by living in a virtual video game for the feeling of success.

The first step ahead on your long journey ahead, is to plan, plan and investigate, jot down notes, write down goals.

INTELLIGENCE- Part 1 by Marco, Roman & Justin

by noreply@blogger.com (monticleleadership) @ _

Wed Oct 09 06:50:00 PDT 2013

Even though it’s only been seven days since the first day of the Monticle Trans-Canada Expedition, we could already tell that intelligence is a vital part of leadership. As an intelligent leader you need to co-operate with your fellow followers, know you followers, remain in power by showing you are the most intelligent

On the first day we stayed at Monticle Head Quarter, the thirty of us were organized into three groups Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie. Each team consists of people with different mindset, abilities, back grounds, and experiences. Every member of the team, including the team leaders, know their jobs inside out and know they are fully aware of what are expected from each and every single one of them. Such well organized teams could not have been created without a great deal of intelligence. Our intelligent leaders know our weakness, abilities to assign us the most suitable job. Later that day, after the job allocation, everyone was working on their assigned jobs in prepare for our journey. Deciding how much resources to bring with us is the most challenging task of all. Excess resources will always be a waste, so we don’t want to bring too much; but we need enough resources so that we would have enough for the entire expedition. We must calculate exactly what we need. The supply must meet the demand exactly. Fortunately, with our intelligence, we were able to estimate how much resources we need and use them wisely. Making sure not even a grain will be wasted.

On the second day, we did not depart as scheduled,. Our leaders showed us how to set up a tent. After all, intelligence has to be demonstrated. Intelligence was shown in the setup of the tent. Every thing, from the pole to the strings, are the key components to the setup of the tents. If a tent is not set up, they are just a bunch of useless stuff inside a bag. The same applies to our intelligence. If intelligence and knowledge are hidden deep within the mind. Even the intelligence if no one knows its exist? Without others acknowledgement, intelligence is the same as stupidity. The sole purpose of intelligence is to bring benefit and help the others, it is to do the deed of good. If intelligence cannot provide help, bring benefit or is used in the wrong way, then intelligence is not so intelligent.

The real intelligence is to possess it as well as the power and the ability to wield it. Intelligence is like a blade, it can be used to slay the evil or to slaughter the innocent. Having great intelligence is not always good, whether it is good or bad depends on the way people use it and present it.

On day three, our journey finally begins. On the way to our first destination, we had to search for accommodations. It is no easy job, we had to find a place that is well-maintained and have good facilities as well as a reasonable price. To start, we have to search for information about accommodations near our destination. Searching for information itself was not difficult at all. It is to select the right and useful information that is difficult. People that are less intelligent will take all information they have access to with a single thought. On the other hand, people that are more intelligent will consider carefully and think thoroughly on what information to select. As intelligent people know, too much information will bury the truly useful information, they will be a distraction to the most important information, the most valuable information may be ignored. Therefore, we must have a clear aim and vision, we must know clearly what we are after.

A leader should always be intelligent, so that he/ she could stay in power or get in power. Intelligence is not only knowing the answer to 12345 x 54321, it is also knowing to plan ahead… On day four we did the exact opposite. The night before we planned our the route and destination, but we did not call the camp site to make sure they have available camp sites. You could say: we were being careless and lazy! We decided to call them only a few hours before we get there, but as we pulled the phone…. there were no service! There is nothing we could do about it. We could only test our luck and ask for vacant camp sites when we get to Rainbow Fall Provincial Park. Turned out they did have around a dozen camp sites available. We are lucky, if they did not have any camp sites for us then we would have to drive around a around a hundred kilometers to the next Provincial Park.

We experienced a similar situation the next day. At around 6:30 in the afternoon Alpha Sprinter was running low on fuel. We only had one bar of gas left, and with the trailer the gas should only last us maximum one hour. After twenty minutes we began to worry, what if we ran out of gas before we find a gas station that has diesel? We started to think of what to do what if we actually ran out of gas… most of all we regret not learning our lesson from yesterday. Just as we were about to run our of gas, we found a Shell gas station. Even though we found a gas station and fueled up, we are just plain lucky, again it was luck that saved us all. Today reminded me of the story of the monkey and his house. All of his friends have a house somewhere safe, in case of floods. Monkey always thought he did not need a house because he slept in the trees. But under peer pressure he decided to build one any way. Even though his fiends kept telling him: Hurry up! There is going to be a huge a huge hurricane and flood. But he had ignored all their friendly warnings. When the hurricane came he stayed on his tree, but he got blown off and washed away with the flood. We are like the little monkey who think he has everything under control. Our headers are like his friends, telling us to do what is right. We should have listened to them in the first place and plan out our gas stops. Because in the end the only once getting hurt are us.

It is not easy to be intelligent, you may think al you need to do is go to school, read books, and watch documentaries. Here is an example from day six, we were supposed to push to Edmonton and stay outside Edmonton Mall, but we were not being intelligent with time control and stopped to long at every pit stop/ gas station and we did not do any thing about it. So we had to stop at a Wal-Mart is and sleep on the parking lot in the cold and windy night. Lesson learned. Intelligence is not only thinking of good ideas, it is when you think out side the box. Like the example above , we never thought we will not make it to West Edmonton Mall. Hopefully such things will never happen again. After all there is no point of repeating mistakes.

We finally arrived at West Edmonton Mall on day seven. Once the largest shopping mall in North America. There are numerous amusement parks, ad hundreds of stores and restaurants. Shopping in this gigantic complex is not easy. With all these stores and limited time, we have to plan out what we need and where we will get them in advance so by the end of the day we would have spare time and money. Now, we have to decide what is on our shopping list and what item we want the most. With so many entertainments in the shopping complex, Water Park, Amusement Park, we have to decide the right place to go so that our time would be spent wisely. Moreover, the prices there are not as cheap or attractive as expected. Sometimes we need to utilize intelligence to figure out which shop has the best price for the same products (i.e. we need to do calculations and comparisons between shops about bug nets or jackets). Moreover, the Water Park is not really that attractive because you are technically paying 36 dollars to get wet in a big giant pool together with a hundred people or more at the same time, feeling some regular waves. Therefore, even though it is more of a recreational purpose, we still need to utilize intelligence upon shopping in that gigantic mall.

This is basically hat we did in one week. We made so much mistakes that are not really intelligence in the first week, we sure are going to do better in the future weeks. By the end of the expedition, we would all be really intelligence. Thanks for your time.