"Effort" by Jacob R

Of all the group projects that were assigned as a class grade that I was apart of, the most interesting one had to be in my sophomore year when Exploravision was assigned for honors chemistry. It was one of the few group projects that involved competition from all over the United States with a grand prize for the top three groups that participated. The goal was to come up with the best innovative idea that could better improve the world envisioned in the next twenty years. Necessary subjects that were required to be mentioned included research in technology and describing the steps it would take for it to become a reality along with the pros and cons and the obstacles that came with it. This was certainly a competitive project, but my group and I did not take it as seriously as the teachers intended it to be.
On September of 2016, the assignment was given to us. My group consisted of me and three other friends who at first felt like the assignment could have care towards it. There was a Saturday Talon that followed the first day it was assigned and my group and I felt like putting some effort into it. The effort is taking time to brainstorm an idea that seemed very much impossible and trying to force it to be possible. The first idea involved the use of perpetual motion, a concept of an everlasting motion that somehow didn’t require energy or a force to keep a device in motion. The idea started out like a light that led us to believe that it was the idea that should be accepted and any rejections towards it should be wrong. My friend who originally brought it up became the most excited as this theory had the capability to revolutionize how we use energy by using a source that is capable of providing endless generated power. Unfortunately, it was completely shot down by others who felt like it was physically impossible for such a device to exist, and the internet sources that we found strongly supports their argument. The likelihood of that concept being a reality is the same as “...dumping a bucket of

water onto a pit of fire and the water freezing as an outcome.” From that point on, we felt like it was better to careless towards the assignment and place more care into other classes assignments and other activities that we felt that mattered more to us. Some upperclassmen who have completed it gave us life-changing advice when doing such tasks. They said, “The amount of effort that should be put into something should be proportionate to how much you care about that something.” With this in mind, we came to a better idea for the topic of our project. We all agreed it was better, more functional, more realistic, and also most likely already accomplished by some company or a man in engineering. It was just a masterpiece that only high intellectuals could think of. The new and improved idea was to attach a couple of floaties to buildings when there’s a flood to make them float somehow.
It was brilliant. It required thought-provoking intelligence that only a person who takes over thirty-minute showers or lays in bed staring at the ceiling for at least two hours could think of. The concept originated from the idea of tossing a jumper house into a pool and seeing it float. Although this used the maximum amount of brain cells to even think of such an innovation, we put the least amount of effort into it. For every deadline, we started and completed each task five minutes before it was due. For every explanation that was required for the pros and cons, we typed a page of something within a minute. For every picture that was needed to be drawn, we sketched a simple two-dimensional house sinking in water. If we felt like we shouldn’t care about the assignment or at least care enough to get that A, then we should give it the same amount of effort. That’s when I learned how to manage and distribute my effort into a variety of tasks.

When the results did eventually come back to us, we were notified that our team actually got an award for it. It wasn’t the top three, but it was an honorable mention from the program. When we received the award, we all looked at each other in absolute shock since we had very little care towards this project. We knew there were ideas that were more complex, had more utilization, and contained actual care towards the project. Others who knew about our idea were also surprised. With the assignment, we learned that certain tasks should require certain amounts of effort depending on our will to care for it. Too much effort may not be worth it in the end, and putting too little effort is just careless. Instead, it should be distributed based on the number of tasks at hand and how much each one matters to the individual.