Ty Naymik

The good I did for myself was enlightening. I have been at One Stone for a year and a half, and I just learned what real leadership takes, specifically the ups and downs of it. I’ve always pictured myself as being a leader when I get older, but I have never fully appreciated the work that it takes to be an effective leader. It’s going to take a lot of effort, time, and endurance, and I now realize that thanks to the DLab experience I had. My Vision statement is, “Prioritize my people, monetize my passions.” I am very passionate about clean energy. In the future, I plan to have a clean energy business or at least a side hustle. If I want to make this happen, I am going to have to become more knowledgeable about clean energy and excel in my leadership ability. Like I mentioned previously, leadership was a really big part of this DLab, and I wasn't sure if I was ready for that, but I stepped up anyways. I learned that leadership is a balance between guidance and demonstration. You need to show your team what you want from them and then help them achieve it. I couldn't find the balance at the start. I gave my team my info and told them what steps we needed to take next, but that was not enough. I needed to help them translate the information into something we could work with. This finally started to come to fruition over the break when I demonstrated the effort and work I was expecting from my teammates by finding, contacting, and scheduling an interview with Russ from Idaho Power. This gave me and my team enough guidance and motivation to synthesize the information, step up, and organize a presentation. Throughout this process, I was also able to gain empathy for the coaches. I never realized how difficult it is to get people to do things they don't want to do. Students sometimes struggle with the online school system, and a result of this is lack of motivation. This makes things difficult for the coaches, because they’re the ones who have to try to teach us grumpy kids. This experience has inspired me to persevere and complete troublesome tasks, even when I might be tired or unmotivated. Trying to lead a group of unmotivated people is difficult, and although I wouldn’t call what I did in this DLab an excellent example of leadership, it was a step in the right direction. This was definitely a fail forward moment for me and my team, and I hope they were able to learn something from it. So what does it mean to me to do good? Well my answer is to fill in the blanks. Do whatever needs to be done to complete your goal. This goes for any goal anywhere. If I notice that there is somewhere I can help, I will try my best. Just like this DLab, when we didn't have a leader, I noticed and decided to do some good.