Morning Meeting by Alejo – D55

This morning I woke up with a terrible lower back pain that I assume it was because of yesterday’s physical activity. Bad call on my behalf. I was almost decided to stay in bed and rest, but I couldn’t forgive myself to loose the battle for punctuality with Pablito like that, so I woke up and came to the MPC.

Alejo’s morning meeting was a reference to Sarah Kay’s TEDTalk, If I Should Have a Daughter. The activity consisted on writing ten things we know are true. Here are my ten things I consider as true. Here and here are the links to Alejo’s blog were you can find what the other wrote.

10 Things I Know To Be True

Debriefing – D50

We started today’s debriefing by sharing our perspectives of the Euclid class, and most of them or all, were very positive. We are all happy with this new method of going with a group that you can follow according to your standards and capacity of learning. The other thing we discussed was about commitment. It started with Isa’s interjection of stating her frustration and unhappiness with some MPCers, since they are not showing commitment at all. The discussion was long and exhausting because some, especially Lucía, when pointed out of their flaws reacted in a negative way, not accepting the feedback and making up excuses. I must congratulate Chacho and Alejo, because the three of us were, I think, the most sincere people when talking to another MPCer. It surprised me a little when Chacho said that Lucía was sinking our boat with her lack of commitment and respect, and that she should reconsider staying on the MPC. Alejo’s intervention was mostly the same when he said that if she was not willing to give her best, then it would be better for her to leave to a cruise she was planning on applying. My intervention was mainly because of her lack of respect during most of the dialogues she is in the outer circle and some even when she is in. Also, when doing other activities. But I mainly focused on her actions during today’s dialogue of Words and Rules, because she was not being real by being on her phone and constantly leaving the room and getting back in, showing her disinterest and disrespect on the dialogue. She tried to counter argue by saying we (Chacho, Isa, Alejo, and I) were not perfect and she mentioned some actions we did that were not correct. That really bothered me so I told her that those comparisons were not near correct, because of the difference in the times we committed them (almost never) and her constant failures. This is how it ended, pretty rough but feeling very good that we said it and that some us are thinking alike for improving our culture.

By the way, I thought I was going to rest some today since we were leaving early (at 3:20 p.m.) but I found out I had this Logo called Domando al Cocodrilo. It’s about psychology and how can we control our brain. I think it would relate a lot with Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Consilience. I leave at 8:30 p.m. nice, ha?

Be Original: Alejo’s Morning Meeting – D32

Today’s morning meeting was about a couple of videos. The first was a clip from the movie Garden State, which was about creating a completely original moment in history. After this clip, we decided to create our original moment in history. It was very funny! I encourage you do the same, you’ll feel great. Then, we watched Steve Jobs’ Vision of the World and discussed it later. We talked about believing and being certain that you can change the world and the things around you. When you realize this and combine it with hard work, then the world is just waiting for you to change it!

Presenting the Liberty Project and some more of Emerson – D29

After lunch, Isa, Alejo, Pablito, Marce, and I presented our idea on forming a liberty club, and I must say that it didn’t went as we expected. Many of our classmates misinterpreted us in many things of our project and reacted in a negative way towards it. After some intense dialogue, I found it helpful to see other perspectives and actually decided as a group that it would be better to implement some suggestions they gave us and substitute them for what we had before. After the discussion, we were able to improve our project in order to do a better work.

Later, we read some more of Emerson’s essay, which we are finding the true meaning of what Emerson is trying to tell us. I found this essay very interesting and accurate in his ideas. I’m also starting to think that Emerson is quite a libertarian for the way he writes and what he claims on individualism.

Carmen's look during the dialogue

Just dialoguing

How to advance liberty workshop with Alexander McCobin – Saturday 20

SFL Workshop @ Acton MBA

 Just for you to know how much we like liberty, seven of the MPC’ers (Isa, Marce, Mabe, Alejo, Franz, Pablito, and I) went to a workshop this Saturday (Revolution holiday) to a workshop about student group organizing with Alexander McCobin. He told us many useful tips about organizing and spreading the libertarian ideas. Also, we made a brief workshop in which the MPC’ers decided to work as a team to create a club or organization to reach this goal in Guatemala. We concluded we would start a kind-of-club (We don’t know the name yet) and make the Liberty Café. Our goal is to, “Engage others to achieve their own understanding of liberty.” This we would achieve by three major means, Le Sticky Method, a webpage and a fan page, and the Liberty Café. Le Sticky Method consists of creating stickers, buttons, and pins with questions about relevant daily topics such like, The Social Healthcare would fail, want to know how and why? The objective of this is to encourage people to ask you this question and start an important conversation anywhere you are, whether a cafeteria or the street. After this conversation, you can invite them to the Liberty Café and offer them to visit our webpage, in which they may find all resources needed to be prepared for the dialogue tables. These resources would include videos, essays, books, and other important ones. Finally, the Liberty Café consists of round table dialogues about important topics. We found this project very interesting and easy to replicate in other places starting in universities, and we even got contacts from Alexander for funding this project!

Excuses are like elbows...

MPC'ers working as a group

How to make it work at the MPC – Casual talk with Alejo. D11

I got really upset at the morning because of how most MPC’ers and Bert see the process of knowledge. Yesterday we spend about an hour or so discussing sets. Yes, I had say sets. Simple, easy sets. Some people didn’t even get it after that tedious hour. I’m not saying I’m a math genius or that I know everything. I’m saying there is no need to spend that much time discussing simple things in group when we can read about it before and then discuss the questions and understanding while we are on the group. So I recommended that in the morning meeting. I recommended that we should read something about the subject before we got into the class so it would be easier for everyone to understand more rapidly. To my surprise, almost everyone took it the wrong way, especially Bert. They thought I was saying I knew everything and that it was a waste of time to spend time with the group talking about simple things (I do think it’s a waste of time trying to understand everything in a philosophical way when things are simpler that what they appear to be). Bert started arguing (and interrupting me) that we should learn about the process of group learning and not be thinking we know everything. Nevertheless, I keep thinking that if we keep it that way our process of learning would be slowly and painful.

After the morning meeting, I talked with Alejo, my cousin. He thought it the same way I did, so we started to see what could we do to improve the learning environment and the speed of learning in the group. He arrived to the conclusion that there are some MPC’ers that should talk less, meaning that they should ask more direct questions and not babble with the subject. How are we going to achieve this? Being honest and respectful to those MPC’ers, telling what they should be improving to make better interventions and make a better contribution to the group. Also, encouraging those who are making a good job, but stand back for others to participate. Finally, making everyone understand we are not in the right path and that we should come well prepared for the classes.