Rebelution!!

Yesterday, my family and I got up at 5:30 in the morning in order to be able to leave for Minneapolis by 6:30 so that we could get to the Rebelution by 8:00 to register. I can't really say that getting up at 5:30 is something I enjoy (getting up at 6:00 in the school year is bad enough!) but it was definately worth it!!! Alex and Brett Harris, who started the blog, The Rebelution, recently wrote the book Do Hard Things. The book and the blog is all about teenagers rebelling against low expectations. The link to the blog is www.therebelution.com and I strongly encourage all of you guys to check it out!! Anyway, the tour was absolutely amazing!! The singing was awesome and the preaching was great! There's so much to talk about from yesterday, but I'll only point out the things that stood out to me the most. One thing, that I know is in the book (I've only read the first 4 chapters so far...) and got me when I read it, too, is talking about the elephant (on the blog, there's a couple links on the right hand side-go to the Myth of Adolescence parts 1 and 2). Summing it all up, an elephant will stay put if it just has a rope tied around its back right leg that's attatched to a wooden pole because when it's younger, it's attatched to a tree with a chain and when the elephant gets older, once it feels that resistance from the rope, it gives up. The elephant could easily break that rope and run away, but there are "shackles around its mind" and therefore gives up. (Okay, so that was kind of a not-so-good summary of it, so I guess you now have to go check out the blog :)) The elephant was compared to teenagers because we could do so much more than we do, but because of our culture and their low expectations for us, we've given up-we have shackels on our minds, too. Another thing that stood out to me was when Brett was talking about how the challenges that we face now are no more difficult to us than the challenges we've faced in the past. But now, as we grow older, if math is hard for us, we just say, "I'm not a math person," and it's accepted as an excuse. But if a toddler who is being potty-trained (I found this part quite funny, but it was also very true) is having issues with the whole training, and if they were to say, "I'm just not a potty person," that would be no excuse. They would keep being pushed until they were potty trained. But going back to the old challenges/new challenges things, he said that a high schooler learning algebra was no harder for them than a 2nd grader learning basic math functions was for them. And thinking about it, I remember when I was learning division in 3rd grade, and I wondered why 7 divided by 3 couldn't work. I definately had the same type of confusion this year in geometry. Although the problems were more complex and difficult, it wasn't (much) harder for me than when I was learning division. And knowing that was super encouraging knowing that I've gone through challenging things in the past, but that I'm able to get through the new challenges that I face, also.
Oh, and also the title of the book was a thing that I've come home really excited about- doing hard things. I really want to challenge myself to do things that are difficult for me. Except almost all of the things that are really difficult for me (mostly talking to people I don't know/I'm not comfortable with) are things that I would be more able to doing at school. So right now, my hard thing is acctually finding a hard thing I can do right now... :) haha not really. But I definately am brainstorming!!
I really hope you guys check out the blog and tell me what you think!! I've found (and this is acctually something they pointed out in the last session) that sticking with doing things (in this case, hard things) is somuch easier to stick to when you have good friends/companions to do it with and it would be awesome if I could stick with you!! :)