September 5th 2022. Basecamp.
I can pause for a few minutes and enjoy the view, looking back, appreciate the learnings done in the past months, recall in my mind the obstacles I’ve overcome in the path that led me here, look in the eyes of each one that was part of the journey so far and let the sense of joy and accomplishment overflow from my heart into my wet eyes.
Basecamp is what I call the place I’ve reached having participated to the Portal rite of passage of the MOL Academy. I feel lucky to have found in Alex Breta's Master Of Learning (MOL) self-directed learning experience an exciting community of people passionate about the richest human activity: learning. I feel stronger because of everything I got from this community and I feel loyal which makes me want to give back.
The secrets to build such a strong community are hidden in plain sight: anyone can learn how important a Temple, Boundaries, Symbols, Tokens or Stories are by reading Charles Vogl’s The Art of Community - seven principle for belonging. But reality is a lot messier than the organized black words neatly layed on the white pages of a book. I feel a great sense of appreciation and respect for the courage and hability Alex demonstrated over the past four months to actually make it work with tens of real people with the most desparate backgrounds and expectations with Zoom and a handful of wonderful mentors as his only friends!
I had a similar experience years ago coordinating an insane about of agile teams across multiple timezones trying implementing Scaled Agile Framework on a number of complex projects and I know how hard it is to actually make an elegant framework work in real life. I think this past experience allows me to better measure and appreciate what Alex has accomplished with the MOL.
I’ve historically been very unconsistent at maintaining journals or blogs and I could try to use Alex’s trick to publicly commit to post at a certain frequency. I might get to that in the future, for now I just wanted to capture this moment, enjoy this milestone and thank everyone in the MOL community who shared this part of the trip so far.
Ad astra!