McKenzie Kearl

BUS 1050

Personal Renaissance

As students we each maneuver through hardships and triumphs in our lives. For

example, this semester has been very different than what many of us are used to due to

COVID. We have been forced to make changes in our everyday lives but we have come

out on top and managed to conquer and make things work. These are times of despair

turned to conquer as it relates to our own personal renaissance, a time of

transformation. For myself, I had taken some time off school for personal reasons and

this semester I have been able to come back and overcome COVID restrictions all while

finishing my very last semester here at SLCC.

We can easily correlate these times in our lives to the dark ages and renaissance

periods in history and throughout business. Throughout time society has experienced

ups and downs that have made us stronger and helped us to learn. This is similar to

business but it is how we use our critical thinking skills that help us to overcome those

downs and grow from them.

Critical thinking is the process by which we use analysis and error detection in

order to make proper judgements in a particular situation. This has been used

frequently throughout time and in business specifically. Critical thinking is what helps a

business flourish depending how well you use those skills.

In I, Pencil by Leonard Read we see the development of something as simple as

a pencil and the complexity in its creation. The various steps and procedures that one
may not have even considered as part of the pencil making process. The trees in which

the wood base is made from and the intensive process by which it is cut and shaped

into a pencil. The many men and women that help the process move along with each

individual contributing their own skills to the process. The small piece of metal that holds

the eraser in place and all the mine workers that have helped to mine the zinc, graphite

and copper from the hills. Lastly, the rubber eraser with ingredients coming from

Indonesia and Italy.

The average student would not usually consider all of the fine details of the pencil

making process when they go to purchase a pack of 10 at their local store. The

complexity of the various details and steps that go into a pencil are relative to critical

thinking in many aspects. The pencil is a business and it takes critical thinkers to come

up with it, making it not so simple at all. The amount of time, labor and thinking that it

takes to do this in order to create a functioning business with thousands of individuals

working together to create a useful tool and allowing those individuals to provide for

their families with the work they do.

Business is largely centered around critical thinking and how a business owner or

employee can take a situation and create something useful. As any business there are

hardships, the pencil making process was not always what it has now become. Many

years of trial and error have made the process what it is today and the critical thinkers

that have taken those hardships and made the business stronger over time.

I, pencil is a great example of growth and development and is just one of the

many instances where the complexity of a business and the making of useful tools go

unnoticed. Some other examples include the manufacturing of cars, the mailing systems
and really any other household items we purchase. There is a lot of work and critical

thinking as well as failures and triumphs that go into the making of everyday items and

systems. It is how we utilize those critical thinking skills and make our triumphs

gratifying.

Our personal renaissance is how we have overcome those hardships in our lives

by utilizing critical thinking skills. For myself I have taken this semester to really grow

and develop with a new way of life. Taking my learning online is something I have never

done and is something that I do not prefer as I am a visual learner and being in an in

class setting helps me to be more productive in my learning. So being online was very

difficult for me. This being my last semester here at SLCC I did not want to fail due to

outside circumstances that I did not have control over. So I took control over what I

coud and made the best of this semester online and I am now on my way to graduation.

Just as a business uses critical thinking we often use those skills as well during

times of hardships in order to come out strong. We use those times to grow and learn

just as any business owner would. This is a repetitive process by which we can either

grow and your business will succeed or failure to evolve will cause your business to fall.

During our times of renaissance we use these skills to learn and grow or we may just

fall as well. I, Pencil was a great example of critical thinking utilizing many areas of

development and skills in order to create something useful in the end. We are then able

to know what works and what doesn't in our development and we are better able to

understand the process of critical thinking as it relates to business and our personal

renaissance.