It seems fitting to start with this ism, because this one was born at the same time as the name of this lodge and greater project. Don't Know Ski Hill was the first iteration of Wakaranai Lodge, and it lived as a fictional ski hill, imagined by my classmate and I, as the setting of all of our class projects.
It was initially created for our Ski Resort Operations and Management Class, where we had to create a report on a ski resort, and go into operational details. I am talking lifts, snowcats, parking, heating, and all the other infrastructure pieces needed to make a resort function. See the thing with this project though, is all the other groups in our class, all 15 of them, chose real, existing resorts to use as the basis of their project. That means, each of those teams, had to go out and research these resorts, to find the real numbers, and then compile it into this report, and make a presentation, and make their posterboards, and yayayah.
My classmate and I, Aaron Mann, we went the other direction. See, Aaron was the one who I got along with in this class full of what I thought going in, would be ski bums, but turned out to be not so much that case. But this kid from Red Deer, Alberta, carried the same spirit I had in me. He was straight out of highschool, and I guess me being a bit farther along in life, he let my intrusive thoughts win, even when they flew in the face of reason, or what the rest of the people in our class were doing. I will forever appreciate the trust that he had in me, and the relationship between us that developed through time shared working on this project, and all the others that followed, and the friendship that was born out of this.
But back to the story.
While the rest of our classmates were grinding away, trying to find out how Whistler ski resort plows all their parking lots, we were busy inventing solutions to every question, and shaping our ski hill to find what was needed. We wanted to have the sickest resort, but also affordable for ski bums, so we had to cut costs. An easy one to cut on was heating. How did we do that? Well Don't Know Ski Hill was built on a volcano, and it had endless geothermal energy, that heated everything, and provided power for our lifts.
It also snowed a ton on Don't Know Ski Hill, so we had underground parking garages. We had next gen Pisten Bully Hybrid Snowcats. We could do whatever we wanted, because we were only limited by our imagination.
As we hit about the 2/3 mark on this project, deep into paper mache world, because well instead of doing a poster board, we decided to make a replica of our model that was 4ft by 3ft, on a piece of plywood, made out of paper mache, with toothpick trees and lifts, terrain parks, buildings etc etc. We had so much time to mess about doing this, because well we didn't have to dig deep to find all the little stats about some resort that existed. We weren't confined by reality.
But this is when the thought hit me. Sitting there with gluey hands. See all the rest of our classmates were doing the same thing, and here we were, having fun, and genuinely getting to play and create as adults. We were doing our own thing, and we were fully committed to it.
We turned the project in, and as everyone else stood in front of their posterboards and presented a project, that looked essentially the same as the group in front of them, we got to pull our giant ski hill into class, and just get so stoked talking about everything that made Don't Know Ski Hill the sickest. I haven't seen our teacher, Roscoe, more hyped, except when he is shredding "the Blast" at Whitewater ski hill.
We got the best grade in the class. Not because we grinded the hardest. Or put in the most time. Or had the most accurate to life project. We got the best grade, because every other group was compared to every other group, and we could only be compared to ourselves. Not only that, but we pushed the boundary of what was possible, and imagined a better world.
So there, after this long story (I promise most isms won't come with so much to them, but the story is the important part of this one, because this is the seed behind all of what we are doing now), we have our ism.
"Instead of doing the same thing as everyone else, and being compared to everyone else, do your own thing and you can only be compared to yourself"
For each ism, I will also be translating it into Japanese in the most accurate to meaning way.
我が道を創る
- 我が — my / one's own
- 道 — path
- 創る — to create
Thank you Aaron for your friendship, and your impact on my life. Forever grateful for you homie. Don't Know foreverrrrrrr