From Caterpillar to Butterfly: How the Bangkit Program Prepared Us for the Toughest Challenges

“Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and if they will not adapt to me, I adapt to them”

- Michel do Montaigne

Life itself consists of a wide variety of challenges, what is more life itself is punctuated by the unforeseen and unpredictable, as life defined by constant change therefore, the ability to navigate successfully in the river of life requires nothing but the ability to adapt. To become live not merely exist one must have a courage to face up to the challenges, to overcome it, knowledge of conditions is necessary. As Sun Tzu explains:

“Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing. Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions. He who can modify his tactics in relation to his opponent and thereby succeed in winning, may be called a heaven-born captain.”

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The importance of adapting to the constant change of life, and modifying tactics to suit each new challenge, cannot be overstated. Recognizing this fact, Bangkit Program had conducted mandatory lessons for us with “Adaptability and Resilience” becomes the main topic for this session, there are ample of lessons that I’ve gained and one of them is “Ways of Adaptability” on which we were told that there are ways for us to adapt, to name a few there are: Ways of Interacting, Ways of Achieving, Ways of Learning, Ways of Working, and Ways of Thinking. In this article I will explain on how I manage to cultivate 5 ways above and how Bangkit Program has helped me to do so.

• The ways of Learning

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”

- Benjamin Franklin

The best way to learn is to be active and involve “fully” into the subject that you are trying to learn, and Bangkit provided us with mountains of high-quality exclusive resources that we can use to supplement our study process. To name a few there are premium courses, good community, friends and mentors that we can laugh with and hopefully we can cry with. These situation unconsciously forced us to “fully” engage in our study time.

• The ways of Achieving

"Maturity is the capacity to endure uncertainty.

- John Finley

The tight deadline coupled with tough learning materials, has successfully triggered a nerveous breakdown in all of us. Such circumstances has activate our natural fight-or-flight response, meaning that we have no time to waste, such event unconsciously teach us the importance of enduring uncertainty, by managing our time wisely, prioritizing tasks over other, and much more. Consequently a new mentallity has emerged, and with it, we are able to achieve more and more.

• The ways of Interacting

“All human interaction are opportunities either to learn or to teach..”

- M. Scott Peck

Human beings are social creature, which means we depends on the others to guarantee survival, all of sophisticated inventions that we are taking for granted are the result of countless group of people that are working together to find a new ways of doing things. Bangkit provided us with a learning community where anyone can interract with each other, and learning things together. Bangkit endlessly stresses the notion of “Make this room a safe place to learn”, consequently many people including myself are engaging in “Active Learning” and are not afraid to make an opinion, such event indubitaly making the process of learning more effective.

• The ways of Working

Bangkit program exist to better prepare us for a successful career in leading technology companies in Indonesia and the world, at the end of this program we are required to create a capstone project that derives from everyday problems. To support this hard yet noble purpose a new mentallity is necessary, we face a significant changes when it comes to ways of working, we’ve been introduced with novel working hours (8 hours learning/day), a new set of working tools, and many more. This is the toughest one to handle as we are not yet used to it.

• The ways of Thinking

Bangkit is notoriously known by its philosopy that “YOUR INTELLECTUAL ABILITY IS NOT FIXED” meaning you can become better at things. Unfortunately many people fall into the trap of thinking that a subject is too difficult for them, or that they just don’t have the “mind” to learn a specific topic. Bangkit endlessly through soft-skill session stresses the importance of Growth Mindset, often the simple shift on our mind is all we need to inhibit Growth Mindset, and this is what Bangkit tiredlessly does for all of its cohort.

To summarize, tight deadline combined with intense-demand learning session has forced us to adapt, life itself is hard, there is nothing that we can do about it except accept it wholeheartedly and do something about it, we must be ready to burn ourself to ashes in our own flame; how could we rise anew if we have not first become ashes?

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly”

- Richard Bach

#LifeatBangkit #Bangkit2023