One of the hardest things in life is to have words in your heart that you cannot utter.
Mind Games, just like lying, cheating, and deceiving in general, has been so far developed as to be a form of art. In chess, you must predict what your opponent will do, what you will do, and then how he will respond. In running a race, you have to know when to go what speed. In baseball, the question is what kind of pitch will I throw next. In StarCraft, you need be aware of what you see, and what it means, if anything.
At the very top level, mind games are as important as the game itself. Skill level being equal, the competitor with more brainpower will win, without exception.
Indecision and delays are the parents of failure -George Canning This is not Quiet People Part 2 as you could probably tell lol. I'll get to that when I get to it -_- Today's blog is about decision making. tl;dr: A wrong decision now is better than a right decision later. Too often I think people waver over things that they shouldn't be wavering over. Just make a decision. It's not hard. At the lowest level, indecision may be making a decision about what to eat, or trying to decide if an answer is A or C on a test. This is in my eyes the lowest level of indecision, and indecision annoys me. I like to think I'm decisive, but maybe some of you who know me well think different. I make decisions quickly and I don't like to deliberate too long on things. If I don't know an answer on a test, I won't sit there weighing the odds of this one or that one, I'll pick the most likely looking choice and come back to it at the end if I have time. I'd rather move on to questions I can definitively answer than to spend time on something I'm not sure I'm going to get right. I think it comes down to this question: Is it better to make a wrong decision now, or a right decision later? In my opinion, it's better to make a wrong decision now. I'll give an example in the context that I understand most: warfare. It is infinitely better to attack and lose your whole army and take some of the enemy with you, than to be caught in the middle of making a decision, and lose your whole army without the enemy taking a single casualty. In this case, attacking was the "wrong" decision, and retreat was the "right" decision. But that "wrong" decision was better because it was made immediately, as opposed to the "right" decision that was made too late. It was better because although you lost your whole army, you still managed to take out some of the enemy and weaken them for a future battle. The "right" decision was actually wrong in this case because although it may have been the logically correct decision to retreat, you took so long to get the that conclusion that you sacrificed time in favor of a strategical advantage that you didn't get to exploit. This kind of indecision kills. In the case of the multiple choice test, the wrong decision is just the wrong decision lol. You're gonna get it wrong whether you make it sooner or later. But I think it could be the same case, especially since most tests are timed. If you take too long to decide on the "right" answer, you sacrifice time for a couple of points that may not help you in the long run. Although in my opinion, they give us waaaay too much time for most tests nowadays. BUT I think it's better to get 3 questions answered in 5 minutes and get 2 wrong and 1 right than to spend the same amount of time on 1 question and get it right for sure and get the other 2 wrong for not answering at all.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.” Hey I finally found something fun to talk about. :D THIS. As a quiet person, I liked this a lot, so I might as well talk about it. #1 "Quiet People Are Looking For Your Help" I'm a person who is very comfortable with just not saying anything. I'm a better listener than talker. I just like to listen and try to think about and analyze what someone's saying. It's just how i understand things better. It doesn't mean that I need your help socializing, and it doesn't mean that theres anything wrong with me. It just means that I have nothing to say for now. #2 "Quiet People Lack Social Skills" Quiet people are perfectly sociable. They just take it at a slower pace. Whereas talkative people may just blurt out the first thing that comes to mind, quiet people like to think things through before saying them. That said, sometimes its good to just say whatever comes to mind. #3 "Quiet People Lack Confidence" Just like in the article I'm gonna use the Kung Fu Master analogy. "Most people fit quiet people into the 'shy nerd' stereotype, where the quiet person is intimidated by other people, or is afraid of being laughed at, or undervalues him or herself. But as long as we're going to movie stereotypes, there's also the silent kung fu master, who doesn't need to says anything, even when insulted, because he knows damn well he's a kung fu master and can remove your spine whenever he wants." I really can't put it any better way than this. I'm not saying that being silent because you can absolutely wreck someone is a positive thing, I'm just saying that overconfident people can be just as silent as under-confident people. Although I do like the kung fu master analogy. PART 2 COMING SOON
" Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." First Try: 1820. Second Try (After Class): 2000 The class reaaaaally was helpful. He literally went through all the things they could possibly show me on the SAT and on the day of the test, I had seen everything. Nothing was a surprise to me, and for the most part, I had some sort of idea of how to find the answer to anything. Not only that, but he gave me every essay prompt since 2005. Take the class.
To be a living being is to live with regret. Those who say they regret nothing are liars or fools. Accept your regret the way you accept your mistakes. Then move on.
The following is not a dramatization of my race today and how it went.
I was racing down the last couple hundred meters of the race. Eric was somewhere behind me. We had an epic battle, one surging forward, then the other. Finally, I threw him off at the last hill. I blew past some Las Lomas guy on the way up, and thats when I saw him. Tobin Bolter. Running with a Northgate guy. I resolved in that second that he, of all people, would not be allowed to beat me. I caught up to him, and started drafting behind him, saving up for the ace I had up my sleeve. Something he didn't know about.
We lost the Northgate guy, and were quickly coming up on another one. I waited for Tobin to make his move. We were rapidly approaching the last hundred meters. Finally, he makes his move. He elbows me and tries to box me in behind the Northgate guy. I avoid it and manage to cut in front of him so that me and the Northgate guy are blocking him off. I can hear Tobin moving to pass me on the left. Now we are at the turn, and just after the turn is the finish line. I quickly cut him off and pull my ace out: my kick. It's fast. Probably too fast. But that's not stopping me, because what do I see as I round that corner? A Las Lomas runner. Celebrating. I knew in that instant, he is another one that I would not allow to beat me. I can hear the crowd screaming at him to run. I can see him turn around, see the fear in his eyes as he sees me booking it down that last stretch. He turns around and starts racing up the last stretch. But it's too late. Far too late. I get around him with room to spare.
Soooo. What'd we learn?
That you don't celebrate until AFTER the race is done. :)
EDIT: I am by no means a faster runner than Tobin now. He has an amazing God-given talent and he has a bright running career ahead of him. And I guess we're kinda friends now. Kinda.
"Dark, unreasonable fear can twist and grind an individual ... It is necessary to dig deep within oneself to discover that hidden grain of steel ... called will." -Ryan Shay My sophomore year, the best year of my running career, our coach awarded me the "Most Inspirational" award. At first I was a little disappointed. It seemed to me like one of those throwaway awards that you gave as a consolation prize. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I actually won a great award. Cross Country is 95% mental. You need the willpower to keep running. You can't have a single sliver of doubt. You have to trust yourself fully. If you doubt yourself for a second, you will never be as good as you could be. My favorite shirt to go out and run in is a bright, highlighter yellow, Nike shirt, that says "Motivate. Dominate." on the front of it. Aside from being a nice, bright beacon telling the new runners to "RUN THIS WAY", it has a good message. You have to be motivated to dominate. If you give up at the first sign of trouble, you'll never live up to your full potential. You gotta be willing to go through the worst of the worst and keep going and get to your goal. So anyways, that's today's blog. And I gotta give credit where credit is due: I found this video, and it compelled me to write this, so please please please please please go check out the video, I think they did a really good job with it. :D
Never give up. Never Surrender.I'm a gamer (specifically, a StarCraft 2 gamer), and a lot of my friends don't understand why (2 come to mind, you know who you are :P). They don't understand why, after 1 year of it being out, I'm still hooked on this game, why I'm so stubborn about defending it, and why my other guy friends continue to play. So, with nothing better to write about, I'll explain myself. First off, I play it, because it's fun, and because it makes me happy. I've always thought that if you had the choice to do something that makes you happy, then you should do it. If you like to play the piano, play the piano. If you like to swim, swim. You should do what you want, and you shouldn't have to justify yourself to other people. Edit: Here's a video saying basically what I'm trying to get across.Second, I do it because I love the community. The last major StarCraft tournament had 35 million people watching online, and over 20,000 people in attendance. (I'll put a picture up. Go check it out in the pictures tab.) I like the feeling that I'm a part of something big; something life-changing and it's stories like this that reinforce that feeling (warning: that's a really long story, just skim it if you have to). You cannot read a story like that and say that it didn't change his life. And it's not like there's these 20,000 nerds all crammed into one building, just quietly watching other people play. No, these people are enthusiastic about what they love, and they're gonna make some noise about it. Like this, and this (0:48-1:19). When I watch videos like that, I'm convinced that people can no longer call this "just a game". And it's not just one game. E-sports has exploded on the North American scene. It's not like this scene has never been here. It's thrived for years in South Korea. Hell, players are treated like rock stars over there. It's just that with games like Halo, SC 2, CoD, and Street Fighter, North Americans are starting to pick up e-sports a lot more. And their fans are all just as enthusiastic about their champions (proof here. Favorite video of the entire set.) And I LOVE these videos, because they remove the game and show just the human elements. It makes it accessible to people outside gaming. Everyone can understand victory and defeat. These films go a long way to getting across some of the reasons we love these games.
Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but STUPID lasts forever.
Well I was gonna write a blog. But when I sat down to write it, I couldn't really put to words what was on my mind. But, I found a convenient video that expresses part of what's been on my mind. So instead of trying to sort out fancy words and make long flowery sentences, click on the video and see part of what's been going on in my head lately. =D
Edit: The only part that applies to whats been on my mind is the texting part (0:22-1:52), and his 3rd point (3:31-4:28). Everything else is filler
“Those who hate most fervently must have once loved deeply; those who want to deny the world must have once embraced what they now set on fire.” -Kurt Tucholsky
Something I don't hide well, especially recently, is anger. Have you ever felt really strong anger? That you hate someone/something so much that you want to just wipe that person/thing from the face of the earth and take half the planet with them? That overwhelming urge to grind them into a fine dust? I've been feeling that recently. But it's really important to control that anger. Anger will make you do stupid things. And it will make you think you had a good reason to do them. It's going to try to justify itself, because it thinks it's right. It will demand that you call names, hurl insults, and yell sarcastic comments. It will remind you of what was done to you to hurt you, and it'll make you feel good about yourself to hurt them. But it's important to control that anger, because when you control it, you can use it for something useful. For example, use it in sports.
If you've ever seen me run, especially in a cross country race, and especially in the last 100 meters or so of the race, you can see my face all screwed up. It's partly because I'm trying to scrounge up all the energy I have left, but it's also because I'm thinking about something that makes me mad. When I think about something that angers me, running becomes easier to me. It becomes an outlet for me to just let all that hatred go. And it's better to let all that negative energy out than to bottle it up.
'Cuz tramps like us, baby we were born to run! -Bruce Springsteen
Edit: I'm dividing this blog up into 2 parts because it ended up being so long. Stay tuned for Part 2!
A lot of people see me around school and know me as a pretty chill guy, especially in the morning (It's because I'm still trying to get awake. I am not a morning person :]). Not many people have seen me show much emotion beyond the occasional smile, unless you're in that group that I've eaten lunch with for the past 3 years or been on an xc team road trip with me. It's because I've been gifted with very strong self-control. I can take anything I feel and I can either ignore it and make it go completely away, or let it show. This helps me a lot when I'm trying to hide stuff like nervousness. For example, asking a girl to Junior/Senior Prom.
This year I was super nervous to ask this girl, but on the day that I was going to ask her, right before I was going to set everything up, one of my good friends (Josh Cannon) walked up to me and commented, "Dude you're so chill. You don't look nervous at all. Aren't you worried she'll say no?" I just gave him one of my sly smiles and went to set everything up. But on the inside, my heart was pounding! If you could've heard it, it would've sounded like a drummer was beating away on it! I was totally prepared for her to just smile, say no, and walk away. Even when I went to hide, my hands were shaking so much that I almost dropped the flowers. But I didn't show it, because I have good self-control. (If you're wondering whether or not she said yes, go take a peek at my pictures)
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