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Time to cover what has been an eventful week.
1) Blogging every night sucks
This week I started blogging at night before I sleep, a new shift compared to before when I blog in the morning. As a consequence, I tend to blog crankier and with a need for more prescience. It sucks because when I blog in the morning, I have a few hours to think of ways to pad and hedge my predictions about stuff. So expect me to be wrong about a lot more stuff, especially since I’ve been in a bit of a funk. But it’s good for me because it adds a lot of pressure to think harder about stuff.
2) I’ve hit the wall
I suppose this is something that happens to people coming out of high school, but I’ve hit a wall in a lot of my aspirations. My fight record in taekwondo against black belts is not good, less than .500 in fact. My record in these professional exams has also dipped to a highly unsatisfactory level. The job search is not going particularly well and my training doesn’t feel as exciting or fun as it once did. I’m not quite sure what to do about it, although the answer probably just lies with good old fashioned discipline. All of life is not supposed to be fun. Hopefully there’s just a hump to cross. Or I’m sacrificing all my other luck for the wedding, which isn’t a bad bargain if it turns out well.
3) I’m intrigued by excellence, not by mystery
Going to the Asian Art Museum showed me that I’m not dazzled by the common perception of the samurai or by specific cultures. What dazzles me is that definition of virtuosity: doing the common uncommonly well. Everyone makes pots and they all hold water, but some people care about making beautiful pots. The samurai didn’t fight or arm themselves better than anyone else, but they organized society and adapted to a changing world better, and that’s what I admire about them.
Goals from the week:
1) Did not pass
2) Fell short
3) Fell short
4) Maintained weight
5) Sorted out wedding stuff
Verdict: Wall indeed. Mada mada dane.
I’m not going to recap Sunday because it was a rest day. Instead, I’ll go straight to the lessons learned because I omitted a lot of smaller events from the week. Here we go!:
1) Real > Fake, always
Aki and I went to a pawn shop to try and sell some of Aki’s old jewelry from her ex in London. Unbeknownst to me, she was holding on to two Cartier watches and a platinum ring with a large diamond, supposedly. Well, it turned out the watches were fakes and the ring was silver with a piece of glass in it, which means its potential value fell from a collective $12,000 to about $80. A couple notables: the jeweler looked at the stuff through his looking glass thing, and it was easily the coolest thing I saw this week. I definitely have to get one for myself. But the lesson is that real jewelry is always better than fake stuff, even if it’s much smaller. The disappointment and contempt on both the jeweler and Aki’s faces made me realize why people are so afraid when they lie. It is something to lie awake for, nervous that someone is onto you or will discover your con. Take your truth, no matter how tiny, and sleep like a baby knowing that if nothing else, at least you’re authentic. That’s worth more than nothing, which is what fakes are.
2) Put yourself through the crucible
We live in a society that is largely bereft of crucibles, that struggle separating the wheat from the chaff. By the time people get sorted, it’s often so late that people are able to delude themselves into thinking they’re worthy when they’re not. Maybe it’s that we want a society where everyone is super nice to each other, too polite to point out each other’s flaws yet too blind and sensitive to accept criticism for what it is. Or maybe we’ve forgotten that it is the pain of hell that gives us the strength to create heaven, which is why immigrants who come here desperate and hungry are often more successful in social mobility than their children. My life tips from those rants? Put yourself through a little hardship – put yourself out there, take a little criticism and a few losses, and move forward. Also, learn to take advice from others, separating mean-hearted comments from comments that hurt but are in your best interest.
3) Be honest to yourself
This week I’ve realized that I know a hell of a lot of people that want to go to med school, but simultaneously they don’t want to live a hard life or they’re not willing to give up everything for that career. It’s made me realize that I don’t like deception but I absolutely loathe self-deception. Of all the people to lie to, the last person should be yourself. After all, you can see the falsity of your own lies. When you claim to be an angel to the outside world, you know what an awful person you are because you have memories of your own faults. I’m astonished at how a person with poor grades thinks they can be a doctor – getting a C in biology means you’re either not very good at the subject or you didn’t care enough to learn about it. And that’s fine. I was getting a C in computer science when I dropped it, realizing that I suck at programming and don’t even really care that I suck. But I don’t dream of making a start-up and selling it to Google for a billion dollars. Seeing my friends’ careers is a stark realization that medicine is a hard and brutal life, one where you have to be smart and tough. And the life never gets easier – med school is much harder than undergrad, residency is much harder than med school, and a career is much harder than residency. You have to want it bad, to have that drive that pushes you when nothing else will. In short, I have no idea why anybody would choose that life when they should know better. I can see why someone would think law or business school isn’t so bad from the outset because it’s years before the vise starts squeezing out the weak, but grad or med school? Please!
4) My low self-esteem and all Russians are ex-KGB
I got another reminder of the fact that I have tremendously low self-esteem from a photo session I had with the wedding photographer. We did it semi-formal so that the photographer could get some idea of how Aki and I interact and find out what angles we look best. He told me that I have good bone structure and that we’re photogenic together. I know I have low self-esteem because my immediate reaction is that he is either lying to me or he says that to everyone. I don’t really mind either, because I’ve convinced myself that he’s a good photographer by sheer virtue of the fact that he’s Russian. Not just that he’s Russian, but that he must have been a photographic agent for the KGB, sneaking around to US military installations and taking pictures of them and their employees. If he can get sneak photos of the Stealth bomber and America’s front-line nuclear missiles, then surely he can capture my moment of happiness with Aki. In fact, the main selling point is that he keeps saying that he’ll be so invisible during the wedding that nobody will notice he’s even there. Also, his assistant is a very attractive Russian beauty (ahem Money), which only convinced me further that he’s a former Russian agent. Finally, he’s the only person in the entire wedding process to have brought out astronomical charts to find out when the sunset is on Oct 10 and how much moonlight there will be. Brilliant.
Goals from the week:
1) Didn’t get to 500 but got the 75%
2) Nailed the extra workouts
3) Didn’t practice daily
4) Practiced the foreign language
5) Weight is at 158 lbs
6) Reduced computer use adequately
7) Did not meditate, too busy
Verdict: Pretty good!
Let’s cover the week:
1) Keys to rebuilding a relationship: brutal honesty, seeing consequences of your actions
My favorite television show these days is Tool Academy 2 on VH1, and this week’s episode was particularly intense. It was about infidelity, where all the guys were tricked into hitting on these three models with a secret camera. The intended message was that the guys don’t have much respect or consideration for their girlfriends, but it turned super intense when the guys started pouring their hearts out about their past cheating. It was sort of funny that all the guys had cheated, but it was devastating for the girls and even the therapist had tears in her eyes when she cut it off. Aki cried a little too from the emotions pouring out. But I think it taught the guys a valuable lesson, both in the pain of honesty and seeing in stark view that their actions had consequences, even if they had managed to hide it for a long time.
2) Keys to building a good reputation: schedule bravely and perform at standard for excellence
A lesson from college football, which I covered on Saturday. If you want respect, then take on a lot of responsibility and handle it. If you’re going to fail any time the pressure is on and just take on a lot of cakewalks, why should anyone think highly of you?
3) Keys to a good work ethic: sleep right, eat right
I stayed up all night on Tuesday and it pretty much jacked up my whole week. I haven’t felt well rested since then and my discipline went all to hell for the week. Maybe it was my body telling me it needed a break or something, but either way it was not a good decision. Also, trying to diet in the meantime has done wonders for my weight but horrors for my mood and my enthusiasm. It was probably just too much change too fast. Even my brother is sure to sleep and eat right during the hard parts of his medical schedule, restricting the experimentation to down times when the consequences can be reversed.
Goals from the week:
1) Did not complete the second batch
2) Completed YMD business
3) Did UCMAP stuff, not as much as I wanted
4) Practiced about half the week, could not trick Aki
5) Practiced foreign language about half the week too
6) Just did the new workout regimen, a little more than I thought
7) Not even close
 Weight is steady at 163
Verdict: Not very impressive.
The week ended on a strong note. Here’s what I learned:
1) Don’t cry about working hard. Just get the job done.
Pity parties are infinitely more annoying when the goals and hard work are self-imposed. Nobody cares because everyone else works just as hard as you. 80 hour weeks in the bank, weekends at the firm, 3 AM calls from the hospital, broken finger with 0:04 left in the Super Bowl. You want it, go get it.
2) Karate Kid theme song
You know the song by Joe Esposito, “You’re the Best Around”? It was actually written for Rocky 3, which is why there’s the line “history repeats itself”, since Rocky wins again. Esposito tried to make the song along the same lines as Survivor, who wrote the first Rocky themes. But it was rejected, so Esposito took it around Hollywood until a producer realized it was jabroni gold. The more you know.
3) Speaking of jabroni gold…
The bachelor party will be done entirely in black beaters and the music will come entirely from mix CDs. DJ Bro-ni in the house, bitches.
Goals from the week:
1) Invitations were mailed out, but hand deliveries haven’t finished yet. It turned out we ran a little short on the first batch. Call it half-done.
2) Kind of decided on tux style but haven’t locked it down
3) Fell short on workouts but satisfied nonetheless. Will add more.
4) Missed a few days
5) Got the juggling but not the sleight of hand
6) Nailed the halo
7) Not even close to stretching every day
330 quiz questions, 68% right. Would fail exams.
9) Hovering at 163 lbs. Can not outrun a bad diet
Verdict: A good week. Not quite there but definitely better.
Things I learned this week:
1) It’s up to the leader to be enthusiastic, it’s up to the team to be passionate
I’ve been around long enough to see groups rise and fall, and this is one of the Catch-22s that often happens. If the team is struggling, the leader often begins to lose enthusiasm, which further hurts morale. This can be extremely difficult to reverse, which is why you see football teams desperately try to switch coaches or eliminate cancers on the team. By passionate, I mean the team has to be consistent, have good work ethic, and care about doing a good job. By enthusiastic, I mean the leader has to be firm, attuned to the team’s needs, and inspirational.
2) Wikipedia was the worst thing to ever happen to movies.
I haven’t seen District 9 or Inglourious Basterds, and now I won’t because I already know what happens. Not only do I know the plot, I know the symbolism as described by the director, the details of the marketing campaign, and reviews both good and bad about both movies. Perhaps I’ll rent them at some point in the future or watch them on HBO when they come out, but the movie theater just lost my $9 because I went to Wikipedia. More than DVDs or downloads, that is more devastating to the artist’s work because now I may never see it at all. I haven’t seen a scary movie in a theater for years, but I can tell you what happens in every Saw movie, all because of the power of the Wiki.
3) Amateur sports is the new exploitation
Do you realize that BCS football and March Madness are each billion dollar events? They make more money than any other sporting event except the Super Bowl. Little League World Series is probably ESPN’s biggest draw in the late summer, in that dead period before the race to the finish for baseball and before the football season begins. Yet these amateur athletes don’t see a single dollar for their effort. Oh sure, the little league kids win a year’s supply of free stuff and that’s very special to kids from countries other than the US and Japan, but in proportion to how much ESPN and Little League makes, it’s nothing. The term “student-athlete” is the biggest farce in the world, because most of these kids are trying to be athletes, not students. I don’t know if the solution is to start paying the kids or at least giving them a bigger slice of the pie, but there’s no doubt that these events are exploiting their games.
Goals from the week:
1) Fell just short of 200 questions, did much more poorly than 80%
2) Got the pullups, pushups, and squats, only did 60% of the situps and none of the running
3) Minimal foreign language studying
4) Minimal sleight of hand practice. BTW, by “minimal”, I mean “none at all”.
Verdict: Pretty awful, but give me a break, demo practices more than filled the gaps
This week is centered around life advice from Aki’s dad, my almost father in law.
1) Outline ambitious goals and then find solutions to them
The easiest way to guide and organize your life is to write out some ambitious goals and think of what you need to achieve them. As with passions, the easiest goals are the simplest ones – you want to double your salary, for instance, or double your productivity. People who think in terms of paths usually just find reasons why they can’t do something. What you want to think is where you want to go and what you need to get there. The road may be long but breaking it down into short, achievable goals is how you get there.
2) Don’t be casual in your goals
Choose your goals and commit to something, that’s what life is. It doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be right freaking now, but the worst thing you could do to yourself is just la-la-la pick a career out of a hat. But like most things in life, it’s better to choose early than to let life choose for you. Because you could wake up tomorrow 40 and in a job that you hate but can’t escape.
3) The road beyond excellence: taking risks
Everyone knows the road to excellence – hard work, dedication, good habits, etc. But once you get there, there’s nobody to hold your hand and tell you the right way to go. You have to make up your own path and sometimes that means taking risks. Education is important because it teaches you how to think, but it isn’t indoctrination. It shouldn’t kill intuition, it should just kill bad intuition. Just realize that at a certain point, there’s a transition from student to leader, and that means beyond college, you should be building the blocks to things like creativity and inspiration.
Goals from the week:
1) Fell a bit short of 200 quiz questions but close enough
2) Fell short on the pullups (no bar in LA) but got the pushups and situps
3) Finished Wicked. Did not like.
Verdict: Not too shabby, but too many holes in the record. Have to blog more often.
Let’s look at what I learned this week. This includes some things that I learned from my trip to Chicago but forgot to include last week because it was more serious.
1) Drive-by shooting is hard
We tried in Chicago to set up cans on fence posts and have two people shoot at them from a moving truck. It turned out to be incredibly difficult and only one can out of four was hit, despite tens of shots taken. It’s very hard to aim from a moving target and it’s not easy to get your bearings even if the car is pulled to a complete stop before shooting. If you’re planning a drive by, take this into account.
2) Bring bags to California
They have this game in the Midwest called bags. Basically you set up two wooden panels with a hole in it, and players stand from about 20 feet away and try to throw little burlap sacks with beans in it and try to either land them on the wood or get it into the hole. The entire reason this game is fun is that the bag makes a most satisfying clunk when it hits the wood. Also, it’s pretty mindless fun, so it attracts a lot of people to it and it’s easy to get anyone to join in.
3) Often the most powerful passions are the simplest ones
Ever since I posted my passion on the blog, I’ve been asking other people what their passions are. I’ve been getting some pretty interesting answers, but there is a definite correlation between the simplicity, the articulation, and the strength of passions. People who know what they want often have very simple goals that they can identify very easily and with conviction, and this seems to guide them very strongly to their goals. People who try to be tricky or suave with things, or mix up goals with hobbies, tend to be much weaker and struggle with identifying a goal that they want to pursue or finding the will to do so.
4) Social support is a critical thing
The idea of a strong social supporter seems to play some role in success, whether it is a teacher, mentor, or friend who pushes you forward. So note: be a challenging and encouraging friend, and/or find friends who will encourage and challenge you. By my observation, there seems to be no worse disservice you can do for your friends than being so blindly and mildly encouraging that tolerance is unconditional. There is a difference between passion and fantasy. Second note, if you want to ruin someone’s life, that’s what you do – mildly tolerate anything they want to do and encourage them without question to accept impossible dreams. They could burn their entire youth before realizing that their dream is hopeless.
Goals from the week:
1) Didn’t study that hard, if I’m honest
2) Wedding invitations prepped but not mailed, still collecting addresses and practicing calligraphy
3) Handled the TKD set-up like a champ
4) Did not work out or juggle every day
Verdict: Pretty bad. Do better next week.
Sorry for the lack of updates, but I went to Chicago for a long weekend and didn’t have a chance to go on the internet. So it will be a long series of lessons.
1) Envy is a terrible and ugly thing
Like most other vices, envy can be good in small doses. Squeezed into a virtue, envy is a powerful and ancient motivator for people to see and seek improvement in their life. However, it is more often corrosive and base, mutating a content person into a dissatisfied shrew just because he notices someone else has something that he does not.
Its corrosive nature comes from the fact that it is blind and farcically selective. We envy our neighbor’s new luxury car without knowing that he spent every penny he had on it and drove his future earnings off a cliff of interest rates. We envy the thin, wealthy, and fabulously well-connected socialite without knowing that her boyfriend is a philandering, abusive stranger. We envy the rich, the famous, the beautiful, and the better or more [insert adjective] here without understanding either the price they paid for such gifts or seeing the gaping holes in their lives where we possess advantages they can only dream about. We envy possessions and qualities which we would not be willing to sacrifice what is necessary to achieve them even if we knew what it was.
Envy is the weak and lazy sister to its hardworking sibling, ambition. It is a futile, foolish, and low emotion.
2) Economics does not know how to learn from history. Learn from them.
Here is the way to never learn from history. Economists are all bickering about when the current recession will end, and all of them phrase their arguments like so:
“In 19__, the ___ Index dropped __ % over __ months, _________ economic indicators were _________, so judging from history, we conclude that now, we should expect X, Y and Z…”
This is what passes for analysis these days by economists. Shame on them.
3) An analogy for futures markets and why they’re useful
You can gamble on the results of a sports event or a presidential election. Making a bet does not affect the outcome in any way. However, there is a high correlation between the predicted outcome and the actual results. So manipulating the results or banning a bad result in futures markets is totally useless in preventing a disaster in results.
4) Guns are an amazing but expensive hobby
Guns are an incredibly fun and exciting hobby. There are few times you will feel as powerful as you do when firing a rifle, feeling the kick against your shoulder, seeing the results of your shooting, and understanding that you control death and devastation in your hands. There is also the simple mechanical beauty for people fascinated by machines that are cleverly and elegantly built. Finally, you experience the thrill of improving at a physical skill, improving your control over your body and seeing tangible results. However, it is not cheap – a gun will run you several hundred dollars, ammunition is tens of dollars per session, and maintenance is a pain. I would like to get into this as a hobby.
5) Theory of success
Aki and I came up with a brief theory of success that seems to be correlated very strongly so far. Pretty much we think of life as a young person is composed of four elements – school, work, hobbies, and personal life. If you want to be really successful, pick 2 of the 4 and largely disregard the others. Most people who pick more than that are likely to overload themselves – there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to dedicate oneself to three things and do a good job at them all. The primary factor should be passion – find your passions and chase them. And as I like to say, anyone with more than 2 passions has no passions at all.
Goals for the week:
1) Locked it down, except for the florist. One more meeting next week.
2) Prepared for glory
3) Chicago trip was a brilliant success. Most fun I’ve had in months.
4) No juggling practice
Verdict: Pretty good. Maybe a little too relaxed, but that’s I what I needed.
Ah, what did I learn this week?
1) The value of consistency
Probably the most overlooked and most difficult skill to attain. Doing something the same every time is incredibly difficult to do, but once you get it, it becomes reliable enough that you can concentrate on other things. If you can’t get it, then trying to concentrate on other things is usually an exercise in futility. And people told me juggling was useless. Feh, I tell you, FEH!
2) Earn the right to be taken seriously
I like teachers who differentiate between teaching the bare minimum for people who want to do just the requisite and conserving their energy for people who want to be taken seriously. There’s no use trying to force-feed skill to someone who doesn’t want the pay the price. I think this is a good attitude to start taking with other people.
3) Cheese is a great snack
Maybe a sign of my conversion to No-Cal-ness. But buying a couple bricks of cheese and some bread ensures you’ll always have a good salty snack. Just slice the cheese into small or thin chunks and eat. It soothes your craving for salt at any time. Um, on the other side, I’m doing quite poorly with sweet snacks because I’m eating handfuls of a large sack of marshmallows.
Goals for the week:
1) I can juggle 25 times. Success!
2) Didn’t run 15 miles or time myself. Failure!
3) Averaged better than 70% on quizzes for the week. Success!
4) I took a rest day. Push!
5) No cold showers. Failure!
Verdict: Push!
It’s that special time of week where I review what I’ve learned:
1) Skill is often luck masquerading as learning
My experience at juggling has taught me that I didn’t really know how to juggle, at least not in the “toss consistently and know where your hands are” kind of way. The reason that the basics are so important is that so few people have a really good grasp of it that it’s worth hammering in.
2) Don’t keep guests more than a month
I’m going to say that guests wear out their welcome between week three and four, because they start to cramp your lifestyle and force you to build around them. Aki’s sister has two weeks left here, and I’m starting to think of her as the illegal immigrant to my nativist. I’ll miss her more than I think because she does chores that I hate (i.e. dishes), but it is troublesome to be polite when all I want to do is wallow in my unemployed misery, scratching myself while I sprawl out in my underwear watching TV.
3) Big differences can come from little mistakes
I didn’t bring it up, but I played a tennis match against a stranger today. He was pretty decent, quicker than me and left-handed with the lashing strokes of a person who’s never taken formal lessons. The match was actually pretty close for a while, until 2-2, 15-30 (his serve), when he made three bad errors in a row and gave me the game and a lead I’d never relinquish. His game collapsed after that and I ran away with it to an easy win. The thing is that I didn’t even need strategy, those few mistakes made the entire difference.
One other notable is that I had match point at 5-2, love-40 (his serve). He double-faulted on a bad let cord, but I let him have another serve because I don’t want to win like that. I ended up making a couple bad errors myself and he surged with confidence, forcing a long series of deuces. I managed to hold on and win, but another error on my part could have turned the set upside down for me.
4) Why everyone injures their groin trying halo kicks
Working with Eric on halo has made me realize why everyone injures their groin trying. If you don’t know taekwondo, a halo is when you do a jump turning roundhouse kick and land on the kicking leg (meaning you have to turn your hip all the way over in the air). The problem is that a lot of people anticipate the kick from the jump and end up trying to swing their leg around, which uses only the groin muscle. The proper way is to turn all the way around before jumping, so that the leg goes straight and then turns with the hip. Doing it this way put no pressure on the groin because the leg is always in line with the hip.
Goals for the week:
1) Draft is done and sent. Getting a proof and printing if we like it.
2) Testing schedule is tentatively set.
3) Juggle practice is progressing nicely
4) Ran TWELVE miles, hyah
Verdict: Pretty decent. Finding a nice stride.
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