Beating Your Little Nephew
Posted on July 26, 2010 with 0 comments
OK. Let’s get one thing straight now that the topic line has your face screwed up in a ferocious grimace and your finger hovering over the dial pad to punch in the number for the Domestic Abuse Hotline.
This has nothing to do with whooping up on your poor little nephew. Never mind the fact that he can program your DVD player’s clock with one hand while simultaneously text messaging his buddies with the other… “Yeah I’m over at my uncle’s place programming his home theater center after the power failure… again!!”, Never mind the fact he’s tricked out his computer with high RPM fans, gold plated connectors, a liquid cooled operating system while you struggle frantically to figure out which remote turns the volume down on the TV as the phone rings for the third time… just one more ring and it rolls to the voice mail system. Or the fact he can boot, double boot and probably triple boot his computer while you just want to really boot it… I mean just haul off and kick that son of a gun after the blue screen of death at the “Balance Complete” button at the end of your one hour long checkbook reconciliation. Or that he can game internationally over the net understanding 10 different dialects of the Spanish language and you think you’re hot stuff because you can correctly pronounce the ingredients on the back of the cereal box most mornings. Never mind that he learned computer mechanics by building a computer one weekend and did a little surfing getting info off some geek forum and in that same weekend you managed to successfully gather all your user names and passwords in one sane place so the next time you’re on a call with tech support from India you can shave a good 20 minutes off the call. Never mind that he also ate all your pizza when you slipped off to the can to look for the headache meds as he has your head spinning.
No this is not about that, but it does relate to your sweet darling little nephew which you’ll see in just a second. This blog is about taking risk in chasing something you really want to do. Something you find a challenge to do. So many of us have some sort of dream, or should I say goal? I guess whether it is defined as either is up to you. A goal is merely a dream with a plan.
Years ago I invested in the Charles C. Givens financial program. While I actually did learn some things from there, I use to be bothered by the “dreams list” he said to create. Other self help programs too have this “dreams list” type thing. It always seemed to be this pointless thing. I looked at dreams as little more than a mind wandering hallucinogen state that one was actually awake and couldn’t excuse the entries away by saying I was half asleep when I wrote them.
It bothered me because as dreams go, they had no plan, no mental connection or task list in how to get them. At least not one that seemed tangible to me. But Goals, now that is getting to the nitty gritty. However I did have a problem with goals later on too. As hard as I tried to achieve them, and I did achieve some just fine, I didn’t get them all and was left feeling I failed somehow.
So what does this have to do with beating your little nephew? Well? The thing is with these goals, these dreams, you know the ones I actually did get accomplished? I felt good about achieving them. In fact some were pretty impressive to me at the time. As I wrote a song this week on basically living what you feel inside and not what others think you ought or falling into that status symbol lifestyle, I began to think what it means, what’s the motivation behind taking the risk and living what you feel?
Ready? OK here comes your little nephew metaphor. Imagine the tables were turned; your little nephew wasn’t a technological genius and really not that good at gaming. In fact, he’s kind of a little dork now that you think of it and you feel sorry for him so you patronize him by playing a game. After you beat the snot out of him for the surillionth time in the latest interactive X Box war game, how motivated would you be to continue playing him yet one more game? Not very. But, let’s suppose he proved himself a worthy opponent, like the one he really is. And you’re getting sort of jazzed about his avatar taking a couple of virtual hits from your guy. You and he are really battling it out on screen now, laughing, making comments trying to screw with the other one’s head a little bit. Legs and arms are flailing, sweat is rolling, heartbeat is jamming 85 BPM, teeth are showing with huge smiles one minute and a friendly grit the next.
Let me ask you. What is the difference in these to analogies? I’ll tell you what it is… the game is boring as all get out unless there is a chance you will lose. If you know going in that you’ll always win? What fun is that? It’s like racing your granny to the corner and back, unless of course she has one of those scooters they advertise on TV.
The point is, unless we have a risk, a chance in losing in our endeavor, we don’t really get excited about it. We might be OK with life, we might be satisfied, but think about it, when you went in for that job interview and you were one of many in the waiting room, how good did it feel to get the job? Even if you didn’t get it, you learned something that gave you fuel to try to win again.
So that’s what it’s about, beating your little nephew, the geek squad leader of X Box gaming. Same goes for your dream. Its risky yes, but isn’t it so much more rewarding living what you feel inside knowing that you have a risk of losing and a chance of winning rather than living day to day knowing that at the end of the week, the beginning of the next will provide a boring repeat? I’m not suggesting we have to live with one toe clinging to the edge all the time, I’m just saying our dreams, our aspirations, what we feel inside, the thing we are really jazzed about in life, our gift, our thing that lets us look at the clock one minute and the next minute its 5 hours later… that’s where we ought live and not let the risk of failing get in the way because that’s really part of the trophy isn’t it?
There’s no pleasure in winning, if from the start you know you can’t lose. Think about that a second.
Now go get ‘em!!
This has nothing to do with whooping up on your poor little nephew. Never mind the fact that he can program your DVD player’s clock with one hand while simultaneously text messaging his buddies with the other… “Yeah I’m over at my uncle’s place programming his home theater center after the power failure… again!!”, Never mind the fact he’s tricked out his computer with high RPM fans, gold plated connectors, a liquid cooled operating system while you struggle frantically to figure out which remote turns the volume down on the TV as the phone rings for the third time… just one more ring and it rolls to the voice mail system. Or the fact he can boot, double boot and probably triple boot his computer while you just want to really boot it… I mean just haul off and kick that son of a gun after the blue screen of death at the “Balance Complete” button at the end of your one hour long checkbook reconciliation. Or that he can game internationally over the net understanding 10 different dialects of the Spanish language and you think you’re hot stuff because you can correctly pronounce the ingredients on the back of the cereal box most mornings. Never mind that he learned computer mechanics by building a computer one weekend and did a little surfing getting info off some geek forum and in that same weekend you managed to successfully gather all your user names and passwords in one sane place so the next time you’re on a call with tech support from India you can shave a good 20 minutes off the call. Never mind that he also ate all your pizza when you slipped off to the can to look for the headache meds as he has your head spinning.
No this is not about that, but it does relate to your sweet darling little nephew which you’ll see in just a second. This blog is about taking risk in chasing something you really want to do. Something you find a challenge to do. So many of us have some sort of dream, or should I say goal? I guess whether it is defined as either is up to you. A goal is merely a dream with a plan.
Years ago I invested in the Charles C. Givens financial program. While I actually did learn some things from there, I use to be bothered by the “dreams list” he said to create. Other self help programs too have this “dreams list” type thing. It always seemed to be this pointless thing. I looked at dreams as little more than a mind wandering hallucinogen state that one was actually awake and couldn’t excuse the entries away by saying I was half asleep when I wrote them.
It bothered me because as dreams go, they had no plan, no mental connection or task list in how to get them. At least not one that seemed tangible to me. But Goals, now that is getting to the nitty gritty. However I did have a problem with goals later on too. As hard as I tried to achieve them, and I did achieve some just fine, I didn’t get them all and was left feeling I failed somehow.
So what does this have to do with beating your little nephew? Well? The thing is with these goals, these dreams, you know the ones I actually did get accomplished? I felt good about achieving them. In fact some were pretty impressive to me at the time. As I wrote a song this week on basically living what you feel inside and not what others think you ought or falling into that status symbol lifestyle, I began to think what it means, what’s the motivation behind taking the risk and living what you feel?
Ready? OK here comes your little nephew metaphor. Imagine the tables were turned; your little nephew wasn’t a technological genius and really not that good at gaming. In fact, he’s kind of a little dork now that you think of it and you feel sorry for him so you patronize him by playing a game. After you beat the snot out of him for the surillionth time in the latest interactive X Box war game, how motivated would you be to continue playing him yet one more game? Not very. But, let’s suppose he proved himself a worthy opponent, like the one he really is. And you’re getting sort of jazzed about his avatar taking a couple of virtual hits from your guy. You and he are really battling it out on screen now, laughing, making comments trying to screw with the other one’s head a little bit. Legs and arms are flailing, sweat is rolling, heartbeat is jamming 85 BPM, teeth are showing with huge smiles one minute and a friendly grit the next.
Let me ask you. What is the difference in these to analogies? I’ll tell you what it is… the game is boring as all get out unless there is a chance you will lose. If you know going in that you’ll always win? What fun is that? It’s like racing your granny to the corner and back, unless of course she has one of those scooters they advertise on TV.
The point is, unless we have a risk, a chance in losing in our endeavor, we don’t really get excited about it. We might be OK with life, we might be satisfied, but think about it, when you went in for that job interview and you were one of many in the waiting room, how good did it feel to get the job? Even if you didn’t get it, you learned something that gave you fuel to try to win again.
So that’s what it’s about, beating your little nephew, the geek squad leader of X Box gaming. Same goes for your dream. Its risky yes, but isn’t it so much more rewarding living what you feel inside knowing that you have a risk of losing and a chance of winning rather than living day to day knowing that at the end of the week, the beginning of the next will provide a boring repeat? I’m not suggesting we have to live with one toe clinging to the edge all the time, I’m just saying our dreams, our aspirations, what we feel inside, the thing we are really jazzed about in life, our gift, our thing that lets us look at the clock one minute and the next minute its 5 hours later… that’s where we ought live and not let the risk of failing get in the way because that’s really part of the trophy isn’t it?
There’s no pleasure in winning, if from the start you know you can’t lose. Think about that a second.
Now go get ‘em!!