Here’s the first one.

What is the first creative moment you remember?

I had a ridiculously vivid imagination when I was 7. Grade 2, right? Yeah, there was a section in the classroom with paints and large paper. I drew me a ship. With wings. It had full sails and everything. Always wanted to be an engineer. So much for that though.

Was anyone there to witness or appreciate it?

My teacher. Most kids drew flowers or scenery with trees and the sun. She raised an eyebrow when she came to mine.

What is the best idea you’ve ever had?

Probably my WoW blog. I never thought it’d become that popular or that’d I meet the people I’ve met over the years (at the convention and otherwise).

What made it a great idea?

It’s opened up a lot of door and opportunities.

What’s the dumbest idea?

Investing in new projects and overextending myself.

What made it stupid?

Because I will never learn that there just isn’t enough of me to go around and that I continually stretch myself too thin.

Can you connect the dots that led you this idea?

The blog came as a result of a need for an outlet. Lots of cool WoW writers out there but there was a niche that wasn’t being satisfied. There was a gap out there and that it had to be filled. (That’s what she said).

What is your creative ambition?

To write stuff that people will find beneficial and worthwhile to them. Bonus points if it’s appealing.

What are the obstacles to this ambition?

It’s not an easy profession to break into. It’s too late for me now to pursue a degree in a related field. It’s not widely accepted as a real job either (even among friends), and it won’t be unless I can somehow make it work. Freelancing is tough especially the way things are right now. Income is dependent on what comes out the other end of your pen.

What are the vital steps to achieving this ambition?

I honestly don’t know. Catch the attention of someone who is well connected, I suppose. Definitely continue working on my craft. Develop a sustained and consistent writing schedule. I’m way all over the place. I seem to be at my best in the ours past 9 PM until 1 AM. I also appear to be on form during the mornings.

How do you begin your day?

Rolling around in bed for about 10 minutes before finally getting up and making myself coffee. I used to rely on caffeine pills but, certain people vehemently insisted that I stop. Fire up the computer, check my EMail, and then pop open up my word processor of choice.

What are your habits? What patterns do you repeat?

Coffee or some other warm beverage. There’s a tendency to read a lot. Anything I can get my hands on, I’ll spend at least an hour reading per day.

Describe your first successful creative act.

One of my earliest posts on what made certain people good in the game at what they do. They each had distinct traits about them that were shared with other people doing the same thing.

Describe your second successful creative act.

I started delving into guild leadership stuff. How to organize players in an online video game and why the stick and carrot weren’t as useful in this arena.

Compare them

I think what made them both successful to me was the positive feedback I received on both. To me there were two messages: People were actually reading my stuff and people liked reading my stuff.

What are your attitudes toward: Money, power, praise, rivals, work, play?

Money: Need it. Wish I had more of it.
Power: Must be used intelligently and wisely.
Praise: Only when it’s earned. False praise does nothing.
Rivals: You run faster knowing there’s someone chasing after you. I study what my “competition” (other blogs) do. When they do one thing, I do something else. I take care to never follow in the footsteps of my rivals. Instead, I make my own footprints so others can follow me.
Work: Mentally stimulating. Sometimes it takes me a while to get in gear. Procrastinate too much.
Play: Don’t seem to have as much time for that nowadays.

Who do you admire most?

Brian Clark. Seth Godin. Garr Reynolds. Darren Rowse.

Why are they your role models?

Because they’re brilliant people who know their stuff and they have their own writing style which benefits their audience.

What do you and your role models have in common?

I’d say we’re all geeks who like to write.

Does anyone in your life regularly inspire you?

Nope. In my life, not that many people give a crap really.

Who is your muse?

I have none.

Define muse.

I think it means someone who helps generate ideas or inspiration. I don’t know anyone like that. Most of my ideas come from a wide variety of sources.

When confronted with superior intelligence or talent, how do you respond?

An acknowledgment of their ability followed by the innate desired to match or exceed their talents. I’m fairly competitive when it comes to stuff like this. It’s all in good fun though. It helps me get better at what I do when I notice someone superior.

When faced with stupidity, hostility, intransigence, laziness or indifferent in others, how do you respond?

Stupidity: Inwardly, I want to slap them behind their head. I end up trying to correct them if it’s something simple but I move on if I can sense there’s no hope.
Hostility: I don’t even bother working with them and just move on.
Intransigence (Refusing to moderate a position, especially an extreme position; uncompromising): Sometimes I’ll give in just so we can go forward. If I feel strongly enough about it, I’ll abandon it altogether and go my own way instead.
Laziness: Either try to motivate them out of it or find someone else who can do the job with the necessary enthusiasm.
Indifference: Generally a good sign if they’re okay with anything. It’s like they have no opinion and you retain executive control of everything no matter what you say. After a while it gets dull because you want to know what position they take and why. It gets boring if there’s no thought behind it.

When faced with impending success or the threat of failure, how do you respond?

Success: Sigh of relief. That something I’ve worked on for a while gets accepted. Means I can move on to the next thing.
Failure: Generally, I shut down for a bit and reflect on why something went sour so that I don’t do it again next time. Depending on the severity, I can shut down for a long time.

When you work, do you love the process or the result?

Oh god, I love the process. The writing process is great, but the editing and polishing process does it for me the most. How can I spice up my writing more? How can I convey my message more effectively? Just going through that and experiencing the *click* That’s IT! moment is what does it for me.

At what moments do you feel your reach exceeds your grasp?

Always in the beginning of something. Sometimes I don’t think I’ll ever meet the end goal but I know I have to try and see what I can do with a certain topic. I usually end up getting lucky.

What is your ideal creative activity?

Brainstorming ideas. I’ll change my environments frequently to try and spark an idea.

What is your greatest fear?

Sucking. I am terrified of failing. It’s curious though. When it comes to my creative work, I’m scared about pushing something through that’s not going to be received well, but I’ll do it anyway just to see what happens. I take a lot of risks by writing about stuff that’s never been written about or writing things in ways that have never been done before. But, try as I might, I cannot translate that hardened “I don’t give a crap” writing approach to life. I can’t remember the last time I asked someone out :\.

What is the likelihood of either of the answers to the previous two questions happening?

The first one happens pretty often. I’d say it’s a weekly routine. The second one’s rarer but it does happen.

Which of your answers would you most likely to change?

The second one. I wish I weren’t so afraid of failing. I think it’s held me back more often than I can count.

What is your idea of mastery?

Being able to do something without thinking. Mastery can be attained after working on skills for such a long time that they’re just ingrained in your system. You don’t even have to consciously think about something. You can just react. Being a master feels like there is nothing you can’t do, yet you continue to learn new things and add them your arsenal. At the same time, I think it holds you back. Ever wonder why ninjas don’t have a favourite weapon? It’s so that don’t become dependent on them.

What is your greatest dream?

To get a position somewhere where I can get paid well for what I write about (and quit school!) and where what I write about has a positive impact for some reader out there.

Random Posts

I was originally in the Crim program. But I made a mistake. I took two distance education courses that I had no business taking. The courses themselves were fine. It’s the fact that they were distance that screwed me over because I know now that I simply do not have that level of discipline that others do.

As a result of this, my GPA tanked and I had to forfeit my major declaration. I’ve taken all of my electives. I’ve taken all lower division CRIM requirements (and all of the non-required ones like Youth and Law, Introduction to Policing, etc). But my GPA is still too low and I won’t be able to get into the upper division ones that I need.

To make a headache worse, my course registration was fairly early. Again, all the courses I want have several GPA pre-requisites involved. They don’t factor in the grades from this semester until well after exams are over. Because of this, chances are I won’t be able to get a seat in the courses since they’ll already be full.

This means I have to take a few meaningless courses for fun or for interest. Naturally, there is the threat that it could drop my GPA. I don’t have much choice in that matter. I suppose I could take some time off and try and find a job somewhere. Don’t think that would fly very well here either.

You see, I’ve also reached the point where my cash reserves are dry. I’ll need to apply for a student loan to continue financing for school. The problem with that is that one of the criteria be that I remain a full time student.

During the summer, one of the distance education courses I took required me to head down to BC’s supreme court and make several court observations. After being there for several hours, I observed that this might not be the field I wanted to get involved in. I witnessed defense lawyers using every trick in the book to prevent gangsters and rapists. I watched innocent people get caught by prosecutors. Sure it pays well, but I started to wonder if this is an occupation where I’d be able to go to sleep at night. And I slowly came to the realization that no, this isn’t what I wanted.

Summary

I have to take courses I don’t need, to qualify for money I don’t have, to pay for a discipline that I don’t know if I’m even interested in anymore.

What do I do?

I’m a little depressed about it (not medically or anything). Right now, it just feels like my life sucks. It’d be reassuring to hear someone say “don’t worry, everything’s going to turn out okay”. But House would say “you don’t know that. Things might not turn okay. They might get worse.” And he’d be right.

When I kill large scale Dragons in WoW or oversized yeti’s and armies of Dwarves, if my team failed that night, we’d talk it over and identify what went wrong. Who wasn’t doing their job? Who was caught out of position? What were we doing wrong? We’d identify problems and come up with solutions. If it didn’t work, it was back to the drawing board. And we’d keep going until the Dragon was nothing more than a carcass at our feet with his treasures in our possession.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t have any answers. I don’t have any solutions. If there’s one thing that drives me up the wall, it’s being placed in a situation where I’m not sure if I can directly influence an outcome.

If not Crim, then what?

If there’s one hobby I really enjoyed, it’s always been writing. It’s awesome to get paid to write about video games. It just doesn’t feel like work at all. I wish I had gone into communications or journalism instead. In order to get in, the GPA requirement is 2.75. I’m barely floating above 2.1. That course of action is then ruled out.

In an effort to help myself, I’ve turned to caffeine to help boost my energy and awakeness. The past few weeks I’ve been extremely tired and sleepy. Sometimes, I wouldn’t have any coffee at home. Or I’d be late getting to school and wouldn’t be able to get coffee.

Caffeine pills

So I resorted to caffeine pills again. They don’t have the calories that coffee does and it has a caffeine that’s equivalent to 1 cup of coffee. Of course, some of my friends happen to take objection. I don’t get it. It’s not like I’m abusing it by taking more than the recommended amount. It was just one pill when I woke up, and one pill later on in the evening. I needed the energy to sustain the level of reading and studying I was doing. I had a paper due last Tuesday and of all the academic papers I’ve written in the past, this was one where I was most proud of. I have an exam coming up on Monday. I studied with my group for 4 hours on Wednesday and an additional 5 hours today. I’ve never felt more prepared.

In any case, I’ve decided to stop using them for now at her request. I cave in too easily to friends at times.

If I don’t do well in this next exam, I don’t know what I’m going to do. The prof made a deal with us where if the class average increased by at least 2%, she’d award us an additional 2% on top of that. That’s almost a full letter grade of an increase when combined.

Time to go back to studying.

Oh wait. I won’t be able to stay awake anymore.

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Yesterday, I acted on a tip from a friend and visited Toys R Us again during the day before going to school. I figured it was a Monday and most people would either be at work or at school so I had a decent shot at picking one up for myself. Lo and behold, I walked in and there were boxes full of Wii Fit sitting in the corner. Oddly enough, Toys R Us limited it to 2 copies per customer so I snapped up another copy because I figured there’d be someone out there interested in getting one. In other words, I have two copies of Wii Fit lying around and I’m willing to part with the other one at cost plus some odd percent.

Why not hit the gym?

I’ll be honest. I am not a big fan of the gym. I don’t like going by myself but that’s because I’m too self conscious. I’d rather go with a few friends or something. I could do a few laps around the block but I don’t have the motivation for it especially with the rainy weather in Vancouver. I do have free membership to the SFU gym but it’s all the way up the mountain. If I had a car it wouldn’t be such a big deal but as such, I’m a public transit user. To carry textbooks, my Macbook and a change of clothes going up and down the mountain is too much work.

Enter Wii Fit

I’ve been playing video games since I was 7. Chip’s Challenge and Gizmo’s and Gadgets ruled the day back then. I was probably the youngest kid in my class who understood what the concept of simple machines were. Naturally, a console game that encourages fitness piqued my interest and I had to pick it up and try it out.

Setting up the whole thing took about 15 minutes. You have to enter your height, your birthdate and all that jazz. After that, you step on the balance board and it weighs you and tells you what your center of balance is and proceeds to scare you into using Wii fit more by giving you all these facts.

So how did I check out on day 1?

Weight: 223 lbs
BMI: 31.89
Wii Fit Age: 31

Ouch.

Obviously there’s been a lot of skepticism over the Fit.

• Does it actually work?
• Is it real exercise?
• Can it cause some weight loss?

So just to set the records straight, I’m going to try it myself and see if I can shed a few pounds. I’ve set a goal for myself to lose 7 pounds in 30 days. You can do that in the game and it automatically tracks your progress. It might not seem like much to most people, but for a guy like me to take such an approach is something of a surprise I’m sure.

The plan

I get up alarmingly early every morning. I don’t know a lot of other University students who wake up at 645 AM (willingly). I plan to do several of the activities between 30 – 60 minutes per day. The first week I’ll stick with around 30 minutes worth because I haven’t done any kind of PE related stuff since Grade 10 (remember Grade 10?).

I’m also going to make a more determined effort to watch what I eat. Thankfully there aren’t a whole lot of birthdays or other events in June so I won’t be eating out as much. This means a reduction in red meat, pop, pasta, desserts, etc and rice (which is going to be close to impossible being Asian). At the same time, this means an increased intake on greens and fruits. I keep saying these things but I never follow through on it. I’m going to follow through on it this time because I have motivation:

She’s Asian, in my STATs class, sits on the far right near the back row and has legs that can kill.

But it is not going to be easy. If I ever ask you to go out for all you can eat or something else that you feel is going to be against my game plan here, feel free to stop me.

How do I like it so far?

It is fun! You start off with a limited amount of games and activities at first. You can only unlock more as you progress throughout the game by logging more minutes.

I started with the Balance games. I wanted to start myself off easy and I found out quickly that I have horrible balance. I missed 7 flags on my first run through the Skiing. I had a hard time on the soccer head butting game because I kept overextending myself and falling off the balance board a few times (use your legs, not your head dummy).

The yoga aspect is much more interesting (in the closed confines of your own home with the shades drawn). There’s a breathing exercise that you start off with first which helps you develop a rhythm. The screen flashes based on what you should be doing (inhale or exhale) and you can pick your personal trainer (male or female). It would’ve been nice to have access to other trainers. Just imagine what Bowser would have done.

I got rocked by tree form. It looks something like this:

They make it look so easy. But geeze, it’s hard to stay balanced. It scores you based on how well you balance on both legs. I scored 0 on my left on the first try. I have a lot of work to do.

I redeemed myself by nailing the Warrior form with ease, scoring 100 points after my 5th attempt:

After Yoga, I gave the muscle conditioning activities a shot. Here’s an example of the Lunge. It’s one of the few exercises on the box of the Wii fit:

After about 30 reps, you can start feeling the burn. But I’m a WoW player remember? So its more apparent to me then everyone else.

Tomorrow I’ll give the aerobics activities a try. Those ones are a bit more fast paced. I’ll also post up a quick picture of myself. Can’t do a self study without a before and after photo, right?

My only worry is that one of these days when I’m standing on the skytrain, I’ll mindlessly go into tree form without realizing it while holding onto the bar. I guess it would be a plus if I can pull it off without holding the bar on a moving skytrain.

Baby steps, Matt, baby steps, right?

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It Was Not To Be

Sometimes, all it takes is one class to completely derail your future. Ever since I took that fated distance education course on Java and programming, I knew that this was not an avenue that I wanted to pursue. It gave me a glimpse on what future University courses were like that involved programming. And they all involved math. Matt is not a mathematics man.

It was too late for me to change my SFU application faculties. When I signed up early, it was under the computing science or science faculties. Naturally, I was rejected from SFU. Talk about stupid mistakes. No one told me I could apply to SFU general as a fail safe. My parents didn’t know much. The friends I had were in the same boat as I was and had no clue either. Off I went to Kwantlen in my first year.

The first week I was there, I swallowed my pride and spoke to a counselor. Half my friends will tell you I’m stubborn. The other half are too nice and will say that I’m firm.

Mistake 1

I had to decide on a specific set of subjects. Specifically, I had to think about what I wanted to do as a career. What the hell, I thought. I decided I’d take a shot at business. All my friends were doing it and I did not want to get left behind either. I tried an accounting course and an economics course to get my feet wet.

At the end of the semester, I did an average job on the grades. More importantly I wasn’t happy. That’s when it hit me like Chris Pronger on Kesler after a goal. It dawned on me that I was going about school all wrong. My parents wanted me to go into business. My friends also encouraged me to go into business. Everyone saw a lot of opportunities in it for me. Yet I didn’t really care about functions, aggregates, supply, demand or any of that stuff. If you don’t care about what it is that you’re studying, you will never do well in life. Thankfully, it only took me a semester before I realized what I was doing wrong. I was taking business courses for all the wrong reasons. I was doing things that other people wanted me to do and that didn’t fly at all. It’s my life, I only have one shot at it, and I’m going to do things my way.

Redemption

In the spring semester, a dear friend of mine recommended me to try a Criminology course with him. On a side note, I encourage all of you to try this. The next time a friend asks you to try something, don’t ask why.

Ask why not?

I took courses: a History class and that Criminology class. I had not yet decided what I really wanted to do and I didn’t want to spend unnecessary amounts of money. Right away, there were some subtle changes that happened:

• I actually read the textbook
• Looked up crime stories on the web
• Actively participated in discussion
• Putting in a ton of effort
• Did not skip any classes
• More importantly, I was interested in what I was learning about

There are people I know right now who are in school being miserable because they hate what they’re doing. They’re learning what they don’t care about because it’s what others want them to do, not what they themselves want to do. I don’t believe in that. I’m not talking about breadth requirement courses. I have to take STATS and I hate it, but it’s a requirement. I’m talking about people going into majors and minors into subjects that they’re better off not being in. It’s a waste of money on courses. More importantly, it’s a waste of time.

The Bottom Line

If I could finalize everything in this post to one line, it’s to choose your own path in life. I don’t believe in fate or predetermined futures. To that end, don’t let others dictate or tell you what to do. If you want to be an engineer, go build bridges. If you want to be in the military, go blow them up. If you want to make money, be a stock broker or a businessman. You’re not 5 years old anymore. You’re old enough to make decisions and it’s time you did.

Me? I want to practice law (or enforce it).

How do you know your purpose in life?

Simple answer: You don’t! It’s a gut feeling that can happen like a premonition or it could take time to cultivate. You don’t have to follow in the footsteps of your parents or your friends. I tried my hand at business and had no business being in it. Don’t expect to keep up with high school friends in University. It’s impossible. I’m lucky if I even see them once a month. Your life is yours to live and it may as well be satisfying.

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