Winning

Sometimes I have a hopeful post. I don’t rant, or berate, or vent, sometimes. Most of the time, I do. But recently I’ve realized that, in order to fool people into thinking I’m a half-decent individual, it’s required of me to lend you some pleasant advice. I hope you can refrain from laughing long enough to read this.

As the above paragraph suggests, I am moving onto a lighter topic, one that inspires hope. It’s powered advancement since life existed. It’s been the sole purpose of a couple of world wars. It’s seen the fall of nations and the rise of just as many. I speak, if you haven’t guessed by the aptly named title, Winning.

For some people, it’s the center of their life. Winning becomes a religion, and only utter defeat will squelch their insanity. For others, they feel all possibility of victory, even in the smallest feat, is impossible.  The rest of the world, those considered… “normal”… are just trudging through.

If you consider yourself part of this normal caste, then here’s a hint: pressing alt+F4 will make your computer so much faster. So would throwing your computer off the side of a ten story building.

Okay, are they gone now? Good, that makes this post so much easier.

To the winning-obsessed people: I would throw in a Charlie Sheen joke here, but that man has had so much limelight he glows in the dark. Instead, I say that, if you treat victory as your god, then when would you stop? Case in point, Josef Stalin, in order to keep his massive power, imprisoned seven million people. Adolf Hitler lit the Roman candle of war for power, for victory. The Cold War was just for “winning”. So, unless you want to be a GE CEO, put down your scepter, hang your cloak and crown, and chill.

To those who feel life is impossible, I first must ask you to earnestly stop having yourselves featured in "New Paranormal Teen Romance" novels. Twilight was bad enough (Even though the book was slightly entertaining(that topic is for another post))
I have a quote from Muhammad Ali.

“The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses - behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.”

He speaks of victory as gained before you meet the other person. Ali was such a great boxer, people were terrified of him. His fists were lethal in the ring. He used this to his advantage. “When people get in the ring and they see me, and they know they’re gonna lose, they’ve already lost half the battle”, he would say.

I walk into school and, right before going up that first painful flight of stairs, I’d tell myself, “If you tell yourself it’ll suck, it’ll suck.” I relate this to my friends, and they cling to their fatalistic guns. It might just be because I told them.

Anyway, victory shouldn’t be something avidly searched for. I also don’t believe it should be avidly avoided. Rather, Victory is meant to be a culmination of events and your effects on humanity. And, like anything that just happens, your effect will increase if you keep at it. It’ll ripple, and even a small ripple will eventually show in the whole lake. Of course, if you keep dropping bigger and bigger stones in the lake, the splash will be huge.

And there the analogy falls apart. I was going to say they the bigger the splash the better, but the 9/11 attacks were a pretty substantial splash. Somebody took a car into the lake at highway speeds, and it skipped a few times before breaking apart. On the other hand, the Golden Voice man made a substantial splash, as does every celebrity.

Now that I wasted five minutes of your time, you can go on to your substandard existence with the uncomfortable feeling that I know exactly what you’re thinking.