If you lift weights once, are you strong enough to lift a car immediately afterwards? No, of course not. What about the second time? Still no. But if you keep lifting, if you consistently put in effort, one day you will be able to, a day will come where you'll just find that you're as strong as an ox.
The same goes for happiness…
We all have hidden talents. We all possess abilities that others wouldn’t expect of us. Nobody is ever going to know everything we can do or know everything that we are. As such, there are times when people don’t expect much from us. It’s not malicious or nasty, they just don’t know. Yes, there are certain people you meet who will look down on you and that can be incredibly irksome. The idea of a person thinking less of you than you are may sound like it is a bad thing but I think that often it can be a good thing, you can use it to your advantage.
Whenever I want to accomplish something in life or when I want something to happen, I find it incredibly irksome if someone says "it's not meant to be just yet" or "it will happen at the right time". Recently I realized a reason I find hearing this particularly frustrating: because annoyingly... it's right.
Waiting is hard, isn't it? It's like the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song goes, "The waiting is the hardest part." When there's something you really, really want, having to wait for it can be tough and the longer you have to wait for it, the tougher it can be. I have been interested in writing a blog post about waiting for a while, yet in a weird way, I have kind of waited to write this blog post. Nevertheless, I have been thinking a lot about waiting recently. For a start, I think there are different types of waiting.
There's something that I personally feel is incredibly important and try to hold onto in life, a motto I'll occasionally remind myself: never lose your ability to be grateful.
There is an important distinction that I personally like to make between being DEPRESSED and having DEPRESSION.
Due to its many ways of being undetectable, depression is a funny topic for people to understand and thus it makes it even harder for them to talk about. A disease that makes you think irrationally sounds irrational to a rational person. A lot of people just don't really even comprehend what it is, how severe their problems are or even recognise that they (or someone else) have even got it.
All this naturally led to me thinking up this distinction. It is my personal way of understanding it all, both for myself and for others.
Deciding whether or not to go to university, can be one of the biggest decisions you ever make. With university fees increasing (in the UK), it's more important than ever to know beforehand whether going will be worth it.
I am a person who on the surface, looked like a great university candidate – I was an academic, hard-working kid who liked Maths. However, my time at university was quite disastrous and – despite getting a good degree in a good subject – it set me back very far. Maybe I wouldn't have gone on to accomplish all that I have done or be the young man I am today without the hardship, it's hard to tell. Nevertheless, I have very mixed feelings about whether my university experience was ultimately a liability or an asset.
It is my wish that young students going to university not only feel that they are making the right choice but also that they are proved absolutely correct throughout the rest of their lives with no regrets.
After an update to Super Mario Maker in November 2015, there is now a Hard version of the mini-game Gnat Attack. This mode is incredibly difficult but those who manage to beat it will earn Mystery Mushroom Costume 101: Fighter Fly. In fact, it is so tough that not many people seem to have beaten it. As such, I couldn't really find any guides online or many videos of people doing it. After beating the game myself, I wanted to share what I felt helped me and hopefully it will help some of you out there too.
I really love Super Mario Maker for the Wii U and have had tremendous fun creating courses. However, I have even more fun when I am playing everyone else’s levels. As such, I have played over 1000 courses and beaten Expert and Super Expert Mode over 50 combined times, including a number of levels with incredibly low completion rates (less than 1%). There are lots of fun levels out there but on these modes, you will see the most difficult courses – either using clever ideas or just plain old poor design. Here are the top 10 things that have worked for me to hopefully help you beat this mode:
It's amazing how life changes in so many ways and what in your life makes you evaluate that change. What has made me take a look back... has been the Pokémon animé. That's as geektacular as this post gets I promise, as over the last 9 months I have had quite a large and wonderful wave of nostalgia thanks to this cartoon.
I have been thinking a lot about luck lately. It seems to be popping up everywhere in my life in the past few weeks. What is it? How does it exist? Who is lucky?
There is so much beauty in this world and yet we only pay attention to a fraction of it. Every once in a while I remember this and start trying to take the time to really focus on everything around me, the wealth of wonder out there.