These past couple days, I've been doing a lot of,
not soul searching, but a lot of memory retrieving.
And I've been really looking into my childhood,
just trying to remember what my childhood was like,
because if you're like most people,
you actually don't remember it quite well.
And it's because I have a theory that
there's two different reasons.
One, we don't really tell stories that often.
Anymore in our society.
And so, and I'm talking about personal stories,
like just stories that happened in our lives
and in our childhood, we don't really tell it that much.
It's just not a norm anymore.
And then it's also probably because
ever since the Industrial Revolution,
we've been, we kinda stopped just sitting around
doing nothing, we kinda just stopped loafing around.
And I say that because now instead of just sitting down
and doing nothing and just thinking,
we sit down and do nothing, but we're occupied.
Like we're reading a book or we're watching a movie
or we're playing video games or whatever it may be,
we're still doing all these things.
And we just don't really find the time anymore
to just sit and think.
Much less sit and think about our childhood.
And so, I've been really making it like my mission
to remember a lot about my childhood lately.
And I have been talking about it a lot
over the past couple days, but one thing,
one massive lesson that I learned today was,
I always thought that I ruined my life in middle school.
And I always thought that I would have been
so much better off, so much more progress made on my life
if I didn't waste all my days playing video games.
I always thought that I ruined my life playing video games.
But then I was like trying to remember.
Like I was doing this exercise that I heard about
in the book called the Power Personal Storytime.
And it was basically, we were doing this exercise
it was basically where you take out a sheet of paper
and you write down a vertical line in the middle of the sheet
all the way up and down the paper.
And you basically write down zero at the bottom
and then your current age at the top
and then you label the left side did not do
and then the right side did do.
And sorry if I sound weird, I'm shaking
because I'm freezing and it's always cold in the basement.
But pretty much you label the graph
and then you divide the line based off
of how many years you've lived.
So for me, I'm 18.
So I basically divvy up the line by years of two.
So I say zero, two, four, six, eight, all the way to 18.
And if you're older, you might wanna do years of three
or years of five or 10, I don't know.
But pretty much I divvy it up
and then once you do that, you basically have to try
and think back to all of the most impactful crossroads
or decisions that you've made
or someone has made for you in your life.
So for example, some of the most impactful decisions
that I wrote down where I started, I got an Xbox
and then I COVID happened.
So the pandemic happened.
That was a huge impactful crossroad in my life.
But it wasn't necessarily a decision I made.
It was a decision made for me,
whether it was like one person or like the world.
Like it pretty much any crossroad,
it doesn't have to be just like a decision.
It's just like a crossroad in your life.
So I got an Xbox, COVID happened.
What else?
I started going to the gym.
I got cut from the soccer team.
I started reading books.
Like these were all huge crossroads.
But the three that I wanna focus on right now
are me playing Xbox.
Like I started getting an Xbox in fifth grade.
And then in junior years,
when I decided not to go to college,
that was another crossroad.
And then senior year, I graduated early.
So these are the three I wanna talk about.
So then once you write down all of your,
like your list of all of the crossroads,
I basically, then I go through,
like what you're supposed to do next is
you go through and ask yourself,
like you basically ponder these events.
So you ask yourself, like,
what were the circumstances that led up to this decision?
Like, do I regret it?
Do I not regret it?
What would my life be like otherwise?
Or like, what were the influences in other people's lives
to help make this decision?
Like all of these, like you basically just ponder it
and ask like, why, why not?
You like, you kind of just like get familiar with it.
And so I'm sitting there in my room
and I'm just pondering Xbox.
I'm like, why did I get the Xbox?
Like this ruined my life.
Like I could have been so much better off.
But then I just kind of let my mind drift onto,
like I just let my mind bring up like the answers.
Like why did I get the Xbox?
Well, I got the Xbox because
I had been, I had an Xbox 360.
So by the way, if you don't know,
there's an Xbox 360, which is the older one,
and then the Xbox one, which was the newer one.
And so I had an Xbox 360 and I played it,
but I only played it when my friend came over
and we would play together.
So I probably played it like once a week
or something like that.
And we didn't play it all the time when he came over.
We would just like play every once in a while.
So I had the Xbox 360.
And I knew that the Xbox one was so much better.
And I knew that I couldn't play with my friends
unless I had the Xbox one.
And a bunch of my friends had the Xbox one.
So, but not my best friend at the time.
Like my best friend had,
he didn't even have an Xbox at the time.
And so I'm just like, oh, I want the Xbox,
but I had the 360, so I don't really care
to get it that much, even though all of my other friends
had it.
But then I, like Christmas season comes around
and we're making our birthday or our Christmas list
and my friend for, he wants to get the Xbox.
So he decided to get the Xbox.
And I was like, okay, now's the time.
Now I have to get the Xbox because he was like the only person,
like he was my best friend and I'm an introvert.
So like when you have a best friend,
that's like really your only great friend is what I'm trying.
I don't know how to describe that.
It's like you're, it's like the Pareto's principle.
It's like the 80, 20.
So if your best friend is like 80% of your friends
and then the other people are just like 20%.
Maybe like significant wise, I don't know.
But pretty much my friends started,
decided to get an Xbox.
So I was like, okay, well now I got to get it
because I don't want to be left out.
And so I'm sitting there in my room,
just remembering this memory.
I realized that I had FOMO, fear of missing out.
I didn't want to miss out from like what was going on
on the Xbox.
I didn't want to miss out while my friends were playing
Xbox.
And so that's something that I realized.
I had FOMO, so then I made the decision to get an Xbox
even though it was bad for me.
I didn't know it was bad for me at the time,
but in hindsight, FOMO, and then I got the bad thing.
So fast forward, I quit Xbox, I sell it,
I delete all my accounts.
This was like last summer, so a couple months ago.
And I did stop playing Xbox like a little bit while before
that, but I didn't actually make the decision
to sell my Xbox until a little while after I quit.
So then I, so then after that,
I, going back to the graph, like the original activity
of writing down the vertical line and labeling all of your
like crossroads in your life.
So then once you do that, you, I don't know if this was
like part of the activity, but what I ended up doing
was I was like, how are these related?
Like how did this crossroad impact the rest of my life?
So I'm asking myself, how did this impact the rest
of my life?
Well, obviously it ruined my life because I would have been
so much better off, but then I realized that it's not quite
how I expected because then going back to the next
crossroad of my life, or not the next one, but like the next
one that I'm focusing on right now is I decided to not go
to college.
And so I'm thinking, how is this, how did getting an Xbox
affect me not going to college?
Well, I learned my lesson that just because I have FOMO
doesn't mean I should go into it because it's bad for you.
It could be bad for you.
I learned my lesson from Xbox, from getting Xbox.
So then I learned that lesson and then that prepared me
for my future because I had FOMO for college.
I didn't want to miss out on what people were doing
at college, but then I was like, but it's not going to be
good for me.
Like it's probably not going to be good for me.
Like I don't want to waste four years of my life working on
like a career that I'm going to have to work for someone else
for the rest of my life.
I want to focus on my own things and actually work for
myself and build my own future.
So I realized that college is probably not good for me.
So that prepared me.
And obviously I didn't realize this lesson at the time,
but me pondering, me sitting there in my room,
questioning how are these connected?
Well, it prepared me to not go to college.
And then I'm like, how did Xbox connect to me graduating
early from high school?
Well, the decision to graduate early from high school,
senior year, cut senior year short, which is probably the
most fun of the four years out of all of them,
the decision to cut the most exciting year off short
in high school to pursue my passions,
even though I may fear missing out on things.
Getting an Xbox and the lesson I learned from that
prepared me for what was to come.
It prepared me for graduating early.
And I then connected it all together because,
and I basically kind of like confirmed all of this because,
or I realized that this is actually a huge advantage.
I always thought that Xbox was terrible for me.
I always thought that I'd be so much better off
if I never played video games.
I thought that I would be so good, so progressed
in myself improvement in my life and everything,
if I never played video games.
But now I'm kind of changing my mind and I'm thinking,
well, I needed to go through that to prepare me
for what was to come because I was talking to my friend
at school like a couple months ago,
telling him that I was graduating early.
And he was like, whoa, I kind of want to do that,
but don't you worry about like missing out?
And I didn't think anything of it at the time,
but in hindsight, I was thinking,
like I was pondering that memories.
And I realized that this guy was not prepared.
He didn't have that, like he didn't go to the bottom
of the pit like I did playing video games.
So he wasn't prepared to make the decision,
the tough decision to stop going to high school.
He wasn't prepared to make that decision,
even though it may have been good for him.
So playing Xbox actually like dramatically improved my life.