i am glod

Success

Every night before you go to bed, you really should be asking yourself one question and one question only. Why can’t we all be more like Charlie Sheen? And I’m not talking about the drug addict maniac part. I’m talking about his attitude towards the world. Charlie Sheen knows that he’s successful, he knows that whatever he’s going to do, he’s gonna succeed, he knows that nobody can stop him, and he thinks that he is the best. No matter what type of obstacles you try to put in his way, no matter how many haters diss him all day on the television, on twitter or whatever, he just keeps plowing ahead and it does not affect him at all. Honestly, even if you don’t like Charlie Sheen for any of his other attributes, that is something you can admire. And one thing, I’ve watched just about every Charlie Sheen interview and aside from just his killer comebacks and the fact that he always says something hilarious whenever he opens his mouth, he said something that really provoked some thought in me and that was basically when he was talking about how he quit drugs, just by thinking about it, just by stopping with his mind. He said he cured himself with his mind, that he just did it, and he said that can’t is the cancer of happen, or happening, and I’ve discovered that that is so true. Can’t is the cancer of America, I think. So instead of looking at Charlie Sheen as some sort of bottom feeder, someone that we teach our kids to not become, we should actually teach our kids to look up to Charlie Sheen-maybe not Charlie Sheen himself, maybe like a better version of him, like me for example. Just kidding. I’m only like two feet tall so kids can’t even technically look up to me, they would have to look- it doesn’t really matter. My point is that in the United States a lot of people raise their kids as if they want them to grow up to become losers, to be completely honest. I’m sure a lot of you guys have heard that some sports leagues in the United States for kids don’t even have a winner or a loser, they just play the game and they’re all participants, everyone is a winner. There’s really no competition in our schools until maybe you get to the junior year of high school where there’s some competition. My friend, having gone to school in China, said there was probably more competition in first grade than there was in his senior year of high school. And for some reason people think that’s a good thing. They think that our children are so safe and protected from having to feel like a loser or failing at things that once they get to real life you’ll immediately succeed at everything because they never failed in their lives. Makes perfect sense doesn’t it? Personally, I’m just going off on a tangent here but I think it’s parents being selfish. They just like to see their kids be happy. They don’t even care about their childrens’ futures. They only care about themselves, so they let them be happy. But you know what? Children shouldn’t always be happy, children should fail! They should cry! They should have scars and bruises and punches to the face and people shouting right up in their ears that they’re losers, that they’re absolute failures, people throwing them on the ground, kicking them, throwing salt in the wound and then releasing the dogs! Ok… that may have been a bit of an exaggeration, but there are some kids that grow up and until they get to the age of sixteen, when they get rejected by a girl, they never have like a real failure in their lives. Throughout the first you know, however, fifteen, sixteen years of their lives, they have never matured in that respect. They’re just as hurt by failure as a teenager as they were when they were little kids. And these are the type of people that we are going to send out to the real world to fend for themselves? But what these people don’t realize is that when a little kid has never failed, he has never truly succeeded either because the only way to truly succeed is by working hard, learning from your failures, and finally, accomplishing a goal that you have been working very hard and very long to get to. My point is, when parents who are protecting their children from failures, they’re also keeping them from success. And when a kid has never really experienced success and how good it feels to finally have defeated the obstacles to come back from failures, they’re never gonna know how good it feels and when they hit real life, they’re never going to try to reach it. Meanwhile, if you put a kid in a situation where he has to work hard to achieve his goals for example, putting him in a real little league baseball season, where he’s gonna have to practice and work hard with his team to not only lose games but also win some and enjoy the satisfaction and the knowledge building of both, that kid will be way better off than some loser kid who plays in a league where they don’t even keep score and everyone is a winner. In fact, I’m not sure if everyone of you has read this article, but it was all over the place a little while ago, this Chinese mother wrote a book called Tiger Mom about her chronicles as an intensely aggressive Chinese mother, where she pushed her two daughters in great heights in music as well as academics and she talked about one time when she was teaching her younger daughter to play piano, this one very tough rhythm that her daughter couldn’t get over and over again and she was ready to give up, but the mother just kept making her do it. She just sat her down in front of the piano for hours, just continuously trying the same rhythm, the daughter could not get it right, but the mother like wouldn’t let her eat, wouldn’t let her do anything else until she did it, and of course the daughter pouted, she cried, she was very upset, and it was turning into an almost painful experience, but the mother stayed at it, she didn’t give up, she didn’t say that after the first time the daughter failed ‘ok you’re still a winner, let’s go do something else’, she kept at it. And you know what? Finally the daughter did it. She played the rhythm correctly and she was overwhelmingly happy. She had worked for hours to try to get it right and she finally succeeded. Do you think she really cared that she failed like hundreds of times before? No! Her failures compounded with her victory made her even happier than if she had just succeeded at the first try, and I think that is one of the greatest things that you can do as a parent, to push your children, to make them learn what it’s like to succeed. Now I’ve talked about academics, sports, and music, but your success does not have to come in any of those categories. You can teach yourself to win in anything and it will contribute to every other aspect of your life, once you have succeeded at something. For example, my friend, as a little kid was not very good at sports, however he did win an event at the 5^th grade track meet among at least a thousand kids. That was the standing long jump. So, he just wanted to assure you guys that he had very powerful thighs as well as gluteus maximus. But aside from that, upon till like 8^th grade he had no major athletic achievements. But that’s’ ok, you don’t have to be successful in every category; I didn’t say you have to succeed at everything; you just really have to succeed at one thing. But if you can teach yourself how to succeed at one thing, for me it was soccer as well as music. I was pretty good at those things and having worked hard in those things, I practiced many soccer moves, I went to many competitive tournaments and developed into a good player, but I also lost many games along the way, and the same with music. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve hit the wrong note when playing my instrument. It was very painful. But on the other hand, after many years of hard work, I’ve been able to make first team all league as well as play the guitar quite fluidly. So having succeeded at those things, now whenever I face a challenge, I’m confident in myself. I know I have what it takes to be able to be good. And I’m sure some of you might think ‘wow! That’s so arrogant! How dare you have confidence! How dare this kid believe in himself!’ And that’s the cancer of America. Everyone should learn to have arrogance, if you can even call it that. Everyone should learn to have confidence, that’s why no one should hate Charlie Sheen unless you dislike him for being a drug addict, which I can see. But the rest on him, there’s nothing to hate. He should be admired. So, I encourage all you guys out there who have never really tried anything in your lives because you were to afraid to fail, to really do it, to really put some effort into it and really try to set some goals for yourself, and even if you fail, you will have learned something. And that is a success in itself.