Today on the way driving back home, my wife and I saw two guys at the sidewalk with a really long stick. They were cleaning the drains of our neighborhood. "They are the true heroes of our city", I told my wife. "Why so?", she replied. I then explained, "Because they do things nobody else wants to do". She was not buying it and said, "They do it because they have no choice. Anybody could have do it". Make sense. But to think deeper and relate it to our conventional comic superheroes - they (the superheroes) don't have a choice too. Peter Parker's guilt over Uncle Ben's death. Bruce Wayne's sworn revenge on crime after his parents' murder. Superman and his 'strong moral compass'. Then again, one could argue that most people have a choice, whether they aware it (or chose to aware it) or not. Spiderman and Batman can always go and see a psychologist. Superman can chose to move to migrate to another planet with his family. The X-Men and their rivals can form a circus and makes a lot of money. Things like that. Bad examples aside, I think the way of defining a hero by assessing his choice option is wrong.

These people - drain cleaners, garbage collectors, policemen, firemen, doctors, nurses, etc sacrifices themselves to do these hard, painful jobs most people wouldn't want to do. Whether they have a choice or not, they are our true heroes. Simply because they do it.

Warning: This post may contains analogies and characters from Street Fighter III:3rd Strike (SF3). He is fast, accurate and disciplined. He rarely made any mistake and make sure every mistake of mine were punished. I just lost the 10th consecutive matches to him. I did had my lucky win, though seldom. One time, I miraculously hit him with my random super combo. "Weird", I thought. "He could have block that easily". After that match, he blurted... "Guessed I'm not Daigo." Bastard.

Meet takesn

Takesn is a Japanese player I met playing SF3 online. A very good and crafty one, at least according to my standards. I still remembered the first time we met. He kicked my ass. Hard. The 2nd time we met, my ass was still not spared. Though I improved from a 10% winning ratio to about 20%, it was still not a pretty sight. The 'not-so-bitter-&-sour' part of this story is I did learned a thing or two from him:

Lesson #1: Diversify to specialize

Takesn loves to play Yang. But I've seen him kicked ass using Alex, Ken, Akuma, Makoto and several others. When asked how many characters can he play, he said "all of them". How true it is for a mastery of a single subject: one has to crossover. Steve Pavlina thinks so. As quoted from his book:

What you learn in one area can often be applied to others. For example, Leonardo da Vinci, considered a genius by any reasonable standard, achieved competence across a diverse set of fields, including art, music, science, anatomy, engineering, architecture, and many others. While some would argue that such wide-ranging interests were a result of his intelligence, I think it's more likely that they were the cause of it—or at least a major contributing factor.

Lesson #2: Be with the best

"How did you become so strong?" I asked. "I play with Japanese a lot", he answered and followed with, "Japanese players are very strong". Sometimes we tend to be with the weaker group in order to exert our superiority. We forgot that in order to be the best, one has to be with the best. Surround yourself with people better than you force you out of your comfort zone and helps you become better too.

Lesson #3: Play to win

Despite my incompetency on playing, Takesn never took a pity out of me. He always, always go all out on me. He plays to win. A famous advice "fail early and fail often" seemed to catch on. Nowadays, people glorify failure, like a fighter proud of the scar on their body. They don't play to win. They play to become 'better'. But think about it, when you don't play to win, don't you lose the battle already? How on earth are you going to get better with that? Always play to win, as if it's the only way to get better. Because it always is.

Last Word

That's about it. Hope you find it useful to apply in areas of your life. If you'd like to play SF3 online too, visit this website and follow the instructions there (though, not very intuitive. I'm putting together a better guide, stay tuned). And don't forget when you come across someone nicknamed "foress" from Malaysia, show mercy. :)

'A man on a mission is a happy man.'