In this trying period, I am learning to grapple with failure, and struggling to understand what it really means to work hard and not give up. I wish I had tried more and failed more as a child (and not stayed so safe), so that I'm not such an amateur at this. It's a silly thing to always want to do well, and not try at something challenging enough that you fail. Try at something impossible or at least more difficult, so that you fail, and then life will scare you less. (When I have a kid some day, this is going into his or her syllabus.) Because you fail... and then so what? Life goes on, damn it. And the learning continues.
Besides, just picking yourself up after you fall is an act of jihad.
"Any art or skill is possessed by those who have formed the habit of operating according to its rules. In fact, the artist or craftsman in any field differs thus from those who lack his skill. He has a habit they lack. You know what I mean by habit here. I do not mean drug addition. Your skill in playing golf or tennis, your technique in driving a car or cooking soup, is a habit. You acquired it by performing the acts which constitute the whole operation.
There is no other way of forming a habit of operation than by operating. That is what it means to say one learns to do by doing. The difference between your activity before and after you have formed a habit is a difference in facility and readiness. You can do the same thing much better than when you started. That is what it meants to say practice makes perfect. What you do very imperfectly at first you gradually come to do with the kind of almost automatic perfection that an instinctive performance has. You do something as if you were to the manner born, as if the activity were as natural to you as walking or eating. That is what it means to say that habit is the second nature.
One thing is clear. Knowing the rules of an art is not the same as having the habit. When we speak of a man as skilled in any way, we do not mean that he knows the rules of doing something, but that he possesses the habit of doing it. Of course, it is true that knowing the rules, more or less explicitly, is a condition of getting the skill. You cannot follow rules you do not know. Nor can you acquire an atristic habit—any craft or skill— without following rules. The art as something which can be taught consists of rules to be followed in operation. The art as something which can be learned and possessed consists of the habit which results from operating according to the rules."
-- How To Read A Book, by Adler Mortimer
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On other fun things, I have completed Fated To Love You, the korean drama -- and it was overall very lovely and I'm contemplating getting it for my Mum to watch. More importantly, this drama introduced me to the famous and much-loved Jang Hyuk, and now I'm finally compelled to look up his popular historical drama Chuno, which has been raved about numerously before but I just never got around to it.
Anyway, this guy -- ah! The quintessential opposite of the pretty flower boys so famous in Kpop culture today; so manly and guy and rugged good looks, even in a character as nutty as his was in this rom-com. I am not surprised Running Man's Jong Kook and him are best buds -- I imagine them hanging out at the juice bar after working out at the gym or mountain climbing every weekend. HAHA. So crazy fit and that hero-physique --- hello, I am anticipating him as this famous Chuno hero character -- because you know hero archetypes and historical fiction is my real genre, hehe.
Until then, Fated To Love You, thank you for a lovely time and for making me temporarily believe in fairytales again.
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