EPTRemember this?
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/380900-its-time-to-say-goodbye
Maybe you don't. Maybe the few people who will actually read this blog doesn't have a clue who I am. It doesn't really matter, I haven't spoken nor written any English in years. And I need somewhere to vent my thoughts.
So in November 2012 I announced my retirement from professional gaming through my own personal blog. After that I've been quiet. For a long time now I've been wanting to do a sequel to my previous entry. It was not until recently however, say the past year or so, that I've truly come to realize how important and valuable the lessons that pro-gaming taught me really were. After coming to that realization, I know feel that I finally feel that I have something worth sharing to the community after such a long hiatus, so here I am.
September 2012 - August 2013
Leaving pro gaming behind and with the vow to "pwn" school I set off on my new goals immediately. At the time, it felt really important to me that I graduated from Law school within the time frame that I set from the beginning, meaning January 2014. Part of that was because it would make up for lost time, the break I had from university to pursue pro gaming, but a lot of it was also that I felt a very strong urge to finish school with the same people I started out with. Most of my friends at the time were classmates who I had shared pretty much everything with since September 2009, seeing them graduate while I still had a year to go just wasn't an option.
To make this goal become reality, it meant that I had to study at a pace equal to 200 % for 6 months. I had one semester to catch up on. It's funny how when you are truly motivated and have a goal to aim towards, most obstacles can be overcome. Truth be told I can't say that I look back on that period thinking "Jaaaysus what a stressful and shitty period that was". I can't even recall that I ever felt stressed out or pressured. All I know is that I got it done, and I got it done properly meaning I finished both semesters at the same time with top grades (Top grade is achieving 85-100% test scores on each individual exam).
All in all when I started out in September my grades were already below average. I had 5 semesters behind me with 55-65% test scores. Bare minimum. During the period September 2012 - June 2013 I managed to finish not two but three semester with top grades. Meaning at the end of June 2013 I had still stayed true to the goal I set out. Leaving me with one more semester (fall of 2013) til I graduated which meant writing my thesis. I'll brag about it endlessly, because to me it validated something that I've always felt when it comes to my studies.The feeling that if I just let go of something that taxes my time so heavily like pro-gaming, finishing law school with top grades is not going to be something that is impossible. Quite the opposite actually, once I left pro gaming I suddenly found myself left with so much free time (even when increasing my studies from like 1-5 hours per week til 20-30 hours per week) that I was unsure about what to do with it. Studying is actually a fucking breeze compared to working 8-12 hours a day.
That speaks two things;
1. Focusing at one difficult task at a time will often yield better results.
2. Pro gaming requires a SHIT TON of time investment.
Something else also hit me brutally during this period of time. I'd always been chubby/fat but never really obese. But pro gaming had taken its toll, my priorities had been all messed up. I'd spend 8-12 hours a day sitting down playing games yet not one minute was spent actually taking care of myself and my body. Meaning I ate shitty and never exercised. Hell before 2013, the last time I did something that made me break a sweat was back in 2006 when I still did sports.
The realization came on December the 24th of 2012. Christmas eve. I remember getting out of bed and feeling unusually chubby. So by instinct I went to the bathroom and stood on the scale; I weighed in at 208 pounds, or 94 kg. Now bare in mind I'm 1.76 cm or 5'8-5'9 tall, resulting in a BMI of roughly 30 (bad).
Someway somehow that made me think enough is enough and yet another goal was set;
I'm going to lose weight, not just a few pounds or kilos, no, I'm going to lose a shit ton of weight and in the end i'm going to look at myself in the mirror and be proud and comfortable with what I see.
I'm not sure how many of you can relate, but looking at yourself rocking only underwear in a mirror and be satisfied with what you see takes a lot from a person, it requires high self esteem. Now I'm going to put in something here before I move on. I'm NOT saying everyone needs to be fit as fuck to be happy with who they are and how they look. I'm saying I NEED to be fit to maintain a high self esteem and to be happy with who I am. Fuck everything related to a norm. The norm right now is skinny and fit, but if you feel miserable trying to achieve that. Then don't. I could probably analyze why I feel the need to be "fit" to be happy and come to the conclusion that it's society and its norms pushing that onto me but honestly, why bother, as long as I feel good and it makes me happy I'll just leave it at that.
All in all at the time of January 2013 I had two goals set that would manage to keep me busy enough to avoid being restless. In retrospect exercise, lifting weights and running especially, is probably my substitute for what pro gaming gave me. It has also made me think a lot about why I loved pro gaming, or gaming overall, in the first place.
Lifting weights at the gym or running unlocks everything that made me love pro gaming. I can set goals and track my progress. I can put up results, I get that wonderful sensation of self improvement that pro gaming once gave me. I cannot really explain it better than there's something really special in setting a goal, working hard towards your goal, and in the end reap the benefits of it. Being able to track your progress a long the way also helps you to keep the motivation up to push further. Before I was tracking progress by measuring what rank I was and in what division at the ladder, how I performed at tournaments and what opponents I beat. How fast I was going when I was playing, how I kept my money low and how crisp I could execute my build order. I would constantly try and refine all these elements through practice, mostly through analyzing and learning by my mistakes from each separate game that I played.
I just switched that out to tracking progress by see how much I could improve my time when I went for a run, or how much more I could lift or how many more repetitions I could do. I challenged myself to refine the way I worked out, I started reading up on nutrition to optimize my intake of food depending on what goal I was aiming towards. I started learning different lifting techniques and new exercises that would optimize how many muscles I could work in one single exercise (deadlifts, benchpress, squats in particular). And then I just put what pro gaming had taught me to use, trial and error. If I set a goal to lose weight and nothing was happening, I went back, analyzed what could be wrong (am I eating too much, am I eating too little, what heart rate am I going at, am I maximizing the amount of fat I burn or am I burning muscles?) and then I tried something else, until I found a solution that worked.
Eventually at the time of somewhere around the middle of February 2013 I had found a concept that I believed to be right. I'm not going to go deeper into that right now, it might however be included in the future. What's important is this; at the end of June 2013 I had lost 52 pounds or 24 kilos and weighed in at ~140 pounds or 70 kilos.
See the results for yourself
merz 2011-2012
+ Show Spoiler +
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/RfCSXnO.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Z3IOtJ5.jpg)
merz 2013
+ Show Spoiler +
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/zLxSDg2.jpg)
To be fair. The picture of 2013 is taken in December and I weighed in at around 132 pounds or 66 kilos there which meant I had pretty much pushed myself to the limit of how much weight I could lose. But the difference is minor. However my goal after the picture from 2013 shifted from weight loss to muscle increase, which essentially translates into gaining weight. Not just all of it in fat this time. But more of that later.
All in all though, when summer hit in 2013 I was in a better place than I had ever been before. I was posting great results in school, I was in a state where I constantly exercised and ate healthy, and overall I had a new found high self esteem and actually felt good about myself and who I was.
Looking at the whole situation in retrospect. I have pro gaming to thank for a lot of it. Pro gaming taught me the discipline to work hard in order to achieve my goals. Pro gaming taught me the importance of trial and error. Pro gaming taught me that mistakes, losing, failing, are NOT to be considered as wasted time and/or effort, they are opportunities to learn and improve yourself even more.
And it's just that, as simple as it sounds, yet harder to perform. My key to every little success I had during 2012-2013 can be attributed to making mistakes. Somewhere along the line around 2009-2012 I conquered the fear of losing, the fear of failure, the fear of making a fool out of myself and realized the true value of failing and then picking yourself back up.
If you truly allow yourself to make mistakes you will excel compared to the people who live in fear of doing so. They will re-check and re-assure every little god damn decision they make in life and it'll make them progress at such a slow rate. By the time they've made their one perfectly well informed decision you've already made 2 bad decisions which were followed by 10 really good ones because you learned from the 2 bad ones and put that knowledge to use. The key here is just taking each opportunity to learn from every single mistake you make and don't be afraid of making them. And then re-do it, and do it right the next time to make sure not to fail again. You will still fail, but in other ways, and you'll learn from those mistakes too; You could say i'm currently failing my way through life in order to achieve success.
Now what the period 2013-2014 held for me was the challenge of writing a thesis to actually graduate and then (hopefully) being able to get a job as a lawyer. Like always, life is a bitch and it cannot always be smooth. Apart from the year 2012, which still is the worst year I've had to live through in my entire life, I had a similar crisis occur to me during 2014-2015, just not a financial one this time.
To be continued...
I remember you. Your writing style reminds me of ClouD a little. Looking forward to the next installment.
