Editing your Perceptions of Yourself

This may be dangerously close to Brian's post, but I guess we had the same wavelengths going on this week.

I used to think that I totally sucked at everything. If I wasn't perfect the first time, I as a person just wasn't any good. When I was little and I colored outside of a line in a coloring book, I would throw the whole coloring book away. I would Hulk rip it in half. Which is quite an achievement for a 4 year old, now that I think about it.

Now that I'm older, I find that I'm really good at a lot of things that I never would have imagined. It all comes down to editing your perceptions of yourself and just not caring what anyone else thinks. Ultimately that's what it comes down to. Don't doubt yourself before you've even tried something because we're all just empty vessels, if you really think about it. The only thing holding half of us back is perceptions and negativity.

A) High Interval Training -- I never ever thought of myself as athletic, and no one else ever did, so I never tried. Then one week I started jumping rope and I lost 10 lbs in 1.5 weeks. I didn't put much thought into it until I tried it again. Now I've been doing high intervals every day for the last month and I love it! My favorites are any of the Jillian Michaels' workouts (particularly the 30 Day ones), P90X Plyos and any of the Shaun T Insanity workouts (which are very hard, by the way). Jumping rope is still fun, too. I actually enjoy doing high intervals and they can take down the average athletic person. Now I don't particularly care what others think of me because I'm doing something healthy that I enjoy doing. And I lost weight.

B) Twitter -- Sometimes with Twitter I'm really on with it. If I don't have anything witty to say about a current event I usually just avoid it all together because I think Facebook is the place for status updates. I'm not really that bad at Twitter. I hated Twitter; I had a Twitter account for 2 years before we were forced to use it in school. If we hadn't have been forced to do it, I would have never found out that I'm semi-witty.

C) Baking -- One of the first things I ever baked was zucchini chocolate cake, and it won first prize in the fair 3 years in a row. It even went up against my sister's identical cake. I love baking much more than cooking, even though I love that too. I make pönnukökurs quite often, which are Icelandic pancakes rolled up with brown sugar. Sometimes I make vinarterta, which is an Icelandic cake made of sugar cookie layers filled with prunes (it sounds kinda gross but it's like a big Fig Newton, and everyone likes Fig Newtons). Apparently no one has the patience to make them so you can sell them at Christmas time. I mean I also make pies and bread and doughnuts and cupcakes, etc etc, but the funny thing is that I don't like sugar so I never eat my own baking except to taste it.

D) Video Games -- I think I started playing video games when I was 4. First game I ever played was Super Mario (pretty obvious) but then I graduated into Battletoads, probably one of the most challenging games on the NES. My grandma bought me a Playstation for Christmas (coolest Grandma ever) and I played that a lot. I saved up my money from my first ever job to buy a PS2, and I played that a lot. Then it was onto the PS3. And between all that was computer games. I think I made a Sim City with 1 million people once, which was a challenge. I don't have time to play video games very often anymore, but I beat LA Noire twice and Portal 2 so I guess I have enough time lately.

See? Even I'm good at some things. There are things I want to try but I'm not scared to even try them because I'm not afraid to try things anymore. Anyone can be good at anything if they just edit out other people's perceptions and projections and just work at it. So what is everyone secretly good at, come on, share.

P.S. Sarcasm isn't a talent.