I think I was the worst wrestler in the history of my high school. Like, 1-30 terrible. Over my two season-long wrestling ”career,” I lost to everyone: boys and girls alike. And I remain convinced that the unsuspecting freshman that I beat was in his first few days of learning the sport. The opening bell would sound, and before I knew it, I would find myself on my back, struggling to avoid being pinned.

Despite the constant losing and the draining weight loss regimen, I enjoyed my wrestling experience, namely for the team’s camaraderie and training. While wrestling is an individual sport, each team trains collectively, and work together closely to improve each teammate’s individual prowess. Rather than being an embarrassing footnote in my life’s story, my high school wrestling failures have proven incredibly consequential, even life-changing.

When I made the decision to accept a job in Brazil, I did so despite not having any friends in the country, let alone family. With a newfound surplus of free time, I decided to take up Brazilian Ju-Jitsu (BJJ), a grappling-based martial art that has become one of the country’s biggest cultural exports. With my wrestling failures front-of-mind, I sought to approach my ju-jitsu training from a clean slate. ju-jitsu has become an instrumental part of my life since taking up the sport, and has re-enforced many of my closely held values.

Humility

After several weeks of settling into my new position, I found a nearby BJJ gym, hopeful that the gym’s proximity would give me little excuse to avoid going. From my first class, I was introduced to an entirely foreign experience, with specific rules and customs to attend to. As a white belt, I was relegated to the back of the gym, reserved for the most junior members of the gym. Surrounded by individuals with years and decades of experience, it is hard not to feel humbled every time I enter the gym, to this day. This humility serves as the basis for much of my learning and progression – my “novice” status enables me to ask basic or “dumb” questions, actively seek out opportunities to learn and improve. This humility drives my willingness to learn, and to not miss any opportunities to get better. This means constant, near-daily training, and pangs of guilt when I do decide to take a day or two off.

Teamwork

The gym is filled with students of all levels, from minimally experienced white belts to black belts with decades of experience. Inside the gym, age, physical prowess, social standing, and one’s profession, things that serve to divide us in the “real world,” especially in a place as unequal as Brazil, go away. As a white belt at the beginning of my journey in ju-jitsu, my primary objective is to act as a sponge – to “soak up” the actions and mannerisms of those around me. Each member of the academy has something for me to learn from. As a result of my willingness to learn, I’ve developed a strong camaraderie with the men and women of the gym, who have acted as a surrogate community for me and have embraced me as the token “foreigner” of the group.

Self improvement

As the weeks progressed, I joined the ranks of my fellow students in the gym: individuals on a personal journey of self improvement, but committed to working together to elevate their own craft and the success of the gym. My initial feelings of humility have not dissipated, but are momentarily accompanied by mommentary recognitions of progress.

One of my all-time heros, Anthony Bourdain, was a humble student of BJJ, a challenge he took up at the ripe age of 58 and partially based in the inspiration of his now ex-wife, Otavia Busia-Bourdain, a dedicated BJJ practitioner and competitor (here’s an article written by Busia-Bourdain on ‘how jujtisu changed her life’).

In an interview with Charlie Rose, Bourdain explained how BJJ has reengaged a long-dormant part of his brain:

I started at 58. It’s the last thing in the world I could’ve ever imagined wanting to do or enjoying. I’ve never hung out in a gym, I’ve never really cared about those things.

I think it can best be explained by, at my age, to entirely learn a new skill is deeply satisfying. To recreate the feeling of being the lowest person on the totem pole, being in a kitchen when I was 17, knowing nothing, in a very hard world. The incremental, tiny satisfactions of being a little less awful at something, every day, it’s like that with ju-jitsu for me. I’m learning an entirely new skill, a very difficult one, a very physically demanding one, but one that I think about for the rest of the day. They call it “physical chess” because it’s something you think about […] there’s a lot of engineering involved.

Patience

Recently, I’ve reflected a bit on my aptitude for ju-jitsu, especially in comparison to my tenure as a horrible wrestler. As I’m still reminded by my training companions, ju-jitsu is oftentimes about patience – about establishing your position, thinking about your next move, and conserving your energy, versus wrestling’s rule of constant motion.

This patience extends to my training more broadly. Time and time again, through injuries (a couple of undiagnosed deeply bruised/broken ribs, fingers, and toes), humiliating defeats, and periodic moments of retention, I am pitted with the enormity of the journey ahead of me and the need to maintain this perspective throughout this lifelong journey of advancement and improvement.

In August, I received my first examination result, adorning my white belt with two stripes, signifying my (minimal) advancement. Now several months in, I’m no longer at the far, far end of the gym, replaced by younger newcomers just a few months behind me. But far from any overconfidence or feelings of deservedness, I continually remind myself that the process continues, learning is lifelong, and I have decades to go before my jujitsu journey is complete.

Over the past two weekends, I’ve devoted hours of my free time playing Myst III: Exile for the first time, after its ported re-release to modern machines by the venerable Gog.com (formerly GoodOldGames.com.)

With a bit of remove since playing Riven, a game that I had been initially introduced to as a child, I feel like I can reflect more clearly on the incredible pleasure I get from playing these games – exploring the individual levels created, working through the puzzles put forth, and immersing myself in the broader worlds created by the folks at Cyan.

Screenshots from Myst III: Exile (2001)

As a younger person, the concept of video game designer is an abstract one, most likely conceived more so as video game “player” (which now, coincidentally, is actually a real job) than designer – of worlds, levels, mechanics, and stories. What’s so incredibly pleasurable about playing games from the Cyan canon, and especially in the progression from Myst to Riven to Exile, is how much care and attention was given to the design of these games, and how much these games were created with the “player” in mind.

As I’ve come to innately learn through playing their games, the game designers expect an active and observant player (with some baseline knowledge of physics concepts). These are not games to be mindlessly played through on a couch – one must be willing to be challenged and occasionally frustrated. In exchange for these ‘asks,’ the game designers have gorgeously constructed worlds filled with areas to explore and puzzles to be solved.

Unlike Riven (and Myst before it), I’ve made a conscious effort to work my way through the game without the assistance of walkthroughs or obvious hints that would take the thinking out of my hands. As a result, I’ve gone through momentary bouts of getting stuck, and several frustration-/exhaustion-quits (the lesser known cousin of the famous “rage quit.”) However, this has also led to intense, pleasure-filled sequences as I figure things out, either while playing the game itself, or via a stray thought on a particularly thorny area passing through my head over the course of my non-gaming day.

Cyan’s puzzles are not meant to “break” you, nor are they reserved for only the most mathematically astute codebreakers. Rather, they are mostly rely on the player’s power of observation, the ability to insert oneself into the world(s) constructed by the designers to orient oneself, learn the world’s rules, and play within the confines of the game’s “sandbox.” From there, it’s mostly a question of connecting the dots between these in-game observations (I use a notebook to jot things down), with necessary patience and reflection in between.

One of the interesting byproducts of playing these games has been the exercise of thinking like a designer to try to draw logical connections, and make progress within the game. In my view, this requires the perspective of an adult – the ability to actively place yourself in the shoes of another (in this case, a grown-up game designer), to logically work backwards and make progress with the “game.” This is something that I could have never reasonably done as a pre-teen clicking through the various art panels of Myst with mouth agape. One stray thought that I’ve returned to often as an adult is the “limits” of videos games themselves, whether due to graphics, computer processing power, or the concept of a video game itself. As a younger person, these games (even the most basic MS-DOS games) felt like they had almost unlimited potential if I was good/smart/adept enough at unlocking them, able to blur the lines between the game and reality, and the possibility of deeper secrets underneath the surface of the game.

Like a director’s mise-en-scene, a novelist’s detail, or an artist’s choice of color, subject, or style, every element of the worlds being explored within the Cyan’s video games were considered by the designers, and in turn left to be interpreted by the players – why was this put here? What question is this meant to solve? In Cyan’s games, which oftentimes include minimal dialogue and no narration, rooms are strewn with tools and artifacts with no broader purpose other than to further immerse the player in these strange worlds, as well as notebooks that take you into the minds of the characters (protagonists and antagonists alike). This, combined with goregous art and immersive sound design, gives a game like Exile, released all the way back in 2001, a timeless quality, and elevates it from a mere video game into a world of art, in my mind (though it appears as if MoMA agrees).

Aside from continuing to refine game mechanics and further improve the game’s intuitive connection between player and game, the game’s principal technological leap from its predecessor (released four years prior) is the use of a panoramic, VR-like perspective to allow the player a full perspective on what’s below, above, and next to him. Today, more than 17 years since Exile’s release (and even longer since its design), the concept of VR has sought to replicate this sensation, adding a more immersive video headset and motion controllers as well as more photo-realistic graphics, but otherwise not changing the core concept in any major way.

In my mind, Cyan’s immersive worlds, and their ability to unlock the innate human pleasure of exploring and figuring things out represented the best use case for VR, in video games or otherwise. It’s no surprise that Cyan’s upcoming release, Firmament, is being designed to be played in VR, and deemed “a new VR experience” by Cyan. Interestingly, its predecessor, Obduction, was given a VR-release after its initial design, which ultimately proved ambitious but underbaked. Back to the drawing board, I have the utmost confidence that the next game will draw on the lessons learned from Obduction, and potentially be the first great VR game, As Cyan founder Rand Miller recently said in an interview regarding the transition from Obduction to Firmament:  “We definitely jumped in, and realized that this was going to work, but it also allowed us to get a nice head start on what’s coming next. It definitely seems like what we do, making these worlds, is definitely going to be amplified by VR.”

A goregous screenshot from Cyan’s latest, Obduction (2016), to be played at some point

One day, I’ll spend the money to update my machine to be able to play some of these newer games. In the meantime, I will continue to maintain that a masterpiece stands the test of time no matter when it was created, and is oftentimes more innovative and engaging than the flashier, better looking new releases. For now, good old games will have to do.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about journaling vs. blogging on this site, and how to balance between the two in a productive and beneficial way.

There’s an obvious psychological difference between words that intended for broader consumption, and those that are kept close and mostly to myself — consciously or not, there’s a certain self-censoring to one’s public-facing writings, as opposed to the more unstructured, impulsive, and emotionally honest relationship between a person and their journal.

However, I do think there’s room for both, and think that the public blog has more utility than one might expect in the journal/blog writing continuum.

When I decided to try and revive this webspace, I had two primary objectives.

The first was to hold myself accountable to the act of consistent writing – any significant length of time between posts would be readily noticeable to the curious / critical visitor, including myself.

The second objective was to do away with the fear of reprisal from broader consumption of my own thoughts and opinions: to leave little distance between my name and my writing, and to leave myself open to the public criticism, commentary, and consideration that putting your name and opinions the internet entails. In doing so, I recognize that I will occasionally be wrong, misguided, naive, or look stupid, and have to be okay with that.

As a general principle, I am a huge proponent of the importance of incremental improvement, the ability of one’s growth mindset to propel one’s learning and abilities throughout one’s life. From a personal standpoint, the skillset that is most important to me deals with the absorption of ideas, and my ability to impart my own interpretations and thoughts on these ideas coherently and cogently. Further, I believe it is crucial to learn from the responses and perspectives of others, who will only be able to respond to my thoughts with their own if I can express myself in a clear and structured fashion.

Therein lies the value of the blog – a repository for my own thoughts and a time capsule to be revisited by myself and others as I continue to learn and grow, while simultaneously a place to hone my ability to translate my thoughts into words, paragraphs, and blog posts.

Ryan Holiday recently reflected on revisiting his first book, Trust Me, I’m Lying, which he wrote and published at the age of 25:

When reviewing these pages — pages I’d hurriedly written and edited in my excitement to publish my first book — I wonder who the hell I thought I was. I’d studied and sat with the topic for how long? And here I was, printing words that could never be unprinted. I’m embarrassed by the certainty of it. As if it had never occurred to me to hedge my bets or entertain the possibility that subsequent events might prove me wrong. Why couldn’t I have said simply that this is what I thought at the time and knew to be true to the best of my ability? There’s a pervasive overdone-ness to so much of it. If there’s any proof of the ego’s insecurity, it’s there — in the fact that I have to put two sentences where one would clearly do, a big word where a simpler one would have sufficed.

Ryan continues:

And here I am now, regretting it, as I inevitably will regret parts of this article, and parts of the article I wrote last week and the one I will publish next week.

Not having had the privilege of publishing a book at 25, I can only imagine the feeling of revisiting your first book, after years and further published books that more accurately reflect how he seems himself today. However, I believe this ultimately only reflects positively on his evolution as an author, as a thinker, and as a human being. His ability to reflect on his initial writing with humility, and to have the distance and clarity to critically examining his younger self is a testament to the evolution that he’s undergone in just six short years. In my eyes, this reflects much more positively on himself and who he is today than the fact that his previous writing may have been immature, boorish, or incorrect.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book We Were Eight Years in Power is a truly fantastic collection of essays written during President Obama’s Presidency that dissect the broader context behind the President’s ascension, accomplishments, and legacy. Each essay is accompanied by an ‘up-to-date’ introduction that I found especially resonant. In these autobiographical pieces, Ta-Nehisi reflects on his year-by-year journey as a news reporter to a magazine contributor and blogger for the Atlantic to the author of Between the World and Me, his trials and tribulations from self-doubt and poverty, and his personal, professional, and intellectual evolution during Obama’s two terms.

In the book, he cites his blog, of which I was a faithful follower (but not contributor), as the place where the majority of his intellectual development and opinions were formed. During that span, he reflected on the books his was reading, openly solicited the thoughts, opinions, and supplemental reading and recommendations of his commenters and interacted with likeminded (and some non-likeminded individuals) on subjects that became the basis of some of his most lauded pieces. As he humbly recounts, it was those oftentimes anonymous contributors, as well as his desire to return to his blog day-after-day, week-after-week, that formed the basis of much of his later success as an author, thinker, and public intellectual.

One day, I hope to be able to revisit this blog with the same type of embarrassment and humility that Ryan and Ta-Nehisi see their earlier writings and blogs, and look towards this (and the internet in general) as a place where I was able to learn, grow, and develop. Until then, the onus is on me to continue to read and think, as well as compose my conclusions for all to see, consume, and criticize here on this site.