Lesson 3: Play Your Cards Right

Right off the bat, I knew I couldn’t get the 5.0 GPA I was aiming for in 10^th Grade. Apparently in my circumstance, an “A” and Pre-AP Chemistry did not coexist in the same universe. School was…well, repetitive. At this point in my life, I’ve never really aspired to be anything. To me, everything followed a cyclical trend:

1. Wake up
2. Hit Snooze button
3. Wake up again
4. Breakfast
5. Go to school
6. Lunch
7. Finish school
8. Walk home
9. Do homework
10. Dinner
11. Do more homework
12. Sneak in Counter-Strike time with a twitchy hand on Alt and Tab
13. Shower
14. Sleep
15. Rinse and Repeat

(Somewhere along the line there was SAT/PSAT preparation too)

Anyways, this cycle continued all the way till the end of my Junior year. Almost two years of autonomous nonsense.

Actually, to be honest, I wanted to be a Professional Counter-Strike player…there I said it. I had some crazy mad headshotting skill back then!

Now I’m about to go into a pretty embarrassing portion of my life. I’m pretty sure that I’ll regret this in the future, but it’s one of those mistakes imperfect people, like myself, make.

There once was a great evil that would deplete all the money I’ve saved up as a child. It is a force to be reckoned with. An addiction. A drug. It also doesn’t help when a card store is just down the street…

That’s right. Yu-Gi-Oh! Cards!

I remember on one occasion, this kid wanted to take a look at my cards during lunch. Being the naïve person that I was, I let him hold my silver card-protected deck in all its glory. He suddenly started walking away with my cards. I frantically rushed after him as he headed up three flights of stairs. Next thing I know, we were together in the restroom. The kid was holding my cards hostage over the toilet, and I finally figured out punk kids existed. I was staring right at one. At this point, I believe my mouth was set to repeat, saying “Please don’t” a million times. Luckily, my negotiation skills weren’t too terrible (especially while on my knees while being slightly annoying) that I came out of that situation without any of my precious babies falling to their watery doom.

Trading cards are probably the worst possible investment anyone could every make. Yet, I fell for it. I don’t remember whether it was the emotion when flipping a “trap card” or scoring an ultra-rare “Blue-Eyes Toon Dragon” card from a booster pack. But whatever it was, it was fueling my addiction, and stole all my birthday money. So much for startup capital…

I could’ve used that money to buy a video card, and improve my CS skill, setting me on the path to become a professional gamer. Or…

I could’ve used that money to pick up a book, perhaps the book was Rich Dad Poor Dad, setting me on the path of an entrepreneur much earlier in my life. Or…

I could’ve dated a girl, lose all my money from our dates, setting me on the path to not date women for a very long time…since they usually have very low ROIs.

Life tends to give you a special hand of cards, it’s up to you to play them right.

So I was flying through life playing the wrong cards…literally. What was my solution to the problem? Will I ever get back on the right track? Will the Yu-Gi-Oh! Cards meet their watery doom? To be continued in the next lesson…

Goals at the time: Flush? Y/N

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Lesson 2: From Puppy to Cardinal

I was looking though my 8th grade middle school yearbook the other day and I just realized how much people change in just a mere five years. I’m looking though all the autographs and all I could make out were phrases like “Stay Hot!” “Stop dating 6th graders.” “AzN PiMp!” “Got Rice?” “Let’s play CS.” “Cya at BHS.” 512Mb of RDRAM also happened to be beast back then. “Bloody Child” decided to take up a whole page for her autograph, and my Algebra I teacher was kind enough to say that I will rule the world. So all in all, at that time I was a hot azn cs player 6th grader pimp who was destined to rule the world, but first had to go to BHS. So I did just that…

Bellaire High School certainly was different than Lanier. First of all, no more “Purple and Red” days or block schedule, this means no more putting off homework for a day. Homework was due the next day after class. I thought I was going to die. There wasn’t a strict dress code either, so now I had to decide what to wear each morning! There were no curly fries in the cafeteria, it was a long walk home each day in the blistering humid Houston heat, and sodas were five cents more. I was obviously not looking forward to my high school days.

During my freshman year, most of my classes happened to be Pre-AP/IB classes, which meant that I was “gifted,” and wanted to hang out with Asians more often. Classes like Biology didn’t make any sense to me, other than sperm having glucose as an artificial sweetener. Geometry made me dislike math to this day, even when I enjoyed Algebra I. My English teacher couldn’t put up with me being tardy all the time. I think the only class I enjoyed was office aid, because I learned how to use a stapler. I rarely participated in school clubs, so I guess one could say I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the whole idea of school.

Goals at the time: 5.0GPA and don’t get beat up in school. Perfect the AWP in Counter-Strike.

But I knew one year later, I would be laughing at all the incoming freshmen. So learn to hate your freshman year, but embrace the rest of your time. Just remember we were all freshmen at some point in our lives.

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Lesson 1: So I begin…

I can’t say I remember much of my childhood. It all seems like a blur as time flies by. So I’ll try to wrap up the adolescent years of my life in a few paragraphs.

You know how it is, you come into a world that is so massive, yet you are so small. You never know what role you play on this beautiful earth, all you know is that Antarctica is going away because Al Gore said so (whether you believe that or not). Yet, I believe that I am a child of God. He has placed me on this earth to fulfill a specific purpose – A purpose that may take decades to unravel, or hit me in a moment of clarity.

Now, most people usually don’t start entrepreneuring at the tender age of two to three, but according to my parents, I worked 40 hours a week including overtime at my job in the cradle, which happened to be crying. Not satisfied with my job, I worked harder till I finally got promoted to diaper destroyer. See? I honestly don’t remember too much of those days, other than I had loving parents who took good care of me through the calm and the storm.

Goals at the time: Finding the perfect escape route out of the cradle.

During the elementary school years, it was Pokémon and Pokémon cards. That’s all I remember. Well, aside from playing Solitaire and Math Blaster Episode I: In Search of Spot on Windows 3.1. River Oaks Elementary also had a cool “Nature Garden” that I helped develop. Did you know that Amazon.com CEO and founder, Jeff Bezos, is ROE alumni? How awesome is that?

Goals at the time: Catching all 150 Pokémon.

Middle school was a bit different, since games became more advanced with the advent of Windows 95/98/2000. Starcraft, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and Counter-Strike all took center stage. I actually built my first computer in the 8^th grade. A classmate of mine said it couldn’t be done. You should see the look on his face when I pulled out the receipts and started preaching in pure technobabble. For those fellow nerds out there who want to know the specs:

• AMD 1.4Ghz Thunderbird 266Mhz FSB
• Generic 512Mb of pc133 SDR RAM
• ECS K7S5A Motherboard (had to go through 4 revisions to get a stable board!)
• VisionTek Xtasy nVidia Geforce 3 Ti 200

Goals at the time: Get the highest 3Dmark01 score.

During my middle school years, I also came to painful realization that there are girls on this planet as well. If I had to make a chronological list of my encounters with girls, it would look like this:

1. Dan goes after girl 1.
2. Girl 2 goes after Dan.
3. Dan gets girl 1.
4. Dan loses girl 1 next day.
5. Dan is immature and loses both girls.

I just realized that my laundry still needs to be folded, so I need to get right on that. But the lesson here is simple. During your adolescent years, you just take it easy, and find what you love to do. That love will soon manifest itself, and begin to shape you into the person you were destined to be. For me it was my addiction to computers, how about you?

Also guys… don’t start thinking that you need women in your lives, your bank account will appreciate it. Plus, there’s always plenty of fish. I leave it to the man upstairs to be my “net.”

The next several lessons will be slower paced as I am heading into high school, where I learned a lot of lessons.

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Sorry guys and gals, I’ve been extremely busy with school work. I have an extremely fun calculus assignment due later today, so I figured it might be a good idea to get started on it.

Be on the look out after Friday, for I will be posting my “Lessons.” These “Lessons” are not confined to any one topic. In fact, they are a brief summary of some of my life altering choices that have shaped me into who I am today. So be sure to check back!

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