The LifeMaven

If you are under enormous peer pressure to do the wrong thing, and are away from your regular support network, will you have the strength of will to still do the right thing? Or do you cave to the pressure?

I know that me personally, I believe I wouldn’t cave. But I have yet to actually be in that situation.

Is it because I don’t put myself there or is it because of pure chance and meeting good people instead?

Again, I believe its because I don’t put myself into situations like that.

It is our own responsibility to not put ourselves in situations where we won’t have the same willpower that we normally do. It is our personal responsiblity not to put ourselves in bad situations. Not to make bad choices and decisions in the first place.

Of course, this is all very easy to say in hindsight. But what if we don’t know how the situation will play out?

In that case, its important to weight the risks and the rewards of the two decisions. What do I have to lose and what do I have to gain? And in any form of gambling, you don’t play with more than you can afford to lose.

For some people, this is quite obvious. They have such a strong sense of ethics and sound judgment that they would never give in to pressure and temptation.

For others though, if the rewards are great enough and the risks low enough, they willl cave to the pressure. They will be unethical and give in to temptation.

I’ve gained a strong sense of ethics, mostly from my parents and several very embarrassing downfalls in my past.

And therein lies the trick. Some people can be taught ethics and good judgment simply by telling them about others’ mistakes. Others actually need to experience the pain, punishment and embarrassment of actually making a poor decision for themselves.

If you’re a parent, a mentor, or older sibling to someone, how do you teach them this lesson? How do you grow a strong personality, a strong sense of ethics and sound judgment?

Thinking about the idea of outliers, can you be successful if you are missing key opportunities?

I believe you can, but the road is very difficult and it would take a great deal of willpower, heart, and passion to do so.

For example, say you want to be a football coach. (A recent dream of mine). If you live in a big city without high school football, haven’t played a real down of football, and don’t know any other football coaches, how are you going to succeed?

The answer is that you have to really get out of your comfort zone and think outside the box. Maybe you write some letters to the closest (geographically) football teams. You buy your own football films and run an analysis of them and include them with your letters to show what you can do.

The trick though, is that you have to be a lot more passionate about it than most other folks who get into coaching. You can’t just sit back and expect to get there, you really have to go out there and seize it and make it happen, because you weren’t given the same opportunities.

So if you want to become as successful as an outlier without the same opportunities, you have to have an extraordinary passion for your field for you to reach the same levels of success.

Your mind is a muscle, not much different from your biceps or your deltoids. The more you use it, the stronger it gets and the easier some tasks become.

Blogging is an excellent example of both the means and the end for your mind. The more you blog and write stuff for your blog, the better you’ll get at it. When your writing improves, your blog improves and hopefully, your loyal readership as well.

The key is making it a habit. Just doing a little bit of writing everyday. Even if you don’t ever intend to post any of it, just write for the sake of writing. The practice will pay off as your mind gets stronger and you develop your creative skills.

At least, that’s how I see it/am trying to do it.
PS: All the credit for this philosophy should go to Sonia Simone. She’s the one I learned it from, not sure where exactly, but she does keep the blog Remarkable Communication and I’m a big fan of her work in general.

I’m not sure how many folks know this, but I’ve been playing around with it for the last day and I’ve learned a lot.

After every online multiplayer match, you get the menu screen with: Player Feedback, Quit Game, Stats, etc. The one that will really help improve your game is Highlights.

From highlights you can review any play from the game by selecting it and pressing X (On 360). It’s just like reviewing an instant replay and you can look at the play step by step using the left and right triggers.

True football fans will realize that this is exactly what real teams do when they review the film and photos from a game! Here you can learn what defense your opponent used that stopped you so much or how they scored so easily against your defense.

I haven’t even begun to play around with this in Online Dynasties, but I imagine it’s even more useful. Most people have a handful of plays that they use on offense and defense all the time. Using this highlight tool it’s possible to figure out what their tendencies are for the next time you play them.

For me, that’s just uber cool!

PS: Unfortunately the only way to review the highlights is immediately after a game. Which sucks if you just lost and it’s gotten to you. Maybe someday EA will be cool and actually let you save the entire highlights section for future use. But until then, the best thing to do is just calm down and look at the highlights a little later, after the sting has worn off.

PPS: This works in regular matches against the CPU, but I think it’s less relevant because the CPU is much better at mixing up it’s play calling. BUT I haven’t looked at it either, so who knows?

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I recently purchased NCAA Football 10 for the 360.

It’s been pretty good so far. I built a Baruch Bearcat team using the Teambuilder feature and have been working their way up from cupcake status in my offline dynasty.

It’s fun, but after about 2 weeks of playing religiously, I’m starting to crave something a little more challenging.

Enter Online Dynasties.

I’ve heard a lot about them, but have never tried them. Basically the concept is up to 12 folks can get together and play through the dynasty mode. Each chooses a school to represent and handles all of the team duties such as recruiting, redshirts, etc.

The trick is supposed to be it combines the challenge and unpredicablity of playing against real people with the longer term focus of dynasty mode.

Since this will be my first foray into online dynasties, I thought it would be a good learning experience to share with any other online neophytes interested.

Step 1: Finding a dynasty

How do we find a dynasty? The method I’m using is by looking through the different forums for the game. I like Gamefaqs because I already have an account there, but there’s also the EA Sports forum and NCAA Strategies forum.

Once you have an account on one of these places, just look for posts about joining a dynasty. You’ll usually need to leave your gamertag (PS3 folks I have no idea your equivalent) and preferred team.

The person who started the thread should send you an online dynasty invite when they’re ready to start. You’ll need to go into the game and look under “Career Modes” -> “Online Dynasty Invites”

And that’s all I’ve got so far. It’s not much, but hopefully I’ll get an invite and can update on my progress soon.

Like many other young males in my generation, I have an expensive addiction.

No, not drugs.

VIDEO GAMES!

This week marked this year’s release of Electronic Arts’ annual college football game. And like any good addict, I reserved and bought a copy.

I know that the value is marginal compared to last year’s game. A few new features, slightly improved graphics and animations, but I still purchased it anyway.

The “pull” was just too strong.

There are two lessons to take from this:

1) Release something in periodic installments and if,

2) the “pull” is strong enough, you can make some serious money.

Many football fans are stuck in a similar boat as me. We know the value of this year’s edition will probably not be worth the $60 investment, but we buy it anyway because we’re so addicted.

What can you do in your business to get people to continually pay in periodic installments?

Memberships? Subscriptions? Or follow EA’s model and just release a new version every so often?

What can you do to create that kind of “pull” that will sustain treating your customers like that?

Marketing? Advertising? Hype?

PS: A monopoly, where you’re the only game in town helps too.

EA has exclusive rights to the college and pro football licenses. There hasn’t been another serious pro football game since NFL 2K5 by Take Two.

Not exactly, but here’s a step in the right direction.

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There is a saying that if you can dream it, you can do it.

I believe this is 100 percent accurate.

All it takes is one step. One action.

If you can take just one step, no matter how small, towards achieving your dream everyday, you will eventually achieve it.

It will not always be easy. Sometimes there will be steps you don’t want to take.  (There are tricks for that I’ll share someday.)

But if your desire for your dream is strong enough, you will find a way to take those difficult steps too.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Confucius

Make sure you take your one step today!

This is my response to Nate’s post How to use blogs over at The Way That You Wander.

Reading blogs is the 21^st century answer to traditional books and textbooks.

There is just so much helpful information out there, that if you consistently read the right blogs on a daily basis, you can learn a ton of different things without much invested effort.

That is real value right there.

BUT! (There’s always a catch, isn’t there?)

But, like Nate said, it is very easy to suffer from information overload. The same wealth of information that allows you to easily learn about a diverse series of topics can just as easily overwhelm you and prevent you from implementing what you’ve learned.

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Sorry for the missing post last night, it was my girlfriend’s birthday AND I had a presentation due today.

I spent the better part of last night, (after spending time with my girlfriend of course) working on editing an mp4 movie in Avidemux.

I figured that my experience with it would be a great topic for a post, since I spent a good amount of time trying to get it to do what I wanted.

First of all, you can download the program here.

This is just a basic tutorial on how to cut a video. (In other words, this is exactly what I was trying to figure out >_>)

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