Its something we hear about all the time, but real life changing experiences are exceedingly rare as far as I can tell. We all have moments that affect us and stick with us for years, some times our whole lives, but an actual event that fundamentally changes your behavior, your philosophy, or your thought process is pretty hard to come by. I remember the day it happened to me. It starts with an iPod.

A Shot In The Dark

The restaurant I was working at back in college was holding a contest to see who could raise the most money for the Lymphoma and Leukemia Society by selling $1 Donation Balloons, the winner of the contest would get an iPod. This jazzed me up quite a bit as I had been somewhat behind the times in acquiring an MP3 player, so this would really be something worth winning for me. Flash forward to the end of the contest and I’m walking out of the store with a shiny new iPod in my hands, excited to get home and load it up with all of my music.

While uploading I noticed that iTunes had a category called “Podcasts” in the store, intrigued I checked it out. Unknown to me at the time, Podcasts are talk radio style shows that come in any number of subjects. It sounded interesting so I headed to the categories that usually interest me the most, Science and Technology. Browsing around the selection one particular podcast caught my eye, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. I had always been “skeptical” but I had no idea what this show could be about or that there were people who identified themselves as “Skeptics”. So I downloaded a few and gave them a shot.

As any person trying to develop into a well rounded individual, I have a couple of hobbies that I try to spend my free time on. This blog, my piano, and recently I was reminded of how much I like the art of magic so I decided to add that into the mix. There is always one problem you run into when you attempt to pick up a new skill or hobby, particularly one where the learning curve is big like a new instrument, and that problem is that you are going to be quite bad at it for what will most likely be a long time. You have to go through what I call The Suck.

No one catches me now

The first time I picked up the piano as a hobby and gave it a good effort I was making decent strides at it and doing things that seemed nearly impossible to me in just a few weeks time… But I was still playing Old Macdonald at the end of the day, two handed or not. I want to play Mozart and Bach damnit! I want to improvise jazz! I want to be able to sit down, have someone request a song, and be able to play it. And I want it NOW!

The same thing happened when I picked up magic again. Sure there are plenty of tricks you can do that dont take that much time to master, but if you want to do the real cool stuff, the stuff that people just cannot possible fathom… Well, it turns out thats like, really hard. Whoulda’ thunk it? I was investing hours upon hours on single sleights of hand, and still wasn’t great at them. I think almost everyone at my job knows how to do the 2 Card Monte now because they caught me at some stage in the trick. I used to suck at it, but not any more. No one catches me now.

Here’s To The Suck

The hardest part to come to terms with about The Suck is that its going to take a while, and it probably wont even be all that much fun. Hell, it might even be aggravating and downright frustrating at times, but as the old saying goes, anything worth doing isnt going to be easy. People who I admire in various fields all typically have one thing in common, and thats the sheer amount of time they have been doing it, which can typically be measured in YEARS, and not weeks or months. And chances are they sucked at it back when they started too.

Got the Blog back up and running. Hope to see it flourish here in the near future.