Test Taking Disappointment

   I took a test for my Wine Spirit Education Trust (WSET) Level 1 certification in wine. The first proctored test I have taken since I took the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) Level 4 back in 2010. The first test of knowledge I had taken since finishing graduate school in 2007. And the one thing you forget if you haven't taken a test in a while, it's not always about what you know, yet also about making good decisions on the questions that you don't know. And, on the few questions I struggled with, I don't feel like I made good decisions when answering them.

   I know I got the questions wrong. I reviewed the answers once I got home and know that I choice the wrong answers. I don't care about being wrong, or not knowing the answer, but what I do care about is making the best decision on what the answer is based on what I do know, and I didn't do that. I answered too quickly without thinking through the answers and instead went with a gut reaction.

   I have been sitting here all afternoon working on excuses on why I failed and didn't receive a 100%. The best I came up with is: Test Dyslexia. I have known a lot of people through my schooling years who had text anxiety, and never thought it was a real thing. The only test I ever took that made me sweat was the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), and I did very poorly, never studying or doing any SAT Prep didn't help either. But, I learned my lesson and with practice and studying did a lot better on the American College Testing (ACT).

   But those were the good old days when you took a test a week. You were doing something we call: Practicing. Taking all those tests every week prepared you to take, more tests. So now when you have to sit down to take a test, maybe there is a bit of anxiousness or nerves, and in some of the questions all the answers started to run together almost like I couldn't read, hence test dyslexia. But again, this is just an excuse I am making so that I feel better about getting those answers incorrect. I actually don't have test dyslexia or test anxiety, I didn't get them right, because I didn't know the answer.

   No matter how you feel about tests, when you are an adult and haven't taken one in a long while, you forget some of the simple rules of test taking like: when you don't know the answer, break it down into what you do know and find the answer that best supports that assumption. And this is the true reason why I am upset, because I made poor decision making when choosing an answer.

   I like to boast that I have confident skills in creativity, problem solving and decision making. But I didn't show those skills today. Even though I did pass, I failed at what really matters to me. So now I have to pick up the pieces, learn from mistakes and move on. I am still here, and have to continue to move forward and improving, and not let the mistakes of the past derail progress or hold me back from my final destination of a brighter and safe future.

Meditate on Failure

We learn in the book, Samurai: The Code of the Warrior, about Yamamoto Tsunetomo, a samurai retainer of the daimyo Nabeshima Mitsushige. After the daimyo died, Tsunetomo was required to commit suicide, instead he asked permission to become a Buddhist monk. Permission was granted and for over a decade he lived in a seclusive hermitage.

One day a young samurai arrived and spent the next seven years recording the wisdom of Tsunetomo in the Hagakure or "hidden leaves", the definitive document on the way of the samurai.

In the Hagakure, Tsunetomo says,

"meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lighting, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead."

This on the surface level sounds very grim to think about. As another famous philosopher comedian Jerry Seinfeld once joked,

"According to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.

People are afraid of death, so why in my quiet moments, whether you meditate or not this could be before you go to sleep, drinking coffee or even sitting on the toilet. Those quiet moments the last thing you want to do is think about dying or considering yourself dead. We live in our own dangerous times where dying in a fiery car crash, shot in the street for your wallet, slipping on ice, choking on a bone or cancer is a reality on a daily basis just as it was for the samurai.

But the lesson for the samurai is failure equals death, so be prepared for death. In our modern lives, we have protections against death and don't have to welcome death as an honorable end before we feel it is time. We have hospitals, doctors, nurses, medicine, police, air bags and band-aids to keep us safe, but nothing can keep us safe from failure.

We will all fail. Not everyone will fail big or often, but at some point, you will fail. That is our samurai destiny.

Examples include:

• Getting a low score on a test
• Losing a sale
• Failed experiment
• Breaking up from a relationship
• Falling out of a window
• Dropping a glass
• Forgetting a deadline
• Missing a landing at the Olympics
• Being told 'NO'

The Winter Olympics are on. Sometimes I forget how much I love the Winter Olympics. Snow and Ice, winter clothes especially thermal underwear. And especially the amount of focus, determination and grit that skiers, snowboarders and skaters have to compete at the highest level in their sport that is  in the center of our attention for two weeks every four years.

The snowboarding half-pipe event is my favorite of all the events, and failing is an option. You can fail big in snowboarding in two different ways: missing a trick or crashing, the worst of the two. Of course each one has a thousand sub-errors that can occur: not enough speed, too much wind, loose boots or anything that can happen, does happen. So an Olympic snowboarder needs to meditate on failure.

An Olympic snowboarder should not only meditate on failure. They need to meditate on success and failure. The best performances in my high school marching band days were those that I visualized success. I rested my mind and went through the show, the notes, the steps as perfect as they could be. But I do remember thinking, "even if I do my best, what will happen if it's not good enough. How would losing feel?" I would then imagine us losing. Why would I put myself through that? The answer to that question is to prepare myself for failure.

As Tsunemoto would meditate on dying in battle, he was preparing himself for a situation that could occur and how he would react to it. The same that an Olympic snowboarder is about to do battle with the half-pipe and they have to be prepared to win and to die.

Steven Pressfield writes in Turning Pro,

"The sword master advancing into ritual combat has inwardly made peace with his own extinction. He is prepared to leave everything, including his life, there on the fighting floor."

We can adapt this mentality to face the challenges in our modern lives. Everyday you look at a project, you need to prepare to make millions or to make nothing; to win gold or to finish last; cut down your opponent or be cut down and die.

Failure is everywhere and it is hard to think about, because if we do, it might come true. Yet, it is still all around us, so we have to be prepared for it. The more prepared we are the less it will sting; the more we can learn from it; the easier it will be to stand up, charge up the mountain and do it all over again knowing we left everything there on the fighting floor.

Hard Work Over Talent

A lot of people say, 'I wish I was just good at something.'

A person goes on stage and sings a beautiful song. People watch and when it's finished they say, 'That person has talent.' I don't say that. If a five year old does it, I do say that, and that person who is now an adult started off with talent, but talent alone did't put them on that stage, hard work put them on that stage.

The hours of practice that you didn't see, the hundreds even thousands of performances that you didn't see. The heartbreak, the pain, the rejection, the failures that all led up to that glorious moment on stage.

Some of us will never get there because they believe they don't have the talent. What you don't know is hard work can just be as good and better than talent. I don't believe you need talent at all to be honest. You just need to be brave, willing to put in the hard work everyday, be vulnerable and show it in a public space.

When you look at a piece of contemporary art that looks messy and effortless as if the artist put no thought into what-so-ever and your first thought is, 'my kid could draw that.' You should stop and remember that the person who did draw that was a kid once and they're bringing that experience with them. They also probably went to art school and drew thousands of pictures of hands, legs, arms, bodies, portraits, apples, rooms and whatever to the point where they made a decision, a choice to paint that particular work and paint another and another just like it.

Your kid drew a picture just like that because it is all they are capable of doing, right now. As they grow up they will improve and move forward. You should teach them the value of hard work over talent. Just because Tiger Woods picked up a golf club when he was three and won tournaments by the age of five that doesn't make his story the formula for being good at golf. Thousands of other kids picked up clubs and worked their fingers to the bone to be good and never amount to the level he has achieved.

It takes passion, it takes time. If you haven't become successful by the time your twenty-eight doesn't mean you should give up. Don't believe that you have to be young to be successful. All the 30 under 30 crap is just motivation for someone else. It's not for you or you should spin in a way that does motivate you and there's always something they did that you can learn from also.

Reading through some old notebooks from my days at the University of Akron, I came across a quote from one of my mentors at the time Michael Spiro. He said, "It's not magic, either you put in the time or you didn't." Meaning you either sat in the room by yourself for hours at a time putting in the hard work or you slacked off and didn't, no matter what art form of discipline you're working in.

Preparedness + Opportunity = Success

This is one of the principals of success I believe and it is true. You have to be prepared to earn success, that's not the hard part in my opinion, the hard part is the opportunity.

If you have a degree in history, but you have been designing your own video games and want to switch over to a career what do you do? Having knowledge of history would be great if the company was making a historical game, but without experience or a portfolio that shows off you skills then you are doomed to be overlooked again and again.

So maybe you should just make your own game and put on the App store for people to play for free.

If you share it with 100 people and they share it with 100 people and they share it with 100 people then eventually you will get to 10,000 and that is the magic number according to Seth Godin to have a substantial tribe. Then that tribe will want to have more and your next project you can sell to them and make a living, or get noticed and hired and make a living and do the things you love.

Learning to Write with Spec Scripts

If you're going to build a house, you should know what a house looks like, right?

If your going to write within a documented universe, then you should study the universe. I'm mostly talking about Spec script writing for a TV show, but should apply to anyone writing fan fiction.

'Why are you writing a Spec for on-air show?' You may ask, 'You should be working on original material.' You're right and I am, but the major network writing fellowship programs require a spec for a show currently on-air.

Luckily, I have some favorite shows that I am invested in and have some stories to tell within their universe. It used to be the standard in getting the job as a TV writer. Anyone who listens to Nerdist Writer's Panel have heard some of them from writers working today. One story I remember is from a lady, whose name I can't remember, getting a job with a spec script of Sex in the City.

Writing specs for current shows should be somewhat standard for learning to write a show. Why? Because it is a show that is on air, its on air for a reason. It's something you can watch and learn from, get the characters voices in your head and see how the story works in multiple episodes.

Then when writing something original, something personal, you would have a strong fundamental of writing characters, storylines, drama, action, jokes or whatever strange and surreal imagery that you may have swimming around that beautiful brain of yours.

Knowing what a script is will help you do all that, just like knowing what a house looks like will help you build one if that was something you needed to do.

What We Can Learn From Sports

Always look forward, never back. When you make a mistake, its a mistake, reset and get ready for the next one.

Javier Baez made two errors on the defensive side in Game 7 of the World Series. He pulled himself together and walked up to the plate and hit a home run.

David Ross did the same thing. After a bad throw that advanced the runners and falling over on a wild pitch that led to two scored runs, he shook it off and went to bat that resulted in a home run.

The Chicago Cubs won the World Series after being behind three games to one when you need four to win a best of seven series. They ended up winning three games in a row, one at home and two on the road, to win their first World Series in one hundred and eight years.

It would of been easy to give up on the Cubs. Sell the team to a new city, fans turn their backs and root for someone else. But none of those things happened. And all the faith and all the cheering and all the gear supporting the team paid off in the end. They learned from their mistakes, they didn't ruminate on them, they had slumps, but bounced back to have the greatest victory of all.

When you feel you can't write, have nothing to shoot, no inspiration to do your art. Think about the Cubs and how they never gave up. Think about pro athletes because they all fail at the drop of a hat, have to pick themselves up and go at it again, succeed or fail, again and again and again.

And we love them when they win and hate them when they fail, if your a fan, a reporter or critic. That might be why we hate ourselves so much when we fail, because we thing everyone feels about us the way we feel about our team. But just remember, deep down we always love our team. And the players, although they may have failed, have to look forward to the next play, next game, next season.

Their are winners and losers, but no one is a real loser. It's just a game, it's just a job, it's just an election, it's just [fill in the blank].

Keep creating, keep moving, don't look back and feel sorry for yourself when things don't work out. Pick yourself up and keep moving forward.