Potential...I've heard that word fifty billion times before, and I've heard it again tonight. Potential to do this, potential to do that. This time, it was my old piano teacher, Uncle Daniel, who said it to my parents. "Your son is so bright, so intelligent, so gifted....." Of course, there's a 'but' that always follows here..... ".....but he's the laziest guy I've ever met."
Such true words are always spoken of me.
To some people, living up to potential is a burden, sometimes an unwanted one. Sometimes people will crack under higher expectations. Me, I milk my potential for all it's worth - in the case of my piano lessons, I lived off of my musical gifts right up to ARCT, practicing about an hour a week in total, when I "quit" piano. It came easy to me - I always passed, and did well - so I never bothered to practice. I still remember every single week, Uncle Daniel would say, "Justin, if only you would practice some more, you would get Honors with Distinction and win all the awards at the competitions." In one ear and out the other. I'm indifferent to my gifts. I take them for granted. Consistent hard work is almost a foreign concept to me.
In high school, I almost never studied. 15 minutes before a quiz, an hour before a test, a night before an exam, and that was it. I still got by, sometimes with the help of friends (I still remember OAC year, Dave and James came over in the middle of the night to help me cram...."hey guys, what's xyz in algeo?"), though I always heard the same things from my teachers: "if only you put a full effort into everything you hand in, you would be the top of the class." I never did, and the only times I was at the top of the class was in my English classes, when my teacher thought I was some kind of writing genius and gave me top marks even though I skipped half my classes.
Now I'm in 3rd year university, and it's finally starting to hit home what I need to do. Last week, Amy told me, "You took a management course and you got the highest mark in the entire course. You're telling me you can't get 4.0s in everything this year? You can do it. You just have to work at it." Well, I've set goals for myself for the first time. I've set out in my mind to make this year MY year, the start of a brand new life ahead. I used to be the most competitive student when I was younger. Right up to junior high, I used to constantly compare myself academically to the other kids, always asking, "what did you get?" Then all of a sudden I didn't care anymore. Now, I feel the need to win again. I feel the hunger to claw my way to the top.
Baby, Justin got his groove back.
The problem though, is the same as it's always been - motivation. I guess it comes with being an only child, someone who doesn't need to take everything seriously because mommy and daddy will take care of it for me. I'll stay motivated for about a week and all of a sudden, it's gone. I'm already starting to see cracks in my motivation. It's quite possible it's health-related - just before I left for Hong Kong I discovered that I had extremely low blood pressure - which explains the constant fatigue. I've watched what I eat much more carefully since then, even giving up my love for green tea stuff, so it's not nearly such a bad case now. So I'm going to hire a personal trainer here and get myself back into shape - continuing what my uncle tried to get me to do in HK.
So why am I posting all of this?
I'm not quite sure. Frustration, maybe. It's always an uphill battle, always catching up to others for me. But I guess what I need more than anything is that if anyone sees me skipping classes for stupid reasons, kick my dumb ass. If I ever say "I don't want to get up" for any reason other than I didn't sleep the night before, kick my lazy ass. I'm gonna need all the help I can get to get this to work.
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Go see Ararat! Wow, I'm pretty excited for one of my good buddies from high school, David Alpay (on the right in the pic)....big star of Atom Egoyan's movie, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival. Still remember the good ol' days when we used to cruise around downtown terrorizing everyone with our obnoxious singing. That's the quintessential everyman there folks. Alpay himself - first guy to make an American Brain Bee into an International Brain Bee by winning it, one of the Asian Backstreet Boys (but the only non-Asian), and now superstar actor. Funny tidbit: I went on google and decided to look up our AznBSB group members. Of Chou, Ryan, Wu, Alpay and myself, only Alpay shows up first on the search results. Congrats man, don't forget me now that you're the next Tom Cruise!
