Superpowers - Hiding and Revealing Earned Skills

Having superpowers would be every kid's dream. To be able to surprise people or use the power for good really feels good. Growing up watching superhero films and tv shows even to this day, I always thought of the possibility of actually making the fiction a reality. Although it is most likely impossible for such things such as super speed, I recently felt a familiar feeling of revealing a superpower. Although comparing one of my amateur skills to a superpower is annoying and insensible, I think it is quite the comparison that makes sense.

As I have a summer job and my weekdays are filled with it, I have to work for people (the obvious). During work, people treat me quite special for numbers of reasons, and one of them is that I am young. People expected relatively little from me. If I screw something up, I do not get the standard treatment in an office, not that I do screw up anything. My work consists of imperfection that I carelessly look over, but luckily there will always be a person to double check my work to ensure the normal operation of the office. And because of all my imperfections, people built a profile of me that writes me as a typical high schooler. Not a miracle nor a spoiled brat, and that I am just one of the many in the line high schoolers in the world. With that said, when they found out that I can actually do things, I was quite blushed. It felt good with me knowing that I have impressed some people. To be honest, all my life, I have been trying to impress people. I only post stories of me to my friends when I have done something that I think is impressive. I never post anything that normal, and I have always try to be above the normal crowd. I want to impress others, and revealing my skills to a new person really makes me feel like that they are impressed. It is like revealing a superpower, a thing that is not known but was be known. And it feels especially good when you are not the one telling them your skill. I feel super good when the revealing comes naturally, and that the people finding out are genuinely surprised.

In my job, I only revealed that I know programming and that I am very familiar with computers. I did not tell them that I am quite good at art, and it makes it quite fun for me to keep it a secret until something comes and reveals it naturally. Although you could say that my fun in hiding a "superpower" is just another way of saying hiding a secret, that secret that I am able to hide is gained from my own work, interest, and some dedication. Knowing that you have done something significant (not that any of my stuff is) and that it is not known interests me a lot. It is such a fun thing to have a secret card that you could pull out whenever you want to.

In the end, I still need to work even more harder to keep my standard that I have set right now. The most dreaded things that I am concerned about is that I would stop improving myself since I think I'm the needle in a haystack of high schoolers. I know that my grades aren't the best, and neither is the difficulty of the classes that I am taking, but there is still a chance that I think I had enough of what I need and stop improving. People are amazed by my skills only because of my age, and it is not really about the rarity and difficulty of the skills itself. As I get older, if I still want to have a secret card that I could pull out and impress others, I have to work more diligently. This all may sound childish and trivial, but I guess anything that drives a person in the right direction should be classified as good quality or thought (typical me that find excuses).

Me in the world of my own fantasy land, where I still think that superspeed is possible

This is my own hand-made notebook that I loved and used to the last of the last bit.

Thoughts on "The Second Mountain" & Dropping of Blog's SEO score

Due to the latest finals, I thought that it would be a good idea to stop everything that is non-essential in my life. And those things include programming, drawing, and my blog. Although I am more than happy to not write a sub-par essay every 2 or 3 days, my blog is suffering as it is dropping through the google search rankings. It had dropped so low that I don't even know what page it is on when I search "speedstor". But either way, I would always know that my blog wouldn't drop far in Bing or DuckDuckGo, not that anyone uses them.

Because of my lack of knowledge and things to type in a blog, I would continue my tradition of ranting about irrelevant topics. So, lately, I am reading two books and one of them is The Second Mountain by David Brooks. Just 3 pages into it, I am already disagreeing about everything written in that non-fiction book. The Second Mountain seeks to illustrate how human in our modern society go through two stages in life and that how these two stages differ from each other. He called these two stages each the first mountain, and the second mountain. The first mountain according to Brooks is one that people strive to meet their ego and ambition. He says people go into the world to earn money, to build and sustain their everyday necessities. Subsequently, the second mountain outlined by Brooks is the one that people realizes their selfishness or see that the world needs their help. They would go from working for their own good to bringing love to the world. One example he gave is that a manager of one company after the second mountain would no longer care that much about the overall efficiency of the company but instead focus on helping and teaching others what they know. The manager would understand the pain and troubles people are suffering and offer their available help. While this first and second mountain concept isn't mentioned that much throughout the story, I oppose strong disagreement upon it. The only reason that I forced myself to continue finishing the book is that I want to have the right to criticize it. I want to say that I gave it its chance.

And to why I do not agree with his argument is pretty straightforward. It is just that I do not think these two stages should not be separated as much as to two separate mountains. Although that might not be very significant at first glance, it matters a lot to me. People, a lot of people, start helping and giving their all from the start of their life. And though they do give out a lot, their giving is their ambition and is their first mountain. If that is the case, the second mountain would not be applicable. Not to mention, what if one person starts helping people before they forget it and seek their ambition. This first and second mountain could be non-applicable in so many situations that I do not think it should be classified as such. To my honest opinion, I do not think there is any way to classify and categorize people life to a general form. Each person's life is unique and from the similarities of being born and experiencing death, I do not think human's life would be able to be separated into bits. Even people's time of giving birth and marriage differs to such a degree that it is arbitrary, and an individual life should not be put into carts (whatever that means).

All in all, I think that The Second Mountain is not that bad of a book. It succeeds in giving people a realization of their selfishness or their over-ambitious goal of making money. It is also able to give people(me) that normally helps others a desire to be even more helpful. The only downfall to the whole book is that it is based on an idea that life is of two parts, one of ambition and another one of helpfulness.

This is how bad my art has become through the half a year of not drawing

I drew this before the exam because I was bored to death, don't question about it