So maybe, someone's life situation also has a "tipping point". I hear ya though. I didn't get beaten up, but I felt like a loser for a long time. It was made w

So maybe, someone's life situation also has a "tipping point". I hear ya though. I didn't get beaten up, but I felt like a loser for a long time. It was made worse because I was naturally able to get a lot of things right, the first time. As things got more and more progressively difficult, I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to accomplish what I wanted to do. I was helped though by a lot of fiction writers -- Heinlein, for one. I read Ender's Game annually for a while. But it wasn't until reading Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age that I got thinking I should start writing stuff, as a way to try to pass on what I know now about taking initiative, personal responsibility, etc. that on the off-chance that some teenager scraping the bottom of the barrel gets a hold of my book, it just might be what catalyzes this realization. Diamond Age was about a primer given to three different girls; the primer was built with nanotech, has a database full of old myths, folklore, and teachings, has sensors to figure out what is going on around itself and the girl that is bonded with it, and is able to generate stories based on what's happening. It was that which lead me to my current studies into Joseph Campbell's works on mythology and folklore. It's also why articles like this has always interested me. It's also why I like the whole concept of OLPC. I'd like to be able to write something like that Primer, or at least a pale imitation of it. It also helped that I trained in the martial arts that I did. Martial arts is pretty much obsolete if you measure if by how well you can inflict violence. A gun is a technology allowing someone to inflict more damage with less training time. But as far as a life practice that keeps your ability to take initiative sharp -- something Stephen Covey describes as "sharpening your saw" -- to push past that, "I dun wanna" feeling, martial arts is better for that than a gun. Since I think you understand this, I'm bringing this out here which I normally wouldn't for Hacker News. There's a Japanese word meaning budo. Transliterated, it means "way of war". I once heard someone explain it to mean, "the art of living well under all circumstances while protecting your interest." That is the context which I was reading the story with the bullying. The other is the Chinese word, kungfu. It's used in America to mean "martial arts", but it's been mistranslated. ("Wushu" is what you want). Kungfu means refined skill accumulated over time, the integral of effort over time. One teacher I met at a seminar once said, "I don't know why 'kung fu' is translated as 'martial arts' when it really means patience."