+10 Health, 5% resistance to magic

Anyone who knows me fairly well knows that like most American 15-25 year old males, I’m a gamer: ever since I was little I've been fascinated with the medium.  In particular I have always loved RPGs or Role Playing Games.  For the uninitiated, these extensive games often focus on fantasy themes and take a stereotypically weak and naive protagonist through a fantastic world.  Typically, you start out at your home village in a green tunic, fighting rats with a rusty knife and by the end of the game you’re on the top of a grand tower, wielding an 8-foot broadsword against an infernal ax demon.  And that’s not even the final boss.

Now, anyone who’s played one of these games knows that all items come with statistics.  The green shirt you start out with doesn't do jack-shit, but somewhere along the line you find the hat of magical magicyness or the scythe of supercool killingness and the readout will be something like “+5 intelligence” or “180000 fire damage, 8 attack”.  The basic gist is that just by equipping the item or weapon or whatever it may be, your statistics go up and you can kick more ass.  It’s really fun, and it works well in games.

The sad thing is that, while we all know it isn’t the case, we tend to think along these lines in real life.  I know I’m guilty of this too, lest I fall victim to the pot’s case against the kettle.

You might question the notion, but all you have to do for confirmation is walk into your closest athletic goods store and you’ll see.  Especially around this time of year, you’ll see all kinds of people making their way to these stores and dropping vast amounts of money on name-brand super-science shoes, under armor jock straps and north face backpacks.  Most of these people don’t need them and won’t really use them.  Jerry McFatfat might drop $300 on sporting goods because they’ll make him better at working out, but he knows and we know that he’s probably not going to work out because he’s trusting his stuff to take care of that for him.

Bottom line is, there’s not a pair of shoes that makes you faster, a lifting shirt that makes you stronger, a backpack that makes you more outdoorsy or a tweed coat that makes you smarter.  A diploma or degree doesn’t, as a thing you possess, make you more educated any more than owning a Tom Brady jersey lets you throw a football 49 yards and hit a moving target with a total effective radius of about 6 inches.

You become good at things, whether it’s running, thinking, acting, lifting, baking pies or underwater basket weaving, by simply doing them.  There’s not a thing that will make you better at them.

Granted, there is such a thing as necessary equipment.  Some tasks cannot be completed without certain items: baseball kind of requires a ball and if you try to play hockey without a stick and pads you’re going to end up both losing and badly bruised.

But nonetheless, we only become what we want to be through vigorous effort.  Whether you’re trying to write computer programs or run a marathon, the only way you get better at doing that thing is by getting up off your ass and DOING THEM!  Life doesn’t come with any free passes and there’s no such thing as a thing that automatically makes you better at something.

It’s been wonderful,

-J.R.M.C.

P.S.  Sorry for the radio silence over the last week, it was Christmas vacation.