When Judgement Gets You Fired Up

Okay, if you ever waited until 9 pm to use your cell phone, then you should get this reference easily. When was Super Mario most effective? It was never when he was small because

even one minor miscalculation could kill any momentum you had in the game? That little Italian, Mustached Plumber was most reliable after he leveled up. He got bigger. He gained some new abilities. This usually took a while. We were super eager to give that little game a try back in the 80's? Why wouldn't we? It was a FREE game. We popped it in the NES after smacking the top and blowing into the mouth of the cartridge and NOTHING could distract us. DO you remember how the first few games went? So eager we were to play that we didn't bother to get any insight on what to do. We just pressed buttons and figured it out as we went along. So, Turtles stopped us in our tracks frequently. Little hamburger men got in our way. We mistimed big jumps and plummeted to the 8-bit abyss.

Then something started clicking. Why? Well, we wound screwing up so many times that we started memorizing when the dastardly villains would show up, we started to gain a feel for WHEN to press the jump button when running toward the edge, we LEARNED how to play

Sometimes, in life, we aren't meant to get things on one try. If we did, we wouldn't really apprentice the skill that resiliency never gets credit for being. Yes, resiliency is a skill. If life were a Nintendo controller, there is a good chance you have smashed it against the wall a few dozen times because you just can't GET IT. It takes a big set of stones to operate from frustration and amazing concentration to do something you know you already failed at

When Judgement comes up, who can you honestly say is the one you judge most often? No... No besides the dork walking through the mall with his head buried in his phone, crashing into random strangers while having the audacity to wear socks with sandals. Its most likely you. No one judges us harder than ourselves. Sometimes we'd like to beat ourselves to a pulp over a mistake without ever looking at what we could have learned from it. To get to that next level in life, we simply need to gather all we already experienced and use it to go forward, not look backward

Instead of panicking or worrying about what might go wrong, isn’t it time to realize you have all of the experience you need? Don’t you think you learned your lessons and now earned the chance to move forward?

I'll leave you with a forgotten classic off of Pat Benatar's 1988 Wide Awake In Dreamland album

"I believe there comes a time

when everything just falls in line

We live and learn from our mistakes

The deepest cuts are healed by fate"

-All Fired Up