Thriving like a cockroach

Saturday night was Uppsala cultural night, an annual event hosted by all the activity clubs in town.

I went out with some friends. We took a drink at Upplands Nation, we went to an improvisational salsa lesson, and hanged out with some exchange students for a while. I was the one who brought groups of people together, and it was fun.

All of the guys who went with me to the salsa lesson thought it was an excellent idea. To them it meant getting intimate physical contact with scores of beautiful girls with hardly any effort. To me it wasn’t anything new. After all, it seemed like a smart idea to attend that dance lesson that night. Luckily the jousting show wasn’t as long as I thought would be. So I could make some positive adjustments to my plan. After the salsa lesson, we checked out over a hundred people dancing in circles on the square in front of the train station. A girl in our group suggested we should join the circle. So I ran over there with her. Then a funny thing happened: it took us like two minutes before we realized the dancers were all Iraqis, except us two Asians. We crashed the gathering of a local Iraqi community. But we were high, we were excited and in that moment, nothing in the world could stop us. We danced for a while before going back to our friends, who were still shaking their heads in disbelief of our little adventure.

Enough report on cultural night, let’s get down to my epiphany.

Mr. Hu the president of CSSAU once said to the graduate freshmen, that one ought to live like a cockroach in order to get used to the Uppsala student life. Roaches are die-hard creatures. You stomp on them a hundred times, they can still get up and crawl away flattened. They recover miraculously fast. To all the SC2 nerds out there, you know what I’m talking about. Just to make it clear, I deal with computer games only in past tense. Roaches even live through atomic blast. When all other sophisticated life forms perished in the nuclear winter, roaches remain, ready to dominate the earth and direct a new round of evolution in its own image.

Roaches are tough. So should men. Remember the Asian Playboy article I posted? A pickup artist should have thousands of approaches, with the number of rejections in the same order of magnitude as the approaches. Only then can they achieve their goal. In the seduction community, there is a saying that the best PUAs have had more failures than the average men. An average frustrated chump have never tried, thus, his statistics could potentially look better, because his number of rejections are zero. In the end, no matter how many battles you fight, you will only be remembered for the ones you win, and not the ones you lose.

Well, I’m not here to talk about seduction community. Getting rejected in clubs is nothing compared to those rejections for life. One of my friends at Cornell went on probation for failing numerous classes in one semester. He wasn’t dumb or lazy. That time, he took on too many projects and was way over his head. He spent half a year studying at home, fixing credits from summer school, and finally returned to Ivy League. In my opinion, he will accomplish great deeds, simply because he recovered from such a blow and learned his lesson. For someone who has always been successful, he/she won’t possess this potential. Well, if the winning streak never ends, then luck can be seen as ability. However, once the walls fall around you, some people just won’t walk around with the same confident stature as before.

It’s not about never failing, it’s the recovery. To realists, “failures” occur when things don’t go your way. They are bound to happen. You just have to live through them. Remember Mystery once brought a fake cigar to bars and night clubs. It was just another prop he wanted to try. Unfortunately, within minutes of conversation, his targets could always realize the cigar wasn’t real. They asked him why he brought a fake cigar when going out. The first time it happened, he didn’t have any good answer. He was like “uh, I don’t know…” Whenever somebody looked through his trick and confronted him about it, it was like catching a pig in a bag. No thrill, just slaughter. However, Mystery came up with an excellent way to recover from his blown cover.

He said: smoking disgusts me. Then he would puff the cigar as if it was real. This line made a humorous turn and his status was reinstated.

In real life, you don’t always find a fast and easy recovery as Mystery did. But you have to recover anyway. When Boston Celtics were facing off the Kobe-led Lakers, their head coach told the Celtics: Kobe will always score. He’ll score no matter how far away the hoop is, he’ll score with your hands in his face, and he’ll score with you performing a perfect block on his shot. You just have to take Kobe’s hits and hit back harder. In that game, Kobe scored a game-high 38 points. However, the Lakers lost with almost 20 points. It’s your right to get whatever you want, but it’s the right of the universe to grant you failures. Countering failure is like stopping Kobe Bryant from winning a game. They’ll always hit you, and sometimes hurt you. Just stand up like those hits weren’t real, and try again.