 In 1997, I had my first day as a sophomore at Valley Park Senior High in Valley Park, Missouri. It was a small school. Everyone knew everyone's business. In high school, my senior class was 75 people. Only 55 of them graduated. So that's how small it was. In high school, you have four first days. You're a freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior. You notice each first day, one of the most memorable things I always remember from like every year to year, was that people were changing. You hadn't seen a lot of them for three months. And when you get there on that first day, you start seeing some of those people who you hated before and all of a sudden they had a smile on their face and they were nice or they had changed. Their hairstyles changed. Their clothes changed. Their overall style changed. But also physically, they were changing as well. They were getting taller, fatter, skinnier, whatever, right? Like everybody was changing. No one looks the same as the year before. So the first day of my sophomore year, I noticed something about one of my classmates that sent me in a completely different direction than I had been going down. And this totally changed a lot of things for me. He was one of my arch enemies though. He picked on me all the time. So ever since we were in middle school, he was always constantly like, you know, banging up against me in the hallway or whatever. I mean, he was just complete DB, right? So the thing is, though, is that it wasn't like I was like one of these really, you know, like smart, uber smart nerdy kids, right? Like I made, I was a very average student. I didn't make great grades. I think I graduated with like a C plus average, right? I didn't participate in school sports. That probably had something to do with getting picked on a lot. But overall, I was a geek. But I had potential, as the teachers would always tell me. The teachers would constantly tell my parents in the parent-teacher meetings, oh, he's grades, I mean, but he's got potential, right? That's like, that's kind of a pretty backhanded thing to say, right? Like you start catching on to how kind of sarcastic or like just playing to your parents they're speaking. But this always followed a right home with, you really need to apply yourself, Blake. The teacher says you have potential and we want to see you use it. Focus on your studies. What's it going to take, Blake? How do you think you're going to get into college like this? This was constantly, like this was just, you know, I mean, it kind of beats away at you, right? You're just like, but, you know, I'm not interested in any of this stuff. So here's why I think I found myself in this situation. So I'm going to back up a little bit. Since the age of 12, I have been teaching myself programming. Because I tried, I was tired of playing video games. And when I, I wanted to learn how they were made. So one day my mother took me to the bookstore to the nearest mall and she picked out, sorry, slides. That was Valley Park. That's being awkward. I had potential. So absolutely the keys aren't synced up here. I had to keep tabbing back and forth. So yeah, I had, you know, so I was at the age of 12, right? I would say since the age of 12, I've been teaching myself programming. So one day my mother was going to take me to a bookstore. She took me to a bookstore at the nearest mall, right? I think it was like a Walden books or something. There really wasn't many borders around at the time. This is kind of mid-America, St. Louis. They get the last of everything. So when she took me, I walked around the computer section. And this became a normal habit for a very long, long time. Afterwards was the bookstore. You go right to the computer section and you sit. But I sat and I waited there a couple of the books. It was a very small section. Computers, you know, like it wasn't like they are now when you walk into borders. There's literally like five aisles and you can't make any, you know, sense of what's what. But there was only a handful. And one of them was game programming in C. There's the image. That's somewhat close to what it looked like. It was a Sam publishing book. I couldn't find the exact image. But it was fun going through some of these old book things because that's what I used to read. But so I got this book on game programming. I had no idea what it was about. I just wanted to make a game. I thought you open the book, you read the thing, boom, you make a game. It's that easy, right? Like, that's all you need. You just grab a book and you do it. And whatever. So I would take this book to school. And when I got to school, I would sit there. And I mean, this book, I mean, you remember books back then, they were like literally like three and a half inches thick. They were huge. And I'd have this huge book with all my other books in my bag. And I'd walk around with it like this. I would sit down at my desk and I'd open it up and look. I would never pull the book out of my bag that I was supposed to have. I never even had pencils. I was always disorganized. But I always had my book. And I'd sit at my desk and I'd even get to class early so that I could flip through that book and read it. And I think read is really the wrong word. It was more like I had no idea what I was reading. I had no idea what I was looking at. But after a few weeks, I had had some of my classmates convinced and teachers too that I created video games in my free time because I sat and read this thing all the time and I talked like I knew what was going on. I was like, yeah, you see that line of code that's doing this, you know, it's like moving the thing. And it was probably just, you know, incrementing a pointer. I don't know, right? So, but I'm going to take a step back even further. In fourth grade, my parents bought a 10 megahertz head start LX with Turbo Boost. It came with 12 CDs and at least eight separate manuals on how to use all the various programs that came pre-installed on it. I spent many hours learning how just basic operation of this, basically how to turn it on, put the CD in, and fire up a video game. That's about all I really knew how to do and play the games, right? And there were all these DOS-based games with like the huge pixels. So, also I would watch my mom use the computer as well. She always, the reason she got it was because she did a lot of word processing. So I'd watch her use the DOS-based Word editor. But I think one of my favorite things was to watch the thing print. She, we had this one of those dot matrix printers with a huge ink head and we would just go, and she would print out these huge banners from my class, right? Like when I had any kind of school project, she would always print out some like three or four-page banner where you had to rip the holes off the side very carefully as to not tear it. And I'd show up and be the coolest kid in school cool skid in school, because I had a computer printed banner in grayscale. But back to the game programming book. I finally got frustrated with not being able to write a game in C. You can only stare at this book for so long, and finally just get frustrated and just go, ah, I've been looking at this forever, and I haven't created anything. I almost kind of gave up. I was almost like, yeah, maybe this isn't for me. Maybe this is not what I want to do. But again, I was just staring at all this obscure code. It really wasn't crystallizing. But what I didn't consciously realize was that I had taken on something overly ambitious. I knew nothing about basic programming. And I wanted to jump into something as complex as game programming. Game programming is probably one of the most complex types of software you can write. There is so much that goes into it. Math, science, just graphics. I mean, it's just an enormous amount of math. And I hadn't even taken high school algebra yet. There was no way I was going to get this concept. So one night, while sitting on the floor in the den next to the books, those eight books that came with that computer, this was four years later. We'd had this computer forever. And I still would play the games on it. But I was sitting in the den, and I was just kind of like, I don't know, just messing around, maybe looking through magazines or something. And what I saw was that one of them stood out to me. And I noticed that it actually said programming. And these books had been collecting dust under the desk, the computer desk. I'd completely forgotten we'd even had them. And when I saw one of them, one of them was an introduction to GWBasic. It had been there the whole time I had this book. I didn't need to go out and buy this book, but that's what I thought I wanted to do. Again, overly ambitious. But I was learning something here. Because this book stood out, I immediately grabbed it. And I was like, an introduction. That's what I need, an introduction to just basic programming. So I grabbed this book, and I was super intrigued. The first chapter dove right in. And it taught the reader, oh, that's the Head Start LX. I actually found a picture of it. Awesome. Brought back memories. But this is GWBasic. This also brought back a lot of memories. But the first chapter, I dove right in. I opened up the editor, and I did exactly what it told me to do. I typed in GWBasic on the command line, and then this editor popped open. And it said, type this, print hello world. And I type print hello world, and it came out. My mind was blown at this point. I just told the computer to do something, and it did it. This was huge to me. I was just so filled with just excitement. I was just over the most trivial thing. I mean, today we don't even, you know, I mean, that's kind of like, yeah, whatever. I write hello worlds all the time. 12 years old, you're like, holy shit. That was awesome. So then I thought, all right, time to write a game. I'm a programmer now. Let's do this. So the first thing I came to mind was something simple, because it was something I could just get my head around. It's just a simple little game, right? I think maybe I thought about tic-tac-toe first, but I hadn't figured out how to draw anything on the screen yet, so I was trying to think of something else. And I came up with something I creatively called number guess. Guess what it did. So after a much trial and error and many, many go-to statements, those of you who use GW Basic know that that's the only way you do things is go-to statements, I had a game that randomly chose a number between 1 and 10 and gave you three attempts to guess at it. And at the end of three guesses, it would either tell you when or you lose. It wouldn't even tell you you won right away. It would just tell you whether you won or you lose. It wouldn't even tell you what the number was. So if you win, it was one of the three numbers you picked. So as I did this, each little step as I was doing it, I would write a go-to statement, and it blew my mind that it was like, well, I can go back in time. I can execute a line of code that's already been executed. And I'm moving back, and then I go back through again, and then I can just do this thing iteratively. And in this if thing, this is crazy. It's like I'm just telling it if this, then do this, right? I was filled with so much excitement. Every little piece of, every line of code I wrote, every little character was just running the damn thing, was just cool, it was like, ugh, you know? You're like, this is just, ugh. This was a feeling I had never had before. I had never felt like this. I don't, I can't explain why, you know? I just, it was kind of like a coming of age story, I guess, right? But I immediately, once I had this done, I'm just so filled with excitement. And the first thing, oh man, oh man. Mom, dad, come here. You gotta see this. This is just, and up the stairs they come, followed by my father. And I say, look, look at what I've done, look at this. And I show them, and I say, look, I'm guessing a number, and then it did that, and then the first thing, they were just like, and I was just looked at them, and I was like, and with far less excitement than I was filled with, they said, oh, neat. What? How do they not feel, how do you not see this? Look, this is, how do you not feel like I feel right now? I just guessed a number on a computer. That's amazing. Very cool, son, that's very cool. Yeah, that's what my dad said. Yeah, oh, you know, is that it? Yeah, is that it? What does he mean, is that it? But I could tell he was happy because I was happy, but he didn't get it. But I conceded to this feeling, I mean, I felt I was just so happy, I couldn't understand why they weren't. And the amount of excitement I had diminished. I was really looking to just share that excitement with someone, and there was no one there, right? They just, they didn't get it. So I thought, ah, maybe they're right. It's not all that exciting, it is just a number guessing game. So I conceded to this feeling, and I left and followed them downstairs and watched TV with them. But at some point after this drag of a situation, this kind of feeling of just like, oh, that sucked. They're just, I had this brilliant idea. What if, what if, follow me? It told you if you were getting warmer or cooler. Boom, chest exploded again, ran upstairs immediately. It was like, got down to the computer and was just like, ah, ah, just typing, just like grabbing the book and flipping through it and just like staring at it, right? I don't think I was really making those noises, but I mean, that's what I was saying in my head. And I was looking through the book and I was just like, how do I do this and how would I do it that way? And then how, okay, I need the end, and then eventually after a couple little bit, again, trial and error, trial and error, got it. It was working, mom, dad. They're gonna get it now, now they're gonna get it. This is it. They come running upstairs again, right? They came back and I made my mom sit down at the computer this time. I wanted her to experience it the same way I experienced it. I sat her down and I knew this time it was gonna happen. And after a round of it, she smiled and said, neat. Yeah, okay, right? Is there anything else that it does? I didn't get this. I couldn't understand what was wrong with her. So this went on a few more times and blah, blah, blah, back and forth, back and forth, right, I would add a feature, they would come back up and say neat, right? And every single time that they said neat, I just drained me and then it would take a while to get back into that excitement, excited mode. I'd have to think of something else, slightly more challenging to go up there and get that excitement and go do it again. So eventually I stopped showing it off and I kind of kept it to myself. I just worked on it, I did whatever I want with it. I refined the output. I played that out. I refined the code. I played that out. I invented a new feature and it turns out you can only invent so many new features to a number guessing game. Once you start writing to the file system for no reason, you're just like, I just did it because I wanted to learn how to open a file and write something to it. So I needed more inspiration. So, and besides, no one appreciated my number guessing game. So, back to the bookstore we went and I would buy something, anything, who knows? Who knows what I was gonna buy this time? So I had flipping through the books again and boom, I hit this thing and I see basic on it. It's called QBasic, right? It's like GWBasic but without the line numbers and a much better text editor. That's GWBasic, or I'm sorry, QBasic. So I grabbed the book, I get home and I immediately open it up and I'm like, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? I rush upstairs, I turn the computer on, I'm looking at the book and it said to start type QBasic at the prompt. So I type QBasic at the prompt and immediately, bonk, command not found. What? So I opened the book app and I went through and looked at that introduction that I so hastily jumped into the middle of the book and skimmed right past and it actually said, you need this version of DOS in order to have QBasic, it comes pre-installed with it or you need to get yourself a version of it, right? You need to purchase a version of it. Well, I had no money and this was my first pirating experiment. But I remember what, why? I'm like, I couldn't understand, I didn't really understand the concept of just not being there, right? So where do I get it? I was trying to figure out where to get it. So my version of DOS was old, the excitement was gone again, derailed. I was all those excited, I got up there and then poof, it went away. So I called my Uncle Don. Uncle Don, he did computer stuff at his work, right? He would know what to do. So I call him up, he gets a version of QBasic, brings it over that weekend. It actually worked. But I had to wait days for it, like three or four excruciating days until the weekend. And that was just, when you're in anticipation for something, it's like three or four days before vacation, right? You're just like, oh, I don't wanna be here. You know, it's just like, I wanna be there. So while I was waiting, I was interpreting the code over and over, I had been writing it down on pencil and paper, right? I was just trying to keep like this excitement going. And once he came over, it worked. And when it worked, it was like, oh, yes, there it is. That was the screen I saw and wanted to see because that's what was printed in the book. When I finally saw it, I was like, ah, now I need to do something. So I thought and I thought, ah, I know. I'm gonna create a number guessing game. But it's gonna be so much better this time because now I have QBasic. I can do, it shows you how to do colors in the book. You can plot things on the screen. I'm gonna, it's gonna be brilliant. Oh yes, my first day as a sophomore, sorry. What was noticeably different about this classmate that I had saw was that the girls were drooling over him. It was disgusting. What made him so much better that he got all the attention just because he lifts metal objects in his free time? Like that's, I write software, I can program. I got a brain. This guy is like a neanderthal. Total DB picks on me all the time. Hate this guy, right? So, what a loser, girls are dumb. But I also realized that I was being bothered by this and I kind of remember not like having like this conscious like soul searching thing. Why am I so mad at him? Why am I not in touch with my feeling? It was just, my brain was just going on my own. I didn't know what was going on, right? I was just like, I had to do something about this. I had to show that like how ridiculous that that is to like be that much into somebody just because of like they can lift metal objects, right? So, I decided I wanted to be buff. So, one night I got home and I was like, I'm gonna go to the gym, I'm gonna do the same thing. Girls, I'm gonna be buff, they're gonna love me. Ladies. So, that night I went home and I begged, I mean, I negotiated with my parents to get me a gym membership. And after I exhausted all what little leverage I had with them, they agreed. So, a few weeks later, I was at the gym. And when I got to the gym, the gym is a zoo for the first timer. How many of you like gone like the first time you went to a gym, you were just like, just it's like they might as well play welcome to the jungle, as soon as you walk in, right? I mean, you're just like, what do I do with all this shit? I mean, there's like people like contorting themselves and like lifting heavy objects and screaming in pain. It's like, why do people do this? Why am I here? Why did I give up everything that I had like leverage just to get this? So, it was super overwhelming, but I was determined I wanted to get buff. So, I spent, well, I spent the first few weeks milking all the free personal training sessions that the staff would offer me, right? Because I didn't know what I was doing. I was actually following other people around as they were getting personal training and watching them from a distance and going, okay, like that? Yeah, all right, okay. The thing is is that that was personal training for them. They were trying to lose weight. So, it took weeks for me to realize that and after a few weeks of working out and all of this like going there and wasting your time, at least it feels like a waste of time, you start realizing you're just like, I'm not getting any results, this sucks. This sucks. The other problem I would do is that I thought, I know, I can do this all by myself. I don't need to follow them around. I don't need a personal trainer. I'll figure this all out on my bone, right? I figured out writing software on my own. I can figure this out. So, I would go straight to the bench press and I would take the big 45 pound plates and I'd put one on each side and I'd sit there, lay down, grab it, put it up, right? And I'm stuck. And then someone would always have to come over and help me and get it off. But then the next time I would try, I was like, you know what, I'm stronger now. I'm totally, I ate a protein shake today. Feeling huge. I'm gonna do it again. And I'd just grab that thing and I'd push it up again and then on my chest, right? And this went on for some time. Again, no results. You get no results that way, right? I was being overly ambitious. I wasn't trying to like take on small little things. So I thought, ah, this sucks. So eventually, after weeks and weeks, several weeks, in fact, of going there, I continuously went and I kept trying new things and trying to figure out what I should be doing and watching other people. And eventually a staff member took pity on me. And he came over and he started talking with me and was just like, hey man, I see you in here all the time. You're frustrated, I can tell. You come in here and then like 15 minutes later, you leave and you're like, you know, he's like, can I give you some tips or something like yes, please? I can't afford a personal trainer. My parents are paying for this thing, but they won't pay for a personal trainer and I need help. I don't know what I'm doing. And the guy's like, ah, no problem. So the first thing he did was strip all of the weights off of the bar. And he gave me the bar and he just picked it up with one hand and for those of you who don't know, the bar itself, a regulation bar is 45 pounds. So when you're lifting weight, you equate that in, right? He gives me this 45 pound bar. There's a 40 year old woman over there curling that, right? And here I am going, you know, like I can barely and he, I could get a couple reps out. And then when I got out, I like within three or four to like six reps, I was exhausted. I couldn't do any more, I fatigued immediately. Like it was an immediate fatigue. And I don't know, if you've ever experienced that, it's kind of, it's very frustrating because your brain wants to go one way, but your body just can't do it anymore. It just cannot physically do it and it is incredibly frustrating if you're not used to it and you don't know how to deal with it. So, but with that bar, I was able to, you know, get more out and get more done. And I'd come back the next time and through all the exercises he was doing, he was just giving me basic movements, the bench press, the squat, the lat pulls, shrugs, whatever, right? And every time he would always just put it at the lowest weight possible and then just tell me to just rep it out, do as many as you possibly can until you fatigue. And eventually over time, I could do more and more and more and more and more. At that point, we'd start adding some more weight. But one day when he was helping me with my traps, these are your traps, right? You ever see the big, huge dudes with no necks? It's because their traps are huge, right? So he was helping me with shrugs. Shrugs is basically this. You grab the bar, you stand up straight, shrug, and he let it down. And that's how you isolate your traps. It's just a basic movement, right? You're holding onto a bar and you're just shrugging and going back down. So he, his name was Joseph. He actually played for the St. Louis Rams. And in part time, he wasn't like one of the 20% that makes millions, but he wasn't underpaid either. But he enjoyed being a personal trainer as well at Gold's Gym and just enjoyed helping people and doing the thing that he loved, which was working out and exercising. So he was also very close with this lady named Melanie who would come in and she stood about this tall. She was 42 and she had her own weight set. And it was this beautiful, like the bars in the gym, when you go, the used ones, they just look all nasty and rusty and just used. You don't even want to touch them, right? Hers was shiny and it was just perfect immaculate, but she had different weights too. She had these big, huge rubber weights and she was doing completely different movements than what I was doing. What she was doing was taking this thing, twice her body weight from the floor and lifting it over her head. And I was like, holy shit, that chick is badass. I was like, how did she, that, wow, that was in Joseph, that's Melanie. She's an Olympic athlete, she's a world champion. And I was like, oh dude, I gotta learn from her. Turns out she was also training a former student of hers. Guess what he was? Buff. I wanted to be buff. Joseph could only spend so much time with his, give me so much pity time, right? I mean, he kind of had to make some money and also keep doing his own things. So as we were doing these shrugs, Melanie came over and to say hi to Joseph. And I'm sitting there in the middle of a set and Joseph just says, keep going, keep going, keep going, and then starts chatting with Melanie. And Melanie just looks at me and she goes, Jesus, look at that kid's build, look at him. And I'm like, I'm fat, I'm pasty white, I got acne, I'm sitting here with a bar going like this. Like I was like, what are you talking about? She's just like, no, no, no, no, no. You've got potential. Yeah, I've heard that before. Oh. But what she told me was that it's, I didn't really quite have the body type to be like the dude I wanted to be, right? The totally ripped buff guy with the well separated muscles and everything, right? What she did tell me was that I could probably lift that shit ton of weight if I applied myself and allowed me to train her. And she was like, I'm done training him. I just enjoyed training. Come on, come on. If you're a friend of Joseph's, you're a friend of mine, let's do this. I was like, am I gonna get buff? You'll get big. I'm in. So, slides aren't working. So that's the, bad picture, that's the gym. This is Melanie, this was her record. If you look, it's hard to see, but her body, she weighed 116 pounds. I know this because she constantly obsessed, over the years I got to know her, she always obsessed about being 116 pounds because that was her weight class. And she had to maintain that constantly and she had to train with that or she would gain some weight to be able to lift, get stronger and then drop back down to 116. By the time she broke her own record, broke her record, she could lift over, double her body weight over her head. From the floor, pick it up and in less than a split second, have it above her head. It was incredible. She was all natural. I know a lot of you might be skeptical about that, but she was. The only time she was ever defeated was, by the way, another lady and she constantly hated on her for taking steroids, so. So that's impressive, 42 year old, tiny little thing. Boom, right? Like that's just amazing. That's skill. So she was, she saw something in me, right? Told me I had potential, whatever, wanted to train me. So when I decided, when I heard this and I agreed to this, that's when I began training to train like an Olympic athlete. I immediately wanted to jump in and do exactly what she did. She could take double her body weight over her head and I immediately went over to grab her bar and I was like, can I try? She almost decked me. Nobody touches Melanie's equipment, not even her students, right? So I had to do it with the crappy bars and the metal weights and she had these nice rubber ones and hers had a nice balance to it and I had this bent janky bar, right? That was like everybody used. But I immediately wanted to put some weight on there and she, I remember correctly, I think she let me fail because she just wanted to show me that you can't just jump right into this, right? Like you can't, that is way too overambitious. I was gonna injure myself if I had put too much weight on there or didn't know what I was doing. There are two main power moves in Olympic weightlifting. That's the clean and jerk. How many of you have ever attempted or done a clean and jerk? Right, probably didn't, you know, maybe in high school, you worked out, you played sports, something, but they would teach you how to do the clean and jerk, right? Most of them actually taught it wrong. It was, it's not as easy to just grab it and just go like this all day long, right? Like that's not a clean and jerk. And Melanie, being an Olympic athlete, I trusted her when she told me that that was incorrect, I listened to her and she taught me how to do the clean and jerk. The other move is the snatch. This is what it looks like from the beginning and the clean and jerk is a two, three move thing. You start here, above the knees, you bring it up, the weight comes in, you drop under, you squat it up, over your head. That's the clean and jerk. The snatch is a little bit different. It's a one-step move. You start wider grip, bring it up, down like that, and then back up, right? So these two moves use almost every single muscle in your body. They put tremendous strain on your body if you haven't conditioned your body for them. Damn, I keep doing that. So let's go back to the clean and jerk. All right, so again, they look somewhat similar but the first most important thing to learn about doing the clean and jerk or something this intensive is that it's technique. Technique is the most important thing. If you don't have the correct technique, you will be injured. You will pull something, break an arm, snap a large quadris, you know, like your quad, I've seen a guy snap his quad before. It's pretty nasty. I mean, all of these things can be done. It's a very dangerous activity, very dangerous sport, but if you have technique, it's much, much safer. So the second is conditioning. You have to condition the body. If you don't condition the body properly, you can't survive the impact that you're in the strain that you're putting on it during this. So there's things that you have to condition and you need to, because you use almost every muscle in your body, you have to condition almost every muscle in your body before you can even start attempting to do things like this. I mean, you can grab a light bar and start practicing technique. That's how you practice. You get a bar that weighs next to nothing and you just sit there and do the movement over and over again. You just learn, right? So out of the things you have to do is your neck. There's a reason, because in order to lift that much weight, they actually don't put that much, as much effort as you would think into putting that up. It looks like they're putting more effort into it than they possibly could even have in their own body, right? Look at this guy. You saw that guy's face, right? I'll get to that in a minute. You need to condition the neck. The reason you condition the neck is because when you're coming up from both of those moves, the neck is the first thing that you use. It's a fast twitch muscle. So when you're coming up, what you'll notice is that you keep your back and you're coming and going and you'll notice that you bring the shoulders up first. And the bar just starts to float. You can't even feel it. Then you jump under it. This is where you condition your shoulders. Because your shoulders must be full of meat. Because when you come up like this, your shoulders stand higher than your collarbone. So when that thing comes down, you simply go like this and you drop, cushion, and your muscles are there to help cushion it, right? And it kind of scrapes your throat a little bit, that rough edge, right? But you feel it just go like this. I always had kind of like a callus here from this. That was just a, you know, battle scar. Also the legs, right? You're coming from this deep squat. Your ass is on the floor when you, down there. And now you have to power back up. Every muscle in your leg is being used. So you have to condition your legs now. You have to do squats constantly, isolate them, hamstring movements, right? Kicks, calves, everything. Your whole, every muscle in your leg, your toes have to be strong, right? So the other is triceps, because that's what's pushing that up. That's part of your shoulders and the movement up. And the forearms. Forearms are super important. Because in order to be able to lift that off the ground, you need a major F in grip, right? Because that is, you are holding on to hundreds and hundreds of pounds. And if you can't grip that bar, it's not gonna leave the floor. And you're not allowed to use wrist guards or any of that stuff, right? So, where did my water go? So, every two to three weeks we switched my routine up and we integrated new movements into it, right? Each day each movement. I also kept a log. I would say how I felt every day. I would like, I would lift something and I was like that was heavy or that was really easy. I didn't eat enough today. I didn't have enough protein today. I didn't do, I would just keep a log all constantly of what I was doing and how I felt each day. This felt like such hippie crap to me when I was doing it but she insisted that I did it and I later realized why. Because as we would change routines or every week to week and I would go to do a set, I would look back at that log and say, oh that's right, I did 45 pounds on this and I can only do it for so many reps and I start fatiguing and that's what I had to eat that day and so forth and so on. So I could make a better judgment as to what I was going to try and accomplish today because I didn't want to try and be over ambitious again because that leads to mental defeat in the fatigue, the physical fatigue. That is that mental defeat that you have. So after a year and a half of this, I was able to lift well over my body weight over my head in a split second from the floor straight up. Both movements. My neck was swallowing my head. I had a huge chest. My shoulders were enormous. My stomach was mostly flat but Olympic lifters, well you got to pack on some meat, right? That's a lot of weight. But girls talk to me. I was buff. I did it. But it wasn't being buff. It was my confidence at this point. It was that I had just accomplished something I never thought I would even approach to do. When I saw her doing that I was like, that's cool, that's badass, I couldn't do that. What she came over gave me one little quick piece of confidence and I immediately jumped in, right? And you realize that it's just technique. It was just that you're conditioning certain things and you're making certain little pieces stronger and stronger and eventually you can take something huge and lift it over your head. It's really an amazing feeling. And as you're doing this every day, every step of the way, you're like, I can take this and I might have gotten it up to here and then dropped it, right? But yesterday, or I'm sorry, last week, I could barely get it past my knees during the squat portion, the first phase of the lift. So you just get it higher and higher and then sometimes it goes over your head and you're like, ah, and you throw it. That's why they have those big rubber weights, right? It's because they throw it, right? Otherwise it comes crashing down. The metal ones, I had to use those and man, that is loud when you drop those things. Loud. I was accomplishing something. This was the same exact feeling I had when I was 12, when I was working with a computer and making it do all these little incrementing things and guessing numbers and plotting colors and doing this stuff. Each one of those, just a big snowball and kept going and going and going and then my parents would say neat. And it would flush, right? I met my just, you could just, all the enthusiasm in my head left and it takes forever to recover from that. Takes forever. But those activities, that feeling, that is addictive. You wanna keep feeling that way all the time. That is gumption. That's what that is. It is the essence of achieving. It is the essence of getting something done. You have to be filled with gumption. I'm going to let the author of my all-time favorite book explain this one. This is a direct quote from the book. I like the word gumption because it's so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and it isn't likely to reject anyone who comes along. It's an old Scottish word. Once used by a lot of pioneers, but which, like Ken, seemed to have all but dropped out of use. I like it because it also describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with quality. He gets filled with gumption. When I first read this book and I read that paragraph, I had to read it over and over again because I was like, oh my God, I'm not mental, right? Like, that's what that is. Now I have a definition for it, right? This is, you're connecting with quality. It's when you just think, whoa, brilliant idea and you just dive right in, right? It's what happens to someone who connects with quality. It's gas. This is what drives us. As engineers, all of you, I'm sure, have felt gumption before. The first time you wrote a piece of software, the first time you got two sockets to connect and send a byte across a network, right? It's like, holy cow, that was cool and then you keep going and you don't stop and you don't stop, right? It's that feeling of being invincible. The reaction I get when I mention to those, I see struggling with understanding things and constantly being frustrated. I always mention to them, the book. The book is, I think you already saw it. Oh, sorry. The book is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I kind of blew that earlier, sorry. Many of you have heard of it, but most of you, I'm sure, haven't actually read it. Everybody's, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that book about motorcycles, right? And when I tell people about it, I say, just please go read this book. It is one of the most amazing books you'll ever read. It's just crazy. All these weird things that go on in your head, whenever you're, you just, maybe you have writer's block or we have coder's block, it's like you sit down at the terminal and you just freeze up and you're like, I don't even know what to do, right? This book talks about all of that and the reasons why and he puts such good depth, good insight into it. Again, they immediately assume that it's about motorcycle maintenance and they're judging it, they're judging a book by its cover, they're not giving it a chance, much like they do with everything else in their lives or they just immediately say, you know, that's too hard. I couldn't do that, screw it, right? They just treat it the way they treat everything else and that is incredibly destructive behavior. My father and mother were greatly concerned with my decision not to go to college. They decided that I probably wasn't going to get a good job, I wasn't going to earn good money, I wasn't going to be able to provide for a family or I might just be a single bum and keep living in their basement, right? That's probably what they were more worried about, having to keep paying for me. So at the age of 16, I actually started writing software professionally. It was because when I was at the gym, I met this guy who knew a guy who introduced me and told him that I was totally individual basic at the time and he was like, I actually have this very small project. Man, if you have some free time, I would really greatly appreciate your help. And I thought, oh, that's awesome, hell yeah, I'll do that, right? And that began my descent into crystal reports for about four years. That was an awful four years of my life. And I became really good at that. And unfortunately, I constantly, it was always asked to do it at every job I went to, even though I signed up to do something else. Anyway, I'm digressing. But when I was out there at 16, I mean, even though I was only like an hour or two here and there, right? I was learning about business and I was learning about, you know, just the real world. I was doing real problems for real companies and I was applying this thing that I was so just ecstatic about doing and it just got even better, right? Now I'm actually doing it for other people. Other people are actually benefiting from it and are enjoying it. So much so, they're giving me money for it, right? And that's what I was kind of looking for when I was 12, when I was showing off my number guessing game. It's like, either say that is awesome or give me 50 bucks, something, right? Like, I need some kind of validation here. But, and I didn't really have much of a fear of failure. Either. And I think that's because I was able to just keep gumption going, right? Like, when you're in high school and you're sitting in class and you begin daydreaming, what's one of the first thing the teachers do? You're sitting there and then all of a sudden, Blake, Blake, what's the answer to the question? What was the question? I don't know. I'm sorry I was daydreaming. That is the most destructive thing they can possibly do to you. Because daydreaming, that is the start of gumption. Your brain has just went and made some connections somewhere, some external, out of, from the external environment that you're in. And just put something together. Neurons start firing, things start colliding, sparks are flying, your eyes are moving, your brain's going and you look like you're in a coma, right? But what you're doing is your brain is just like, just overcharged, right? It's in turbo power. It's like the little turbo button on that Head Start LX. Someone pushed mine. And it just went, got an extra mega-herd out of it. So, again, they never thought I was gonna get a real job. I worked for Anheuser-Busch, I worked for RGA, I worked for many, many Fortune 500 companies and I hated all of them and I never really thought I ever had a real job to begin with. But the most, but one thing I also learned about this was that I was able to survive in these companies with these boring, horrible positions doing boring, horrible business things like crystal reports. Because there was something about crystal reports I would find and then say, actually, that little piece, that's kind of interesting and then focus on that all the time. And then every report I ever did always use that feature in a new way, even though it probably didn't fit. But I was making a game out of it, right? And how many times can I do this and get away with it, right? How fast can I make these? How can I automate building these horrible things? I actually started using Ruby back in 2001. You know what I used it for? It generated Java, C++ and C-sharp. I spent all my days writing Ruby to do nothing but generate C-sharp and I wanted to see how efficiently I could get that to work and how long I could go without before someone actually realized that I was cheating. They wanted us to write it all by hand. Ruby wasn't authorized. But I installed it anyway, nobody knew the difference. This is what's missing from a lot of people's lives. They don't have gumption, they don't understand what it is. They don't know how to hold on to it when they do have it. Or they constantly are in environments where they're so distracted that it just can't get going. It gets that first spark and it starts moving and it just, boom, you hear it escaping from their head. That's lack, they lack gumption. So what I wanna talk about now real quick is just that. When you're in that mode and you're going and then someone opens the door to the conference room and you go, what, right? You were in the middle of this brilliant idea and they just destroyed it, it's gone, it's out. You know that feeling when you're driving on autopilot home from work and you're focusing on the road but you're thinking about something funny someone said that day or you're thinking about an idea and you're just kinda like trying to keep it going on your way home so when you get home, you can do it, you can implement that feature. And then all of a sudden you see a cop in your rear view mirror and then you're like, right? And you completely forgot. Everything that you were just thinking about no longer matters, you no longer realize now you're watching this guy on your tail and eventually he goes off, best case scenario. And afterwards you sit there and all you can do is just calm down, right? You're just like thinking about that. You're like, oh, I've been cops, God, why did they do that, I hate that. Why do you have to ride so close? You know? And then you're like, what was that idea I had? Shit, right? Those are gumption traps. They happen. But try to, you have to avoid them. A cop coming on your tail like that, how you really can't avoid that, right? But they happen. So there's two things you need to learn which is how to recover from them and how to avoid them. But most importantly, trying to avoid them is truly key. There's another form of a trap is the first time you're focused on something, the first time you attempt to do something, you have one goal, right? And the first thing you do is you rush in and you're like, I'm gonna do this, I can totally do, and then you get this feature and you're just like, yes, it's almost complete. I just need to integrate it in with the rest of the system. You put it in there and then boom, you took production down, right? That's a mistake, you take a breath, even if you're writing unit tests, right? Like end-to-end integration tests, you need those. You need to run it through the paces, benchmark it, do those things, right? Because what you just did when you do that is you went out of sequence. You jumped an important, very obvious step because you couldn't control the gumption. That's almost as bad as not having it at all because it's also very destructive. Understanding when to shut it off for a second and come back to reality or discipline yourself that when you're in that mode to keep going, do those things that are really important, that's huge. That's one thing this book really didn't talk too much about. But there is another book called Flow. The last name of the guy has about 16 syllables so you know you have the right one, starts with a C. That book goes into more detail. But it's really, really a neat book because you can see all of these, he talks about all of these more modern, these just people and music and art and computer science and botanists, you know? I mean anything, like they all have flow. Some guy on an assembly line with the most mundane job can actually have flow and he's happy. And the guy next to him hasn't figured out how to capture it or even how to create it and he's miserable. They make the same amount of money and have the exact same job. This was a real study that they talked about in the book. And they asked him why, why is it that you are happy and you are not? And when the guy who had it answered, it was because he did exactly what I was doing with Crystal Reports and all these other jobs that I hated doing, but I had to do them. And I was, he made a game out of it. He actually figured out how to make it faster. He could get faster and faster and more efficient. He could crank out his job more times than anyone else on the assembly line, right? And he knew that he could get faster and faster and faster and better and better and better at it. That's also what I was doing with that number guessing game. I was making it faster and faster and faster and better and cooler and more graphics and this and that and eventually you can only get so good and you need to learn when to shut that gumption off and redirect it somewhere else to keep it going because eventually you will plateau and you'll get burnt out, right? So one of the ways to overcome the gumption traps is like the first time I grabbed that bar and I got fatigued. The first thing I did was felt mentally defeated and physically defeated, right? I was very frustrated. And I remember going, that's okay, no, no, no, no, no, put me back in, coach. I'm gonna do it this time, right? I hadn't let myself recover. Not only did I not let my brain recover from that defeat but I hadn't let my body recover either. In software engineering, our bodies take a huge strain as well, right? I mean, when you come home from work, have you ever had such a productive day that you just, it's eight o'clock at night and you just go and hit the bed, right? You're just exhausted. You've been in that mode all day long. So if you hit one of these things and you fatigue and you hit a trap, one of the things I like to do is stop for a second, take a breath, maybe go grab a drink of water, maybe take a walk, do something and just kind of clear my head for a second and just kind of stare at the ground or the sky or something, just get away from the screen and think about nothing for a little bit. And as soon as I can tell them my head is clear, I'll start then thinking about what is it that I did wrong? What did I miss? What did I, ah, that's what it was. So I write that down. But you've already put so much effort into doing that thing and then felt defeated, just the thought of going back and trying to fix that thing, you know that you're gonna have to start taking things apart and it's gonna require more work than you're mentally capable of doing right now and that is also a gumption trap. The key is to realize that you're just having a try, it's just a moment, it's a temporary phase. Just be like, ah, I'm not even gonna think about trying to fix it. I wrote down what I would do differently, but that's it, I didn't really write any specifics down. Now it's out of your head, it's on paper. Sometimes I actually do go back and then write a failing unit test or something and it just raises an error so that the next time I, when I go to bed and I get up the next day, I run make test and it just blows up and it says, this is what you were doing and I go, cool, all right, thanks, and then I get back to it and I'm like fresh, right? And then just get back into that flow. You've got gumption again. There's so many more of these gumption traps, but I highly suggest reading this book if you haven't. And if you have, read it, reread it. I mean, I've read it a few times, but when I was thinking about this speech, I had to go back and read that whole chapter again on gumption traps and it's still just timeless. You're just like, oh man, I totally forgot about that. That's just so crazy, that's so cool, right? So to me, I have three things that I like to do to try and get gumption going. Number one, or number three, I'm sorry, in reverse order, number three is just be quiet. Find a quiet room, or if you're gonna pair up with somebody, move somewhere into another room where no one else can distract you. No noises can go off, someone's cell phone doesn't just ring and it just throws you off because when you're pairing with somebody, you can kind of be in the same flow with them, right? And you guys, all of a sudden, it's just like, you're just on the same plane and you're going, you know? So quiet. The next is tools. This is the most important thing. You need good tools. You don't need a lot of them. You just need good ones, a few good ones. A solid text editor that you truly, you know, just you know it. You've almost mastered it, right? You're a Tex-Mate tyrant to play off Tom's whole thing. But the key is to master those tools. Like a great chef only needs a few things. Stainless steel pots, a knife, and pre-cut ingredients before he cooks the main piece over the fire. Because typically when cooking something over the fire, like that, it happens fast and you need to be able to get those ingredients on quick at the right time to get that right flavor. And if those things weren't prepared ahead of time or you didn't have the right tools to reach for and it took you longer than it should have, then you can burn the entree and you're defeated, right? So preparation is the key. Have what you need ready. And number one to me that I've discovered recently is that as much as I wanted girls a long time ago, I'm not coming out. Hold on, let's see. Let me start that over. I've always liked girl, you know, I liked chasing the opposite sex and just, you know, that's what I was attracted to. So that's what I wanted. And that's why I was doing these things was because Dave Chappelle put it really well. Why do we want the nice cars and the expensive houses and the everything? It's bait. So as soon as one of them comes and says, ooh, nice car, gotcha. Right? But at the same time, once you've done them, you've gone through all of that and you finally find someone you can settle down with, then you can focus more on other things. You still put a lot of attention into them and you work on that, but I've been able to get so much more done now that I'm not constantly worried about, you know, what am I gonna do tonight? There's a party over here, is there any girls? Right? And it, this also goes with, you know, maybe, I mean, if you're single, then having a part, Tom talked about this last night, having good partners, having good business partners. And the reason that this works is not only just because you can bounce ideas off of them because it's, they depend on you. That is the most important thing and you depend on them. You have this symbiotic relationship and that helps create gumption. It creates excitement. You wanna do something to just, just provide, like, just make that, you know, make life so much better, right? And to share, and just to have someone to share all of these, those crystallization moments where you go, ah, that was it. Yes, high five, boom, right? Let's go grab a bag of Coke and hang out for a minute, right? Let's relish in this. So, that's it, thank you.