The cutting edge
As I often do I am borrowing the title of this post from a movie and indeed as usual if you have seen the movie you will know what this post is about. The movie I am referring to today is a bit obscure so I won't blame you for not having seen it. I will make it easier and tell you what I am going to write about today. I will write about figure skating, but above all about perseverance.
Figure skating is an obvious topic since I have started my training, very late in life and you could really almost see it as the first sign of my midlife crisis.
I have always been fond of this discipline but having grown up in a place where the temperature never drops below the 10 degrees Celsius, I had never had much opportunity to practice it. I had parked this fancy in the back of my mind till it resurfaced when my body said, now or never and I decided it to be now instead of never.
By starting my training I got confronted with the concept of perseverance in its purest form. Perseverance is a rare quality, not so many people possess it, figure skating for some technical reasons definitely helps practice this virtue. In simple words perseverance is the art of keep on trying until you have achieved your goal, but more subtly it is also the art of knowing which ones are the situations where keep on trying WILL make you achieve your goal.
In that respect figure skating is very easy, you instinctively know for what keep on trying will bring you results. The teenage girls of the competition team that share the training rink with me, are an example of this. They train everyday for hours on, jump after jump, fall after fall until the routine is perfect.
I only see them once a week, I am not a teenager anymore, I am not sure how much perseverance my body can take, but I feel their passion and it makes me also want to try harder.
Since I am not a teenager I am also interested in transferring these learning to other aspects of life. As I said perseverance is quite a rare (and I don't consider myself as a great keeper of this virtue) quality but not because people do not generally keep on trying but because they do not know when this is worth doing.
I will give you a non politically correct example of this aspect for Anglo-Saxons (American, British) keeping on trying is always worth (First World War is the best example of it), for Dutch keeping on trying is never worth (the Dutch schooling system is the best example of it), for Latins (Italians, Spanish, French) keep on trying is a calculated risk (Machiavelli is the best example of it), but the calculation might often be wrong.
In that respect I am truly Italian and the question for me is how do I get the calculation right most of the times?
I don't have an answer yet, does any of you do?
Figure skating is an obvious topic since I have started my training, very late in life and you could really almost see it as the first sign of my midlife crisis.
I have always been fond of this discipline but having grown up in a place where the temperature never drops below the 10 degrees Celsius, I had never had much opportunity to practice it. I had parked this fancy in the back of my mind till it resurfaced when my body said, now or never and I decided it to be now instead of never.
By starting my training I got confronted with the concept of perseverance in its purest form. Perseverance is a rare quality, not so many people possess it, figure skating for some technical reasons definitely helps practice this virtue. In simple words perseverance is the art of keep on trying until you have achieved your goal, but more subtly it is also the art of knowing which ones are the situations where keep on trying WILL make you achieve your goal.
In that respect figure skating is very easy, you instinctively know for what keep on trying will bring you results. The teenage girls of the competition team that share the training rink with me, are an example of this. They train everyday for hours on, jump after jump, fall after fall until the routine is perfect.
I only see them once a week, I am not a teenager anymore, I am not sure how much perseverance my body can take, but I feel their passion and it makes me also want to try harder.
Since I am not a teenager I am also interested in transferring these learning to other aspects of life. As I said perseverance is quite a rare (and I don't consider myself as a great keeper of this virtue) quality but not because people do not generally keep on trying but because they do not know when this is worth doing.
I will give you a non politically correct example of this aspect for Anglo-Saxons (American, British) keeping on trying is always worth (First World War is the best example of it), for Dutch keeping on trying is never worth (the Dutch schooling system is the best example of it), for Latins (Italians, Spanish, French) keep on trying is a calculated risk (Machiavelli is the best example of it), but the calculation might often be wrong.
In that respect I am truly Italian and the question for me is how do I get the calculation right most of the times?
I don't have an answer yet, does any of you do?
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