And Don't Forget That You Called It All Bullshit, Well, It Still Is And If You Stop Giving Into It, You Will Walk Away The Freest Man

--"The Freest Man", Tilly and the Wall


Normally, I cannot stand on-line quizzes. I hate how they try to boil your personality down to a famous Disney character or a song by Coldplay or any other of a half-million other set of choices. Most of the time when I see a blogging site employing quiz after quiz to fill space I tend to think that the author is too unoriginal to employ his or her own material. Quizzes and memes have truly become pet peeves of mine when it comes to the internet experience as I have found so many individuals who are crafting some highly intelligent and creative works, that all the fluff and dander of quizzes serves no point but to irritate and annoy.

That being said, there is one quiz I take every year and I make sure that my closest friends have at least taken once in their lives:

What Kind Of Leader Are You?

I can think of three reasons why I think the inclusion of this quiz in my post does not qualify me as taking the lazy way out. One, I wrote it myself from scratch. One thing you will never see on this site is me snatching someone else's quiz just to fill space. Two, I never intended this as a quiz many people would take. It started off as a supplement to a card game I was creating. In much the same way Magic: The Gathering has five colors, each with strengths and weaknesses, so did my game have twelve clans, each with strengths and weakness. Instead of picking a clan arbitrarily, I thought it would be a neat idea to take a short quiz to determine what kind of leadership style and, therefore, clan, suited one best. Third, I have seen this quiz is for more useful than for mere games. It has really been almost completely dead-on in showing me how a person is likely to face a serious obstacle as well as how a person handles responsibility for others.

For instance, if you take my friend Kerri Ray, she tested out as being a perfect fit for the Dragon clan. In the context of my game, the Dragon are governed by the theory that training and expertise lead to perfection. They succeed because there is really no outcome other than perfection in their minds. If that doesn't sound like her then I don't know what does. One can see in her everyday life she truly believes there is no room for error, no space for whimsy. For her there is only the goal and the quest for attaining that goal with sheer excellence in all areas--intelligence, decisiveness, and, most of all, focus.

On the other hand, Breanne tests out as a Mongoose, which, in the game, is a clan that believes in letting the opponent make the first move and reacting accordingly. They never instigate the conflict, but they sure as hell know how to end it. It's surprising that her results match up as they do with this clan because, given her penchant for avoiding conflict, I would have thought her inclination would be to the non-conflict oriented Crane clan. Yet, the more I reflected on her outcome, the more it made sense to me. For Breanne it isn't about running away from the problem because she's afraid to face it. For her it's about getting away from the conflict so that she may mount a more effective rebuttal. For her, she doesn't see the point in pounding away at an obstacle needlessly. She would much rather take a step back, see what exactly is barring her way, and figure out the best way to tackle it.

As for me, I don't think I could have received any other result but Wolf clan. In the game, that clan relies on outnumbering and throwing en masse their attacks at the enemy. I believe that's my approach to most problems. I tend to throw numbers at everything I do. I have a belief that I write at length because I'm searching for inspiration and direction, as if the more sentences I throw out there, the more opportunities I will have for actually composing something intelligently. Also, this approach can be plainly seen in how I used to date in my college days. I used to go out with two or three girls a week just because I knew some of them I wouldn't, some of them wouldn't like me, or that some of them would fail just because. I always called it the shotgun approach, as in you cover a big enough area and you're bound to hit something.

For most of my life it has always been a game of numbers. Why stay up till nine when I could stay up till midnight or even three? Why watch The Wizard once or even twice when I could watch it sixty-two times? Why stop at doing eighty when ninety is only ten miles an hour faster? I always thought that overkill was a myth propagated by people who didn't know how to have fun.

Lately, though, I'm beginning to see the fallacy in trying to overdo everything. It kind of ties into my beliefs on happiness. Most of the time I've done something extravagant it was because I was trying to impress someone. For example, I once bet a waitress fifteen dollars at a buffet in D.C. that I could polish off six full plates of food. I didn't need to eat that much and the fifteen dollars wasn't that big of a deal for me even then. The real reason I did it was to impress her and the friends I was eating with. I've always put myself out there, doing wacky things, doing things way over-the-top, or over and over again, because I thought it would garner the attention of people whose attention I thought I needed. Friends, family, or even strangers--for me it was always about trying to get them to notice me. That's the real reason why I think I tended to go overboard when it came to my day-to-day life.

Now, with the change in rationale for my behavior, of trying to impress only myself and of trying to find the joy in the small things, I tend to hold myself back when my first instinct is to go big. I no longer have to finish a huge meal just because it's there. I no longer have to call a girl three to five times a day just to say hello because I want her to know I was thinking about her. I no longer have to bring up how many times I watched this certain movie or that certain show. In the end, how often you do something doesn't really impress as much as how well you do something. That's what I've learned. I'd much rather be judged on the content of my character rather than the records I supposedly hold. Numbers are only remembered in athlectics. What really impresses someone on a day-to-day basis is how one presents himself when the day is mundane, even boring. One doesn't have to create excitement around oneself in everything one does to be exciting. One really can walk into a room and light it up just by being one's self.

That's the goal I'm trying to attain and that's how I'm trying to solve my problems from now on. I'm no longer trying to throw myself into a dilemma, attacking and attacking until I stumble onto the solution. I'm trying to allow myself the understanding that there are far simpler ways to solve my problem and to separate the doing of something significant from the publicizing of it. It used to be that I would set out to do something for the recognition. Now a lot of the things I do are for the simple satisfaction of completing it.

No, there isn't a clan for that yet. But maybe that's the point. Maybe I've started coming around to the idea that I don't need a group around me who thinks and acts like I do. Maybe I'm starting to accept the fact that I am an original person even if I'm the only person who knows it. It's alright because, in reality, I'm the only person that needs to know that.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers