Interesting encounter.

Today, i met a foreigner on my way to Resorts World Singapore. He was impressed watching me play yo-yo in the train and requested to take a video with his phone. Of course i couldn't reject his request! After all, it would be an interesting experience.

During the conversation, he sung me praises and told me many things that were worth learning and listening to. At first i thought that i should just get it over and done with but later i realized that he was like an angel sent from the heavens to bring light into my recent problems and frequent conundrums. He told me that i was better than those he saw during the Asia Pacific Yo-Yo Contest in March but i denied his statement almost immediately, telling him i was only 9th in Singapore and no where near the Asia Pacific standard. That was when he told me more meaningful things as we chatted like long lost friends who have just met each other again.

In the conversation, he told me that the ninth and the fifth place are probably more or less close to each other and that if I have had a good day and landed my tricks, I would have probably gotten a 5th place, or if i had an even greater day, probably top 3. He continued by saying it was just the mentality and consistency in a competition that matters because competitions always screw with your state of mind but not others. He ended by saying that ultimately, we should be challenging only our capabilities and not other peoples abilities, because we do things because we want to and not anything else.

It was certainly an eye opening experience to have a conversation with a complete stranger for so long. He was so polite, so positive and so friendly unlike the typical hostile Singaporean who can care less about other people regardless of their races. I am no exception. From my conversation, I learnt another life lesson. It's not just a lesson about mentality during yo-yo contests, but rather the mentality in life. If we applied what he said during the conversation to another form of competition, for example examinations, what he said would make terribly good sense. Because in examinations, we are not challenging and competing with other classmates and friends, but rather competing with how much we want to do a certain thing. It is something many students have been oblivious to as we always tend to do countless of comparison between who is great and who is not. In the end, those who do not perform well or perform too well will probably be ostracized from the class. It is a sad, inevitable truth but we all have to face it.

Perhaps we should all learn to have attitudes like foreigners who present themselves so positively, so friendly like an extrovert who is not shy to do anything like holding a conversation with strangers. Though it may be impossible, we can start doing so by changing ourselves to be just like them. Everyone knows that a smile and an interesting experience makes a day complete, right?