Humping the Turtle
God is the ultimate creator. We are made in His image and thusly, we are creators too! The secret to success in our lifetime is to decide on doing what we were made to do, to eliminate any distractions to achieving that goal, and to watch and listen, soaking in the wealth of information and resources that are always around us to help us achieve our goals. Our awake minds help us to make connections on how to combine and adapt these resources in new and exciting ways; but often we have to have a single-minded focus, hell-bent on achieving our dreams, to take the resources and turn them into something new. There are many parts of the creation process that may be considered mundane or unsexy. The difference between Bill Gates and the guy who goes to the cemetery with all of his dreams unrealized, is that Bill decided to buckle down and get through these boring parts–Bill humped his turtle. The cemetery guy decided to forego real accomplishment in exchange for temporary pleasures and comfort. He wasted his life on distractions.
I remember watching my brother Ryan play video games when we were kids. Ryan was the type that would painstakingly play levels over and over, mastering pixel parkour on so many of those early Nintendo and Sega Genesis gems. In a lot of those games, if you missed the edge of a suspended platform, your character fell to its doom. This type of game heightened the tension and nerves, maximizing the relief when you got through a tough part, but also maximizing the pain during sections that were hard.
I was often astonished at Ryan’s tenacity and determination to keep trying and to make tiny adjustments with each pass until finally his digital hero would get through. He would reach the princess, the final boss or the ever-coveted credits screen. Ryan would sit for hours at those same screens, with that same repetitive 8-bit music in the background. On a side note, some of the favorite and most nostalgic music of my life is original NES Music. I am sure this love came from the hundreds of hours of exposure watching Ryan play.
When I would play those games, I would try a few times, resolve that I would be able to get it if I “really wanted to,” and then proceed to convince myself that the effort was not worth it. I was wrong. Way wrong. In retrospect, convincing myself that I could do anything I wanted to without really ever taking the time to complete something from start to finish is my biggest character flaw and the biggest regret of my life. This thinking left me with an unfounded pride and arrogance in my abilities with no real accomplishments that required any work. The only games I would ever beat were the ones I could cheat on by taking a shortcut, using a password or following someone else’s walk-through to reach the end. These victories were not in fact victories but empty failures. I was a Game Genie kind of guy.
Though God’s grace, I have been fortunate enough to have been blessed with many talents and the ability to improvise. So even with this character flaw, God has allowed me to do some incredible things easily. But I realize now that I will never reach my end-credits screen without taking the time to do the mundane, to hump my own turtle. Okay before you think I have some weird reptilian fetish, let me explain the phrase.
On the original Super Mario Brothers game, there was a trick at the end of level 3-1 where you could hop on a turtle descending the stairs and wedge his shell between your jumping plumber and the staircase.
If you did it just right and jumped just high enough, your character coming back down would catch the turtle shell and prevent it from going past you going down the rest of the stairs. With each jump, in the point totals would increase until eventually the high point total resulted in extra lives. Each jump at this point gave that 6-tone extra life chime. You could actually perform these jumps until you more than maxed out your extra lives (more than 99). Meaning that you had tons of more opportunities than the standard 3 lives to get through the rest of the rounds. I call this process “humping the turtle.”
I tried this process several times and even achieved one or two extra lives but never really got the timing. Ryan on the other hand, would sit there and jump until he got the max lives within the time he had left in the round almost every time. Nevermind the fact that he may have only needed 5 or so more lives than standard to get through the really tough parts of the rest of the game. Ryan would always take as much time as he could before the timer expired getting extra lives. There was no other point in the game to do this trick. The opportunity only came once. And Ryan maximized this opportunity every time.
There are many lessons we can take from humping the turtle. First, the more we do the mundane and follow it through to resolution, the more satisfaction we feel and sense of completion. This instills more confidence. Going forward, we know that it we fall we can get right back up. We know that falling is a part of the process. Second, we can build up a reserve of energy (extra lives) that keeps us through more attempts to succeed than we should be afforded.
To illustrate this outside of video games, let’s look at music production/creation (a love that a Ryan and I share today). I absolutely love digital music production. So much in fact that I have spent thousands of dollars of software and countless hours learning what all the knobs do. I have been playing with digital music production for 20 years now since the days of Windows 3.1 and the copy of Digital Orchestrator Pro I bought with money I earned running spotlight at the Carousel Dinner Theater.
But in all that time, I probably could count on two hands the number of completed songs that I have made. I would come up with incredible beats, hooks or so ideas, scratch that down in the program and then never take the time to arrange the idea into a final product. I have thousands of song fragments, many of which have the potential to be hits, strewn across terabytes of hard drives.
I have shown Ryan a few, and he has told me on more than one occasion to finish them. Ryan has arranged many tracks for himself and other artists and I am astonished at both his prolific body of work, and his tenacity to finish a project, to push through the mundane arranging and sound tweaking parts of the process. The difference in our approach is that Ryan learned how to hump the turtle and I haven’t yet fully decided to buckle down and do the hard work. After we are both gone one day, people will still able to listen to Ryan’s music. No one will take the time to go through my hard drives and listen to my song fragments. My not humping the turtle has kept me from fully expressing the creativity on the inside and turning it into a product that others can experience.
That is, until now.
This post, is an announcement to the world that the time has come to put my head down, focus on the end goal and do what needs to be done to achieve my dreams. It is unfair to the world to keep what God has given me from them any longer. I will not go back to the life of hopping from fancy to fancy, drifting along like a cloud with no substance. If I am hopping, it will be vertically in place on the back of a turtle shell.
