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One of my ways to respond to things is to make things in relation to them. Mr. Kobe Bryant has passed away in a helicopter crash.

Here are some of the things I learned from him:

Narrative

The power of narrative is something that his recent life after basketball had been focused on. I watched many interviews of his where he talked about the power of storytelling. I have discussed this concept here and there in recent episodes of my podcast. There is a compelling power to a story you have written. You can re-frame things in a way that sends one message, or another, or another(Youtubers and video editors know this).

When you tell a story, you can bring people into the world of the story. Kobe had mentioned in his interviews that he would get others on his team who were obsessives, that would bring a level of detail to the storytelling that would serve to immerse everyone in the story’s world. He mentioned that the bar code on one of the books attached to a story he was part of making had to match the look of the rest of the fictional world it was from.

Storytelling with a high level of detail can paint a picture that is as real as life for a person, and can make their future reality similar to that. Ice Cube said “If I can picture that, I’ll bring a picture back.” in his song “Cold Places”.

Storytelling and its value will be one of the biggest takeaways from Kobe’s message that I am applying in 2020 and onward. I have left out storytelling from a portion of my life, and will look to make better use of it moving forward.

Discipline

Very few people could present the discipline and focus that Kobe could. He was able to show all the other players in the league that he would put in as much work or more as them, and that it would pay off during the game. He brought this throughout his career, and then transitioned it to the career he was just getting into, as far as creating a fictional world for children with storytelling and film.

The power of discipline like that is that it sets the tone for everyone that you are the person who is setting the standard. Once you set the standard, it is like having a pillar that you can lean on whenever things get shaky. Focus builds on itself, and you end up not flinching at anything that shows up in your existence. We don’t want to get thrown off in this world, because we are here to do as much as possible in the short time available (Kobe had 41 years).

Practice

Are we talking about practice? Yes, because that is what leads you to having the game of your life. If your practice is harder than the actual game, the game is not difficult. Kobe would put up hundreds of shots, try every possible move, and out-practice all.

He has a video up on Youtube where he showed some of his moves and shots for the game, and you could see that he had strategy behind what he did. He said it wasn’t about being fast, but about selling the fake, when doing a move on the court. It is strategy that he brought to the table, after all.

Conclusion

Though there is more to say, as I have been watching Kobe’s material for years, I will leave this article at here and put any other material in other content. The narrative message is the biggest one I will take into account and apply through 2020 and onward.

I have seen other complete guides on the internet, and so I thought I would write one that is in one of my categories of activity. If you are interested in meeting people in Los Angeles how I do it, I can provide my perspective on the matter. I would organize this essay, or put a lot of effort into it, but that would be counter to my natural style, and I probably wouldn’t finish it if I did, and you wouldn’t have this to read.

Step one is to realize that you are worthwhile. This is the step before any other step. If you don’t have self-esteem, or an understanding that you are lucky to even be here, the rest of this complete guide won’t be valuable. You have to go through the day, and into discussions with people, with the sense that everything you did before then led you up to this point, and it would be an insult to all of your past to not follow through with internal smoothness. Nervousness and anxiety are an insult to your past self.

I would tailor this guide to someone who is more sensitive, or someone who is less sensitive, but I’m not tailoring it at all. It is fairly straightforward from my perspective.

Step two is to go out to public places and say things to people who pique your interest in some way. Again, this requires the self-esteem, and more importantly, life understanding, from step one. You go up to people and say something, using all the knowledge and social experience you have up until that point to be received well. If you really care about results, you can write out how each time goes, and look back at what you wrote to see if there was something you could do better.

Now that you have gone through step two, you are having a sense of better ways to interact, or the kinds of people you are more geared toward, or have gotten motivation through your hurdles or successes.

That was most of the steps that matter. If you are a connector like me, part of your motivation in meeting people is to connect them to others that day, that week, or at some time. It is nice to bring people together who would never have met before.

Another category to take into account is those who send you some form of negative energy for trying to socialize with them. If you have the self-esteem from step one, they have no reason to look poorly at you, so it is a reflection of their own day. Understand that their time is not going well in some regard, and that they don’t know you. Don’t absorb the negativity or rejection, but absorb the motivation you get after the fact. Not sharing your greatness and life is an insult to your greatness and life.

Some would say that it is not so easy to do what I have described here. There are obviously a thousand articles in between the steps I have written that would iron out the details of each part and sub-part, and so on. I like to focus on the broader topics, because the details along the way have a tendency to work themselves out.

A person who brings a level of energy to a category always gets results and stories in said category. It is a matter of imparting some of the life that you have onto that category, which in this case is meeting people in Los Angeles in a similar way to myself. Note that I didn’t make it meeting people in LA in general, because my way of doing it would be different than the next individual. I wouldn’t judge their way, in the same way I wouldn’t be receptive to their judgment of my ways of communicating, or beliefs on the matter.

If you have the passion behind it, you could then bring people together who you have met from here to there. This can branch out to the point of having a huge congregation of individuals who are on your team in this regard, which is a great feeling. It is always up to you how far you go with something.

One good thing about getting to meeting people in Los Angeles is that it translates to lots of other places. Los Angeles individuals in public have been run through more systems and are more socially competitive than individuals in most other places, so getting skilled here means even more ability in other regions.

I like the variety of new people, and the little things that I get to see or figure out thanks to them. It is an expansion of sorts, and putting yourself into entropy keeps you more in line with the world than deviating from the natural variety of it.

If I continue this guide at a later time for a part 2, the complete guide becomes even more complete. Onward we go~

This guest post was submitted by Gary Kazazian. You can check out his upcoming EP at garykazazian.com.

People show care in a number of ways: gift giving, offering insight, listening to someone in a time of need, cheering somebody up, showing up on time, never canceling, being agreeable even if they don’t necessarily agree, etc. Though much of the above are agreed upon universal ways of showing care, there is quite a bit of grey area in the matter. One area that doesn’t have much grey area is gift giving. Across the world, gift giving is an act of care. Even if the gift is something that the recipient doesn’t particularly enjoy, it is usually still a net positive in terms of care.

Continue reading “Caring”

I used to play the game Uniball. In that game, you were a ship trying to score goals in this space hockey/soccer world.

One time, there was a player named Hajile in the game(which comes from Elijah backwards) who was a skilled player. He was good at shots and dribbling and teamwork. I remember one specific game where he took a shot off of the wall that would bounce into the goal. He took the shot, but it ended up that it bounced back to his ship and he shot it again, not making it the second time. He then mentioned something like “it was the first one”.

Continue reading “Hajile On The Concept Of “It Was The First One””

The USA World Cup team lost a match yesterday, and that put them out of the World Cup for 2018. This is a soccer tournament, and lots of the world will be watching the World Cup next year.

I like such events because they bring people of the world together, like some of the people I watched the match with. I am not intent on watching sports, but I like when people connect in some way that fits them.

Continue reading “USA World Cup Soccer”