Extreme fanaticism

I watched this clip during church service today and I was quite blown away. There is such an uncanny similarity between the two things that were compared that its freaky. It also made me realise how easy one could become like that and not be aware of it.

Anyway, here is the video:

I think that there is essentially nothing bad about playing sports or watching sports. For me, I learned a fair bit about discipline from doing sports - through the physical and mental training, the controlling of my diet, management of my time so that I can do all the things that are important.. etc. I also learned about humility and camaraderie among other things. So yes, there is value in sports, but I guess the problem comes when we give more importance to sports than to God our creator (Exodus 20:1-3; Matt 4:10).

Moving to the next step

Recently we attended church camp which was held at a wonderful campsite called Lyrebird Park. The facilities are fantastic, the food was great and the hosts of the campsite are just a lovely bunch of people. I also found out that the Lyrebird is an Australian native bird that has the amazing ability to mimic natural and artificial sounds in its environment. This made me wonder if the moo-ing sounds I heard every morning were from real cows or a Lyrebird.

Church camps are good because they are a time when we get away from our usual routine to focus on God and wait upon Him and let Him realign things in our life. I know we should be doing this everyday but I admit that I get distracted easily by a billion things that happen everyday. Somehow, driving to somewhere further and more rural reduces the distractions to just two - drinking and eating. I believe it is biblical because people in the bible used to climb up mountains or go to deserts or get away from the crowd and to somewhere secluded to pray and commune with God. This often results in God giving them a word or a revelation.

For me, I felt that God spoke to me about one or two things during the camp. One of it was during the group activities when we did rock climbing. Rock climbing was never one of my strengths, I am usually better at coming down than climbing up. Also, my natural talent for procrastinating makes rock climbing even harder because I'd be stuck in the middle of the wall and I would be looking up, indecisive of which hold to go for and by the time I want to go for it, my arms are worn out from gripping the holds for too long. Anyway, after 2 failed attempts at reaching the top (which actually isn't very high but that's not the point), I was feeling quite exhausted and rather perplexed as to why I couldn't get past the last two meters. Then after a while, someone came and told me this: you can't rely on your hand holds, you should use your legs to step up even if you don't have a very firm hold on your hand, you can't wait for your hand to get a 100% secure grip, otherwise you won't move up. How true that is. My procrastinating, or lack of faith or focusing on plan-Bs keeps me from moving forward in God's plan for my life. By gripping and hanging on to the holds I am on and wondering if the next 'hold' would be secure, I'm just waiting for the inevitable to happen - my strength and confidence to be fully zapped and me falling off the wall.

Before attending the camp, I kinda have a feeling where God is leading me next in my life, and I have roughly decided what I would do; but at the same time, I can't help but keep thinking of the 'what ifs', and either consciously or sub-consciously, I create back-up plans for the different 'what if' possibilities, which wears me out. So this camp has reminded me once again that I have to stop doubting (it will be a struggle) and just move forward in faith.

By the way, I did climb to the top of the wall on my third try (by the grace of God of course). :)

How do you get people on your team?

Just some randoms thoughts I had recently...

When I was in the canoeing team in university, we had a recruitment drive every year to get new 'blood'. We usually try to get experienced people who has paddled competitively and especially those who were really good and have the medals to show for it. But for various reasons (maybe kayaking is not as glamorous or interesting as other activities) so it's difficult to attract good talent. The problem or risk of getting people who had no experience is that if they have absolutely no talent or perseverance (the latter is more important) and give up trying halfway, a lot of time and resources are wasted training them in the first place. So I would rather have a small team of good and dedicated athletes than a big team of people who may not stay on.

I think it is somewhat similar at work. A company wants to hire the right (or most suitable) person for the job - a person with the necessary skills, attitude and even personality so that everyone in the team could connect and work well together. A recruitment ad is put out listing out the requirements, and assuming it's a well known company with great career prospects, there will be tonnes of applications and the hiring manager will have to sift through them and pick out a few good ones to interview and determine if one of them is the right fit.

I reckon that should be common in well known industries and companies with well established career progressions. But what about new and specialised fields with unknown career progressions? Something like sports engineering. When I first got interested in sports engineering back in 2003/4, there weren't much information available about it and the only thing I found was this book: High Tech Hot Shots: Careers in Sports Engineering. It gives a great introduction to sports engineering and the opportunities available, which actually isn't  much and they are mostly in US. I consider myself very blessed to have the opportunity to do a Masters by research in this field and even had the chance to attend a biennial sports engineering conference organised by ISEA last year. From my observation, there were approximately 150 people who participated in this particular conference and I would say more than 80% of the people were in academia and less than 20% were from the industry. Even though this may not be an accurate representation of the sports engineering field, I think it still reflects how small is the group of people involved in sports engineering in the world.

As a result of going to the conference I was made a member of the association. However the membership only lasted a year and when it was time to renew the membership, there was actually a special deal - if you recommend someone new to join the association, both you and the new member could get a membership fee discount. The way I see it, this is their way of getting more people to join the 'club'.

It's odd because I assumed that sports engineering/technology is an extremely interesting subject and lots of people would be interested in it, so it shouldn't be necessary to use gimmicks to draw people in. But the truth is far from it. Having been doing research in this field for the past 2 years, I have seen my supervisor having problems recruiting post-grad research students to do sports engineering projects even though he has got funding; and I have seen days when not a single student turn up for his "Design of Sports Technology" class which is unbelievable. Maybe it hasn't gained enough popularity in the traditional science and engineering field?

So how do you form a (good) team of sports engineers? I guess first of all you have to find people who are interested in sports engineering with useful and relevant technical and analytical skills. Then they have to be passionate enough about sports engineering and be willing to find their own funding, because there aren't many companies that will pay you to do it. I know this sports technology guy who is self employed and he does a lot of work with cyclists and rowers and optimising their equipment and other stuff; he said it's always interesting to test out the latest technology and gadgets and how they could be applied to sports but the bottom line is you have to put food on the table; so he has to do work that pays, not just work that is interesting. So basically being a sports engineer can involve hard (and possibly not profitable) work which makes forming a team of sports engineers even harder.

Then I read about Jesus and how He got His twelve disciples, and it's really quite fascinating. Most of the disciples were fishermen, one was a tax collector, there was a zealot (or rebel but not sure if that is considered an occupation) and although not much was mentioned about the jobs of the rest, I reckon they should be blue collar workers or maybe jobless. So they don't seem very 'talented' if you ask me. Jesus first met four fishermen and simply told them to follow him (Matthew 4:18-22). Then He met a tax collector and did the same thing (Matthew 9:9). The rest either joined in because they had nothing better to do or maybe they could tell that Jesus would be the next big thing. On the other hand, it wasn't just them who decided that they wanted to follow Jesus; Jesus picked them. He decided that those were the twelve people who would form His core team. I think His requirement was straight forward - the disciples had to be willing to follow Him at all cost - including leaving their previous jobs and their families in order to follow Jesus. A rich man couldn't do that (Matthew 19:20-21). We know that following Jesus was extremely hard work because most of the disciples ended up being martyred. But we know that Jesus picked the right disciples because the message was preached (and without using any gimmicks!) and today we have churches all over the world. Praise God!