Overpass Experiences

The Eric Wroolie Blog

  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • Linkedin
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Blog
  • Social Activity
  • Videos
  • Overpass Apps

Powered by Overpass Apps

How to Kill Someone’s Dreams

April 15, 2017 by wroolie Leave a Comment

The easiest way to kill someone’s dreams is to question them as if they should have an answer. Ask a lot of questions about hypothetical situations and watch the doubt fill their face. “What will you do if you get sick and can’t pay the bills?” “What is your plan b if it does not work?” “Are you absolutely certain you want to be doing this?”

Sometimes, finally getting yourself to do what you’ve always known deep down you should be doing is hard. Sometimes it feels like everyone is against you. You are trying to coax that higher version of yourself to take centre stage. And there are so many who are asking questions and shining a light on the doubt you have.

But, the truth is no one is certain of anything. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people question me about what I would do when I left a job. And, it really scared me. But, sometimes, those people end up losing their “secure” job anyway. No one really knows.

I think I experienced this most when I left the Army. I was so unsure of whether I was doing the right thing that I continued going strong until the last day. I elected to attend PLDC (Primary Leadership Development Course) and the promotions board to get my E5 sargeant stripes even when others I entered with were just waiting to leave. I still wasn’t sure.

I had all my friends and colleagues wanting me to give them my life plan. “What are you going to do for work?” “Are you going to college?” “If you go to college, what will you do afterwards?” And the most I said “I don’t know” the more I doubted whether I was doing the right thing.

And the Army recruiter was just as bad. I still get angry when I think about it sometimes. They just had to put doubt into my head. They just had to hint that maybe I was not doing the right thing and my fear took over. I very nearly stayed in.

On one of the many times I left a full-time contract to pursue Overpass full-time, I got the same treatment. It wasn’t so much that people doubted I could do it (but many did) as much as it was their constant questions about whether I had “thought everything through.”

But sometimes, you don’t need an entire plan. You don’t need to know how to get from A to Z. You just need to focus on A to B first.

And then you leap.

And it’s scary.

And if you can get used to uncertainty, the world is yours.

Filed Under: Army Days, My Life

DLI Today

February 11, 2012 by wroolie Leave a Comment

Here’s an interesting video on the Defense Language Institute (DLI) from the History Channel.  I attended the Chinese Mandarin Course for all of 1991.  It’s so hard to believe that was twenty one years ago. 

The video is interesting.  We didn’t have whiteboards or the internet.  We worked with photocopied articles from the People’s Daily.

Also, the narrator (the Full Metal Jacket guy) says they study their “chosen” language.  Yeah, right.  My recruiter told me I would be studying Russian.  Imagine my surprise at the end of Basic Training when they told me I would be learning Chinese.

I can still speak Chinese and do it whenever I can—the internet helps.  I’ve been to China on business where it really came in handy.  Now, my kids are enrolled in a Chinese class on Saturday afternoons.  It sticks with you, I guess.

Filed Under: Army Days, Chinese, Languages Tagged With: DLI

Eric Wroolie: Gym Man

September 29, 2009 by wroolie 7 Comments

I’ve always hated going to the gym.  It’s not that I don’t like working out—I just prefer something like running.  Running is easy.  It’s solitary.  You can listen to music and not have to worry about being watched or criticized or anything.

Most of my experience with gyms goes back to my time in the Army.  Every post I was stationed at had a gym that soldiers could freely use in addition to our mandatory physical training.  I would occasionally go for periods of up to a week of regularly gym usage.

Arnold Schwarzenegger Color S-Africa
Creative Commons License photo credit: d_vdm

My memories of the gym are of bulky guys having lengthy conversations about their pecks, their lats, their gloots, whatever.  We shared the gym with soldiers from the infantry divisions.  As a linguist, it was a little unnerving (“Sure, they can kill a guy in a few seconds, but let’s see how quickly they can translate the People’s Daily.”). Just by standing in a gym, you were in danger of one these bulky, self-obsessed, guys tapping you on the should and saying “Spot me?”  So, not wanting to look like I didn’t know what I was doing, I would just grunt “Yeah, okay” and pray that the guys could actually bench press the amounts they were trying to lift.

I can remember working in one of the small controlled machines in the corner of the gym and listening to one guy spotting another on the bench press in the centre of the room—“Yeah Man!  You can do it!  Come on! Come On!  Yeah!  Yeah!”  My sarcasm made me want to mock them, but I wouldn’t dare.  However, if he had said “Eye of the Tiger, man!”, I would not have been able to control myself.

I pretty much stayed away from the gym after that.  I’ve run several 10ks, half-marathons, and marathons—but have stayed out of the gym.

As I get older, though, running is not enough to keep me fit.  I fear myself losing out to the obesity epidemic.  Either I have to exercise more or change my diet.  So, last week I joined the gym.

Joining the gym at 37 is not as easy as I thought it would be.  I wish I could have filled out an online form and just showed up at a time I thought it was empty.  Instead, I had to apply in person.  My big fear was that when I approached the reception desk at the local leisure centre and told them I wanted to join the gym, they would start laughing and say “I should think so!”  But, it was easy.

Once I filled in the paperwork, I had to book a meeting with a trainer to discuss my goals and set up a training plan.  I was nervous about this meeting.  I tried to think of a good answer to the question “So, what do you want to achieve by working out?”  I feel uncomfortable answering this question.  I don’t like bringing attention to areas of my body I’m unhappy with—especially to fit guy in his early twenties.  So my rehearsed answer was “You know, I want to do a little toning and work a little bit on upper body strength.”  But I really wanted to say “I want six-pack abs and I want people to gasp for the right reasons when I take my shirt off at the beach.” The answer I gave seemed to work and I am now set-up with a training plan.

The gym at the leisure centre is nothing like the gyms I used on Army bases.  So far, I’ve been going in the middle of the day and there seem to be mostly older people (older than myself) and no body builders.  I am now set-up with a direct-debit scheme that should keep me motivated to keep using it.  So far, so good.

Eye of the Tiger, man.  Eye of the Tiger!

Filed Under: Army Days, Bumblings, Growing Up Tagged With: Army Days, Gym

  • 1
  • 2
  • Next Page »

Recent Posts

  • Preferring to Be Alone
  • How to Kill Someone’s Dreams
  • Are any Puzzle Pieces Missing?
  • Software Development Skills like Currency – And the value is always falling
  • Delegating and Giving up Control

RSS From the Overpass Blog

  • Since Apple Business Manager, Enterprise Apps Are Difficult September 11, 2019
  • Connecting Students Through School Mobile Apps May 14, 2019
  • Can You Make Money with Business Apps? April 5, 2019
  • Is an iPad App Developer the same as an iPhone Developer? February 21, 2019
  • How Apple IOS Developers need to think differently February 13, 2019
  • The Do’s and Don’ts of Enterprise Mobile App Development February 11, 2019
  • Premier mobile app development company expanding its market reach February 1, 2019
  • Overpass Apps is making waves in iOS and Android designs in the UK January 30, 2019
  • Construction Apps From Top UK Construction Companies June 7, 2018
  • Infographic: Top 5 Apps with 1 Billion Downloads June 5, 2018

Tags

Anti-virus Army Days ASP.Net Automation Baseball Beijing BR China Chinglish coding Cornbury CSS DLI Eric Wroolie Family Gym Holiday HTML5 IE6 Line Break Misc. music MVC Framework Nike+ Overpass PNG PowerShell Redcloth Ruby Runkeeper scam Skype Spotify Superpreview Textile Transparency Webby Web Design Web Standards