A number of months ago a curious little news story started to take hold across the last five minutes of local evening new broadcasts across the country. It should have been a blip across our cultural landscape, but the story is back as chronicled in the February issue of Blender magazine. It‘s about a boy who convinced his parents to let him stop going to high school full-time and focus on becoming a professional video game player, and one who only plays Guitar Hero III.
Shock. Horror. Distain. What the hell were his parents thinking?
I’m certain that a majority of people who heard the story thought the exact thing, then waved it aside with all the other marginally interesting snapshots of stories that flood through our consciousness after eliciting an automatic moral response that falls squarely into one of two extremes - right and wrong. And I’m careful to classify this as a story snapshot because most people weren’t exposed to all the pictures from the trip between “normal high school kid“ to “professional Guitar Hero III player“. I was one of those people, one who only caught the video bite shown sometime before the late night talk show block started. I was one who couldn’t believe that a respectable mother and father would allow their son to drop out of high school to play video games all day long. But then I remembered something from Junior High School. One of the boys stopped going to school so he could focus on gymnastics, full time. He eventually made it to the alternate American Olympic gymnastics team.
Where is the difference? The root cause that drove these people, both still children, into a lifestyle that isn’t normal can be distilled to one simple personality trait - drive.
Blake Peebles - 16 year old Guitar Hero III phenom - was quoted in the Blender article, which I’ll paraphrase, as saying that playing video games isn’t always fun anymore. But he still does it. I bet that kid who followed his passion for gymnastics felt the same after his five thousandth back flip. Unlike what most kids are taught today - quit when things get hard - this kid is sticking with it, even when the dream job starts to feel like just a job. And there are fallacies in the original story as told in its 120 second time slot (stories must be edited for content which makes them sound resonable to the general populace). Blake was working with a private tutor and is now attending an on-line high school three to four hours a day on top of ten hours of Guitar Hero III practice. That practice isn’t just sitting in front an Xbox 360 with his guitar controller. There’s strategy to review, culled from nearly hundreds of on-line sources. Competition sechedules are reviewed as new ones are cropping up and each has to be weighed in terms of prizes, media coverage and location to determine if they are worth attending. And the multitude of possible book, movie, reality television show and novel ideas need to be reviewed and refined as Blake and his family understand that this is a temporary situation, one that needs as many back-up plans as the family can develope.
If we distill all this down, what we're left with is this kid is treating what most adults see as a huge waste of time more seriously than most of those same, judgmental adults treat their own careers (and that’s assuming they all even have careers and not just jobs; there’s a difference). And there are a number of skills that this kid is learning at a very early age, one at which he may actually be able to use those skills later on in life when it really matters - determination, persistence, balance and commitment. But those aren’t even the best of the lessons that this young man has learned.
The best is that life is a path and not a hedged maze. You can go out of the well-worn areas. The backlash that the family endured, especially from on-line sources, was intense immediately following the first story about their decision. Parents across the country let the Peebles know, with extremely pointed and curse-filled language, how much they disagreed with their decision. But Blake didn’t care about what people thought, only that he was living his dream. And his family only cared that they were there to support him on his unworn path.
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