The Game We Should Fight

Yang Wenli won his every battle. It was because he never fought any battle that he would lose. But there was no easy one in his victories. Many times, especially nowadays, we always consider cost-effectiveness for everything. The one who takes bold challenges is regarded as an inferior one.

As I updated in my last posting, Miyu Takeuchi has failed to debut in her last competition. A lot of nosy parkers say that it is because she clung to the main vocal position that requested her insanely challenging high-tone voice. They’re saying that if she took the safer position and evaded from the controversy, she might be able to make her debut. If she took the easy way and won the place, I might be happy with her win. However, Miyu took the other way, and now she comes to the one who has my full respect.

Several years ago, I met with a very memorable quote in a book “Economics of Almost Everything." Although I cannot remember the exact wording (and the original quote was in Korean), it said that “Not every win and lose is the same. What we have to aim for is a very close win from our full/best effort. Only the one who can accept the aching last-one-step defeat can learn from the failure.” We might always get A+ if we always take the elementary school math exams. But it does not give us any true information about ourselves. We can know about ourselves only with eternal battles, and the most informative one is from the close win or the imminent failure.

Miyu announced that she’s going to graduate(leave) from AKB48 and find a way as a solo artist. I’m impressed with her choice to make her way, and I wish my best to her way from now on; hope she has found a meaningful answer from the last choice.