How do we square the fact that there are people in our society that find ways to work and live with skills that are even more meaningless than the most scrutinized bean-counter?  It is not enough to say that these people earn a living at these tasks.  In some respect, we should applaud their resourcefulness.  The thing that is most alarming is that people practice these skills to make themselves better.  They practice hard.

The man below spent 6 months studying the seemingly random pattern of lights on the “Press Your Luck” gameshow.  Six months of intense scrutiny and study and attention and finally he recognized 5 rotating cycles around which the blinking lights always followed.  Then he verified his theory with his pause button – able to stop the light at will in his severely cluttered livingroom.  All of this was work – work without meetings or semi-casual fridays or movies devoted to the dronery, or folk songs depicting the struggle or days on and days off.  But it was hard.  Harder still because it was different and secretive and weird.  And yet this man persisted until finally he got his chance on Press Your Luck and promptly won $100,000.

He didn’t cheat.  He worked very hard to earn his victory.  What were his incentives?  What could he have accomplished if he applied his energy and focus to more mainstream endeavors?  How could he overlook the drone-like isolation of six months worth of staring into a television’s blinking pixels – to analyze bigger blinking lights – for the slight slight chance that he might win some money.

This man’s work ethic is amazing.  As are the hand-eye coordination of the Koreans below.

The output of all this effort goes *poof* like the smoke off a firecracker.