How do I train like Roronoa Zoro?

There was a clip on my Facebook page of the famed pirate swordsman fighting off a temple of Samurai Monks or something in truly spectacularly animated fashion (I’m not sure since I haven’t watched One Piece in *counts on fingers* 19 years?). Anyway, he beats them handily.



This made me think on Zoro’s story. I read the series in its first inception back when Shonen Jump was popular here in America some time in the early 2000s.

“Become the world’s greatest swordsman.”

That’s it. That’s his story.

He goes along with goofball Luffy’s plan to become King of the Pirates (Anime is the best, isn’t it?) and they travel the world together in all kinds of wacky adventures. Zoro honors the commitment he made to Luffy, sticking by his side for *counts toes* 20 years and roughly 47,000,000 pages of comics, helping his captain out.

And everything he does in the series, EVERYTHING, is all in the purpose of becoming a marvelous swordsman. No, not just marvelous, the BEST. Because this is an anime, nothing short of becoming the best will do. Every action is to strive towards that, to move forward to the ultimate goal.

So, am I doing that?

Is everything that I do on the path to becoming the published author I want to be?

No. That’s too small, Bob. Think bigger.

The GREATEST author?

Writers have a bad habit of underselling ourselves, working below our mental blocks that tell us we can’t be the best at anything. We need to be satisfied with being “just fine.”

But connecting two dots that should probably never be connected, Stone Cold Steve Austin once said something to the effect of (and I can’t find it because of course I can’t) that if you’re not going out to the ring to steal the show every night, don’t bother going.

That.

My mind should be that. Everything I do should be in the service of becoming the greatest author ever. Will I succeed? The math doesn’t seem to be in my favor, but at least it’ll all be in the service of something and I can die knowing that I lived doing what I could.

Can you tell I’m turning 32 in a few weeks?

Thanks for reading,

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