Before I was a Myachi Master, I earned my living as a juggler. I did a lot of street performance and I did some private parties, classes, trade shows and parades here and there. All of that together didn't always pay the bills so I spent more time than I care to remember delivering pizzas in the slower parts of the year.
I certainly could have gotten a higher paying job if I wanted it. I graduated from college. I'm a hyper punctual dude. I love to travel, have no kids and could have gone anywhere for a job at the time. Instead I chose to stick that Degree in my pocket and do the same thing that I did to make my way through school. I just kept juggling.
What's worse is that nobody really gets rich juggling so it isn't even like the dreamer who wants to be a movie star or a rock star. There was no pot of gold at the end of my ambition rainbow. Even the best jugglers in the world never buy yachts or private planes and they don't tend to date the supermodels either.
A lot of people used to ask me "Why juggling? If you want to take a low paying job that hardly anyone ever succeeds at, why not artist or musician or actor... or at least stand up comedian?"
And I suppose that if I was being totally rational about it, I might have asked myself the same thing. I play guitar... I sing... I draw... I might not be good enough at any of that stuff to make a living at it, but to be honest, I wasn't a good enough juggler to make a living at it either. I still had to deliver pizzas 3 or 4 months a year.
But there's nothing rational about what you love. It'll sound weird to most people, but I love to juggle. It's something that I'm passionate about. Being passionate about juggling might seem strange to a lot of people, but when you come down to it, everything that we are passionate about is strange. The very notion of being passionate suggests that you're also irrational to some degree.
As personal as it is, I think I can share it with everyone who reads this blog. I look at Myachi as a type of juggling, but I look at almost everything as a type of juggling. I look at yo-yo and devil sticks as a type of juggling. I know neither of those actually fit into the definition of juggling, but in my mind it's all an extension of the same set of skills. Heck, in my mind riding a unicycle, walking on a slack line, swinging poi and parkour are all extensions of that same skill set. In my brain, pretty much every skill is a subset of juggling. I never claimed I wasn't strange.
The thing that unites all of these endeavors for me is a single key feeling: Hitting a new trick.
The first time I pulled a controlled 180 on the slack line I felt it. The first time I made it around the block on my unicycle I felt it. The first time I nailed a five ball cascade I felt it. The first time I hit a Duck N' Dive I felt it.
It's this euphoric moment where you can be standing by yourself in a room and you'll still jump up and down and scream. It's this tingling sensation that starts in your heart and spreads to your fingers and toes. It's this little nirvana that you reach when you realize that you just crossed the line between "I can't do that" and "I can do that". And somewhere unspoken within that feeling is the realization that this means you can do anything.
Every time a wall falls in front of me it gives me that same feeling. The harder the trick, the longer it takes, the more grueling the effort, the more frustrating the failures, the greater the sensation. Something that eludes me for years (like a 5 ball juggle or a Duck N Dive) is a buzz I can float in for the next couple of days.
But usually the sensation wears off a lot quicker than that. Usually after a minute or less, I'm ready to do it again. Because in this world when one wall falls down you only walk through because you know there are three more walls behind it begging to be knocked down as well. The challenges never end.
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Myachi is, in my far from objective opinion, the greatest skill prop of all time. I know you can't except me as an impartial source, but I offer pretty strong evidence. Myachi simply has more tricks.
I know that theoretically speaking every skill toy has an infinite number of possibilities, but in the real world, that doesn't mean much. The real test is how much can a person actually do. If you compare Myachi with any other skill toy that I'm aware of (and that's a lot of skill toys) it offers far more tricks at every skill level.
It doesn't matter if you're clumsy or mad athletic and coordinated, there are more tricks that you can learn in a day with a Myachi than there are with a yo-yo... or juggling balls... or a diabolo, a kendema, a footbag, astrojax, chatter rings, cigar boxes, staff, poi, devil sticks, flower sticks, a lasso, finger chux, meteor, stackers, clubs, rings or shaker cups (I told you there were a lot).
Not only is this true in a day, but there are also more tricks you can learn in your first week, your first month, your first year and your first decade. Keep in mind that I'm saying this assuming equal practice. If you spent an hour every day practicing Myachi and an hour every day practicing any other skill toy, you'd learn more tricks over every period of time with the Myachi.
That's simply because there's so much you can actually do. The game incorporates bits of footbag with bits of toss juggling with bits of contact juggling with bits of acrobatics, dance, flair, finger boarding, martial arts and way more other things that didn't occur to me. There are also things that are uniquely Myachi.
Now that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with all those other skill toys. They offer tough challenges the same as Myachi, they just don't offer as many. There's a reason why I own every skill toy I can get my hands on. I'm addicted to that instant of accomplishment and I want to get it everywhere I can.
The reason I love Myachi above all others is that it simply gives me that feeling more often. It also pays the bills and that doesn't hurt. I've often said that my first reaction to Myachi Man's job offer was something like, "Awesome, it combines the two things I love the most: juggling and getting paid."
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