How I Failed At Eating Ramen

So last night, I took on the Yoshimaru Ramen Challenge where I attempted to finish 3 portions of ramen. In 15 minutes, I had to finish everything – 3 portions of ramen, chashu, tamago eggs, soup and condiments – and not puke everything out immediately after that. If I succeeded, I’d get the entire bowl free. If not, I have to pay $30++.

I love ramen, and I can usually demolish an entire bowl in like 5 minutes or less. I also usually request for several rounds of kaedama (a “refill” of noodles), so I was pretty confident about dominating the challenge.

This was what I looked like before I started:

And 15 minutes later:

As you can probably guess – I totally failed. As much as I love ramen, it was a real struggle to shovel hoards of noodles into my mouth after like 8 minutes or so. I managed to finish most of the noodles and ingredients, but I couldn’t stomach the idea of pouring like three bowls of thick soup down my throat in the last remaining minute.

So…. whoops! I had to shove down my pride (and my ramen) into my throat, and fork over 35 bucks for losing the challenge.

But you know what? I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The concept of testing has always been a central tenet of cheerfulegg. I’d much rather try several different (crazy) things and fail at 98% of them, than never try at all. I’ve found that testing (and the inevitable accompanying failure) is the best way to exponentially grow in finding the right investments, improving the quality of your work, and boosting your personal capital:

1. I failed at several different trading strategies before discovering passive investing
2. I failed at writing a book, but dramatically improved the quality of this blog, an ebook, an upcoming video, and several other projects in the pipeline that will help my readers even more. (And yes, I might still finish that book in the future!)
3. I failed at my recent LifeTest, but built a sustainable habit to wake up early

I’m considering making “Number of Failures” as a metric – It’s a way to gauge if I’m sufficiently trying out new things that are pushing my limits. Any thoughts?