The Ollie of Social Life
Erase half of the unwanted drama in your life
[1] Obed Yancor and Tiernan Moore are sophomores. They knew one another and became friends long before high school. This summer they both decided to try something new: skateboarding!
[2] Though Obed has more experience, he and Tiernan are basically new at it. They often do their practice runs at the Neut, formally known as the Neutaconkanut Park, a few miles away from their neighborhood. That was where they first met Nickantony Quach, two weeks into their skateboading career. A few weeks before the meeting, Nick, though not sure, was determined to meet his newly self-imposed objective of publishing. On each and every calendar day, he posted a fresh video on Ri4CTV, his YouTube channel. They all are relatively new at what they do. It was a meeting between two Skateboard beginners and a new YouTube creator.
[3] The result of their meeting is the video, Local Skaters Obed & Tiernan, which is Episode 2 in Season 1 of the YouTube series RI Skateboard. In the video, the skateboarders tell viewers of their story. Their articulation impressed Nick so much that he asked them to co-host, Obed & Tiernan, their own weekly show on his YouTube channel. To his surprise, they agreed. Within a few weeks, they got their first episodes filmed, produced, and published for Ri4CTV.
[4] A few years earlier, Nick took a private lesson in skateboarding. After two falls, he gave it all up. After the lesson, like before, he was never interested in skateboarding to the point that he would know all the ins and outs of the sport. His work on Episode 7 changed his attitude towards skateboarding. His admiration for the sport jumped to a higher orbit as he learned of The Ollie in Skateboarding.
[5] In skateboarding, an ollie is done by leaping with your board into the air without using your hands.
“The ollie leads to everything else,” says Tiernan in the video, “because it’s just getting off the ground.”
“You need an ollie to do every other trick,” underlines Tiernan. “The ollie is the foundation of every single trick” in skateboarding.
[6] Seventeen hundred miles away, a few weeks before the September 11th attacks, Nick walked his son to school on the very first day in first grade. While waiting at the nearby stop sign, the significance of the day dawned on him. He has always been a father by default and never a father by design. When his son was hungry, he fed him. When he was cold, he gave him warm clothes. Fathering had been mostly reactionary. The stop sign did not stop all that, but it did stop Nick from being just a father by default. In the following days, Nick raced against time and spent many sleepless nights trying to figure out how to be a father by design, and start immediately from the first week in his son’s first year of school.
[7] No parents gave Nick a good impression in the way they brought up their children. Those in real life, as well as those in fiction, had too many rules, or no rules at all. For those with rules, they often forgot the first half while rarely practicing the second half. At the stop sign, Nick wanted to become the first perfect father, ever! Jairson Ascencao had turned two-years-old. To Nick, he was, at the time, 1700 miles away and not in the picture at all.
[8] After many sleepless nights, Nick came up with the one and only lesson for his son throughout his first year in school. It has only five words, later known as the First Thumos Mantra, which defines the most important concept for humanity. At the time, Nick did not realize that he was defining The Ollie of Social Life, which is the title of Episode 1 in Season 1 of the YouTube series Thumoslang102.
[9] If you mastered the ollie of social life, you should be able to erase most of the unwanted relationship drama in the remaining years of your life. This prospect is the main reason why Jairson feels attached to Nick within weeks of their first meeting and thereby made him his lifetime mentor. All 21 videos in the YouTube series Thumoslang102 capture the first delivery of Nick’s mentorship to Jairson personally.
[10] Until many years later, Nick did not realize the power of what he created. As Tim, a senior student a Brown University, walked across the Henderson Bridge, he disclosed the trouble he carried over the recent years in the relationship with his parents. Nick told him about the five-word mantra and asked him to give it a try at home over the summer. Two months later, Nick received an email from Tim. He thanked Nick and reported that the mantra had worked and that he no longer had problems in the relationship with his parents. The email made Nick realize the power of, and thus want to write about, the thumbnail definition he created 1700 miles away, 14 years earlier.
[11] English is not Nick’s first language. He was itching to write but could not begin, mainly due to lack of confidence. Eight months after the email, Mike Vanseveren, a neighbor in the same building, introduced Nick to his childhood friend, Mark Canny, who was so impressed with Nick’s creation that he agreed to be a co-writer. Two years later, the 2017 book, Thumos: Adulthood, Love & Collaboration, was published, months before Mark graduated from the University of Rhode Island. What happened during the book writing project is partially captured by the video, Mark Canny, which is Episode 18 in Season 1 of the YouTube series NDBaker93 on Ri4CTV.
[12] Ri4CTV was first created by Nick during the summer of 2018 to tell viewers about the book, which defines the new philosophy as created in Providence by Mark and Nick. It is explained by the YouTube series, PVD Philosophy. With less-than-perfect English skills and without marketing skills, Nick failed to demonstrate the new-found philosophical power. As he struggled with the storytelling for his book, Nick ran into several people in the area who somewhat sought after his philosophy.
[13] The more he worked with the published philosophy during various mentoring sessions, the more Nick realized that it could be made, and he figured out how to make it even more powerful. All he had to do was to strip all the rules off of the Thumos philosophy. What remains is its nomenclature, which is later named as Thumoslang. Technically, Thumoslang is a collection of over 500 thumbnail definitions, the first of which is the First Thumos Mantra that defines The Ollie of Social Life.
[14] In December 2018, Nick gave Thumoslang a try with a local teenager, Charbel Hachem, whose life was changed in three sentences. This experience is captured by the video, The First Step, which is Episode 4 in Season 1 of the YouTube series Grow Up With AOC. It was a resounding success and Thumoslang was thus born before the year was out. Making your product more powerful does not make its marketing easier. In the following months, still with less-than-perfect English skills and few marketing skills, Nick failed to demonstrate the power of Thumoslang, which is much later effectively described as the nomenclature for social life.
[15] Out of nowhere, Ifeanyi Onyekaba appeared. He, a local boxer, was fifteen-years-old when he migrated to the United States all by himself in 2009, ten thousand miles away from his hometown in Nigeria. “I consider myself a fighter since the day I was born,” says the boxer as he begins to tell the story of this life in the video Ifeanyi the Boxer, which is Episode 2 in Season 2 of NDBaker93.
[16] When Ifeanyi was at a fork in the road, he asked Nick, whom he met only once a few weeks earlier, for advice. Their second meeting took place in the later part of this summer, and it lasted three full hours, all on camera. What transpired in the meeting is captured by the six videos published as the YouTube series Thumoslang101. This is the conversation that changes the world as it gives a full demonstration of Thumoslang. Thumoslang101 is what makes it possible for Nick to deliver his mentorship to Jairson in mere days.
[17] A few weeks later, Nick walked Alec Mustafayev, a senior in high school, through the process of watching the YouTube series Thumoslang101. The experience is captured by the YouTube series Thumoslang104, also known as, Season 7 of NDBaker93. Alec’s life was impacted by Thumoslang, but not in the same way as Jairson’s life was.
[18] Elias Turner, also known as Tengu (@tengu.pvd), another senior at a different high school in town, was also introduced to Thumoslang. His first encounter with the nomenclature was, however, not carried out on camera. In the video, Nomenclature, which is Episode 6 in Season 6 of NDBaker93, he recounts the experience.
“When I first walked out the door with Nick, I didn’t know what I was in for,” said Elias, “I didn’t know the rabbit hole of an idea that he had to emplace in my soul, in my mind.”
Four and half minutes into the video, Elias said the following.
[19] “Thumoslang is truth. It’s the light that I couldn’t see in my life up until my recent conversation with Nick. What I thought would be a walk in the park turned out to be an extravagant rainbow of ideas that my mind couldn’t keep a hold of or calculate or put together. I was amazed at what Nick told me.”
[20] “He told me about the misconstrued statements we have surrounding relationships. We believe that when we communicate and/or interact with each other, we create a relationship. Now I know that, that isn’t true.”
[21] “It’s amazing to me because the words that he was speaking to me blew bombs off in my head. I felt an array of colors inside my body. He told me probably the most honest thing about a relationship I’ve ever heard.”
[22] “It wasn’t that relationships aren’t simply the interaction we have with people. Rather, they’re the relations we have with people. We have certain things that we do with people but that does not mean that we have a relationship with them.”
[23] “For example, you go to the deli and talk to the deli man. He gives you baloney. You walk out of the market. You never had a conversation with him other than the fact for baloney. Can you even call that a relationship?”
[24] “How do people want to define relationships nowadays? Is it just simple interaction we have on the bus? We’re going to the same destination but when we leave [the bus], we’re going [on our] separate ways. To me, that’s just a [shared] experience.”
[25] “A relationship means you need to have multiple [ongoing] relations. They don’t have to necessarily benefit you or the other person. You do have to have a sense of multiple connections. This speaks truth to me in more ways than I ever thought it would.”
[26] The following thumbnail definition from Thumoslang spells out exactly what a relationship is.
Relationship; that means, ongoing relations.
[27] That does not work without a thumbnail definition from Thumoslang that defines what a relation truly is. It is presented in the video, Relationship Count, which is Episode 2 in Season 8 of NDBaker93. This video shows you how to count how many relationships you actually have today.
[28] If you cannot count and come up with the exact number of relationships, you do not know whether you have too few or too many of them. Having too few relationships often means you do not have enough good things in life. Having too many relationships often means several of your consequential relationships may soon be unintentionally downgraded.
[29] Thumoslang is a brand new concept. As of this writing, there are no books on Thumoslang yet. The next best thing is what has been written by Mark Canny and Nickantony Quach. It’s the 2017 book, Thumos: Adulthood, Love & Collaboration. Luckly for those who are in Rhode Island, the Douglas and Judith Krupp Library at Bryant University is the first library in the world to have the book in stock.
