Learning to juggle is a great task to undertake. Surprisingly, there is a lot to learn from throwing balls in the air.
Persistence. You will not learn to juggle in an hour. It took me an entire night (of alleged “studying”) to learn how to do it on my own. You will fail countless times. That’s why persistence is so important to juggling—which is mind-bogglingly simple once you get the knack for it, but impossible unless you keep at it. Chances are you will need to persist in a lot of things throughout life—like living perhaps—and therefore might as well practice persisting with juggling.
Practice. Similarly, you will also fail unless you practice juggling. Persistence and practice and perseverance and pudding. Yes you will need to pudding quite a bit to juggle proficiently. A lot of people say, “Oh, I can’t juggle. I have terrible hand-eye coordination.” Well maybe if you practiced for hours on end like the master jugglee—that is, the person juggling—then perhaps you might be able to do it, eh? You can’t be discouraged after you try it 5 times and can’t do it right away.
Control. When people say they are juggling a few projects or juggling a few tasks or juggling a few relatives they most often mean that they are seeking to find the butterfly in the storm of chaos. They are desperately trying to hang on and balance their projects or tasks or relatives on a precipice—sometimes quite literally in the case of the latter. Juggling, despite what the dictionary may say, is control. To juggle you must have at least some semblance of control over the balls and to juggle well you must have complete control over the balls or pins or chainsaws. To be productive and stress-free you must be in control or else you’ll drop the ball.
Adaptation. When you juggle you quickly learn to see where potential problems may lie and are thus forced to deal with them in some way. Usually this way is with adaptation unless you enjoy failing and likely donking yourself on the head. So learn to adapt to your problems—like our humble ancestors—and you will evolve (into a better juggler).
Hand-eye Coordination If you want to have any chance of fragging that nine-year-old kid on Halo or Counter Strike then you better get a-juggling. Juggling helps immensely with your hand-eye coordination for obvious reasons. There is a lot of information to take in and a lot of really confusing physics equations your brain needs to solve in order to juggle well. Most of the time you won’t even be looking at your hands while you juggle (much like video games). It will also help you to not cut your finger off the next time you’re chopping up some vegetables.
Good Conversation Starter. At your next fancy business dinner or even something as ordinary as a box social, try juggling to break the ice with that girl across the room. Chances are you’ll get in a conversation—even if it’s a conversation with her boyfriend about the subtleties of his fists’ indentation on your temple. On a more serious note, I recently (June 2008) juggled 3 bottles of bubble solution at a small get-together, and it was a hit! Soon I was juggling two bottles while someone else threw the third bottle into the mix.
Fun and Cool. Juggling is a rather impressive feat once you’ve gotten the hang of it. By a striking coincidence, juggling is also pretty fun to do.
Learning to juggle only takes a few days to learn so why not start right now?