Definition of Competitiveness

Definition of Competitiveness: possession of a strong desire to be more successful than others.

I never dared call myself a competitive person until CEO @[581573088:2048:Hung Phan] of @[100057406241301:2048:Papaya Vietnam] gave me permission. Well, I'll take it then.

(in no particular order):
1. I beat @[100003320395826:2048:Phuong Bui Minh] in SC2 — a player with a big name in the RTS scene.
2. I was king of the SC1 arcade. Diamond rank, top league SC2 back then.
3. Most of my time at VNG I was top KPI on whatever team I was on.
4. I only play with groups where I'm the leader. If I have to join a group in a low role, I'll find every way to climb to leader, or lead in an area nobody else wants to.
5. I yield to those around me (outside work) the things anyone can do, and fight for the hardest ones, especially under the hardest conditions.
6. In middle school I was addicted to video games, lazy about studying, but still wanted to prove I was good, so I focused 100% on English (by playing English-language games) to reach a level nobody could match. Proof: in the grade 9 mock exam, I was publicly praised in front of the whole school as the only one with a perfect 10. In reality I finished the test in 10 minutes and sat there messing around helping classmates (not allowed in mocks), and the teacher (who also taught English) smacked my hand with a ruler hard enough that the next time I saw him I had to say: teacher, you hit like a pro.
7. In high school I was addicted to video games, lazy about studying, but still wanted to prove I was good, so I focused 100% on English (by playing English-language games) to reach a level nobody could match. Proof: a grade 12 teacher (named Tuyền) had to announce to all her classes that in this question X only LỘC got it right. Even though I wasn't a perfect 10.
8. VNG Core Team some year at the army barracks: I volunteered to use my self-taught swimming skills to compete against the CEO who worked out diligently. Result: didn't lose.
9. VNG Core Team some year at the army barracks: I was part of the crawling race team. Finished with both knees bloody.
10. VNG Core Team some year at the army barracks: I joined a team game that included crawling up high — I'm quite sensitive to heights. But when I saw the VNG COO on the other team shaking in his hands and feet, I stood up and ran the whole length.
11. Morning of Dec 21, 2023, sitting coffee with anh @[100000128858517:2048:Nghia Nguyen] listening to him talk about how his team reviews PRs, it hit me "shit, I haven't done that" (I do review PRs, I just don't do "that"), and in the afternoon I went home and wrote out a solution for "that" and a bunch of other magic coming from it.
12. I've always been mad at myself for knowing computers later than Bảo Nguyên, for learning programming a decade behind him (him: 7th grade; me: 14th). I've been mining his knowledge by bothering him for 21 years.
13. I bought the M3 Max to cut 100ms latency off every keystroke typed (but really, build time also dropped from 1:30 to 30s).
14. I bought an R6 fresh out of the crate because I don't know anyone who rides a PKL bike fresh out of the crate. (Still don't know anyone now.)
15. 2007, I splurged on a Sony Vaio SZ340 to beat the guy anh BM I'd admired since 2002 (I used to bother him late into the night with stupid questions).
16. I watched MU on my exact birthday to set myself apart from the small number of Vietnamese who've been to see MU at Old Trafford.
17. I've watched several thousand movies so that whatever film anyone mentions I can say I've already seen it and also tell them the name of the lead actor's old man.
18. I always play games on the highest difficulty to torture myself until I've beaten them.
19. When I entered the world of ornamental fish, I had no experience, so I focused on the science of fish to reach success. Now I know how the whole science of animals and plants works.
20. I research every topic so that in any conversation I can deliver interesting info that no one in the group has heard before.
21. I always pit my childhood against friends from every region of the country I've met to show them the weird games I played that they didn't know.
22. I challenge myself — I'm an engineer, but I can also write flowery prose like I'm writing now.
23. I get called a blockhead with a dry personality. I build the most romantic scenarios that no one else can build.
24. I get called emotion-driven at work. When I have good emotions, I work 100 times as hard as people who aren't driven by emotion.
25. I research the hardest things to understand and explain them back in an extremely easy-to-understand way, to beat the people who knew it before me. That way I know a ton of things so I can always know more than the people I haven't met yet.
26. Grade 12, my friend, the king of the SC1 arcade who'd led me from 0 to number 1 — and I turned him into number 2 — told me he was going to study Computer Science to build robots that would rule the world. I replied: I'll build a virus to destroy the robots you build. And so I became a software engineer.
27. Working on TalkTV, I told my junior let's add the ability to paste images directly into chat. Do it fast, because if we're late Facebook Messenger will ship it first. And I was faster than Twitch.

Tell a few things for fun, because for me, the motorbike I ride daily, which parks in a different spot each day — I've figured out whether to leave it in 1st or Nth gear for each spot (you can only shift into 1 or N) so that when I start the bike it starts fastest. Stopped at a red light, in whatever gear, I know whether to shift up or down to take the fewest moves to get into 1st, because 1st has the best acceleration.

How many trees do you have to cut down to get enough paper to write it all.