A LETTER OF ADVICE TO RON DANIËLS IN 1977

Dear myself back then,

I write to you from the future and hope that you will be able to use some of the advice I will give you after I have been trying to live your life the best I was able to. I have been looking at you the last many years before I just couldn't take it any longer and had to find a way to inform you about a couple of things so the road will not be as hard as it has been for me.

Believe it or not but you will be nearly bold later on so where you long hair while you can and don’t care about what your parents say about it because you're not a bad person because of that, Oh and bye the way your parents were wrong about a lot of things. One thing they were not wrong about is to let you leave school at 14 and let you follow your own feelings and love for sport. I know that you think that you know a lot about badminton, but believe me it is nothing compared with what you will know later but it will not come by itself the school that you don’t like is going to follow you the rest of your life and you will study every single day to get knowledge and it don’t stops with Badminton, try to see the improvement of this sport in everything you read, hear or see make combinations of this things and bring it in connection with your sport.

I advise you that you let your kids make up their own mind if they want to go to school or not just like your own patents did. Some like to go to school, others don’t, people don’t know what the World will look like in 5 years from now (so in 1982) let alone what you will do in 2020. Make sure you are flexible and do only things that you like. It will help you a lot more than your school diploma will do. I have been looking at your old school friends who finished their education and believe me you don’t want the type of life they are living.

The love of your life you have just found is NOT the love of your life, she is not even the love of your next 3 years. The next one will do a lot better but also not “to dead us part”. So don’t stay in a relationship that is killing you from the inside outwards. I would say learn not only about sport but also learn languages, Holland will be a very small country for what you want to do. If you think the NBB (Dutch badminton Federation) is not good now wait and see how they are doing in the future. Don’t stay in the Netherlands, go out and see the World learn to see your sport from the point of view of other countries. 

OK Ron I will follow your path for a couple more years just to see how this story is going to end if I find so interested things in the future I will try to report back, so lets say I write again in1987 that year will be a big change for you and remember the things I told you about school and how your parents did it :-) do something with the advice I have given you between 1977 and 1987 and make it a great decade.

Kind regards

Your future you :-)