The main reason I titled it as such was to show that while I'm working on doing hard things, Russell challenged me to really step my game up (aka kicking my ass). I meant it the most complementary way possible. You start to reframe the way you look at challenges when you meet someone who's done something like build the world's first internally programmable computer.
"A kick in the ass" is the phrase for what you describe, because it propels the recipient forward. An asskicking, on the other hand, implies that the recipient will be out of commission for a while.
I use exactly the same kind of language myself in exactly the same way, so am not having a go in the slightest. Was just from thinking about the way we use fighting as a metaphor for this kind of meeting that led me to write my comment.
And your post was great, it was genuinely inspiring. Thank you very much for posting it, I would have loved to have been in your shoes on that day.
Am not sure that it is even a poor headline as such, as it does it's job descriptively with a commonly understood label, as in, I understood when I saw it that someone was going to find themselves completely outclassed.
Is more of a cultural criticism really, that we often allow ourselves to see so many of these kinds of interactions as some sort of constant social competition, when there are so many other interesting ways of approaching stuff.
