kevinleemelife happens

“There is an ancient Chinese story of an old master potter who attempted to develop a new glaze for his porcelain vases. It became the central focus of his life. Everyday he tended the flames of his kilns to a white heat, controlling the temperature to an exact degree. Every day he experimented with the chemistry of the glazes he applied, but still he could not achieve the beauty he desired and imagined was possible in a glaze. Finally, having tried everything he decided his meaningful life was over and walked into the molten heat of the fully fired kiln. When his assistants opened up the kiln and took out the vases, they found the glaze on the vases the most exquisite they had ever encountered. The master himself had disappeared into his creations.”

Sometimes you sacrifice until there’s nothing left to give but yourself.

One of my professors sold his company for 1.1 billion. I am definitely excited for all my classes this semester.

Why are smiles so contagious? And if a “Free Hugs” campaign can be established worldwide, why isn’t there a “Free Smiles” one too?

As stated in a previous post, I’ve decided to recap some of my semester as well as the major lessons I’ve learned. This is going to be a long post but hopefully you’ll attain some valuable information.

To give you a brief overview of what I’ve been doing, this is a list of some of the items I had to juggle my time with:

1) 20 units of coursework
2) Internal Vice-President of ABA
3) Apartment Managing Job (dropped near the beginning of the semester. Couldn’t make time)
4) Failed Company Start-Up
5) Internship (www.magoosh.com)

I’ll go down the list and explain as much as I can:

1) Twenty Units of Coursework

20 units of class looks a little intimidating but the reality is that a business major honestly doesn’t have challenging classes. I took seven classes and I’d say only about three of them actually required considerable time and effort. However, that being said, this brings me to what I’ve learned: Go into everything you do thinking it’s going to be a tough ride.

Ever hate yourself for getting all the hard problems right but losing points over all the easy questions? That’s how I felt with my course load this semester. I went into most of my classes assuming they would be a breeze considering that half of them were breadth courses required to fulfill my business major. Of course, that’s not how life is, especially in Berkeley. If I had gone into each one of my seven classes knowing that it would be a tough ride maintaining that A, I’m pretty sure I would have put in much more effort and time in studying and learning the material. Instead, I underestimated most of my classes and subsequently received a GPA beating.

2) Internal Vice-President of ABA

To put it shortly, I’ve learned invaluable lessons in terms of organization, professionalism, and passion. By closely working with a team of 4 talented officers as well as 16 Cabinet members for an entire semester, I’ve had the privilege of learning from each of their personalities and gaining insight on how to develop myself into a better person. Apart from personal development, I’d say the importance of this experience lies in one word: Stewardship

I first heard of the word when the ABA President Ray Leong mentioned it at our last Cabinet meeting. He defined it as a Native American term pertaining to the idea of giving back to the land. In my mind, stewardship can be summarized in five words: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest. For someone like me, who heavily promotes the idea of going out and doing what you want to do, not what other people want you to do, my definition of the word seems a bit hypocritical. However, I want you to think about how much the word stewardship relates to your own life. Why do people give to charities? Why do people attend church every Sunday when they could be doing other things? Why do parents work so hard to give their children better opportunities? Why do people stay in clubs/organizations?

3) Apartment Managing Job

It took me about a month to land this job, because I had to go through one of the existing apartment managers to contact the landlord. Since the landlord owns about 10% of Berkeley property, he’s obviously a busy man and it can take days for him to get a message. For about two consecutive weeks, I tried to set-up a meeting with the landlord and for two weeks, I was denied any contact. However, whether out of perseverance or luck, I was finally able to receive a meeting where I got the job.

Apartment managing is time consuming because you’re either doing paperwork, or you’re busy showing potential tenants available rooms. After all the trouble I went through, I ended up working for one summer and then quitting because of schoolwork. Seems like an awful waste of time doesn’t it? If I learned one thing from all this, it’s definitely this: If you choose to commit to something, give it 100% and follow through until the end.

4) Failed Company Start-up

I actually want to reserve this point for an in-depth post later on because there’s a lot to write. I will let you know that the underlying premise behind the company was to revolutionize online education. There were many reasons that led to the end result but one of the key takeaways I’ve learned from this experience is: If you want your idea to succeed, convey your passion to every member of your team.

5) Magoosh Internship

The opportunity for this internship came primarily from a bit of luck as well as some initative on my part. The first stroke of luck came in one of my Industrial Engineering Operations Research classes, where I met two MBA students named Bhavin Parikh and Hansoo Lee, who just so happened to take the class because they were short 3 units to graduate from their second year in the UC Berkeley MBA program. The second stroke of luck came in the fact that both of them had been running a startup company called Magoosh, which coincidentally also pertained to the idea of online education. I won’t go in depth as to what Magoosh offers as you can probably figure out that information by just browsing their site, but in a nutshell, Magoosh offers graduate level test prep online and the idea came about when both founders noticed the lack of cheap online test prep for graduate students.

Since I had previously attempted my own startup in the field of online education, I was immediately interested and later sent an e-mail to both founders asking if they would be willing to accept me as an intern. Now the key thing to understand from this is that people don’t just accept interns for the hell of it. When you apply for a position in any start-up, you should be able to effectively convey what your value is and what you can do for the company. Since internships are a learning experience, offer to work for free and know that you’ll be willing to do any work that they pass to you, whether it be data entry, market research, or even getting the bagels.

Fortunately, the founders don’t expect me to do any sort of useless work such as getting coffee/bagels, and I’ve learned many lessons that will definitely help me in the future if I decide to further pursue web entrepreneurship. Maybe I’ll post some of the more valuable lessons later. (I seem to have a lot of “will post later” so hopefully I follow through on those) The key lesson to learn from all of this also happens to be one of my favorite quotes that I live by: “You miss 100% of the shots you never take.”

Even though I knew that these MBA’s honestly didn’t need an intern, I went ahead and took the initiative to ask them if they needed help. Don’t spend your life regretting the things you wish you had done. Just do them.

To recap the major lessons:

1) Go into everything you do thinking it’s going to be a tough ride.
2) Stewardship: Choosing service over self-interest
3) If you choose to commit to something, give it 100% and follow through until the end.
4) If you want your idea to succeed, convey your passion to every member of your team.
5) “You miss 100% of the shots you never take.”

So hopefully you’ve been able to learn something from all of this because I definitely have. My semester’s been tough and downright unbearable at times, but everything I do is out of passion and love and that’s why I keep chugging along.

“When work, commitment, and all become one and you reach that deep well where passion lives, nothing is impossible.”

I haven’t really been posting that many articles or blog entries lately. It’s become ridiculously hard to find people to interview because my network only extends so far. Might need to find another purpose to my main site unless I somehow find a new network of people who are really passionate about things they do.

It’s been rough dealing with everything that’s happened these past few months. I’ve definitely learned a lot of lessons and changed a lot of my work and personal mentalities. I think I’ll post a list of important takeaways from my semester in a next post. My semester is finally clearing up though and I definitely won’t be taking as many classes next semester because of time commitments to ABA so I should be focusing more on posting.

I have very high standards when it comes to real friends and best friends. My roommate fits them.