September, 2009

My Life — 1 Comment
25
Sep 09

Fear

Two days ago, a friend of mine bought me a book for a belated birthday present. (If anyone’s interested, it’s a great book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell) As I got ready for class the next morning, I decided to carry the book with me in case I had any free time during the day to read. While walking to class, I found myself opening my book and reading while I walked, oblivious to my surroundings. Gradually, as I became aware of my actions, my first reaction was, “Oh jeez, I must look like such a nerd right now.” Yet, after that first initial thought, I realized that I really don’t care anymore. And then I just kept reading. And ran into a bush. Tripped twice.

Point is, you can do a lot of things if you don’t fear possible embarrassment. It’s your life; do what you want and forget what people think about you. The more you fear, the less you will end up accomplishing and that is a kind of lifestyle you don’t want to live.

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16
Sep 09

School Thoughts

There’s something nice about waking up every day excited for school. I generally start class around 9:30 and end at 6:00 every day but even though I’m drop dead tired by the time I walk back to my apartment, I feel productive and proud of my use of time. I’m actually excited about at least 6 of the 7 classes I am taking this semester because they all delve into subjects I am interested in. Even Korean 7A, a literature requirement where we study ancient folklore and history of Korea, has become a class I look forward to attending.

Sadly, I don’t find myself too interested in my Economics class, simply because I find the study of the graphs tedious. Not to mention, some of the concepts don’t make any sense to me. We had a problem that said, “An earthquake hits a neighborhood, destroying 10% of houses in the area. Draw the supply and demand graphs.” So this is a fairly simple econ problem but to my surprise, I discovered in my section that the only change that happens to the graph is an inward shift of the supply curve, but the demand curve remains unchanged. So I can understand the supply part, obviously if 10% of the houses are destroyed, there’s less supply but who in the right state of mind would want to purchase a house in a neighborhood that just got destroyed by an earthquake? Am I just bad at economics or am I the only one who thinks that in the real world, the demand curve would go down as well? There’s an obvious reason why no one bought airline tickets right after 9/11.

So that was my little economics rant that I still can’t understand and if someone could please enlighten me or prove me wrong, please do so in the comments.

Apart from that, classes are still fun. I apologize for the lack of interviews lately but I’m taking a class that has weekly speakers who have acclaimed positions in well-established companies so I’m thinking of doing a multi-part segment for www.kevinleeme.com where I try my best to transcribe the main points I found most interesting in these lectures. We’ll see how it goes.

My Life — 2 Comments
9
Sep 09

Curiosity

Yesterday evening, I sat in on a lecture from Ted Hoff, the co-founder of the very first microprocessor and the now deemed “rock star” of Intel. I’m not going to lie, he wasn’t exactly the most fascinating public speaker and I might have accidentally taken a quick nap in the middle of his speech, but I was still conscious enough to catch some of the most important points of his lecture. He started off with a twist on a famous line saying, “Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it definitely helped THIS cat” whilst pointing at himself.

Ted claimed that nothing but curiosity and luck led to his success. At age 12, he received his very first subscription to a science magazine and ever since then, he has remained curious towards the miracles of science. He mentioned how lucky he was to receive older mentors early on in life who helped guide him in his journey and before he was 18, he became an official inventor by U.S. patent for his work on train circuits.

Sometimes as you get older, you’ll begin to settle in at a day job or whatever it is you happen to be doing, and you’ll realize that you gave up curiosity a long time ago. You’ve accepted your fate, closed off your doors, and settled for something you might or might not enjoy doing. I remember reading a friend’s blog (Victor Shih) and noticing one specific passage:

“Epitomics is a mainly customer service based company so there are protocols on all procedures, which bring tedium to every day activities, but I cant help but look at all these adults and see in them something I have always feared. The end of the road. School is filled with so many opportunities and avenues to explore. Discovering and rediscovering oneself. But at the point where many of the adults at work are, they’ve already found all the things theyre meant for. Theres no more excitement or innovation. I feel as though this is it for me. Schooling will be great and exciting, but in the end I’ll end up just like these adults: stagnant.”

I feel the exact same emotions Victor feels and I fear the day I lose my ability to stay curious. I urge you all to keep that curious cat inside you and occasionally drop in a ball of string for it to play with.

Stay hungry and stay foolish.

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2
Sep 09

Criticism

Many people in this world will bring you down no matter what you are trying to achieve. These few unfortunates ones were probably raised badly or grew up in an environment where it was okay to bring others down to compensate for their own failures. You will deal with these kinds of people all your life, and you will realize that it was the taunting and negative comments that ultimately brought about your success. You pushed yourself harder when they criticized your work. You rose above their challenges and you crushed the desires to sink down to their level and fight back.

No one ever created something new without facing the challenges of the old and stubborn minded. Innovators and entrepreneurs face the disapproval of the masses every day and yet they walk the lonely path because they know what lies at the end of the road.

Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

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1
Sep 09

Simple Answers

Before summer started, I asked a friend what he really wanted before he died and he said, “a group of people who I love and love me back.” The simplicity in this answer was surprising but I put some thought into the statement during my summer and I’ve come to realize that I would be a happy man indeed if I could maintain my relationships with my close high school friends for the rest of my life. Thinking about it is strange; everyone eventually branches off into different parts of the world, each with his/her own ambitions and goals but if we were all to come back home one day in the future, nothing would be different. We all desperately seek companionship and scrapping away all materialistic ambitions would leave a desire to have people close to you.

It’s hard to comprehend the statement, “money can’t buy you happiness” until you’re sitting alone in your aged years wondering where all your childhood friends disappeared off to.