kevinleemelife happens. how will you adapt?

Over the past few months, I’ve discovered a prevalent problem in my life which has caused me to reconsider my values of success. Like many of my fellow classmates, I went into this semester with the intention of obtaining a full-time job offer. Post recruiting season, I thought that having a job offer on hand would make me happier or somehow satisfy some sort of gap in my life but I found myself no happier than I had been before this semester started.

I’ve been defining much of success throughout my college career as a set of achievements. Getting into a college. Success. Getting this internship. Success. Getting that award. Success. And yet, it’s taken me 4 years to realize that climbing the ladder of achievements has never been the true defining moments of happiness in my time here on Earth. I’ve often heard and read before that your career will not define happiness but I chose to ignore the advice and I’ve finally begun to reconsider the priorities in my life.

I don’t want to be the man on his deathbed wondering where time went and why I could never be happy despite the money or career advancement. Achievements are just that, achievements. They are milestones; important for your personal development, but shouldn’t be a foundation of personal happiness.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt

When you ask someone for their opinion on the purpose of human life, you often receive generic responses such as “To live, laugh, and love,” or to “experience the world.” While those answers may be true, I believe in a simpler answer of the two S’s. Survival and Self- Improvement.

Ever since the beginning of mankind, humans have retained the natural instinct to survive. And to do so, humans had to self-improve, whether it be through the creation of tools, weapons, fire, etc… Without one there isn’t the other, and to this present year, if you think very carefully about every action a human being makes in this world, it all still ties back to surviving or self-improving in order to survive.

And yet, humans have the uncanny ability to never realize the importance of survival and self-improvement until it’s too late. Students procrastinate until the night before a test, only to realize that the only chance of survival is an attempt at self-improving  through studying all night. Individuals facing health risks through obesity realize that they should have been self-improving their eating habits all along. And our civilization pollutes and exploits the land, until one day, we’ve realized that we’ve depleted all the natural resources and destroyed our world to a point where self-improvement no longer is an option.

One of the best feelings in the world is receiving a message, text, im, or any form of communication from a friend you thought had forgotten about you a long time ago.

If you love that feeling; why not pass it along? Message an old friend. Rekindle that friendship.

If you share my positive views of innovation and change, then there is a high chance that you consider living in this time period of endless technological advancement an absolute privilege.

My mother was gifted an iPad several days ago by a college friend of mine who is currently living at our house for the summer. Now I’ll be honest, although my project this summer deals entirely with tablets, I still don’t necessary find any specific “need” for this product (I do think there will be a need down the line and I could spawn a whole post about this but not now). Regardless, it’s an amazing piece of hardware with one of the best user experiences I have ever seen. I had just watched Toy Story 3 for the second time in theaters (absolutely amazing movie; Pixar really knew how to strike that childhood sentiment chord) so one of the first applications I downloaded from the App Store was a Toy Story visual book. Thinking that the application would be a 2-D book similar to any digital book you’d read on an e-reader, I opened the application only to find a rich interactive visual experience. Each page of the book was wonderfully animated with pictures that panned in different directions as the narrator read the book aloud to you. Words would highlight yellow as the narrator read, so you could follow along, and you could even touch a page which would instantly turn the page into a black and white stencil that you could color in. Heck, there were even short movie clips and mini-games that you could watch and play in between reading.

My description might have been a little information overload but the point I am trying to make is that several years down the line, I can envision myself sitting in bed with my child reading this visual book and playing toy story minigames on a touchscreen device. Interaction with content is one of the main forms of engaging students and there will eventually be so many more educational uses for new technologies such as the iPad. I’m still going to make my kid read REAL books and I will still read tangible books to him/her but technology has come such a far way that we would never have envisioned ten years ago.

“Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.”

I struggle daily thinking of how I will raise my own children. Will they work hard for everything they own or will they reap the benefits of my successes? Should they be encouraged in their youth like Cameron Herold to find ways to make their own money or simply be privileged to play in the sun during the fleeting years of their childhood?

What is considered the right way to raise a child?

In middle school, most of us might have blogged on Livejournal and Xanga, focusing on posts regarding our personal lives. If we weren’t talking about specific events throughout our day, we were ranting about our parents, teachers, and “anonymous” people we were angry at. And even though other people’s lives had nothing to do with our own, we soaked in this material because we were curious and we had nothing better to read.

As time goes by, our lives are complicated with technology that has allowed us to drift further and further away from reality. Every day, content is thrown at us in the masses. If you aren’t busy finishing work, you’re scrolling through the newsfeed on Facebook, watching related videos on Youtube, and reading the most popular news articles on Digg.

There simply isn’t the “time” to read about someone’s daily life on their blog anymore. Unless that content provides some sort of value to the reader, it simply becomes a filler.

A minor bump in the road that is forgotten as soon as we drive by.

Just like this post.

Yesterday at work, I watched Ranajit (employee who sits across from me) work on some slides involving a training powerpoint that he was trying to standardize among all Intel employees. The powerpoint training had to do with product pricing, an area that Ranajit did not focus on in his daily work.

I asked him, “Ranajit, why are you trying to create a training powerpoint involving a field that you have no expertise in?”

To which he replied, “If I were an expert in this subject, why would I waste time creating a training around it? Sure it will be a challenge to learn something completely different from my field of work, but I chose this subject of product pricing in order to force myself to learn.”

To often we seek comfort in the subjects we already know. I know many Asians who take Chinese as a language in college even though they grew up with the language in their homes. They study abroad in Shanghai, a familiar place with familiar people. We study a major in college because our parents tell us it is safe and job guaranteed.

The burden we face by immersing ourselves in a completely new environment pays off tenfold in the long run.

I had a middle school friend who always sacrificed the present by worrying about the future. If our families went to dinner together, and his parents wouldn’t let him come play at my house afterwards, he would be gloomy the entire dinner. If he knew that we only had 3 hours to play games together instead of 7 hours, he would spend all 3 hours begging his parents to let him stay that extra 4 hours.

Fast forward to 2010 and every day I find myself in the exact same situations. I constantly worry about my future and where I want to end up. I sacrifice the quality of my lifestyle eating cup noodles, thinking that saving that extra buck will add to my savings in the long term. And in the process, I forget the most important lesson: Enjoying life as it goes by day to day.

“We’re so busy watching out for what’s just ahead of us that we don’t take time to enjoy where we are.”
- Calvin & Hobbes

I have always, and always will admire disruptive new technologies/innovations and the utilities they bring to consumers

Although I have a Macbook, iTouch, and an iPhone, I’m not what one could call an Apple Fanboy. However, what I do appreciate is the new cultural revolution that Apple has brought to this world with the iPhone. Over these past few years, we have seen Apple revenues shoot through the roof with its smartphone release and watched as people all around us began to adopt this revolutionary new piece of hardware.

This morning, my mother came into my room raving about the iPhone 3GS that her friend had showed her. When I first bought my iPhone 3G, my mother wasn’t too impressed; she was more excited about receiving my iTouch which I would no longer need. However, my mother’s friend conveyed such excitement and passion for her 3GS that my mother couldn’t help but feel a need to purchase one for herself too.

And this is what Apple does best. Create such amazing products that people can’t help but act as “fanboys,” thus spreading this infectious “fanboyism” to fellow colleagues.

Focus on an amazing product, and all the rest will follow.