life – Positive Tenacity

How to Cultivate Your Resilience

Practices to strengthen your resilience

People love a guy who rises from the ashes. Remember that.
Whitey Durham

Resilience is something that many talk about, but is hard to come by. It can be quite useful to have innate resilience in you to overcome the hardships of life, professional career, and even entrepreneurship. Things worth pursuing in life are hard. That’s why it’s rare to see great achievements, and it is that very journey of overcoming the difficult challenges with resilience makes it fulfilling and worthwhile.

There are many words used to describe resilience: perseverance, tenacity, relentlessness, and some even may use the word stubbornness, but they all describe one common theme: not giving up, trying again, being resourceful to achieve a seemingly impossible goal, and ultimately getting to that very success. (Also recommend reading Paul Graham’s essay “Relentlessly Resourceful“)

So how does one harness such resilience?

The Adventure of a Fool

Recently, I went on a business trip to South East Asia to meet with some of our customers. There I visited a more developed country like Singapore, and then traveled across a city in one of more developing countries like Indonesia. Jakarta was full of surprises, an eye-opening experience, similar to the feeling I had when I first visited Beijing.

There was an insane number of motorcycles on the road, swerving around a three-column of cars on a two-lane street. They were opportunistic, if not entrepreneurial. It was dizzying, yet mesmerizing to see how so many of them could go past all the cars without scratching a single one.

Continue reading “The Adventure of a Fool”

On Problem Solving and Not Giving Up

* This is a letter to my family.

I’m not sure if the internet we are using today in 2017 will still be the same by the time you are an adult, but because of the internet, you will be exposed to far more information and stimulants than a single person’s brain can process and handle. (Of course, let’s wait until some AI-leveraging tech for human brains get released!)

What this means is that you can get more distracted than focused, build a habit of consuming more while creating less, and critiquing more and acting less. You can spend your entire day on consuming content and talking about it, without actually making any impact or progress. Of course, a single line of comment on a popular news feed may have an impact — getting a few more likes for ego-boosting — but at the end of the day, the most precious resource you have is your energy, attention, and time, so make sure you save these for the important stuff.

Where the Grass is Always Green

When I was eleven, my family moved to the United States, due to my father’s job working for the Korean government. I still remember my first ride from JFK to some urban parts of the New York city. Still a bit jet lagged, I was struck in awe looking at the graffitis on the streets of NYC. I’ve only seen graffitis from the movies and the sheer unfamiliarity of the view somehow got me scared and excited ambivalently.

Taking a bite of freshly baked extra cheese pizza was a pleasant surprise to my taste and grabbing the oval-shaped ‘football’ for the first time got me all confused.

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