Blue is Me

Tag: determination

  • A story of my goal setting, determination and resolve

    Let me start by saying that this is going to be one of the more brutally honest posts that I will ever write. And despite the title, I’m not really boasting about myself, but I do want to tell a story that I hope can inspire others. And please don’t judge me the wrong way from this post by the way, I am speaking (and following) my heart in this post, and I think there is no more nobler endeavor than that.

    When people ask me about my greatest strength, I like to say that its my ability to focus on my goals and achieve them. I am very good at breaking down my goals into small, concrete achievable steps. So when I make my goals, I always make sure that they are achievable. They might be very difficult, or hard to do, but achievable. When I moved from Canada to California, and California to Korea, I did the same thing, just kept that in my head as the overarching goal, and break it down into steps needed to achieve it. Find a job that lets me work remotely, find a place, learn Korean, etc was all needed to accomplish that. I use a checklist a lot, which really helps me focus on what I need to do next.

    I came to Korea, for 2 main reasons: 1) to get away from the soul-sucking consumerist sausage-fest that was Silicon Valley, and 2) Find myself a girlfriend and potential wife.

    I want to elaborate on the second point a bit, because this story is about love and determination.

    I wasn’t interested in Korean girls until I had a lucid dream about them in summer 2011. I won’t explain in too much detail, but this dream caused me to become interested in Korean culture. So I started learning Korean in Fall 2011, and met some of my best Korean friends in the process. Of course, along the way I developed a goal to find my Korean girl soulmate.

    When I have a goal, I am absolutely determined to reach that goal. So this being a goal to find someone to love and be with, it’s probably the goal I’ve spent the most effort in, and the one I’ve gotten the least progress.
    I have never had an actual Korean girlfriend. Even now, I still don’t have a Korean girlfriend.
    I have had many Korean friends, and my experience with Korean female friends have led me to believe that Korean women are the perfect fit for my personality. In my mind, they are the most attractive women in the world, and very nice and polite, dependent, and caring toward their boyfriends. As such, its become fixed in my mind, that I have to be with a Korean girl, date them, and marry them. No other women will satisfy me.

    My lack of progress in this goal motivates me even more. The last Korean girl who liked me was back in May 2012. I have never dated other girls since then. I have absolute loyalty and dedication towards them, and I will do anything for them. I will marry a Korean woman, or stay single forever. Yes, I am dedicated to that degree. I moved to Korea in search of love. I learned Korean for almost 3 years while most of my American friends dated Korean girls in that time, I did not. Despite going to many parties and meetups during the last 2 years, my only return for trying was a lot of ignored messages. I even went to Vancouver to meet a Korean girl only to get stood up by her.

    But despite all this, I keep trying. Why? Is it because of my stubbornness? The sheer difficulty of getting them? My belief that there should be more Chinese guy-Korean girl couples? Or even an unhealthy obsession? Maybe its all of these things. The fact that I semi-worship them, the repeated rejections, the lack of progress, the challenge of not being Korean or White, the love of Korean culture, that I felt genuinely genetically attracted to them, its everything combined. We always want the things we can’t get. We always believe the hardest things to get are the most valuable. Thus no matter what, nobody can stop me. I will keep on trying, and trying, and trying until I succeed, or be single forever.

    This is my story of determination and resolve. You have to work towards your goal, and you have to find a way to achieve it, if it’s at all remotely plausible. As long as something is possible (I’m not trying to be the President of USA for example), then it’s doable. You just have to keep working and working at it and never give up. It’s somewhat ironic that finding 100k+ salary jobs was easier than getting a Korean girl to like me, but whatever. It’s life. I can’t settle for second best. I just can’t. You only have one life, and if you can’t find the best mate, then what’s the point? This is love we are talking about here, this is finding a partner to spend the rest of your life with! This is who you are having your children with! I am not easily satisfied with a lower standard like some of my friends. The one and only standard for me, is to be with a Korean girl (and not a Korean-American girl mind you).

    The secret of achieving goals is to 1) be specific, 2) break it down into steps, and 3) be relentless. You heard it from me here.

  • Finally moving to Korea

    It’s been a long time coming – but I’m finally moving to Korea. Yes, this is the moment I’ve planned for for over a year. It took me a while to get here, but from stubborn determination I was able to do it.

    I’ve had a lot of good memories in SF, especially in 2012, and I’ll never forget that. But it’s time for me to move on to the next step in my life. I’ve been preparing for over a year for this moment.
    After I came back from Korea in Sept 2013, a place that fit me to a T, I promised myself that no matter the cost, I would find a way to be there. I would learn another language, I would give up my job, I would give up living in SF, I would give up making lots of money.. for a chance to be in the place that I love, for a chance to find a girl I love. That’s not a crazy thought – it’s who I am, and what my destiny is.

    This year was a year of enlightenment – I didn’t have any crazy trips like in 2012, or go to crazy parties like in 2013, this year I focused on one thing only – getting to Korea. I continued working at BitTorrent for over a year to get experience, I lobbied hard at Walmart to get a remote position, and I re-dedicated myself to Korean, attending two semesters at Sejong Academy and 3 months of Korean tutoring.

    I learned that experience is more valuable than anything. I was spending crazy amounts of money over the past year and a half – $30k in shopping expenses – about 30% of my total income was being spent on unnecessary things, and this year I’ve learned more than ever that money was not the key to happiness nor was owning a lot of things. I’ve sought this year to keep my spending to a minimum – and I’m happy to say that last month I’ve reduced my shopping expenditures to a mere 9% from 25% a year before. Experience is what counts – not owning things.

    I’m doing all this because I was tired of living in America, in Canada, in western culture. The so called “American Dream” is really just making a lot of money, and owning a lot of things. In SF, all the politically correct nonsense that people have to put up with (Gamergate being the latest example of nonsense caused by feminists and the media). All the tech companies here are filled with 70% tech-obsessed males who live and breathe code like some kind of zombies. When I look at Korea, I see a country where they value being together. Being with others. Drinking fun with your friends. Eating with your co-workers. Taking cute pics with your boyfriend/girlfriend. That’s what life is about. Not about owning the latest 4K TV or smartwatch. But being with people.

    Everything I have to do myself. Just last month, I had to call up Blue Advantage Arkansas to manually send me my health insurance card (Shouldn’t Walmart have done that?), I had to pay $200 to see the doctor (because Walmart didn’t mail me the insurance card on time), I had to pay $2500 to get rid of bedbugs from my apartment (left me with tons of scars and got in trouble with the condo management), pay $50 for someone to unlock my iPhone and they never called me back, pay $260 to mail back my passport in time (passport renewal failed because my passport photos weren’t correct which also wasn’t my fault), pay $200 for a background check for my soon to be tenant (my old high school friend), help set him up with an interview, do the paperwork, unit inspection, etc. I had to pay $600 in towing/parking fees to the SFMTA even though they wrongfully towed me (I mailed a towing dispute 3 months ago with no response), I have to call up everyone to confirm things that were supposed to be done weeks ago. I have to find an apartment in Korea, pay a massive deposit (Korea’s deposit is a year of rent), somehow find health insurance there, live like a vampire (work SF work hours), transfer my money over, buy furniture, etc.

    As you can see I’ve been quite stressed last month. I’m sick of it, frankly. I need a fresh change. I realize the life in Korea is not perfect. They have to study from a young age all the time, be competitive all the time, study hard, get into a good school, find a good job, work long hours, live with their parents, marry the right person, etc. Conversely, I’ve been living by myself since I was 18, paid for my own tuition working part time and the PEY internship, paid off my student debt within a few months of graduation, found my own full time job in California right after I graduated making more than my parents, and have never been unemployed since. I did this all with very little help from my parents. They helped me look for a place initially, and helped finance my current home, but everything else was mostly my own doing.

    And now once again I’m on my own to move to Korea. And I will do it. Because unlike many people, I have the ability to focus when I need to. I have my mother’s stubbornness and my father’s talent to thank for that. This is why I can’t play games or watch TV for long, because I can’t do anything unproductive for sustained periods. I have to be productive. So I make videos. So I study Korean. So I play guitar. So I read Wikipedia. So I blog. So I do programming. And so on. I have to do something with my time that’s worthwhile. And I believe when you really really want something badly enough, you will find a way to do it. No matter what obstacles are ahead. I’ve always believed this. Human willpower is a very strong thing. As long as you have something to motivate you, a passion for it, an absolute desire for it, then it’s like Michael Jordan going in for a dunk; nobody can stop you.

    난 비생산적인 하는걸 싫어서 오래동안 티비랑 게임하는거 할 수 없다.
    매일매초 생산적으로 해야된다. 그러니까 동영상를 만든다, 한국어를 공부한다, 기타를 친다, 위키피디아를 읽는다, 블로그를 쓴다, 프로그램을 한다 기타 등등. 어떤 뜻있는 일을 해야된다.
    만약에 어떤 걸 진짜 진짜 원하면은, 어떤 방법을 찾아낼 것이라고 확신해요. 아무렇든지 방법을 강구할거예요.
    내가 인간의 의지력을 항상 믿는데 동기를 주는게 있고 열정 있고 의욕 가지고 하면은, 아무도 못 말려요.

    Edit:
    I can’t help myself but complain about this issue: Mark Zuckerberg speaks Chinese and all the Chinese girls on the internet praise him. How come no one ever praises me for speaking three languages? So Zuck speaks one other language (and not that fluently FYI) and gets praised for it, while I can speak 2 languages fluently and one at an intermediate level and I get nothing. Is this because Asians are expected to know more languages and Westerners are not? Why the double standard? Ok I’m done ranting with that.

  • Life is stubborn, and so am I

    First off, happy Chinese New Years everyone, hope this year of the rabbit can bring some good food and spirits for those that are celebrating.
    For me however, I had an interview with Amazon, and a good amount of snow and coldness (-10 C) here in Toronto; no celebrating since I live alone.

    This would be my second interview with Amazon, it was at my campus instead of a phone interview this time. Unlike the first time, I prepared well, reviewed all my data structures (Trees, Graphs, Linked lists, Arrays, hash tables, stacks, queues, heaps) and algorithms (mergesort, quicksort, breadth first, depth first, in order, design patterns, singleton, factory, recursion, divide and conquer, dynamic programming), as well as large systems design (distributed systems, scalability and load balancing). The interviewer, instead of giving me several small questions, just threw a big technical question at me: code the placePiece method in a game of Reversi. The thing is not that I wasn’t able to do it – it just took a long time. The algorithm is to place the piece with given x and y coordinates in the matrix, check all 8 directions for a piece with a different color: if there is a piece with different color, pass in the direction and the piece, loop through it pushing all the nodes onto a stack/queue, and then if the same color piece is reached, pop all the nodes and color them the same color. O(n) complexity.
    Thing is, I had to code this in about 30 minutes and wasn’t able to finish on time. He asked me to code using Java instead of pseudo code (which would have been faster). I don’t think it was fair; why give me one long algorithm question when he could ask me several smaller questions and learn more about my object oriented and programming skills. All this shows is how much I’m able to code in a period of time.

    Anyways, I’m a bit annoyed because I prepared so much for this interview and only got one question asked of me. I know a lot of people wished me good luck this time – I personally believe luck is a combination of preparation and opportunity. The really sad thing is, I did prepare and I did make use of all my opportunities. I should have done well, except I wasn’t expecting him to ask one big question. And I don’t think I could have improved on my time unless I specifically knew what question he was going to ask. I don’t know what I did wrong besides running out of time. I was about 75% done the code, I kept asking him for clarity, I gave him feedback on my thoughts as I coded, I explained how my background working with distributed systems at the government was a good fit for Amazon, I asked the recruiter good questions, I even wore an Amazon T-shirt to the interview! And I couldn’t advance past the first round.

    Some part of me thinks that life purposely makes things hard for me. Looking back, there’s very few situations in which things actually went the way I wanted to. I had three goals this year: to do well in school and graduate, pay off my debt, and find an IT job in the U.S, and it’s almost as if life is telling me that the third and hardest goal shouldn’t be achieved early. It’s making me work really hard for it. Even my second goal has issues. To pay off my debt, I need to get my money out of the stock market, and get my scammed money back from my Mastercard. The Dow is over 12,000. My stocks went the opposite direction; so much for that one. As for the second one, here’s the story. I wanted to build a web application back in June 2010, and this merchant from a forum I visited asked to do it for $2200. I foolishly trusted him and gave him my money. Couple months later, he said he would do it in one week, and it still hasn’t been done so I asked for my money back. He didn’t give it back. I initiated a charge back through my credit card company. Then the merchant tells me that the chargeback has been done and shows me some Paypal screenshots to let me know the money was out of his account and would be in mine a couple days, then told me he needed an extra $1100 from me because I had charge backed some services he did provide, like hosting my site. I believed him and gave him another $1100. My Mastercard company later told me the merchant had fought back and provided documents as a rebuttal to my charge back. Since I basically lost all my money at this point, I fought back again with proof I sent him the payments for things he did provide me. Mastercard tells me it would be months before they could make a decision. Great, basically that $2200 is gone, at least its in limbo for a couple months.

    Nevertheless, despite these setbacks, I will keep trying. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t give up easily, as I realize things often do not go my way. I still believe that if I keep trying, then maybe somewhere things will start to bend my direction. Who knows, I believe its always better to weigh the decision of trying and not trying. If you try and the worst case scenario is that you get rejected, then it’s the same as if you didn’t try; thus its always better to try. And I’ve always wanted to aim high rather than low; if you compare yourself to low people or think of the alternative to not achieving high, then the consequences I think are too scary for me. So life is difficult; that’s fine. I welcome that. With each failure, it only serves to strengthen my determination. I’ve never lowered my standards before, I’ve always wanted to aim near the top (but not the absolute top; 中庸之道) , and if I can’t get it, then I will keep trying until I do.