Stories telling: I don’t find my purpose, I stumbled on it

Who am I? I’m a boring guy with a nine-to-five job minding his own business but—before you join my dark side, I have a checklist for you to look at first, I don’t want your mama kicking my ***  for being a bad influence.

—{ Audience }—
☐ Kids
☐ Teens
☐ Adults
☑ Anyone sitting at Starbucks and pretending they’re reading books

—{ Sarcasm Level }—
☐ What is sarcasm?
☑ Significant brain usage
☐ Dark Souls

—{ Grammarly }—
☐ It can be easily understood by 5th Grade
☐ Too many grammar mistakes
☑ Give me a break, I learned enough just to pass English test

—{ Number of bad words }—
☐ 0
☐ 1
☐ 2
☑ 3+ ( not sure about this )
☐ Eminem’s song

—{ Reading Time }—
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ To infinity and beyond

—{ ? / 10 }—
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☑ Smashing a LIKE button

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Austin Kleon wrote a book called — Steal like an artist

He said that one of the ways that he is creative is that you can take little things that inspire you and you take pieces of all those things that you love that you want to emulate and when you combine them together you get something that’s uniquely you because no one else would have chosen exact inspirations and no one else would have put them together the way you did.

We’re talking about practice here, not plagiarism—plagiarism is trying to pass someone else’s work off as your own. Copying is about reverse-engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.

Over the past few years, I’ve been stealing ideas from everyone and shaping them to something’s mine. And you — my friend, feel free to steal any of this idea If it ever means anything to you.

Looking for purpose, defining yourself ? Wasting time

You read it wrong, I didn’t mean you’re wasting time, I mean you should waste more time. What the heck is this guy talking about!? Calm your paws, allow me to demonstrate.

I used to worry mostly about wasting time a little too much. I ended up equating every moment that I didn’t use to fulfill my purpose as a moment that I was going to be unhappy or not helpful to people.

— and it all depends on the opportunities that are given to you.

As for me, my biggest opportunity is my day job. That’s right, you heard me— a day job.

A day job gives me money, a connection to the world, a routine and the best part — where I can learn things and help others. It started to seem like my day job was the thing that had purpose.

I realized that I had more purpose and was actually more useful by doing something that was important to me instead of doing something that I assumed was important to the people that I wanted to help.
I don’t think you find yourself by sitting in a room by yourself staring at a mirror, you do it by going out into the world, expanding beyond your little bubble and understanding what about the world resonates with you.

So let me rephrase, you are not wasting your time by doing things that have purpose.

Overcome procrastination – by school yourself

My favorite quote from Elisabeth Gilbert’s book — Big Magic is “Done is better than good”

Have you ever felt that it is difficult for you to complete a task even when it is easy to do? It’s not your fault, it’s just your procrastinating monkey inside your brain ( —Tim Urban can help you understand more from his TED talk presentation). Plus you might have to think too much about how to perfect it before you do it and the only thing you need to do is JUST DO IT!

But you might be scared to start. That’s natural. So stop it and —
— Let’s get some helps from — Mr. Google

Well, it’s lucky for me, I have a dad to ask or I can learn by helping him fix things ( even most of the time all I learned was how to hold a flashlight and get yelled at ). Get back to the point, if you have no one to ask, you can google it!
Google everything. I mean literally everything. Google your ******* dreams, Google your girlfriend problems. Get lost in the stacks. Don’t ask questions before you Google it, you’ll either find the answer or you’ll come up with a better question.

Don’t worry about doing research. Just search.

And I will tell you a secret “Go deeper than anybody else — that’s how you’ll get ahead”

Too many minds

I love this movie, especially this scene. An officer named Nathan Algren is struggling with the wood sword fight. His friend exposed that he has “too many minds”. He was thinking and was worrying too much about the people watching which led to his distraction.

Soon after, you learn that most of the world doesn’t give a **** care about what you think (or do). It sounds harsh, but it’s ugly true.

But if you look on the bright side, this is actually a good thing, because you want attention only after you’re doing really good work. There’s no pressure when you’re unknown. You can do what you want. Do things just for the fun of it. When you’re unknown, there’s nothing to distract you from getting better. No public image to manage, no audience, no emails, no hangers-on.

The important thing is that you show your appreciation without expecting anything in return, and that you get a new workout of the appreciation.

Once you put your work into the world, you have no control over the way people will react to it. 

People will misinterpret you and what you do. They might even call you names. So get comfortable with being misunderstood, disparaged, or ignored.

Life is a lonely business, often filled with discouragement and rejection, but it’s still a tremendous boost when people say nice things about our work. 

That’s why I put every really nice e-mails, texts I get in a special folder. (Nasty e-mails get deleted immediately.) When those dark days roll around and I need a boost, I open that folder and read through a couple texts. Then I get back to work.

Try it: Instead of keeping a rejection file, keep a praise file. Use it sparingly—don’t get lost in past glory—but keep it around for when you need the lift. And trust me — you’d love it 🙂

Power of words

If you hate someone, stab them, shoot them or tie and hide them in your basement but “Don’t ever, for any reason, for any reason, ever, no matter what. No matter where. Or who, or who you are with, or where you are going or… or where you’ve been… ever. For any reason, whatsoever…” — hurt someone’s heart by your words—

— alright, alright, I’m just joking about the amputation, don’t do that either :)) but the point is focus on your word.

When you give advice to someone, especially youth, they will remember and keep it, so you should inspire them with the same mouth you use to kiss your mom. Bad words hurt but good words might stay and change someone’s life.

Once I was invited to my best friend’s birthday. I was so lost when I came to his house, then I realized there were more than 20 people, all strangers except my Bday boy (20 people is a lot specially for an extremely introvert like me, you know that 🙂

My friend was too busy with his fellas on a new karaoke machine. And my poor-lonely-fussy-face was sitting in the corner like “how soon should I leave for this dang party?” then I decided to leave, but before I could escape, my friend was standing behind my back

Sorry that too many people today, I knew you uncomfortable, drive safe bro, see you tomorrow

I left, but he put a smile on my face. I’ve promised that I would never doubt our friendship anymore and I’ve trusted those words like I had never trusted anything before or since.

Build your career by become Collaborator not Superstar

We always love to help people. But you can’t help them if you don’t first listen to them, you won’t know exactly what their problems are and how to help them unless you understand them.

So collaborate with others and with your environment. MIT did a study about different groups and their productivity and three groups came out of this study

• The first group was a group with one high IQ member, a superstar of solving problems, those groups didn’t do that great.

• The second type of group was where all of them had a relatively high IQ, a lot of good problem solvers, those didn’t do that great.

• The third group was always very successful because they had high social sensitivity, so they had empathy and they listened to each other.

“Superstars” — they come and they go, they don’t have long careers, the people with long careers are the collaborators, who bring out the best in others and therefore the best in themselves.

One of my duties is to interview new members for my troop, I always want to take all the people and narrow it to the most trustworthy people. From here forward, I don’t care how high their degree is, the only thing I cared about was who worked well with people, who could collaborate because that produced a group of people that was cohesive and brought the best in each other and was always better than any single talent.

If you’re a pair of scissors trying to cut grass, you’re never going to be as efficient as a lawnmower but If you’re a lawnmower don’t get a big head because no one’s ever going to trust you to cut hair.

I’m always more excited for my future when we act as partners to create a future that is beautiful and completely unique to us.

In the end, listen – listen to the people you want to help because it’s not you who changes the world, it’s collaboration that changes the world.

TLSR – Too long stop read

“Deleted Scenes”

This blog began its life on index cards. Here are some that didn’t survive

Fake it until you make it
Style > Strength
Work is soul crushing - but you keep it
How to NOT take things personally?
Why do we work?
The way you spend your time is the way you spend your life

THANK YOU

To my mom – my first cook, first everything.

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To all the movie Lords out there. I always admire human creativity, especially when people are making movies. They need nothing but rather paper and a pencil. Then ideas are written down, reworked and perfected until they are finally ready to be presented to the world. So you will see in this article how I was influenced by the movies— pieces of art.

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To all my lovely coworkers for reading this blog instead of doing their tasks.

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Finally, thank you ME for too busy being awesome! You impress the heck out of me.

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