The Real Implications of "Occupy Wall Street"

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few months, you've probably heard a lot (perhaps too much) about "Occupy Wall Street" (OWS). It's a movement which started in NYC but which has quickly expanded to basically every major city in the world, at a rate that is startlingly impressive, given the general apathy and lack of interest in political protest which traditionally characterizes my generation.

I have not been able to see these protests in person, being that I currently live in Korea, but from everything I've read about OWS in the news and from my friends' Facebook posts, it's essentially an impassioned mob of young people who are angry about the shitty and stagnant state of the US economy, the state of their livelihood (and/or the state of their friends' livelihoods) and want to lash out at someone or anyone who they think might be responsible for this mess we're in. And in this case that "someone" is the fat cats of Wall Street, because let's be honest, they are a pretty easy group of people to hate on.

Many have criticized Occupy Wall Street for being a movement with no unified purpose, one that will will inevitably peter out and die. Others have criticized OWS as being nothing more than an excuse for young, bored people to throw a huge party.

But if you ask me, personally I think all that is beside the point.

If you ask me, I think the most interesting aspect of OWS has been its ability to mobilize so many young people of my generation, traditionally the #1 most politically apathetic demographic of the past several decades. There are so many other things in the past two decades which could have (and should have) gotten young people just as angry and impassioned and out on the streets, but in the end it's the evil empire of banks which ended up doing the trick.

And I don't think this is any coincidence. I think a movement like Occupy Wall Street has been a long time coming. I think that what those protesters at Occupy Wall Street feel, is something that a lot of the rest of us "normal," less-angry people feel as well. Maybe for a long time we didn't quite know what this feeling was, but it's been simmering below the surface for years and years and is just now coming to a boil.

And that feeling is that the Finance industry is an industry that has spiraled out of control, has become grossly overcompensated relative to the amount of value it adds to society, and whose Day of Reckoning has finally come.

I believe "Occupy Wall Street" signals the end of an era. I believe that Finance is done as a "hot" industry whose time has come and gone.

In the late 80s, 90s, and early 2000's, Finance was probably the hottest industry to go to. People heard about the unbelievable salaries and bonuses that people were making in Finance, and many young, intelligent people who might have otherwise chosen to be professors, engineers, entrepreneurs, doctors, or whatever, they all opted instead to seek out the seemingly greener pastures of Finance.

If you take a given college class, there are typically always going to be lots of smart people with very diverse interests, who want to go into Medicine or Law or Academia or Engineering or Science. But suddenly in the 1990s Finance became THE hot industry to go to, and it started a flight of talent in which the Finance industry started taking in and siphoning off all the talented people who would have otherwise gone into another field which they had (until then) always interested them, had the irresistible allure of Finance not gotten to them.

Many of these people who had "crossed over to the Dark Side" to become investment bankers and traders, they tried to justify their actions by telling people (at least, those who would listen) as well as themselves about the social goods that the Finance industry provides. About how it provides liquidity to the markets, about how it makes the markets more efficient, and about how they provide efficient funding for large corporations which acts as the fuel for economic growth.

And that's all probably very true. Despite all the negative press that the Finance industry and the people who work in it have been getting these past few months, you can't deny its place in society. Just like we need a police force to protect our citizens, and we need hospitals to take care of our sick, we need the Finance industry for many things. We need financial institutions to keep our money safe, to lend money to individuals and corporations who hopefully can put it to good use and eventually pay it back and then some, and to invest our assets wisely so that we can have a nice nest egg waiting for us when we retire. And contrary to what people might have you believe, people in Finance are not all evil, greedy, blood-sucking, money-hungry bastards looking for ways to deprive innocent people of their hard-earned money.

But what is undeniably true is that in the past few decades, the Finance industry got overpopulated with people who simply wanted to make a quick and easy buck, people who had lost sight of (or simply never cared for) the original various noble purposes of Finance and its place in society. And we started seeing sophisticated new financial products and services being developed which no one really understood and which we didn't question as long as they served the purpose of giving us a free lunch and free mortgages and free money which we foolishly hoped that we wouldn't have to pay for, ever.

As a result of all this, as we saw the Finance industry became overrun by greedy individuals who wanted to get rich without any regard for the end users of their products & services, aka their customers, and that's the point at which any industry will become derailed and eventually come crashing down, as the Finance industry finally has now.

There's a quote from my favorite movie that goes "When a forest grows too wild, a purging fire is inevitable and natural." The 2008 Financial Crisis and its aftermath were awful, but it was the "purging fire" that our society needed, to shake itself out of the strange Finance-driven bizarro world that it had made for itself. We've been through the worst of the fire, and while we are still feeling the after-effects, it will be much better for our society in the long-run. The "golden age" of the Finance industry is over, and over the next few years I believe we will slowly see a return to harmony when it comes to the future career aspirations of many young people.

My hope is that many smart and talented people will still go to Finance, but that the proportion of the smart people of the world who do go into Finance will return to a more reasonable and balanced level. The greatly-decreased glamour of the industry as a result of OWS-type public protests will ensure that only people who really want to do Finance and are truly "meant" to do it, will do it. The other people who went into Finance because it pays a lot and seemed cool, these are the types of people that in today's world will re-evaluate their options and choose what they really wanted to do, and I'm hoping that the world will benefit by the "better-late-than-never" choice that many of the current crop of talented 20-somethings are hopefully making. Because it's talented but misguided individuals like that who, in the absence of OWS and this public outcry against financial institutions, would have worked in Finance into their 40s and 50s and lived a relatively unfulfilling life as a result of not doing what they were originally meant to do and being unable to make the mark on society that they were supposed to make. But now they will be able to realize what it is they truly wanted to do in life, which for many people in Finance, probably is not and never was, Finance.

So that is my unconventional take on the Occupy Wall Street movement. I'm fascinated seeing all these young people of my generation taking to the streets to protest something that they feel was unjust and which the government has done nothing to address. And I'm hoping it helps to open the eyes of all the rest of the young people in the world and help them see that they don't have to "sell out" on their childhood dreams to pursue a potentially high-paying career which will bring glamour and wealth but may not bring what all people want, which is the genuine happiness that comes from knowing that you've made the world a slightly better place, when it comes time to leave it.

We Are All Superheroes (Part 3A)

So in the first two entries of this three-part series, I've been talking a lot about myself and my past but I've kinda gotten away from the main point of this blog, which is to talk about my ongoing journey to become a successful entrepreneur who will help save the world, and I realize that there are several fundamental questions that I still haven't answered, specifically:

1) You say you want to save the world, but there are many possible ways to do that. Why entrepreneurship?

2) If you are going to become an entrepreneur, what kind of company do you plan on starting and why?

This third and final chapter of this series titled "We Are All Superheroes" will be broken down into two parts, in which I will attempt to tie everything together and show how all these disparate elements of my past have come together to shape my future.

To answer Question #1 above, this is a question I've always struggled with. Ever since I was a little kid, I've always felt an unbearable sadness when thinking about all the people in the world who suffer in terrible and undeserving ways and who cry out for help that never comes (and probably never will). And what added to that sadness was that I had no idea how I could go about trying to help them, in an effective and scalable way. This sadness has followed me my entire life, and it continues to haunt me to this day.

There are many traditional ways and avenues in which one can try to save the world. You can work at a non-profit / NGO or as a social worker. You can become a public servant and go into politics. Or you can work in a totally unrelated industry and become filthy rich like Andrew Carnegie or Warren Buffett and then start your own foundation when you get old. For literally the past decade or so, I have been thoroughly exploring each of these options, only to come to the conclusion that NONE of these methods was the right way to go about it. At least, not for me.

For example, since very early in my life, I have often flirted with the idea of working in a non-profit organization. It's something I always thought about as a kid and even in my senior year of college when I very seriously considered applying for the Peace Corps. But the more I thought about it and the more I spoke with people involved in non-profits and NGOs, the more I heard nothing but one negative and discouraging story after another. Stories of people who start out with good intentions but are quickly disillusioned by the alarming amount of bureaucracy, corruption, and/or ineffective management that plague these organizations. But more than that, I just wasn't convinced that I'd be able to make a real impact through this type of non-profit work. Sure, I would be doing real hands-on work that would help people in a very tangible and direct way, but as foolish and/or arrogant as this may sound, I felt like I was capable of much more, that given my strengths and abilities, I could make a much bigger impact on the world.

Later when I was in high school, I had a brief but intense dalliance with politics and public affairs. In fact, at one point I was legitimately in love with it. Back in high school, this one summer I did this thing called Junior Statesmen of America or JSA for short, which was a summer program designed to "prepare young leaders for active participation in public affairs." The program was awesome and at the end of that summer I was convinced that my future was as a public servant. I think I even wrote about it in my college app essays. But alas, harsh reality soon set in and, like any reasonable person should, I came to realize that our political system is broken, corrupted, and pervaded by special interest groups, and that 98% of the politicians out there are shameless narcissists with severe personality disorders.

It was as a college student that I started flirting with the opposite extreme - Instead of working at a low-paying non-profit job where I could make a very direct but limited impact, what if I went into an industry like Finance and focused exclusively on becoming rich (while still maintaining my "good intentions") so that I can use the wealth I earn to make a bigger impact in my 40s and 50s? But over time I realized this was not a realistic plan either. First off, Finance attracts a lot of extremely smart and talented individuals, and while they are not the evil money-hungry demons that the "Occupy Wall Street" movement would have you believe, I think it's safe to say that very few (if any) of them have the same philanthropic bent and desire to save the world as someone like myself, and to put it simply, I was scared that once I entered that world, I would be changed in a way I didn't want to be and I'd forget why I had ever entered Finance in the first place. Not only that, after reading more about people like Andrew Carnegie, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates, I discovered that none of them had originally been motivated by a desire to help society, but rather that their philanthropy was something that they got into AFTER they had amassed too much money than they knew what to do with.

So as you can see, at this point of my life I was not in a good place. I wanted to save the world but I had NO idea how to go about doing that. All of the three options I mentioned above, not only did I NOT think they would be effective, but I just could not imagine myself doing any of those things for the rest of my life.

And then one day, fate decided to intervene and throw me a bone, and everything changed.

I currently work at an international bank in Korea called "Standard Chartered Bank (Korea)," and one day at work, in Spring 2010, I was assigned to a project called "Next Generation Banking" whose objective was to utilize the latest innovations and technologies to change the way retail banking customers interact with a bank and do their personal finances. My job was (and still is) to take something like banking and personal finances, which are inherently boring, confusing, and inconvenient, and to somehow make it into an amazing experience that is fun, simple, and easy.

I was very lucky and blessed to have this great opportunity fall into my lap, because it exposed me to things which I otherwise might never have been able to gain exposure to, and it set off a chain reaction inside me which is still in motion. At first all this talk of tech and innovation and IT all felt very strange and foreign to me, but in the one and a half years since I've been chosen to lead this project, I have fallen in love with the power of technology and innovation and its ability to improve people's lives and solve some of the most basic problems and inconveniences of our society.

This serendipitous surprise was the epiphany I had been searching for. For me, this was my equivalent of Bruce Wayne seeing a bat crash through his window and being inspired to become that which he most fears - a Bat. This was the equivalent of Peter Parker getting bitten by a genetically-modified spider and acquiring the powers which allowed him to become Spider-Man.

This project was the trigger that got me to start reading all the major tech and social media news sites like TechCrunch and Mashable. It got me to start religiously listening to the Stanford "Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders" podcasts, which each week features a famous entrepreneur talking about their experiences and any advice they would give to aspiring entrepreneurs. And last but not least, it finally showed me the path that I had always been looking for, a path that I have been walking down ever since.

TO BE CONTINUED...
_____________________________________________________________________

As always, thanks for reading! :) As stated above, this entry was the first of two parts in this third and final chapter of this series titled "We Are All Superheroes," which aims to explain to all my friends what I really meant all those times when I said that I want to become a superhero. In the next (and last) entry of this series, I will be talking about why I believe I have what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur, and exactly what kind of start-up company I plan on founding, and why.

We Are All Superheroes (Part 2)

As many of you reading this probably already know, I absolutely love superhero movies, and I've also probably already told you about how "Batman Begins" is far and away my favorite superhero movie of all time. But another one of my personal favorites is the movie "Unbreakable" (2000), about a man who slowly discovers he is a real-life, modern-day superhero. The movie offers a much more realistic take on the traditional mythology of superheroes. If you've never seen the movie you can watch the trailer below and if you're interested you can find out more by checking out the movie's Wikipedia and Rotten Tomatoes page as well.

The protagonist, played by Bruce Willis, is an ordinary family man who works as a stadium security guard and is searching for meaning in his life in his middle-age. His life is turned upside down one day when a train he is riding derails and crashes, killing 131 people total - every single passenger that was on board *except* him. It gets him started on a journey where he slowly discovers the reasons behind why he survived the crash, and the superhuman powers that lie within him that he never discovered until now due to a combination of denial, intentional ignorance, and having never truly tested himself.

The core underlying theme of "Unbreakable" is that comic books are simply one of many ways of passing down stories of great men and women from the past who were supremely talented, achieved great things, and who at the time seemed larger than life. Just like cavemen used to draw on the walls of caves to tell stories about heroic individuals and their impressive achievements, and just like the Egyptians engraved elaborate pictorials on their temple walls to commemorate people who they considered gods or god-like, comics are also a modern-day way of telling stories of great individuals from the past, even if the story itself and its various elements end up becoming exaggerated and embellished a great deal over the years for entertainment value.

There's a reason why this movie, as well as Batman Begins, are both on my list of all-time favorites. They are both examples of the superhero "backstory" which documents the physically and psychologically arduous journey that all superheroes have to go through, as they slowly discover the extent of their special abilities and have to come to grips with the enormous responsibilities those "powers" will entail.

All superhero backstory movies can be broken down into three parts. In the first part, the hero-to-be undergoes a terrible personal tragedy. For Bruce Wayne, it was the cold-blooded murder of his parents when he was a child, for Peter Parker (Spider-Man) it was the murder of his Uncle Ben, and for Bruce Willis' character in "Unbreakable," both his marriage and his life were slowly falling apart until the horrific train crash which changed everything.

In the second part, the tragedy acts as a trigger which causes the hero-to-be to start questioning their own existence and their true purpose in life. After a period of struggle where they feel lost and confused, they eventually start to realize their true purpose and start to discover the "powers" inside them that had been buried within themselves, lying dormant and becoming increasingly rusty over the years. Once discovered, they start to hone and refine these powers, becoming a truly fearsome force to be reckoned with in the process.

And in the third and final part of the hero-to-be's journey, they are confronted with their first "test" and must put all of their newfound knowledge and powers to use against a rising evil which threatens the very existence of the world that they are trying to save.

If you ask me where in this three-part progression I am at right now, I'd say that I'm somewhere between the second and third parts. I'd say that I have already been through my personal tragedy (at least, I hope so haha), and more recently I have slowly but surely gained an understanding of what some of my "powers" are. I am now preparing for the third and final part in my personal transformation, in which I try to start putting my new superpowers to good use and start doing what I was born to do and what I was always meant to do but just didn't realize until now.

This second part I mentioned, about discovering your own personal "superpowers," is not easy, as I've discovered. We are all born with certain talents and innate dispositions, and with the right training, the right guidance, and when we are put in the right real-world situations, they will emerge and blossom and flourish. But it's very easy to grow up in a situation where we never have the opportunity to realize the natural talents we were born with, sometimes because of the circumstances in which you were born, sometimes because society and people around you have different values and try to make you live your life a certain way. For example, if Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, with their intellect, ambition, and business savvy, had been born in a third-world country with no electricity and no links to the outside world, then they would have lived the rest of their lives as normal villagers, hunting and cooking and raising a family while never even seeing or hearing about a computer or how they both might be able to change the world with one. And the world would have been robbed of their creative genius and transformational abilities.

For me, I've looked back on my life and discovered some special powers that I realize now I have always had which, when put together, will allow me to become the superhero I hope to be one day. 

For example, I've noticed that I have an innate talent for knowing what other people are thinking and "putting myself in their shoes," so to speak. In a comic book this would probably take the form of ESP or telepathy or something like that, but in real life it's more of just a knack for understanding what others are thinking and going through. This power helps me in many ways - It helps me to quickly ascertain what a person's hopes and fears are, it helps me gain people's trust, it helps me befriend people quickly, and it helps me help them with stuff that's troubling them.

Another power I have discovered I have, is the ability to take knowledge and insights from interesting and unexpected places and apply it to other fields which on the surface might seem totally unconnected and unrelated. I am a person who is always thinking in terms of metaphors and analogies. The way I view the world, everything in this world is connected and everything is related in so many ways, it's just that it's not always easy to see these connections, or to see them in the right context. I believe that this kind of mindset helps me to be more creative than the average person, and will help me to bring innovation and opportunity to fields and concentrations which I believe need them most.

And last but not least, I've always had an insatiable and enduring love for languages. The simple concept of being able to communicate the same idea in a multitude of different ways, each of which only a certain amount of people who know that language can understand and appreciate. There's something about that last part that's very beautiful, but also very frustrating as well. It's awesome to pick apart different languages and discover each's unique characteristics and little eccentricities, but at the same time it's this endless linguistic diversity which causes so much miscommunication, inefficiency, and needless division in this world. I'll talk in more detail later about how I want to try to change this as an entrepreneur.

I should note that despite the many similarities between superheroes' journeys and people's real-life journeys of personal discovery, one key difference between the two is that in real life, the answers never come easy and the journey is always infinitely more complex than in the storybooks. However, this relatively simplistic portrayal of struggle and redemption in superhero stories is actually a good thing. I truly believe that despite all their exaggeration and over-the-top imagery and hyperbole, what all superhero stories in comics share is that they have managed to boil down the essential characteristics of what being a real-life hero entails and what it takes to become one. These concepts have been boiled down and simplified and presented in this type of enjoyable comic form in order to make it accessible to a mass audience, so that hopefully we can all be exposed to these kinds of stories and so that one day we can ALL discover the superhero that lies within us, which has always lived inside us but which (for whatever reason) was not able to emerge and take form like it should have.

_____________________________________________________________________

Like what you're reading so far? If so then I've got good news, as this is only the second entry in a three-part series! In the third and final entry of "We Are All Superheroes," I will be talking about how my personal tragedies and many failures in the past have shaped me, and exactly how and in what capacity I plan on using my "superpowers" to try to do what all superheroes try to do - Save the World. You won't want to miss it! :)

As a bonus, I will leave you with some cool, noteworthy quotes from the movie "Unbreakable" -

"Why is it, do you think, that of all the professions in the world you chose protection? You could have been a tax accountant, you could have owned your own gym, you could have opened a chain of restaurants, you could've done one of ten thousand things, but in the end, you chose to protect people. *You* made that decision and I find that very, very interesting."

"These are mediocre times. People are starting to lose hope. It's hard for many to believe there are extraordinary things inside themselves as well as others. I hope you can keep an open mind."

"It's alright to be afraid, David. Because this part won't be like a comic book. Real life doesn't fit into little boxes that were drawn for it."

"And that little bit of sadness in the mornings you spoke of? I think I know what that is. Perhaps you're not doing what you're *supposed* to be doing..."

"Do you know what the scariest thing is? To not know your place in this world. To not know why you're here. That's... that's just an awful feeling."

We Are All Superheroes (Part 1)

Why do I want to become an entrepreneur?

It's a very simple question which for me isn't so easy to answer in a very concise way. I could probably write a 100-page essay on this topic, but to put it very simply, I want to become an entrepreneur because I have a fundamental need to not just change the world, but to save it, and I believe that founding my own start-up is the best way for me to do so.

In this entry I will be talking about the first part of that sentence - How I came to realize that my sole purpose of existence is to "save the world" i.e. make the world a fundamentally better place, namely by bringing opportunities to those most in need of them.

There was a point in my life, during my junior year of college, where I hit an emotional and psychological low point in my life. At the time I was diagnosed with a mild form of clinical depression. I went on some meds and fortunately it was right around winter break so I was able to take a break from the daily pressures and stressors of school and life and just think about how I might've gotten to this point.

Looking back now, I'm able to say that the reason I had gotten to that point was because I had lost all sense of purpose in my life. I felt like everything I did was without any real purpose, any real end. I felt like I was always just going through the motions, and that everything I did was only because society said that someone like me was supposed to act like that.

Fortunately, that low point was the beginning of a gradual turnaround for me, in which I slowly but surely was able to find meaning in my life, and I was slowly but surely able to figure out what I was put on this Earth to achieve and what I would have to do to get there.

They say that if you want to figure out what you're meant to do in the future, you first have to look back at your past and the natural story that you have weaved for yourself over time. And at the time I needed that really badly. I needed to figure out what I was passionate about and what I was meant to do, because I just had no clue, I had nothing to live for and this lack of purpose was slowly killing me inside.

And so over the next few years I started looking back at my life and analyzing everything I'd been through since I was a small child. I looked at what I had always enjoyed in my life, what I had always hated, things I had thought I would enjoy but ended up hating, and things I thought I would hate but ended up enjoying. I looked at the moments where I had felt the happiest in my life and tried to figure out what had caused it, and I looked back at the lowest points in my life, where I had felt most miserable and worthless and empty inside, and again I tried to figure out what the root cause(s) might have been.

After all this analysis I started to see some common themes emerge from my life, these little recurring patterns which you lose sight of and forget about in the day-to-day mundanity of life, as the days and the weeks and the months pile on and blend into each other and you totally forget who you hoped to be and what you had hoped to become when you were young and still "unadulterated" by the pressures and expectations of adults and of society as a whole.

I realized that the one driving force behind every happy and sad moment in my life, the one determining factor  which came up time and time again no matter how much I may have blocked out from my memory, was this - I am physically and emotionally unable to be truly happy unless I know that I am somehow making many other people happy first. It was that simple. The happiest moments in my life had always been when I knew that I was making others happy, and on the flip side I had always been most miserable when I had felt that I was living life for myself and for my own wealth, my own comfortable lifestyle, and my own future irrespective of anyone else's.

It all made so much sense, and it explained so much about why I had felt a certain way in certain moments of my life.

It explains the time when I was in the third grade and my school was holding a fundraiser for UNICEF. I was so saddened and distraught when I find out what UNICEF was for, that while other kids gathered up spare change and a few dollars of contributions from people they knew, I went a more extreme route and simply took the $60 or so dollars of allowance I had saved up until then to buy a new Super NES videogame for myself, and donated it all to UNICEF, even though my parents were insisting that I didn't have to donate so much, that even $10 or $20 would have been a lot. I absolutely loved videogames back then and I had saved that money for months on end (which for a child is an eternity), and yet something compelled me to stubbornly refuse my parent's urging and instead go all or nothing with my donation.

It explains my extreme (and some would say absurd) love of superhero films and superhero mythology in general. Anyone who knows me will have heard me tell them of how I have watched the film "Batman Begins" more than 100 times start to finish, easily. And that doesn't take into account the times I'll watch certain parts of key scenes of the movie when I don't have time for the whole thing. I've done this for other superhero movies that I really like as well, yet it's something I never do for any other kind of movie. Something about superheroes strikes a chord deep within me that even I might not have been fully cognizant of until recently. I realize now that I feel a sense of kinship with these fictional heroes because of their self-sacrifice, the overwhelming sense of duty and responsibility that they must live with, and their daily struggle with forgoing a normal life for the sake of a greater good.

It explains why when I got a serious girlfriend in college, I felt so happy and yet so sad at the same time. I was happy because I had a met a great girl who was perfect for me in a lot of ways and who accepted me for all my flaws and eccentricities. But at the same time, I always felt an incessant tinge of sadness, not because of anything she had done, but because I realized that the more happy and fulfilled I was with her, the less focused and motivated I was on helping to save the world. The more I ended up enjoying a normal life, the less I would be able to fulfill my "superhero duties." I've always had this weird tendency where I feel that I don't deserve to be happy or comfortable or fulfilled when there are so many people out there who go to sleep at night hungry and impoverished, physically and emotionally abused, hopeless and desperate. That's why I don't sleep on a bed (random fact about me), and that's why I felt so ashamed and guilty of allowing myself to become happy and complacent while doing less and less towards doing what I was meant to be doing.
_____________________________________________________________________

Hope you are enjoying my "Superhero Backstory" so far! Due to the excessive length of this entry, I've broken it up into two parts. Stay tuned for the next installment where I talk about how I came to discover my own various "superpowers," how I plan on using them, and the things one must do in order to unlock the superhero within each of us.

Day 1

Hello everyone.

This is my first entry in this blog which I have titled "A Day in the Mind of a Wannabe Entrepreneur."

I guess I could start out by explaining why I created this blog and what I hope to achieve with it.

This blog will basically serve as a documentary of sorts, chronicling my day-to-day journey and thought process as I go from being a nobody with a dream, to hopefully a somebody who managed to help save the world in a global and scalable way.*

It's a super-exciting time in history that we're living in right now. We as a generation are so extremely blessed to be alive in the same time period as people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page (co-founders of Google), Mark Zuckerberg, etc. who have radically transformed the way the world works and the way we interact with this newly transformed world.

As for myself, through a serendipitous combination of A) Repeatedly seeing these iconic figures working their magic and changing the world and B) Being put on a project at work (since mid-2010) that deals extensively with innovation and trying to come up with creative new solutions to age-old problems, I too have been inspired by this wave of creative energy that we are living in, and I've humbly decided that I would like to give it a go as well, by (sometime soon) starting my own company with a new business idea which will change the world for the better.

However, I don't realistically expect anyone who is an already an entrepreneur to take any interest in this blog. The stuff I will be talking about will be stuff that they already experienced a long time ago and have little need to relive now.

Rather, my intended target audience is all those people out there who (like myself) have always had an entrepreneurial fire burning within them, but who for whatever reason have never really gotten the chance to explore it more fully.

And while I will be writing in great depth about my personal journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur, this blog isn't actually about me at all. Regardless of whether I ultimately end up succeeding or not, I want this blog to serve as a vehicle to inspire others. The people I want reading my blog are those who know nothing about entrepreneurship and innovation but have always had a deep yearning to make a real impact on the world in an unconventional way. I want them to see what I'm going through and realize that it's something that they are fully capable of doing as well. And if you yourself are not that interested in becoming an entrepreneur but you know someone who is (or could be), I would love if you shared this blog with them.

Last but not least, this blog will be talking a lot about entrepreneurship but at the end of the day I want it to be interesting and accessible for anyone who comes across it. I like to think that I am a pretty good writer with a pretty good sense of humor**, and so whether or not you are an aspiring entrepreneur, I hope that you can read my future blog entries and then get on with your day with the feeling that it (i.e. your day) has been livened and improved (even a tiny bit) as a result.

Thanks for reading and I hope you can join me on this scary but exciting journey I'm about to go on :)
_____________________________________________
*If you're an American and you're reading this, I'll assume you've seen the critically acclaimed blockbuster superhero film "The Dark Knight." It's an awesome movie about Batman and his battle to save Gotham City from the nefarious Joker. However, what some people might not know is that "The Dark Knight" is actually the second part of a trilogy, and it was preceded by the relatively less popular (but criminally underrated) movie "Batman Begins," which focuses less on [Batman the Superhero] and more on [Bruce Wayne the Human Being]  and his long and difficult journey to eventually become the Batman that we see in "The Dark Knight."

And that's what this blog is. This blog is my own personal "Batman Begins." Maybe one day I will be like Batman as he is in "The Dark Knight" - A grizzled veteran who's been at it for a while and has seen it all. And I'm sure I will become that, in due time. But right now, I am more like Bruce Wayne from "Batman Begins" - A young man with some personal demons who knows he wants to make Gotham City a better place, but just isn't sure what's the best way to do so and how exactly he will go about doing that.

**Those who know me will know very well of my previous blogging endeavors on Xanga, an ancient blogging service which is basically on life support nowadays and has become Terri Schiavo-esque in its slow, painful descent into non-existence. Until now, I've used my writing skills and irreverent sense of humor to write (what I hope were) funny and entertaining posts about whatever crazy things were going through my sick, twisted mind at the time. But as I graduated college and started working full-time, it's become increasingly difficult to find the time to write write humorous long-form blog posts on a regular basis while still maintaining the high standard of comedic quality I want. Thus, while my Xanga will continue to exist and will still be there for me to write in when needed, this new blog is a way for me to still be my normal irreverent and facetiously funny self while talking about a subject that I am very passionate about and which hopefully can inspire passion in others as well.