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...
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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 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.
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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.