Peter Begins

As many of you may already know, this September 21st I will (finally) be quitting my job at Standard Chartered Bank Korea, where I've been working for the last 4 years and 3 months. It marks the end of what has been a very formative time for me, and the beginning of a new chapter in my life story, a story which will no doubt become a New York Times #1 Best Seller one day, since I am "the greatest" and all.

This was my first full-time job since graduating college in 2008, and so naturally it's my first time quitting a full-time gig as well. Some of you may be thinking, "Hey Peter, what does it feel like to quit your job?" and even if you were not wondering that, I am going to tell you anyways because this is my blog and I do what I want.

To answer your question, it's an interesting feeling, this whole quitting thing. I've been reflecting a lot on my time here and everything that's happened while I've been living in Korea and working at this company for the past 4+ years.

Actually, the first two years of my time in Korea and at Standard Chartered Bank were pretty unremarkable. Not only was it a constant, stress-filled struggle for me as I tried to learn Korean as quickly as humanly possible while also adjusting to Korean culture and Korean work culture, but I was also pretty damn jaded after two years because I just had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and none of the work I had done up to that point was very interesting, nor was it something I could see myself doing for any long period of time.

Like Bruce Wayne in this opening scene from "Batman Begins" (2005), I had come to Korea to experience life in a new land and learn more about myself while gaining some quality work experience, but after two years' time, I had become truly lost.

However, the next 2+ years were a significant improvement. By that time I had become reasonably adjusted to the language and culture, and I had started work on a new project dealing with innovation in online and mobile banking. Even though I'd never done anything technology-related like that before in my life, I soon fell in love with it (technology, web development, everything) and it's the reason why I'm now leaving the bank.

But perhaps most importantly, it was at that pivotal 2-year mark that I was able to find and work for a boss whom I could really respect, someone who I actually wanted to work for and who was willing to mentor me and teach me many valuable skills that I'd been sorely lacking up until that point.

Here is an excerpt from one of my business school essays, which describes how I initially ended up working with my boss and the kind of esteem I held her in:

However, none of this would have been possible had I not met my current boss, who I've been working under since September 2010. They called her “Dr. An” and her reputation preceded her – She graduated from the top undergraduate engineering program in Korea, got her engineering Ph.D. in the USA, was a standout consultant at McKinsey, and had already established herself as a superstar within a few short months at Standard Chartered Bank. She was strong, confident, and ruthlessly efficient, but also meticulous about providing honest, accurate, and constructive feedback to each and every one of her direct reports to help them learn and grow. I learned in August 2010 that she was leading a new project that overlapped a great deal with my own and, believing that she could be the transformational mentor I’d been looking for, I did whatever it took to “join forces” with her and a few weeks later I was working for her full-time on the “Multi-Channel Task Force.”

For anyone who's seen the movie "Batman Begins" (2005), if I am Bruce Wayne then I would consider her my Ra's al Ghul. Not in a bad way, because in the movie Ra's al Ghul and Bruce Wayne ended up becoming mortal enemies later on haha (-_-). Rather, I mean in the sense that, like Ra's al Ghul did for Bruce, so my boss similarly mentored me, continuously challenged me, and helped shape me into the sharp and focused individual that I am today.

Through her, I learned many new skills and techniques that I will no doubt be using for the rest of my life. Drawing from her background as an engineer and consultant, she taught me how to think logically and analytically, how to approach problems and discussions in a structured way, and how to effectively manage a large team despite her youth as a senior manager and despite her relative lack of banking experience (relative to many of her older male peers).

Here is a great scene from the movie that should give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

I learned a great deal from her and will always be grateful that I was able to work with her.

Actually, my boss and I have very different personalities, but I think that may be a big reason why she was such an ideal mentor for me at the time - She is noted for her exceptional analytical skills, super-logical way of thinking, and great attention to detail, which were all areas that I was previously weak in. On the other hand, I have always been and always will be a humanities person through and through, with a knack for thinking outside the box and finding connections in seemingly disparate phenomena, coupled with a deep understanding of human nature and what makes people tick.

As a junior employee, this seeming clash in personalities was actually great for me, because my boss only put me in roles which matched my unique strengths, and so I was able to continue honing those strengths in my day-to-day work while gradually shoring up my weaknesses, as I continuously received often-harsh but always-useful feedback from my boss and then worked relentlessly to implement those lessons in the next go-around.

Similarly, in Batman Begins, Ra's al Ghul's view of justice was very different from that of Bruce Wayne. Ra's al Ghul believed that there are criminals in this world without decency, who must be fought without hesitation and without pity. On the other hand, Bruce Wayne believed that this kind of compassion is not a weakness, but rather is the only thing preventing heroes from becoming villains themselves, which is why later on Batman had a strict code of conduct in which he swore never to use guns and never to intentionally kill an adversary. The latter rule was the one Joker tried to repeatedly get Batman to break in "The Dark Knight" (2009).

That's why, even though I was able to learn so much from my boss, it was this same clash of personalities that made me realize that our mentor-mentee relationship would inevitably have to end, in this case because I would end up leaving the company, not unlike how Bruce Wayne ended up leaving Ra's al Ghul and the League of Shadows so that he could fight injustice in the way he saw fit.

Interestingly enough, my boss seemed to know from the start that I was not meant to continue working in a traditional corporate environment, and she let me know early on, even though I myself did not quite realize it yet. Sometime in late 2010, I was having a conversation with her over coffee about what I might want to do over the next 5 to 10 years. Even though I wasn't exactly sure at the time, I told her that I might want to go into consulting, because I could learn a great deal while I was figuring out what I really wanted to do, while gaining valuable experience across many different industries.

However, she replied by telling me outright that I am not fit to be a consultant, and that working in a "more creative" field would be much more appropriate. At first this caught me off guard, and I remember feeling quite insulted because I thought she was trying to tell me that I wasn't "good enough" to work at a top consulting firm.

But it's very interesting looking back now and realizing that she was totally right, because nowadays I couldn't even imagine myself as a consultant, given how set I've become on becoming an entrepreneur and trying to create something radical and new that could change the world. This is something that's simply not possible within a finance or consulting context.

In a way, I think the nature of almost all mentor-mentee relationships is that they must eventually come to an end. Once the mentee has learned enough from the mentor, then it's time to move on and make your own path. This was the case with Bruce Wayne & Ra's al Ghul, as well as with Mark Zuckerberg & Sean Parker, Warren Buffett & Benjamin Graham, etc.

As detailed in the movie "The Social Network" and in other media, Sean Parker was instrumental in the early expansion of Facebook, but eventually Mark Zuckerberg learned enough and gained enough confidence to take over the reins at Facebook and come into his own as a CEO.

And as demonstrated in this video clip from Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne eventually had to part ways with Ra's al Ghul when he realized that his philosophy regarding justice and crime-fighting was simply too much at odds with that of the League of Shadows.

So starting on September 22nd I will be starting down that new path, one that is sure to be very stressful and full of uncertainty but more rewarding and fulfilling than anything I've ever done before.

I am leaving behind the corporate world and the world of finance and banking, and I am starting from complete scratch to try and become an entrepreneur, i.e. someone who changes the way people live and the way the world works, for the better.

It's funny, I always talk about how I'm Batman, but in fact if I were to measure my own life against Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, I am not even at the halfway point of the first film, Batman Begins. Which means I'm barely 1/6 of the way through my superhero journey.

There's still a long ways to go, but I can't wait to find out what the remaining 5/6 holds in store for me :)

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.