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.

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 :)
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*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.