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 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.

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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."