Inspired Writing

Over the last two months I have made great strides in developing my writing. I have felt a great unleashing of creativity that I  never thought I could tap into. I once thought it was beyond me to consistently write everyday or every other day about a certain subject or field. It was always hard for me as a child to express myself through writing than it was through other means such as singing or through actions.

Writing itself is more nuanced than I thought, with a lot of context and sub-context that go into each piece. This can take the form of the manner in which you express yourself through words and how the article or piece can sound. For example, a blog can sound elitist or low-brow without the authors' intent and would completely ruin the blog. This kind of voice can make or break a person's writing and how others perceive them.

I have yet to figure out my style and voice that I want or would like to bring to my blog. Perhaps it will come through naturally as the time progresses and I get more confident in my writing and content produced. Having a clear voice and message, I believe will be the key for the success of this blog taking off and helping others.

Growing up, I have always been surrounded by writers but never did I think that it was something that I though I could do or want to even pick up for that matter. It was the gentle nudging of several people in my life that got me more and more interested in writing. I finally realized how rewarding it was to write and how much I could ultimately benefit from it. 

Self-Discipline

Life is a funny thing, one minute your on top of the world feeling as if there is nothing that can tear you down and the next minute your life can be upside down with no way out. I always thought that life's events were cyclical in nature and that one cannot predict what is going to happen with any certainty. There is always some unforeseen force of nature that can change a bad day into a good day and vise versa. I really believe that the only way to battle through life, and it is a battle, is to be as prepared as possible for the future. The only thing that I feel like I can rely on the most is what I have control over and what I can do about it. 

If I were to give a reason for the success I had with the events in my life, I would say that self-discipline was the key. Knowing that I have to depend on myself to get me through life has been a pervading thought in my mind ever since I was a little kid. The fact that my parents were not able to help me through school and other events that only a millennial kid understood made my learn curve extremely steep. It is both empowering and sad at the same time knowing that the hardships that I went through made me a more responsible person as a result, but it has also made me in my mind more callous.

I talk about self-discipline because I think that it is a skill that anyone can work on and the returns on investing time and energy into it is countless. It is not always easy to turn down having fun on Saturday night in order to go partying and drinking in favor of studying all night. Or having to work extra shifts to pay the bills and save money rather than buying something on impulse that hardly gets used. I still have impulse buying issues that I need to work on.

The idea is to try to take little steps and make choices that promote self-discipline everyday. One day you'll find it easier and easier to make those hard choices. I fully admit that I am not the paragon of discipline. This post is more of a intent on creating a self-fulling prophecy than telling others what to do with their life.

Stay thirsty, my friends...

Flying Away

In the last two years, I have been able to travel to more destinations and cities than previously in my life. It has been an amazing and exhilarating experience to be able to see outside the world that is California. I think that it is certainly beneficial for people that have the means and the opportunity to travel as much as they can when their young. I am a bit behind the eight ball when it comes to traveling, as I could have visited more places when I had huge chunks of free time. Now, all my trips are a lot shorter, due to having a 40 hour job. Getting time off is now only a luxury that once occurred every year with summer vacation. I often look back to my past and wonder how my ability to travel further and further grew with every life event.

When I was a kid, maybe 5-6, all I knew about travel was where my parents would take me. I knew very little of the outside world besides what was shown to me and where I lived. My apartment complex was gated, so most of the time I stuck to exploring the confines of a little barred cube. I eventurally gained access to the outside world via a bike and that only allowed me to travel about a couple of blocks outside. Still, it was more than enough to cure my hunger for curiousty at that age.

Once we moved to a suburban neighboorhood for middle school, my range was extended to a couple of miles in all directions. I was able to explore a significant part of the local city. Armed with a bigger bike and a confince of a 13 year, I was determined to explore the entire city on bike. This goal was only half met as the rigors of high school and computer games drove me inward.

The next great expansion in my world of travel was the gift the horseless carriage, or the automobile. With this great tool, I was able not only to travel outside my local city but it allowed me access to the greater Los Angeles area. It was a miraculous time as I was exploring the nooks and crannies of LA's best hot spots. But alas, it still wasn't enough to cure my wandering spirit. Even though I had a range of about 75 miles, I felt that I had too much of the culture in Los Angeles. I started to long for travel outside my bubble.

With the start of my new job, I felt as if no longer was I limited to the state but now the whole country was at my finger tips. With various business trips and fun excursions I have been to a growing number of U.S cities across the country thus far. There are still plenty of cities left on the map that I need to visit and only time will tell when that happens, but I will be ready and waiting with much enthusiasm.

Watch out world your next!

Media Mogul

A day in the life of a media mogul, I wonder what it would be like. I've always had a craving to be in front of people and grab their attention from when I was little. The thrill of the moment and the undivided attention that I received while speaking was like a boost of serotonin each second I was in front of a crowd. I've never had a problem with putting myself out there for the public to scrutinize my every word or mistake. Well, I shouldn't say never as there has been plenty of humiliating experiences that I have endured in front of people. I figured that the worse that can happen would be public shaming for a short period of time before people forget and move on with their lives. But getting back to the topic at hand, I want to take publicity another step. I want to work towards becoming good at all forms of social media.

This idea came to me as way to secure my financial future and ensure that I had other opportunities for potential career choices down the road. It is too easy to pick a narrow field and be pigeon holed into something that might end up as a dead end career. I want to be able to shift with the times and  recent moves towards a massive online world has made me believe that it will continue in the future for some time. Only by broadening my baseline skills with the ability to sell myself online, can I reach a point where if the unfortunate layoff do occur then I have the experience to move to another job in the same field or something different.

Job hunting has never been easier with social networking and the internet. With the ability to reach global jobs as opposed to working at a traditional brick and mortar shop or office jobs. Even by creating an online presence can one make money, creating unique content that people enjoy and share has made people with popular youtube channels quite rich. That is where I want to be, in the thick of the new world and creating my footprint on the internet.

I hope you'll join me in my journey to become Ashton Kutcher 2.0, or Steven Xu 1.0 which ever sounds better. :)

An Inconvenient Blog

One of the greatest skills that a person could obtain is the ability to fully express themselves, whether this is through music, dance, or even writing. The fact that someone can be viewed completely in the lens of another through the totality of their experiences is amazing. The point of these blogs is to bring my soul to the surface and bear it to the world through my many experiences as a unique individual.

But bringing this to light is still a great challenge that I hope to conquer with each and every blog post that I write and read. The idea is to create something that is completely my own in this world, without any filters and censoring from others. The first step is to vocalize ideas that truly matter to me and how it effects my day to day life. I have to admit that I am still self-censoring a lot of what I say on this blog, not because of what others might think but because of the self doubt of my ability to convey my thoughts well on paper.

This is why I titled my blog, An Inconvenient Blog. As a blogee (trainee), I have much to learn about creating content that will drive people to view my blog with regularity. Learning through all the skills required for a successful blog has become a laboring process that I feel compelled to work through, rather than for enjoyment. There are times when I absolute have to blog to get my crazy thoughts down on paper, but in the absecence of good ideas it is harder to find the inner motivation to continue to write.

I believe that in the past couple of months that I start this blog back up, I have been able to write consistently better and faster as well. Although, spelling is still a nagging issue of mine, bless the makers of spell check. It is amazing that with constant work at something you can see the change in results little by little. For example, I shudder to think and look back at my previous posts that were ridiculously short in length and some all to obvious grammatical mistakes. It serves as a reminder of the progress that I have made.

The key to writing better as my friend said, "Always keep writing regardless of lack of ideas or content and you will get better." I would think even Shakespeare had a couple of duds early on that has never seen the light of day. I am not so fortunate as the world of the internet makes my early mistakes all to visible to anyone with a browser and time can view my writing flaws.
 

The Next Step

What is the next step? In my continual search for meaning in life, a question that I often stumble upon is the title of this blog. For some a rudderless existence makes finding a purpose in life extra difficult as one can be taken in many different directions and they have the chance to regret. I struggle with how I want to change my life for the better and those around me, but what is the next step?

To positively influence the people around me, I believe that I need to have a certain power (possibly wealth) or sphere of influence (large social network). Both are hard to achieve in my current position as I do lack the resources. Here is where my title comes in, I can work on both but at an torrid pace or I can select one or the other to focus on and make better gains. I have a hard time deciding which one will benefit me in the long run, though I am leaning towards a greater social network. Inherent advantage would be direct exposure to highly successful people in the silicon valley area.

All of this takes time and throughout the process, I must always remind myself that I am in it for the long run. Only by small steps each day that I can hope to achieve greater dreams. I think in reality the next step is always to keep in mind of future goals in life and work towards it with due diligence.  I can only say that it is damn hard.

Ambition

There is a fire raging on and it is consuming the Earth one piece at a time. No one knows when it is going to die out and how much it will consume before it it through. That fire is within me, burning through the day and night, chomping at the bits to try and gain fuel and get brighter. I am not really sure how it started, but all I know is that it needs to be fed and controlled. Some would say that I am ambitious and likes to overreach my goals, others say that I need to take it easy and enjoy life and be more content. Which do I prefer?

Well, fire of course! A gypsy once told me that the reason that I was so driven was that in a previous life, I felt I was lazy and wanted to change. She described it as a billiard ball hit another ball and transferring the energy/feelings from one soul to the next. I am not quite sold on this yet, as I believe that my ambition and drive came from some interesting life events a couple of years ago. I won't go into details, suffice to say that it was external motivation first, which gradually became internal and fuel the fire.  

Life is about the choices that we make, I made a choice to block out certain aspects of my life and focus on others. I've always had dreams, but realistically they were always out of reach until I saw that by focusing intently on those dreams, I had made small but effective progress. That confidence allowed me to gain the strength that I needed to further block out stuff that was not important and like a positive feedback loop it created the person today. Knowing that I can conquer most challenges is very empowering and it gives me great hope that I can conquer the future as well.

So for the time being that fire will rage on and consume all the goals and challenges that are in my way.

America the Free?

What I have noticed that this election has been the more vocal than the ones that I have seen in the past couple of elections. It seems that there is so much anger from both sides that it is no longer about finding neutral ground and coming to a solution to this fiscal crisis. I think that getting congress in a room without yelling and outright contempt is a good day.

I can't believe how far this has gone on, all of us are losers and if they can get a resolve done on an issue that is as important as the fiscal cliff then how can we solve the smaller issues? I wish that congress can magically get along with each other and move America forward finally.

I hope for the best and that these people who are in control of the +300 million people of this country can show some compassion with each other. If not, well the decent into the hell is certainly easier for all of us.  

Bend and Snap!

So recently I finished working backstage at a community theater's local production of Legally Blonde. I wanted to do something that was completely different from the normal day to day life. It was a very interesting experience working with people that came from different background then myself. Almost every person there was going to do this for a career and they were a mixed bag of talent at best. What really stood out to me was that energy that flowed throughout the show's production.

During a show I would get a rush of energy from everyone around me. It was an exhilarating to feel so energetic just by being around other people. The energy came from dance numbers, singers, and the music. Once the curtains were raised, even if I was tired before I started, I completely forgot about being tired and was in the moment.

I think that everyday should have a mix of seriousness/calm and fun/energetic experiences. Too much of our lives I think is spent in the former and not the latter. Of course that's coming from an engineer, if your living a balanced life then more power to you.

I might do another musical one of these days just to get that rush of energy, until then I'm bending and snapping my way through life!

Direction of Growth Unleashed

Lately, I've been trying to decide which direction I want to take my blog and how I want to spend my efforts in a broad or narrow ideas. It seems that I have been focusing on myself as opposed to creating posts that are supposed to be enlightening to others. I am hoping that a more broad focus of subjects can help me pin point what I really care about and thus what I really want to write about.

I intended this blog to touch upon several different subjects to try and give my own thoughts and opinions on each topic but it seems that, I might have more success if I split up my blogs to another website than put it all on one blog. It might even be better just to scrap the other topics for now as I just try to get a firm understanding and basic skills for blog writing.

There are a lot of ways to take my blog in this day and age, with plenty of tools online to help the struggling blogger. How do I chose which tools are the best? What is the perfect way to showcase my creativity?

Time to meetup?

Well it is about time I met up with a group of people that I have never met before, kinda like the first day of work. I have been trying to find creative ways to occupy my time in hopes of filling my weekends with meaningful stuff.

There are more than a couple of groups that are in the SF bay area that are more than willing take on a lost soul. I wonder if I should just pick a random group each week or start to target groups that I want to participate in. It really doesn't matter what the activity is because your there to meet people and do new stuff anyways. But there is always a little intimidation factor that works itself into meeting a whole new group and people, kinda like the first day of school at a new school.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, that step is the hardest one to overcome. I believe it takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there for people to judge you. It takes some balls to walk into a new place and feel like you belong, yet I want to have that feel everywhere I go. It is a state of mind that one has to be able to do that all the time, if that is even possible.

People say that the best way to do something is to just dive right in and do, that has its good and bad sides to it. It is more impulsive and has the advantage of somebody more likely to go out and doing it. But, the consequence to that is that I think if you want to keep going it will take more long term commitment to follow through with these meetup activities.

The ideal would be a person that has confidence in themselves and are willing with doing new things with new people while being impulsive enough that they take on the challenge in the first place. Anything that we do in life depends on how we mentally view ourselves.