so I'm in this weird no man's land I'm like walking around with like a 3.85 GPA 1240 12:30 on my SAT I'm lazy and writing my essay for the school and application so when I applied to UCLA UC San Diego and cowp St Louis Obispo one after the other I was rejected and I got rejected applying to a non-impacted major graphic design I thought that was going to be my back door never did I think ion become a graphic designer this is about failure and I've been thinking about this also last night so you know
um I I was not a great student in high school I feel like my older brother had got all the brains all the pressure to do well and so there wasn't that much pressure on me to do well and I just never found an application and I could tell my parents are super disappointed cuz they knew I was busy reading comics playing video games spending time with my girlfriend in Asian culture especially first generation immigrant college and and and having a solid education was everything and so I thought you know I I wasted this opportunity
and I felt shame ashamed about it and I felt like I really let my parents down now I'm going to go to col Community College and that's where Asian kids go to repent educational Purgatory you know like it's we don't know what to do with you right and so around that time my older brother who's four years older than me he's finished uh going to school at uccl UC San Diego and he's preparing to go to grad school so he's got to study he's said hey come on down you can live with me you know
he his his favorite expression you can get away from the parental units and you could just be your own person and he also knew I had a pretty toxic relationship with my girlfriend but he invited me down and I made promises to him I told him I'm going to focus on school I'm going to work on my portfolio because you know those schools didn't accept me because my portfolio was not good enough they even wrote in a rejection letter shows potential keep working on it but not ready today I knew it was true but I
was still angry about it so I told my brother I'm not going to call my girlfriend I'm going to focus on work and of course I call my girlfriend I'm watching late night TV shows like aren Hall and CNC Music Factory with Paula Abdul I'm just putting in again the minimal effort to completing my design assignments I had committed in my mind it's going to take me 2 years to community to college before I can get my portfolio ready to go to Arts Center and this whole time I think my brother's getting fed up with
me you know here's this guy who's hanging out in his house creating friction for him and his girlfriend and I'm I'm I'm wasting uh time and I'm racking up a phone bill just calling my girlfriend he has to pay for it all so our relationship gets really strained and it was just like a combination of a bunch of things happening simultaneously that kind of led me to one of the Dark Nights of my life I was having issues with my girlfriend longdistance relationship don't work when you're like 18 years old and we get into this
big fight and I'm just super jealous and angry and I'm like okay it's over man I'm I'm crying out my eyes and then I'm talking to my brother and he's like you know this is not working this isn't working man and I was feeling really resentful to him uh because I'm like I'm your brother and your girlfriend's making my life miserable and you're not sticking up for me so I was full on victim mentality right there I was just feeling really alone and I remember this very clearly thinking to myself there's ever a person you
can lean on it's your mom so I called my mom I'm like Mom and I'm I'm like I'm like crying I'm like you know uh I I hate my brother this is terrible I I was like expecting her to like say honey you you'll be okay let's figure out how to get through this together cuz that's who my mom is she's got the soul and the Heart Of An Angel and she said something she never said to me before and she said you know maybe this dream of yours going to art school at Art Center
which is very expensive maybe just come home and go to State School in San Jose just get your degree there and I know she was trying to comfort me but in my heart I just felt like she gave up on me like this was my dream and she's saying that's an expensive School let's not waste the money you can go to this other school and it'll be just fine and I got really angry inside and I I hung up with her and I was just I was a crying mess very emotional person back then and
just thinking life sucks life is not worth moving forward because um my girlfriend and I broke up I hate my brother his girlfriend hates me my mom is just like done with all this nonsense I don't even talk to my dad cuz he's like the kid is going to study what so I was feeling very alone very broken and I remember and you know I guess a lot of teenagers think this but like thoughts of suicide were like entering my head I'm like life is just not worth living anymore I i' I've broken every promise
fully guilty and it's only in reflection that I can say that I was just an idiot but in that moment I was like just it's not worth it n none of this is worth it and so in that moment that night I remember after all the tears had dried up like I cannot cry anymore I said the path forward is pretty dark you have a choice to make so this is the call to action here are you going to continue down this path or you going to choose a different path are you going to continue
to blame other people or are you going to take responsibility and be accountable for what you do are you so determined to achieve this thing that you said in your mind or you just going to settle and all those thoughts were kind of magnifying in my head and and you know I've just described this before but I have outer body experiences quite often actually and so I can see myself floating away as the camera my My Lens my POV was floating above me in the ceiling looking back on me and saying you know what make
a decision and I remember just as clear as it is the next day I woke up I'm like I'm done I'm going to have Terminator vision from here and out and I said I hate the person that I am I want to reinvent myself and become somebody totally different cuz I said to my myself at that time you're a loser you know you're a slacker you're lazy it's all talk from you you've broken every promise be somebody else tomorrow and so in that night The Dark Night of the Soul 24 hours later I'm a whole
different person I'm full of self-pity I'm full of anger and spite I'm using this energy now to try to figure out how do I climb out of Lazarus Pit I need to become a new person I need to be reborn but I'm broken what do I do and so I was sitting there and and it just became really clear to me I wanted to and just it's just like so childish even what I'm about to say okay I just wanted to get into art center which is the school I was supposed to get into I
just wanted to prove everyone wrong and that's not a great healthy place to begin a journey like this but it's mostly just anger I wanted to prove my ex-girlfriend wrong for for um giving up on us as a relationship and that one day she'll regret it by the way she did by the way so I'm just like you know there's a happy ending to the story and then I wanted to prove my my my brother wrong that he didn't make a mistake by believing in me or maybe I wanted to prove his original premise right
and I'm I'm embarrassed and I even said to him once I got through this in the next 3 months cuz that's how long that Journey took I said to him I'm wrong I'm sorry I acted like a brat and I took everything you did for me for granted and I'm really really sorry and he goes no problem bro and that was it and I wanted to prove my mom wrong like Mom you should never give up on me I have this dream and I I know I wasn't U honoring the the trust and the faith
that you put in me that you place on me but I'm going to do it and so then Begins the journey and now it's like you know what it it's it's almost like a movie where you know the the room is messy and the pizza box is half eaten and the TV is on turn off the TV clean up the room and you get things in order you just start to get your act together and I knew that there was a mountain of work that had to be done in my timeline in a year and
10 months and I have basically until the end of that semester cuz my brother was finishing up he already took his exam he's waiting for it so there was a very finite deadline now basically by the end of that summer we're going back home and that's all the time that I have and so I took whatever amount of energy I had I squeezed it in and I went into straight up beast mode and I pretty much completed a portfolio from nothing in I think it was like less than 2 or 3 months I can't remember
now and I got it together and I felt so accomplished like every day that you work towards your goal every step that you move forward you can turn around and say whoo we've covered some grounds it's like Dan Hardy talks about the The Compound Effect he says don't forget the Big Mo it's momentum it's like when you pump a water pump priming the pump it takes a lot of energy to get the water from the well to come up but once the water's flowing it's almost effortless to keep the water flowing and it was flowing
and I could see the reaction from everyone around me from my teacher who also invested time in me and saying I'm going to do everything I can to get you to go to Art Center and she was seeing the output and I was asking for feedback on projects that I just self-initiated and then she introduced me to her boyfriend at that time now her husband give Chris some advice and help and so all these people start to Coes around you this Coalition that want to help you because we all want to help people that are
moving forward I was talking the other day like how do I choose who I want to mentor and very selfishly I try to pick the best students cuz I could only help a few people in real life and I want I'm looking for people who are ready to change who are ready to grow who will do the work and so in that moment in time I think I didn't know it but externally I was sending out a signal I'm ready to grow I'm ready to put in the work stop watching Paula Abdul stop watching oural
Hall and I was just doing the work and and the people at Kinkos would see me or at zebra copies and say here he is again you're a regular now here at at the at the coffee shop working your thing what are you working on and so all those little things are like tiny little positive affirmations that is putting gas in the fuel tank and propelling me forward so that period of time growth happened in a very short window of time relatively speaking and it was like the momentum and you have speed and the wind
is at your back and you're going forward and so that's that's how I did it when I start to post these personal stories and I try to put a lesson in there not just like doing a trauma dump on people because then it gets into what my friend Derek s says it's like pity porn like wo is me how how difficult is my life uh the world's against me I'm okay with sharing just about anything about me my life the difficulties the things I've done well the things I've done poorly uh if it's in service
of helping someone I don't want to tell people stuff because it's just for the sake of Gossip like oh my God I can't believe he thought that or he said that or he did that that would not be helpful so here's our rule of thumb if you're still new in trying to create value and trying to help people or to establish your own art or expertise probably just lay off on the personal story just for a beat give people a reason to care first and then they're going to want to know who the person is
behind the work and some people have been able to do it in very integrated way and to build their audience I think Aaron drin is one of those people and he's done a wonderful job of doing that I say right now if you haven't done enough like for example if you're a 19-year-old kid I can say that cuz I'm almost 50 okay no disrespect but if you're a 19-year-old kid and you're still like like figuring out your way in design just practice your craft get good at something share that openly and and be very honest
and direct about it and eventually people are going to say you do really great work we'd love to interview you and understand your process and understand your story and it's going to be very natural cuz some people who are going to listen to this I don't want you to run away from this and say well I've never created content before here goes the whole story emotional trauma dump and why does anybody care all of us have a call to action in our lives multi mple times uh in in a year in a month even in
a day and it's your refusal of the call your anxiety about the call that's the interesting part I don't want to be the guy who volunteers information it's called oversharing you know TMI and I don't want to share those stories with you unless you're interested so everybody right now just look back into your life and think about a time when you had anxiety over something find out what the call to action was and who helped you to get through it who is the mentor who helped you to get through the threshold and what lesson did
you learn having left the Ordinary World into the new world what did you learn
