B00A3OGH1O EBOK (4 page)

Why would
people who make so much money waste time making videos like that? And why would they charge tens or hundreds of dollars for a system that made them millions? It’s not worth the time and money. And if it’s truly for philanthropy, then why would they not share knowledge for free like many websites do? Why take money from the average Joe when they proclaim to be so wealthy? Why are the reviews for the product found only on their own product page, which they have complete control over? Why not sell the product in the mass market where people can leave reviews on the product without worrying about having their written reviews deleted by the seller? None of it makes sense unless you take into account that their motivation is greed and deceit.

Just remember this before you buy into any more “Get Rich Quick” books: If somebody knows a system where they can get rich quickly, then they’ll be using it and not telling you about it.

5
Growing Up with Chess

My parents raised both my older brother and I in Queens, NY. Like my brother, I went through the public school system and studied hard. I did not want to disappoint my parents, because they worked hard to give me this opportunity. It would have been foolish and irresponsible if I wasted it. Although my father worked from 8 AM to 9 PM, he still spent the night either studying his medical books, teaching me important life lessons, or challenging me at chess. My mother always made sure that we got to school on time, signed us up for extracurricular activities, and limited the amount of TV we watched and video games we played.

Since my TV and video game privileges were limited to only around 3-5 hours a week throughout my entire childhood, I sought out other hobbies to occupy my time. When I was in elementary school, one of those hobbies was playing board games with my family members.

Usually after dinner, my father would be sitting in the living room reading his Chinese newspaper or his books. After I had finished my homework for the night, I would usually challenge him at Xiangqi, which is also known as Chinese chess. Xiangqi is a turn-based strategy board game consisting of two armies with the same goal of defending their fortress while attacking their opponents. My father was hesitant to play against me at first, because I played at a very amateurish level. However, as I played it more and more, I started seeing patterns with the style that my father played. I developed plans to work around his defenses and set up my defenses to counter his attacks. Eventually, I started beating him at the very game that he was trying to teach me.

My father was impressed by my progress at Xiagqi, so he went out to buy an advanced strategy guide. The guide had diagrams of different setups for the pieces on the board, and it would tell you the proper strategy to defend your fortress or to attack your opponent. The purpose of the guide was for the user to practice attack and defense strategies until the user memorized them.

The problem was that I did not have great memory, and my father and I did not play enough that we would memorize the strategies. So instead, we did away with the book and just played by adapting to each other’s moves. Eventually, we were playing at around the same level, and I no longer had to bug him in order for him to accept my challenge. Instead, he would be the one coming to my room and asking me to play against him.

While playing with me, he would teach me some of the most important life lessons that I would ever learn. Some of those lessons changed my life forever, and I’m glad he passed that knowledge down to me. Playing chess was actually a setup to one of the most important lifehacks that I would ever learn.

Lifehack #9: Adapt to survive.

I went through three stages when I learned how to play Chinese chess. The first stage was the primitive stage. I did not know what I was doing. I had no strategy or style of playing. I was simply moving pieces on the board instinctually and doing what felt right at the moment. There was little planning involved, because I had not yet learned of all the different checkmate setups. While this method of playing made me unpredictable, it also made me make poorly planned moves. Anyone with a good strategy could have easily defeated me, because of a lot of my moves were wasted.

The second stage was the methodical stage. This was when my father gave me the advanced chess playing strategy guide and taught me all of the common setups that people used to achieve checkmates. While this stage of playing is generally better than the primitive stage of playing, it also made me lose some of my original style of playing. I was no longer unpredictable. My style of playing was very methodical and rigid. Every move I made had a scientific and studied reason for making it. My father knew all of the strategies as well, so he could easily predict which checkmate I was going for. This made it easy for him to defend against the attack strategies that I made. It was a very mechanical process that was determined by one’s education on the system.

The third stage was the fluid stage. While I had the knowledge of the different strategies, my style of playing became unpredictable again. By sensing that my attack strategy was already caught by my father, I was able to change up my moves and throw him off-guard. Pretty soon, I was making moves in order to control the pieces that my father was moving. I was playing for both sides and dictating the actions that were going on.

I call this the fluid stage because I no longer have a rigid system of playing. A fluid can take the form of any object it pleases, and can get around hard stone walls by flowing between the cracks or flowing around it. In this case, the hard stone walls are my father’s defenses. By adapting on the spot, I could attack in an unpredictable way and defend against any new attack strategies that my father was throwing at me.

Adaption is the key to survival. And you can recognize this three-staged pattern in all aspects of life. Take a person’s career for example. If a person starts a job without any experience, he is pretty much just winging it. This is similar to the primitive stage.

If a person is educated, then he will probably become a part of the corporate system. This is the methodical stage. He will have a manager and use his education to complete his job for a fixed salary.  And he may someday become a manager himself, but only if he plays within the rules set by the system. This is how corporations are structured. And society as a whole is tailored to push you towards this rigid methodical stage. In this stage, almost every aspect of your life has already been done before and all you have to do is follow the same path. This is the stage most people tend to get stuck in.

I was never content with being in this methodical stage. Things felt too repetitive and uncreative. I felt like I was a mechanical robot that did things according to what I was told and expected to do. Unfortunately, society raised me to be this way. Society expected me to go to school, get a nine-to-five job, and then get married and have kids. This was the so-called “ideal” life. Luckily, I snapped out of it while I was still young, and turned into a maverick.

I owe much of my success to my adoption of new technology. While other programmers were still stuck with the basic programming languages that they were taught in college, I actively sought out new technology and adapted to the changing times. This was the fluid stage of my career. I became my own boss and created innovative things for the PC, the Internet, and iOS devices.

Many have tried starting their own businesses and failed. According to the U.S. government-run Small Business Administration (SBA), seven out of ten new employer firms survive at least 2 years, half at least 5 years, a third at least 10 years, and a quarter stay in business 15 years or more. This means that most businesses fail after five years.

So why do so many businesses fail? A lot of it has to do with businesses that fail to adapt in time. Companies like Apple and Google thrive, because they are always innovating. While companies like Research in Motion® (RIM), which is responsible for the Blackberry®, is failing because it did not embrace new technologies in the smartphone and tablet market in time. And a company like Samsung® is thriving because it is copying Apple’s style of innovations. Samsung was sued by Apple successfully for over $1 billion for infringing on Apple’s patents
in 2012.

So, there are those who innovate and adapt according to market needs (i.e. Apple), those who copy others to survive (i.e. Samsung), and those who fail to copy and adapt in time (i.e. Research in Motion). RIM is pretty much just hoping that people would want their Blackberry phones again without actually reacting to the current market demands. That would be like a dial-up Internet Service Provider surviving solely on their dial-up services without embracing cable, WIFI, or fiber optic technologies. So in the realm of smartphones and tablets, RIM would be stuck in the primitive stage, Samsung would be stuck in the methodical stage, and Apple would be in the fluid stage
. Though, all this could change depending on the companies’ leadership.

If this
was in the realm of artwork, then those in the primitive stage would be the ones with no artwork experience. They would be drawing based on what they thought the artwork should look like. This would lead to really sloppy artwork, unless the person has a natural talent for it. But once the artist gets educated, his artwork becomes clearer and more professional. And when the artist evolves and starts creating his own style of artwork, he enters the fluid stage. In this stage, he is not stuck in any one particular art style that he was educated in. If his art was music, then he would be composing his own style of music rather than simply copying the ones he hears. And if his style is undesired by the market, then he would adapt to what his audience wants while still adding his own creative flair to it.

And if this was a mixed martial arts fight, then those in the primitive stage would be the ones with no fighting experience. They only throw punches instinctually. Those who are in the methodical stage would be using a particular style of fighting and only use moves based on what they learned in that style. Those who are in the fluid stage, have no one particular style, but are also well-versed in many styles. They adapt according to their opponent’s fighting style.

So find out which parts of your life are stuck in the primitive or methodical stage. If you are content with routines and consistency, then by all means, stick with the methodical stage. And if you don’t wish to bother with learning more, then stay in the primitive stage. But when you want to break out of the constraints of being in a rigid system, then learn to adapt and be formless. Create instead of copy. Only those who choose to break out of the mold are the ones who end up the most successful.

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash.
Be water, my friend.
”

– Bruce Lee

6
Classmates

I wasn't the smartest student in my class. There was always someone smarter than me. I wasn’t the greatest athlete or the most charming person in class either. I learned early on that there were high chances of someone being better than me at something no matter how great I thought I was. And I saw that as a challenge rather than as an excuse to give up. And on the flip side, I knew that there would always be people who were less fortunate than me. Knowing all of that humbled me.

Even though the people in the cliques in my school mostly hung out with people of their own group, I hung out with people of all different cliques. It didn’t matter if a person was hanging out with the cool kids or the nerds; I still hung out with them anyway. And although I came from poor parents, I still hung out with the rich kids in school. And although cliques mostly revolved around ethnicities, I still hung out with students from different ethnicities. There were no boundaries to who I hung out with. I was a nomad amongst the cliques and was never bound to just one group.

I even befriended the people who used to bully me. And there were quite a few kids who tried to bully me. I was always one of the smartest kids in class, so I had a big target on my back for bullies. I've had kids kick me, call me derogatory names, and even stab me. You really had to adapt quickly to survive in the NYC public school system.

But being adaptive doesn't necessarily mean that I had to be two-faced. I still stayed true to myself. Whenever there was an argument between two of my friends, I tried not to take sides. And if I did not have a choice, I’d take arguments from both sides and try to show both sides where the other side was coming from.

Lifehack #10: Don’t be divisive. Be open-minded.

If you only choose one side of a hot debate, then you may end up being biased towards the issues. You block out the arguments that go against your side and only focus on the ones that go for your side. And if you associate yourself with a certain group, then you inherit all of the prejudices that are associated with that group.

Take politics for example. Usually those who are close-minded pick a side and never truly accept the arguments from the other side. They tune into news channels that lean towards (and even reinforce) their political views. They are stuck believing in their beliefs, because they have chosen to ignore the arguments against their beliefs. And the more they consume the political bias, the more biased and extreme they become. They start developing a preconceived notion about the other side of politics. Often they think the other side is dumber than the other, or the other side is more hateful than the other. And by associating yourself with either side, people will already judge you before you even get the chance to explain your side of the politics. That is why being open-minded about the issues is a better choice than firmly believing in your political parties’ views.

Being open-minded in general can be very useful and rewarding. You learn more this way, and are not stuck believing in something that could potentially be wrong. People will always appreciate it more if you’re willing to listen to their side of the argument, instead of being dismissive of what they have to say. And this applies even if the person who wants you to listen is close-minded. And since you don’t know if the person is close-minded or not, it is best not to impose your own views onto others without being receptive of the counter-argument.

It is also very hard to be instinctually open-minded, because your ego causes you to always want to be on the right side of the argument. And if you truly believe that you are right, it is hard for your ego to step aside and accept alternative ideas. But think about why you think you are right. Do you only believe it, because of how you instinctually feel or because someone taught you to believe it? If it is either of those reasons, then you should be open to the idea that you might have believed in something that is not true.

When I was younger, I used to think that I was always right while my classmates were wrong. I was among the smarter kids in school, so usually I was right about that assessment. However, after I went to college, I was surrounded by people who were just as smart as I was. It was hard for me to break my old habit of always believing that I was right. So, I used to be stubborn and close-minded whenever there was an argument.

I finally got the wake-up call after having a long shouting contest with my close college friend over a science problem (something that only nerds do). Later on, I realized that I was the one who was wrong the entire time. I felt really stupid for not really listening to her arguments. I physically listened, but it did not penetrate into my cerebral cortex. Something had to change with the way I approached arguments.

One of the reasons for my early close-mindedness was that I was raised to be a skeptic. I’ve been scammed a few times when I was really young. When you’re young, you tend to be trusting of people and tend to be more gullible. I’ve also been surrounded by people who claimed to be right, but were later proven to be wrong. This led me to be skeptical about anything anyone says to me.

I slowly grew out of my close-mindedness as I found time after time again that my ideas may not have been the best ones. My ego wanted me to believe that I was always in the right, but I quickly learned to ignore my ego after having many humbling experiences with people who were smarter and more educated than I was.

So how do you overcome your close-mindedness?

Don’t identify yourself by your thoughts and beliefs. When Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium, was asked whether he was an atheist or not, he replied with a response that summed up my philosophy pretty well:

“The only ‘ist’ I am is a scientist… I don’t associate with movements. I'm not an ‘ism’. I just – I think for myself. The moment when someone attaches to a philosophy or a movement, then they assign all the baggage and all the rest of the philosophy that goes with it to you. And when you want to have a conversation, they will assert that they already know everything important there is to know about you because of that association. And that’s not the way to have a conversation. I'm sorry. It’s not. I’d rather we explore each other’s ideas in real time rather than assign a label to it and assert, you know, what’s going to happen in advance.”

– Neil deGrasse Tyson

My skepticism led me to become an atheist when I was just a teenager. I was raised as a Christian, because my mother was a firm believer in Christianity. I even attended church every Sunday against my will until around high school. After studying science and taking a hard look into Christianity and other religions, I realized that religion was an unproven belief system. Religion, along with most of the stories associated with religion, made no sense to me. It went against logic and reasoning.

That’s when I started to associate myself with atheism. It was a reaction to feeling scammed and lied to. I went to the opposite extremity to distance myself as far as possible from what I believed at the time were fairy tales told to people to make them feel better about themselves for doing righteous things and shameful for doing unethical things. I saw it as a tool for kings to socially engineer his people into doing the things he wanted them to do without questioning his authority (which he would claim came from God himself). With this belief in mind, I saw it as my rightful duty to stop people from falling for this lie.

I have had many heated debates with my mother and brother about this issue, because they were both firm believers of Christianity. And the debates always ended up diminishing my relationship with them. But, my ego was pushing me to further pursue the issue until they believed what I believed in. I honestly believed that they were being scammed, and that I was their savior. But what were the end results? They are still believers of Christianity, and nothing really progressed.

My mother once asked me, “If religion makes me feel happy, then why would you want to take that happiness away?” After that, I realized what the purpose of religion was to most people. It was no longer just about maintaining control over the masses. Religion was a tool used by people in terrible situations to cope with their lives. After this epiphany, I stopped forcing my beliefs onto them and others.

A study by Frank Sulloway and Michael Shermer had shown that a person’s belief in religion decreased with age until around the age of seventy-five when it shot up again. Because of this strange uptick in religious beliefs after the age of seventy-five, they postulated that a person’s age was not the cause of one’s religious beliefs. Rather, a person’s age strongly correlated with his or her situation, and the situation was what determined a person’s religious beliefs. For example, an elderly woman was more likely to have lost power, status and loved ones at her age. Along with a perceived impeding death, this woman would more likely turn to religion to help her cope.

Thus, forcing one’s beliefs onto others is not the way to go. You may introduce your ideas and hypotheses to them, but it is ultimately up to them to choose what they believe in. That’s a freedom that everyone is entitled to.

If I kept pushing my beliefs onto others, then I would be no better than the religious people who did the same. My mother had been through a rough life. And if religion helped her recover from that life, then I should not stop her from believing in it.

After I learned to ignore my ego, I decided that being an agnostic was more fitting of my philosophy. An agnostic is a person who believes that it is impossible to know of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena. The atheists I know are actively against those who believe in a God or believe in spiritualism. You see them on internet message boards all of the time. If there’s a YouTube video that deals with something even remotely religious, you will see a debate between atheists and religious people. It would be nice to see a healthy debate on the issue so that we could further each other’s knowledge. But, this was not what I was seeing. What I saw were two bickering sides that wouldn’t budge on their beliefs. The net outcome was just anger and hatred on both sides as well as strained relations.

That is why I am taking the stance that I don’t know whether there is a God or not. If clear scientific evidence presents itself for either side, then I am ready to embrace it and further my knowledge. But in the meantime, I will not claim superiority in knowing something that I do not actually have proof of. And if given the choice, I would rather not even talk about religion to people, because I do not want to spend my free time talking about such divisive things. I rather focus on bringing people together rather than dividing them.

Instead of arguing about religion, we should focus on furthering one’s knowledge of the world every day and on helping the people around the world suffer less. And if your religion covers those two basic philosophies, then we’re already on the same page. And if more of us weeded out the details of our religions, we would probably realize that the religions we follow mostly have the same running theme of self-enlightenment, and helping the less fortunate. And then hopefully, we’ll realize that we’re all human beings under the same Sun with roughly the same goals. We just so happen to be slightly different from each other.

But realistically, peaceful coexistence will probably never exist. Different personalities lead to differing opinions. So, what may seem great to you may not seem so great to someone else. This is why it is important to keep an open-mind about everyone’s opinions.

Lifehack #11: Embrace your haters.

Behind every successful person, there lies someone who hates him for being successful or hates what he does.

I had haters even early on in my life. One of those haters ripped my name tag off of an artwork that I spent months drawing. It was so well drawn that it ended up in the front lobby of my high school. Someone at my school didn't like that. And the fact that it was my name that was ripped off made it clear that it was a personal attack.

Haters are just another incarnation of bullies. And I always find that the easiest way to get bullies to stop bullying you is to get to know them and befriend them. I knew that there was a reason for their anger towards me, and usually it's because they were dimwitted, jealous, and/or came from a broken family. A lot of the bullies had parents who were divorced. This left them with an alpha male attitude, because they grew up without loving parents to coddle them. They learned to fend for themselves and probably held much anger towards society for not giving them a better life. Without the proper guidance, this usually led them to express their anger in displays of dominance and strength in order to gain validation from others.

And then there are the bullies who have parents who spoil them. These are usually wimps in a real life fight, but their snobbish and condescending attitude towards others is no different from physical bullying. These are the kids who call people derogatory names and get away with it, because they don’t receive retaliation for it. Usually it’s when they themselves get knocked down a few pegs, do they ever stop their bullying.

Thus, most of the battle is won by getting to know your enemy. By relating to people, you learn to speak to them in a way that makes them want to be your friend rather than your enemy. This is why I had to be a chameleon in order to befriend the people in the different groups.

Sometimes, to stop the haters, you really just have to stop doing what they hate you for. At a young age, I used to brush off criticism for my work, because I was still egotistical and thought that my work were masterpieces. Eventually, I learned to accept constructive criticism and even welcome it. Criticism helped me grow because it showed me more about what the markets wanted. Now when people offer suggestions and criticism for my products, I listen.