7 months and 27 days

Sorry about going MIA for the past couple of, oh well, months. (I seem to be doing that a lot these days...) So I'm back in Hong Kong at the moment, attending Cosmoprof HK and selling our YouTube marketing network. Being back here made me realize 3 things:

1. I need to brush up on my Mandarin.
2. I need to brush up on my Chinese writing skills, which are, currently, nonexistent.
3. I need to remember once in a while that I'm 22 and I have a whole life ahead of me.

I guess these thoughts all somewhat came from this interesting meeting I had with a Chinese entrepreneur who has been selling machinery and management software since the beginning of time, and throughout the meeting I was constantly being verbally reminded by him that, well, my mandarin sucks, my Chinese writing sucks, and I was a baby in diapers when he started being a CEO. I was also told that China is taking over the world and the Chinese (the real ones who can do #1 and #2 perfectly) will soon eat up everyone else's jobs. How depressing! Truth hurts, I guess.

Anyways, I received an update from the Wesleyan library today and just realized that I submitted my honors thesis exactly 7 months and 27 days ago. Something so huge back then seems so distant right now. I don't even remember how I convinced my advisor to let me continue on with my thesis with the tiny bit of econometrics knowledge that I gained (probably solely) from Wikipedia, or how I was once so passionate about my thesis topic (which probably haven't benefitted the human race a single bit). I have almost forgotten about going home at night dreaming about the numbers that just wouldn't add up, and being depressed about our research progress with my lovely housemate Beth.

So I took 15 mins and read through my 80 pages of random rambling, found 5 typos, and was at a completely loss about one of the paragraphs in the Methodology chapter. Then I also realized this piece of amateur work will be up there on the omnipresent Internet forever, and I must admit that it is embarrassing as hell. It was a little less than 8 months ago, and I have already forgotten how it felt to stay up all night crunching numbers on STATA or trying to understand what the heck Weber was talking about in his books. I wonder if I will feel the same way about my life right now 8 months from now. In fact, I wonder how I will be feeling about life at all 8 months from now, because it just feels so, so far away.

If you want to play catch-the-typos, here is my pseudo-intellectual piece about religion, social attitudes, and economic behaviors. (Do they relate? Well, not really. Now that we know, because it's so, so, so important to the human race)

My new bachelorette pad (+parents, that is)

Ok this is a very random and slightly meaningless entry, but ladies and gentlemen, you are seeing the view from my room at our new place! Well, technically, my parents' new place, since I'm fairly sure they didn't add my name on the sales contract. I'm not ecstatic about overlooking the tennis courts and the swimming pools, but I'm happy I'm getting an awesome open harbor view, and I cannot wait to see it in person (and stuff the room with IKEA things because I am the most pathetic IKEA addict ever)!

Also presenting the crawlspace that AG will be sleeping in when/if he visits, aka the smallest guestroom/storeroom/solitary cell in the entire universe:

On a good day you might even be able to put 2 people in there. And yes, this is how expensive space has become.

When your job becomes you

I had an interesting phone call with a real (like real life real, not reality TV real) housewife in Orange County, and after the first couple of minutes of meaningless discussions about the weather, health care, and the news, she smoothly moved into introducing me to one of the most massive multilevel marketing campaign of the century. I really shouldn't mention the name of the product here because of the omnipotent power of Google, so I'm going to leave it as "a interesting dietary supplement that probably doesn't work the way it says it does, and how do I know that? Because it is saying it's THAT close to curing cancer". She went on and on about the wonders of this product, with a voice so passionate that I was starting to believe what she was saying. Or at the very least, I was starting to believe that she wholeheartedly believed what she was telling me.

Multilevel marketing is a notorious, yet powerful, tool used in the retail world. The idea is hardly harmless - it is essentially a top-down tree diagram with one distributer leading to more distributers and yet more distributers as you move down the diagram. Everything the bottom layers makes is shared with distributers on top of them, so everyone gets a piece of the cake every time a sale is made. The most classic example is Amway, which was a familiar name in my household when I grew up as my mom used to buy Amway detergents and occasionally vitamins from a friend almost as a courtesy. The only impression I had with Amway and multilevel marketing was how chatty my mom's friend was - she had this amazing ability to relate every single discussion and every single household issue to one or more Amway products, which were often conveniently stored in her garage ready to be sold. I guess that's why I never bought myself to think of multilevel marketing as a scam per se - to me, it has always been a relationship wrecker that destroys the mutual trust and genuine sharing that are supposed to exist between two friends. Instead, some really, really great dish detergents (my mom kept buying them from her friend partly because the detergents were really good, apparently) just tend to get into the way of every single good conversation that you will ever have in your life. As far as I could remember, my mom's friend was forever labelled as the "Amway Lady" in her circle of friends, and after we moved out of the neighborhood, my mom never mentioned this friend in a non-Amway context.

Perhaps being labelled as the "Amway Lady" in the neighborhood is not so different from being labelled as the "Professor" or the "Lawyer" or the "Pot Dealer from Across the Street" in the neighborhood. An occupation is an occupation, but is it true that our jobs sometimes just become us instead of a part of us? As much as I don't like to be defined by what I do (or what I don't do), it is hard to deny that sometimes that's how the world sees us, as professors, lawyers, i-bankers, or like my OC housewife friend, a soccer mom trying to sell some dietary supplement that she might or might not believe in. When our jobs become who we are, inside and out, does it still leave us any room to live life just as it is? Where do we draw the line between us as human beings and us as the occupation we present to the world? Does the line even exist?

To deserve or not to deserve

This came from one of my advisors at Wesleyan when I was in the middle of much contemplation about my future moves during my short visit with AG in Chicago:

Don't worry so much about what you *might* do in a few years. Put all your energy towards getting as much as you can out of whatever you do now, and the future will naturally fall into place. There is no need for a 22 year old (or a 25 year old or possibly a 30 year old...) to know what they want to do forever. I think at 22 years old, you should know what you want to do for a year or so; at 25, for a couple years; at 30 for a longer stretch... Things will fall into place for a reason. That said, some lucky devils do know what they want to do at an early age, pursue it, and discover it really is what they want. They drive the rest of us mortals crazy with envy. Don't worry about them. Take care of yourself and have fun and things will work out. Now it is clear why I am happy teaching finance at a liberal arts college.

A friend of mine who is applying for business schools next year comments on her entire collection of some of the most stellar reference letters you could ever dream to have: "I don't deserve it", and so I started thinking about what it means to be deserving of something. Of anything, really - I didn't feel like I deserved what happened to me when I lost my first job, but then again if you ask me now, I don't like I deserve the support I have received from my family and friends, and the invaluable advice and encouragement I have gotten from different mentors and advisers either.

I suppose we are hardly ever deserving of anything that comes into our lives - all we can do is to embrace the good and the bad, and try to shed the sticky concept of should-haves.

Big Idea, Big Money, and Big BS

My god I haven't updated this blog for such a long time, and I certainly need to apologize for that! So for those who are wondering my whereabouts, I have temporarily settled in San Francisco, living my glamorous start-up life. In fact, I should probably just change the title of this blog to the Start-up Life because this, I promise you, is an interesting experience everyone should live through for a while at least once in their life.

The Bay Area is an interesting place where big money, big ideas, and big BS converge. If you go to any networking mixer, 50% of the people there would be working for some kind of tech company in the Silicon Valley, while 50% of the people would be venture capitalists funding some kind of tech company. Out of that 50% of the tech guys at least 50% of them would tell you they are going to start "their own thing" - and then they will tell you this amazing iPhone app they are going to make, or an amazing website they have in mind, or this amazing business idea you could just respond with a WOW. Then if you keep going to these mixers, and you will keep meeting these people, and then 50% of the time you will meet the same folks over and over again and they will tell you the same stuff over and over again. Out of 50% of these people you will meet again will not actually do anything, and they will keep their comfy jobs at Google or Yahoo or Facebook, and then they will keep talking about their big ambitions of "doing their own thing". 50% of these people would actually quit sitting on their asses, and then WAY LESS than 50% of these people.

So the key is to have big BS that leads to big ideas which will eventually attract big money. But how?

That's what I'm learning every day here in SF. But here is the dark, dark side of the internet - the keyword is monetization. In fact, over the past couple of weeks I have grown from not knowing what it means at all to saying it myself every 10 seconds. The internet world here is not about a free flow of idea and information - it's certainly not about freeing the world from censorship in China or Iran or wherever - it is about making big money out of feeding the world big BS. Here you learn that all the information you gather online is carefully sorted out, filtered, and paid for. You learn that there's no free lunch in this world, and there is certainly no truth on the internet. It's a world wide network of carefully analyzed and designed packaging, targeted marketing, and somewhat ruthless moneymaking. You would be surprised how many people are making a living out of each Facebook quiz that you take, and everytime you look at your Facebook Fluffy Animal application. Every click you make, every quiz you take, every piece of information you gather - it is all hard cold cash for some stranger out there, most probably in the Bay Area.

Well I haven't written in a while and I have already turned into a true internet cynic! Now everything I said before about making money on the internet seems so... naive. What you see from the otherside as a user and what you see from the insider as a provider are 2 completely different things altogether. So I'm still slowly climbing up my learning curve :)