Wednesday, November 11, 2009
7 months and 27 days
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)
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
My new bachelorette pad (+parents, that is)
When your job becomes you

Thursday, September 17, 2009
To deserve or not to deserve
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.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
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 :)


