My Interpretation of a Quarter-life Crisis

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Random Observation/Comment #271: My friend gave me a birthday card that thanked me for being a motivational person. I haven’t stopped smiling since. Maybe through this medium, I can fulfill my desire to return my knowledge to a community. Thanks for reading my rambles, Mom and Dad :) .

This Cow is so Zen

If you’ve ever wondered “Is this it? Now what?” you may be on your way to a quarter life crisis. It comes in different forms for different people, but it’s usually guided by a lack of direction and an abundance of freedom. By freedom, I mean more specifically free will with the limitless number of choices you can make at the present, but the choices you’re not making due to some lame excuse. Let me start from the beginning (as I usually like to answer my questions in a round-about way).

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Farewell Kaipaw

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Random Observation/Comment #270: When you’re in your 20′s you go to clubs and parties. When you’re in your 30’s you go to weddings and baby showers. When in you’re 40’s you go to children play-dates and couples outings. When in your 50’s, you go to your kids’ graduation parties or anniversaries. When I’m in my 60’s, will I be going to funerals more than parties? If so, I hope my friends consider serving alcohol – well, alcohol or ginger ale/cranberry juice, whichever I can drink… We’d definitely still crank the party rock anthem and shuffle.

90 and beautiful

Apologies for this message being late, but I had been reflecting about how to write this post during my trip to Russia and found it rather difficult to put into words. I wanted to say the same thing about Kaipaw as I did about Goo Jerng, but alas, she had not exactly taken a front seat in my upbringing.  Granted, she was probably there to hold me and change my diapers a few times, yet her charm and personality had not left any fond memories or obsessions with foods like my summers in Pennsylvania.

From my oldest memories of Kaipaw, she had the same elegant beauty in her elderly age.  Even at 90, her wrinkles were shallow around the eyes and defined her grin with a look of sincerity and wise humility.  She would either smile politely or sometimes just stare blankly; lost in deep thought. That raspy voice is still so clear in my mind when she asked me if I wanted to drink the sodas in the fridge (for you see, better I drank it than Amanda).  As the sodas became beers, her mannerisms and my greetings remained unchanged.  I’ll always remember her smile as she said “how are you?”  We weren’t even blood-related, but no harm in having another kid, right?

I can tell she lived a life based on stories.  Not only did she love to listen to random ones, but she also wanted to tell her own.  I’m sure if you could find the right topic about Chinese TVB soap operas, she could go on for hours.  I remember her role in the group dinner-table conversations where she would sit there silently eating and paying attention to the mixture of side conversations throughout the table.  I’d always look over to see her poking at her food or looking around to briefly meet peoples’ eyes.  It was endearing to see her put forth the effort to ask the simple questions.  I had a gut feeling that all she wanted to do was to tell a story and have more than one person next to her listen.  Maybe it was her personal story?  Maybe it was just a random observation/comment?  Either way, I don’t know if we ever gave her a chance.

Perhaps attention becomes the most important thing after you have grandchildren.  Maybe recognition is the only thing one needs to feel important and a part of the world time inevitably races onward; whether you care to pay attention or not.  What better way to slow down time than by being surrounded by those who are always listening? Amanda always listened.  Perhaps you were her best friend.  Wouldn’t you want to live forever if it meant forever in their hearts?

~See Lemons Miss Kaipaw

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Toastmasters: Tips to be a better speaker

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Random Observation/Comment #269: Toastmasters is about being an effective communicator and a better leader.  Name a profession that these skills do not come in handy. Never stop learning; Smarter every day.

Fear factor?

Happy New Year and best wishes to continuous health and happiness!

With the new year starting, I have a call to action to all those wanting to become a better speaker:

  1. Practice telling stories. I encourage you to tell the same one over again (to different people, unless you have good friends) and change the organization, voice inflections, and gestures with every iteration. It’s the easiest way to practice and build confidence.  In fact, if you’re able to keep a kid’s attention span, your intonation and enthusiasm must make someone smile.
  2. Take awareness of your filler words (verbal pollution).  Insert pauses/take a breath instead of saying the um’s, ah’s, y’know’s, I mean’s, so’s, like’s, but um’s, erm’s, etc… Start today!  (Warning: you will start to neurotically notice filler words.)
  3. Pay attention to the presentation techniques by watching great presenters. Politicians, new reporters, TED Talkers, and many others draw in the audience for a reason. Notice some of their techniques with smiling, eye contact, gestures, posture, and tones, and use this in your everyday social life.
  4. Speak slowly, breath, and annunciate. The first thing to go during public speaking is your normal calm demeanor (if you ever had one).  Take a deep breath and slow down so people can hear what you have to say. Remember, you’re speaking to convey an idea, so you might as well take the time to say it if you think it’s worth being heard.

Here are some additional tips from Toastmasters. Public speaking, to a certain extent, is a skill that can be learned with practice.  New Year’s resolutions take work, so get started!

~See Lemons Practice Toasting

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Reflecting on 2011

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Exactly

Random Observation/Comment #268: Life is not about finding meaning, it’s about making meaning.  Today should be an improvement from yesterday and this year should be the best year of my life.  “Always forward.” Quote of the year.

Last year, I: visited Puerto Rico, Las Vegas, Munich, Schliersee, St Kanzian, Vienna, Barbados, and Russia; started a zipcar rental to do one-day ski/hiking trips; became President of Toastmasters for Credit Suisse; appointed Committee co-chair for Credit Suisse’s photography club; purchased a D5100 and a 35mm F/1.8 prime lens, thus leading to becoming a go-to event photographer for Credit Suisse’s internal events (covering close to 20 now), regular portfolio photographer for friends (modeling or headshots), assumed family photographer during reunions, holidays, and birthdays, and press/event photographer for Guest Of A Guest; started yelping and foodspotting in March 2011 and became a Yelp Elite 2011 within 2 months; wrote 100+ reviews on Yelp and Foodspotted almost 300 dishes; revamped and migrated this blog; completed 3 months of 30-day challenges allowing me to do 55-60 push-ups in a row, stretch to touch the floor, and 350 crunches in a row; reorganized my new room downstairs; created a physical map of all the places I’ve been around the world; started a system for documenting all the random items I’ve collected from events from my life so I can save them in an organized/archived series of clear sleeves and notebooks; went to a cave expedition; saw a Green Moran in a submarine; played at 3 table tennis tournaments and started to get much better from going to Spin almost 4 times a week (love for the BH Tenergy 64 and FH short pips); finished the first 6 chapters of Hylourd comic book – Ryan is up to page 13 in sketches; Became a godfather with my namesake to live onward (which really didn’t take much effort on my part); participated in zombiecon and santacon; played live action Dungeon and Dragon sessions with my Dragonborn Warlord; learned some pigeon Russian; started more side-project ideas for the company, but none of them seem to have all my attention since I’m trying to finish writing this book for her. Oh, yes, and I’m back with her.

2011 was the year where I caught wind of an early quarter-life crisis.  It wasn’t because I had too much free time at work or the work wasn’t challenging enough – it was about giving back to the world and maintaining steady growth.  I spent much of my time re-evaluating my life and finding interesting side projects that would expand my networks and finally bridge the gap of earning some monetary rewards with my hobbies.  Everything revolved around motivation and inspiration.  I wrote when I felt I had something to say and networked when I found some cool events to attend.  As work became more Business-As-Usual, my life pushed forward in strategic development and design.  I studied for exams I didn’t need to take and took on tasks that didn’t even belong on my to-do list.  I drove forward because … why not?

Due to the inspirational uplift from Dana LaMon’s speech, I have adjusted the tradition of my year-end reviews (2010, 2009, 2008) to group my goals, aspirations, and dreams by my Desires.  The Fantasy ones are still going to be separate because they don’t fit under any desire – it’s just cool:

Desires: Continue reading →

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Don’t Worry, Be Happy

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Candy Cane Cheers

Random Observation/Comment #267: Russian is very difficult to learn. I think I’m just going to nod, smile, and drink vodka when I get there.

I am a fairly happy person. If you think about it, there’s really nothing to be overly sad about. Maybe there are a lot of #firstworldproblems (e.g. waiting too long for a Galaxy Nexus to be released (WTF, Verizon) or my phone running out of battery on the train so I can’t watch more youtube videos), but these general frustrations don’t really warrant a full blown depression. Sure, I may want to cry when the game doesn’t save after beating a difficult level and then the game freezes, but it’s all usually fleeting.

I may not be rich or have a lot of friends or even have a really cool job, but happiness is not about showing off.  Happiness is mostly a state of mind. I was inspired to write this blog after reading “The How of Happiness” by Sonja Lyubomirsky. Okay, you got me. I didn’t really read it, but I skimmed the important parts and just wanted to share a summary of it.  It may, in fact, change the way you look at life.

“Happy people are all alike; every unhappy person is unhappy in his or her own way.”  True story.  Continue reading →

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Simply Inspired – Dana LaMon

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Bread masters

Random Observation/Comment #266: If you think of speeches as a series of personal stories to support an inspirational idea, the organization and the delivery becomes much more fluent.  In fact, the best way to practice being a good public speaker is to talk more within your groups of friends.  Use the Toastmasters techniques of voice inflection, hand gestures, and eye contact to show your excitement about the story. It will help you become a more effective communicator all around.

Dana LaMon: A blind man with a Yale mathematics degree, BAR in California, 5 published books, 4 children, and a 1992 World Champion of Public Speaker – now that’s a nice introduction.  His two speeches, “The Four E’s of Excellence” and “Driving Forward” are absolutely inspirational.  It was definitely the best part of the Toastmaster’s Fall Conference.  Every word he said opened a different part of your mind and heart.  It has made me rethink my own life and actually cleared up something I have been trying to say for the past year with these blogs – it’s about the distinction between desires and goals.

When I wrote my 30 day challenge blogs, I scratched the surface of why these challenges are important to me.  To summarize, I said that these challenges help me complete larger goals (e.g. new year’s resolutions) by setting smaller ones that stretch your comfort zone and help you see tangible results so you’re motivated to continue to the next goal.  What I forgot to distinguish in my hypothesis is what Dana got perfectly right about desires and goals.

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Greetings, Alexander Clemens Hahn

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Cutest baby ever

Random Observation/Comment #265: The whole weekend was Dirac Delta, where the max state of warm fuzzy emotion was at t0 (the time of the birth), and the baseline 0 was a state of constant nervousness and worrying.  Maybe you can superposition a few other Dirac functions with max at t1 (holding the baby) or t2 (looking at those cute little baby feet), but I was mostly filled with this odd anxiety.  I’m sometimes a worrier.

There may have been more moments in the waiting room than smiling and holding this newborn, but at least it gave me time to write something to him.  Don’t worry; I’ll spare the details of his father passing out and getting admitted to the ER.

“Dear God-son,

(You probably won’t be able to read this until 5 years later, and you probably won’t understand the depth of these words until 10 years after that, but when you figure it out, send me a postcard (if they still exist).  When you’re far older inventing your own philosophies around parenthood and writing sociology books (if that’s your cup of tea), don’t hold me to these words because I’ll probably just say that I wrote this when I was young and naïve.)

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30 day challenge – Lessons Learned

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Random Observation/Comment #264: There are so many consumers in this world. I would rather be a producer. Not the literal producer, but actually a literal one.

I thought my first impression of this 30 day challenge thing was profound, but I had only scratched the surface of many little nuances that taught me a lot about life.  My first impression basically claimed that the challenges don’t matter and it’s actually about paying attention to your life and realizing how much gets done on a daily basis that can be considered an achievement.  These activities are essentially short-term test runs for routines. If they deem beneficial to your health or productivity, you can include them in your life.  If you suffered through the whole challenge and found it useless, then it’s probably good to just leave it as “I tried it once.”

After 26 days of consistently paying attention to my everyday tasks, it seems I had been practicing my personal form of project management.  If I see my life as a project, not only have I taken complete ownership of it, but I’ve built my own timelines and dependencies in order to meet my goals.  After planning and staying flexible and carefully re-evaluating, I’ve come up with the following advice for those who’d like to take up these challenges.

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30 day challenge first impressions – Week 1

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Random Observation/Comment #263: Side projects make life worth living. Passion will always drive excellence.

As seen from my previous post (right below this one, actually), I embarked on a journey to productively make a change in my life per month.  Day 0 was September 15th, and after 7 days, I must say that the philosophy behind these challenges is much different than I thought from the beginning.

It may be true that completing these challenges will make you feel more productive and accomplished every month with that pat on the back, or even that the habit created from the challenge can carry through as a useful routine, but I never realized that the true value is the method of keeping track of each activity.

The truth is that these challenges aren’t revolutionary; however, my attention to the detail of doing each task is the real challenge. I don’t feel like I’ve changed my routines. Instead, I’ve taken a more active role in my personal activities. I don’t realize how many people I talk to per day and how many of them have actually been out of touch for some time, but random events happen where I bump into old friends. When I revisit this challenge regarding the friends I’ve caught up with, I’ve found that I catch up with enough people regularly.  Recording who I spoke with and looking back in the past 7 days gives me that slow nod of satisfaction.

In terms of the push-up routine, I needed to make adjustments to the original challenge because 100 per day started to kill my arms and chest after 4 days. I did not plan it enough to separate them throughout the day, so I wound up over-exerting myself too much in the beginning.  I decided to then adjust the challenge to do 60 push-ups in a row by the end of the 30 day challenge. This means that I will need to pace myself to do +1 more push-ups per day. I am at 37 in a row right now, which is still within my normal limits.

And lastly, the blogging and toastmasters speeches challenges very conveniently become filled by the essence of the challenges themselves.  The whole thing is really quite balanced and self-sufficient.

I think this entry was too enlightening for the first week. I will hopefully get more inspiration to write more impressions in the weeks to come.

~See Lemons a Quarter of the Way There

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30 Day Challenge

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Random Observation/Comment #262: Being productive is tremendously rewarding. So rewarding that I’ll assign myself work and do it for free…

executive.

I was inspired by this ted talk about the 30 day challenge and decided to pursue some of these for myself. The main idea is to commit to a goal and plan daily activities to complete the challenge you set for yourself.

 

TED Talk – 30 Day Challenge – Matt Cutts

As Matt Cutts explains, the reason behind this is so that you can hopefully maintain a good habit if you liked it beyond the 30 days and incorporate it into your life. These challenges will test your personal motivation to complete these tasks and probably give you a wider feeling of accomplishment as the months pass.

Here are some 30 day challenges I’ll try to complete before the end of the year:

  • 30,000 words in 30 days – write 30,000 words for my book
  • 30 days of photos – take a picture every day and describe your mood during the picture
  • 3,000 pushups in 30 days – 100 push-ups per day –> pretty good routine, but I’ve never maintained it for all 30
  • Send a message to a different old friend to reconnect everyday for 30 days – this should be easier with fb, right?
  • blog once a week for 30 days
  • learn 5 new words per day (in any language) for 30 days – this should help with my pursuit of increasing my vocabulary in German and Japanese as well
  • Complete 1 toastmaster speech per month – this is actually quite difficult. Maybe I’ll just talk about this blog post….

Here are some of my completed 30 day challenges:

  • 30 days of foodspotting – actually still doing this after 4 months
  • 30 days of yelping – got into yelp elite because of it. Sweet.
  • 30 days of writing in a diary – I’ve been keeping this up for the past 2 years. I use Google calendars and set alarms for myself.
  • 30 days without scrabble games – My phone was always on wordsmith, words with friends, and wordfeud. It was getting out of hand so I had to get off of it. I play occasionally with 3 good friends. It was really taking up too much time having 5 games open on 3 different apps with random people. Plus, I kept winning.
  • 30 days of blogging consistently – I had done this in Japan for 6 months, when I had no life. It was easy – A foreign country with no internet at night. When I got back, I had to pull this back a bit because I started to have a real life.

I’m going to pace myself, so I’ll start with the workout routine and messaging a different old friend every day. I’ll have one blog per week for the update on these challenges and then one blog per month on a topic I will use for my Toastmasters speeches.

Wish me luck!

~See Lemons Challenged

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