When the Beatles hit the U.S. shores in 1964, they were hailed as the vanguard of the British Invasion. However, did the Beatles simply succeed out of sheer talent? In Gladwell’s book, Outliers, he traces the Beatles’ growth, maturity, and success to a critical time that they spent in Hamburg, Germany. The Beatles began playing already since 1957 but it was not until 1960 when they were brought over to Hamburg to play 8 hours a day, 7 days a week in a strip joint that they were able to get the right experience they needed to be successful. Lennon recalls when they were in Liverpool, they played one-hour gigs once a week or so meaning they played the same songs over and over again, their hits. When forced to play continuously all the time, they were compelled to improvise, learn new material quickly, play all types of music, etc., just to keep their foreign audience engaged. Their raw talent was placed into a boiling crucible where, after 5 trips to Hamburg, they transformed into the Beatles that arrived in the U.S. in 1964. Gladwell speculates that it takes 10,000 hours to arrive at a definable success in many fields. Bill Gates, the subject of yesterday’s blog, arrived at his 10,000 hours through luck of circumstance that put him well ahead of everyone else by a sizable time differential.
I look at how YouTube and the entire Internet medium have become my voice, so to speak, to reach the masses across many shores. We have on this website regularly people from Asia, Europe, South America and from every part of the North American continent. Similarly, I now attract patients every single day from across the United States and the world, all by virtue of a singular message beamed out over the net. Back in December 2006, I had this crazy idea to start loading videos onto a nascent site, YouTube, because I had a message to deliver but had no platform for doing so. I remember that my sister and mother were laughing uproariously about my activity, thinking what a colossal waste of time. Now the attention that I have garnered through my Internet exposure accounts for 60 to 70% of my business.
I don’t know if I have logged my 10,000 hours in, but I am on track to do so and exceed that number. I work tirelessly every day between my busy patient practice, at night, and on weekends thinking about and working on the Internet. I learned Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and work somewhat religiously on my site, as I am doing right now on a Saturday. In a way, this is not work for me; it is my love and passion. I love communicating my vision. I love thinking of new strategies to communicate that vision, and I love my ever expanding audience, which is now 1.5 million viewers on YouTube, almost every country in the world has seen this site (178 out of 195 countries according to my webmaster) with over 1,200 unique visitors to this site every day. I now come up with creative ideas that my webmaster implements for me at a furious pace because the execution of these creative thoughts come to me almost naturally by this point. I had a PR individual ask me last week, “Don’t you worry that someone will steal your ideas if you put them out there?” I frankly said, “No, they can’t keep up with me so I don’t even worry about it. By the time they copy what I have done, I have already thought of something else and far better.”
Although fruitless hard work backed up without talent and passion is not going to move you forward, hard work to the point of almost insanity is a requisite for success according to Gladwell’s thesis. Obviously, I subscribe to that philosophy. Cheers to hard work driven by inestimable passion!
I was greatly looking forward to Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, having read his two other brilliant treatises, Blink and The Tipping Point. I so thoroughly enjoyed Outliers that it has inspired several blog ideas. I would go so far as to say that Outliers is the best book that I have read in the past decade or, at very least, in the pantheon of one of the very best.
The thesis for Outliers is that the classic “rags to riches” story of the self-made man is bunk. He focuses on from whence do these so-called successful outliers truly come. In his estimation, they are a product of their environment among other factors. However much I would like to attribute my own successes to my DNA, I have to humbly admit that I am a product of circumstances, legacy, and luck. That is not humility but the very core of truth. My blogs will feature a story from Mr. Gladwell’s book that I find fascinating and then relate how I see myself within the context of that story. Of course, in deference to Gladwell’s genius (or should I say environmental good fortune), I will only reveal a select handful of stories to encourage you to read the entire book, which is a worthy read.
Let’s begin with a boy genius, Bill Gates…or is that the case? Everyone is familiar with his story, nerdy braniac drops out of Harvard to start a fledgling business called Microsoft that turns into a global multi-billion dollar empire. Did Bill Gates rise from nowhere? Not really. He was a product of a very special time and place that fostered his success in an unequivocally tangible way.
Gates grew up in Seattle to well-to-do parents and was enrolled in an elite, private high school, Lakeside. Lakeside just happened to have a Mother’s Club that raised $3000 dollars to start a computer club in 1968, which didn’t even exist at major universities at that time. Most computer programming used an unfathomably laborious technique known as a computer-card system. Gates’ high school relied instead on an advanced time-sharing system that greatly facilitated his ability to program efficiently and effortlessly. When the money ran out for his computer club, a mother of one of the Lakeside boys just happened to need a programmer at a computer company called C-Cubed, which turned into another opportunity to work at ISI then TRW. He happened to be within walking distance of the University of Washington, which allowed him to work on computers between 3 and 6 am. Now none of all that would be that remarkable today. But that was 1968 when computers really did not exist and computer programming opportunities were nil. Gladwell argues that the software billionaires of today all came of age at a very narrow window in time with a narrow timeframe of 1953-55 birthdates: Bill Gates 1955, Paul Allen 1953, Steve Ballmer 1956, Steve Jobs 1955, Eric Schmidt 1955, Bill Joy 1954 (btw a great story of Bill Joy, the founder of the Internet and UNIX code in the book), etc.
I look back at my circumstances that has catapulted me to write 5 books in 5 years, have published hundreds of scientific papers and book chapters, to write a blog every day without too much difficulty, to respond to thousands of forum posts within minutes, to speak on live TV in front of millions of people without a blink, to lecture without notes, to create a video log almost every day with no prepared or studied notes, and to love every minute of it.
It began I believe in high school when I was an over-achieving Asian kid who did not fit in entirely. I was particularly sensitive about my ethnicity and for me without natural athletic abilities I strived to differentiate myself from being a stereotypical Asian kid good at math and science. I became the editor-in-chief of the yearbook and the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Reflections, etc. To be honest, I was a terrible writer who struggled with putting down a sentence let alone a paragraph. I think I had some animadversion to science in college partly to fight the stereotype of the Asian math whiz. However, I was drawn incredibly to the study of history. My years at Princeton and the need to write a several hundred page thesis before graduating forced me to write, write, and write. It put me in an environment to write and to cultivate my craft. History is perhaps the most recognized major at Princeton due to the quality of the professors and that pulled me to major in a field that was my worse subject and most hated in high school. Also, the small preceptorial system compelled me to begin to be comfortable with spoken argument and presenting my ideas out loud. However, I was still dreadfully afraid of public speaking.
I remember that I have always been enamored by my uncle, Sir David Lam (yes, he has been knighted by the Queen of England), who was the Lieutenant Governor (that would be Governor here Stateside since the Governor of Canada is the Queen of England) and who had the uncanny ability to speak extemporaneously without notes at public gatherings. He was always an idol to me and continues to be now in his mid 80s. I remember being so frightened of public speaking that the idea of it made me physically ill. I gave my speeches always with prepared notes that I had to read because a small blink would make me forget what I was saying or at least that is what I thought. I remember it was not until my fellowship with Ed Williams that I was called by Susan, his administrator, “Sam, Dr. Williams is sick tonight. You will have to give his seminar for him.” I was at the gym at the time, got off the treadmill, and basically panicked. I had no time to prepare and even if I did, it would not be my lecture but someone else’s. I gave the speech that night with tremendous trepidation without notes and resorted to my usual humorous asides when nervous. I had an overwhelming reception and it paved my way to be a much more comfortable public speaker.
Without these life circumstances and a catalog that would take a thousand blogs to fill, I would not be where I am today. I will discuss more in-depth other forces that have clearly shaped me external to any magical DNA that I may possess.
Fashioning myself a design pundit and a supercilious aesthete, I was looking for some new design inspirations on an old theme, the Christmas tree. I remember growing up with a fake Xmas tree that we unfolded every year from the attic and bent down the artificial branches with each passing year a branch snapping off, almost reminiscent of our own senescence. There was always something a bit contrived about a fake tree but, of course, something quite appealing in its flame-retardant safety, environmental recyclability, and not to mention economic frugality. And how do you fit that tree in your non-SUV anyway?
My mother said, “I’m really tired of another boring old Christmas tree. Any ideas?” I am always up for an aesthetic challenge, especially when it can be a fun exercise. We started our quest in this Christmas tree store at the nearby Shops at Willow Bend. It was anything but innovative. Standard old trees with over-embellished, filigreed ornaments that ran counter to my spare design aesthetic of “less is more.” I thought Neiman-Marcus, the epicenter of taste with a Texas twist, could be a source of inspiration. (Any great designer will own up that he or she steals ideas.) I saw a pair of very narrow, tall pine trees with echoing radial, spoke-like ornaments that flanked the escalator upon alighting on the second floor. These trees really captured my imagination, especially considering having it paired with its neighboring twin. However, I didn’t know how to acquire such a tree, or trees, nor how to attain all of these unique ornaments. The task seemed to be of Sysiphan proportions.
Marching onward to the third floor, I saw in the home design section, these naked tree limbs sprayed white and arranged in a vase with equally restrained ornaments. I thought brilliant! At this point, my mother insisted on going to this cool garden store in West Village in Uptown Dallas that she loves called, what else, Gardens to look for other ideas. Upon entering the store, my brain fixated on 3 design displays that had the same naked tree limbs with very spare ornaments. I asked if I could buy the display. Jeremy explained that “No, sorry these items are going to be moved to the front window for our holiday display.” Upon reconsidering what he needed for his display, he sold us the “Christmas tree” and related ornaments. With my design bug in a frenzy, I started to evaluate what vase would be best to fit this Charlie Brown Christmas tree (yes, the unwanted cultural legacy of this tree has been pointed out to me so let’s just get that out of the way.) I started with a small pot and pursued a course that transmogrified my tree into a Rauschenberg-like found-art piece until Jeremy cradled our tree into the pictured concrete vase that returned the design to a Zen-like simplicity. Pictured is the end product of an arduous design odyssey!
I conclude my travels in Asia with a place that has left an indelible mark in my soul, Bali, but not for the reasons you might think. More about that in a moment. I spent a week in Bali to attend the Oriental Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (OSAPS) meeting arriving on a Sunday night. The meeting would start on a Tuesday, and I had pre-booked time to go scuba diving on Monday morning. 7 am on Monday morning I stood outside of my hotel ready to go diving but with no divemaster showing up for an hour, so I gave up. Calling the dive agency, they apologized profusely and asked if I wanted to venture out on another day. I told them no and found another dive outfit for Friday morning.
Bali has always been a quiet Hindu community centered around tourism set amidst a chain of Indonesian islands that are mainly Muslim in outlook. The people in Bali are generous, warm, and indigent by Western standards. They make a hard living by catering to the mass of tourists that flock to the island. I remember for one dinner we had a spectacular live show near the hotel pool and a lavish buffet. The following night for closing ceremonies, we went all the way to this new multi-million dollar center that was built to resemble some ancient Incan-like ruins and ate a sumptuous feast on the lawn while being entertained with a perpetual tribal dance playing out in front of us. Friday morning came and I went to go to dive after about a 6-hour drive to the Eastern coast of Bali to a site famous for a U.S. WWII wrecked ship that had been even more splintered by the nearby active volcano that oozed into every cranny of the timbers. It was an amazing dive.
I was debating at that point whether I would be safe to fly out on my appointed 1:30 pm flight on Saturday given that it would be barely 24 hours to off-gas the nitrogen load. I went to Kuta to dine on some indigenous food that night and then retired to the local bar scene at Paddy’s nearby. I remember talking to a lot of Australians (since Bali is a favorite destination for proximal Australian tourists) and asked this one Austrialian woman why all of these men were in drag. She explained that they were the Australian football team (that’s soccer to us Yanks) that had just won a championship back home and were celebrating their victory.
I decided to fly out on my 1:30 pm flight on Saturday back to Hong Kong which served as my base camp for part of my travels in Asia. I rarely cannot sleep, but on Sunday evening I got up and opened my friend’s laptop to scan through the New York Times online, which is usually part of my daily morning ritual. I was astonished to read the story about the Bali bombings that occurred the night before at 11:03 pm Saturday night that literally decimated everyone at the night clubs, Sari and Paddy’s, where I had been the night prior. A chill went through my spine, and I lay now definitively awake for the remainder of the night. Fortunately, I phoned my parents the night before to inform them that I had safely returned to Hong Kong on Saturday so they didn’t worry when they heard the news themselves.
I heard that most of the individuals who survived were burned beyond recognition, had lost their sight and/or hearing, and were permanently crippled from the experience if they were not fortunate enough to die. I remember reading a story in the local paper of a Hong Kong man who bent over to pick up some coins he dropped at the precise moment the bomb went off and was spared significant corporeal harm because the bar served as a physical barrier to the blast. When he got up he saw everyone with at least 80% body burns and he held a teenage girl in his arms for less than a minute before she expired. That tale has stuck in my head.
I am extremely thankful for surviving but do not want to be so arrogant to think I am more special than anyone else who did not survive. I emailed the Australian girl that I had met at the bar on Friday, and she recounted that she had made it home prior to that night like me but that the entire Australian football team didn’t. I will always be grateful that I am alive and well, not burned, not deaf, and not blind. If anyone is fearful today or negative, remember well how close we are to having it all taken away and that we should live with an open heart of gratitude.
One of my favorite cities in all of Asia is Shanghai. Perhaps my feelings emerge from its magical history as the international, polished jewel of China a century ago. Perhaps my cherished view of Shanghai reflects half of my legacy, as my mother and her family hail from Shanghai. In any case, it has more to do with it being a fascinating, almost over-wrought, urban metropolis that bespeaks the decadence, opulence, and gusto of modern China.
I travelled with my mother in 1993 throughout China including the greatest-hits tour of Beijing, Shanghai, Guilin, and Xian. By the time I had finished my travels I became intensely appreciative of my home country, the United States, and foreswore a return trip to what I deemed a dusty, impoverished, and barren land. However, by 2002 when I returned to lecture in Shanghai I was floored at the transformation I witnessed. It was as if Sturgis, Michigan (sorry to my in-laws there) had become Chicago, Illinois over night.
I flew into the old airport that is reminiscent of one of the tiny airstrips in the Caribbean islands and flew out of one of the best, if not the best, airport in the entire world, Shanghai Pudong International. The old, dust-caked roads in 1993 gave way to superhighways that arced across the sky and linked every conceivable part of the city to another. The buildings that crowded the skyline were modern and distinct like a major U.S. city with a little less decorum, reflective of the nouveau riche status of China. I remember having a 4-dollar, one-hour foot massage followed by a luxurious French dinner in a restaurant called T8, dining on sweetbreads and foie gras. What a contrast!
After dinner I strolled through the cobblestoned streets that were fabricated to match Europe in a vibrant other worldly area called Xin Tiandi (literally new heaven and earth), partook of some Billie Holliday at a jazz club where the chanteuses sang in English, saw a music video being filmed with interracial couples embracing under a boom crane and was mystified at a McDonald’s version of Starbucks called McCafe. Shanghai is a must see if you are in the Far East even more than Beijing. It will stimulate you, shock you, and offer you a glimpse of the collision of cultures and tastes that is modern China.
Btw, if you haven’t read China Inc. by Ted Fishman, you should. It reveals a lot of the current commercial roots of how China is emerging as a world superpower and how it is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
The greatest airports in my opinion are in Asia: Pudong (Shanghai), Incheon (Seoul), and Hong Kong. There is nothing like these wonderful ports of entry into a new city. Incheon is one of the best and rivals Shanghai’s Pudong. I have travelled twice to Seoul, once for an extended several weeks during the 5-month trip to Asia and the second time for a week in 2004 to lecture, operate, and actually recover from a flu given the incredibly arduous hours I spent that week only to feel that my self-pity was unfathomable when I stood in line at LAX immediately behind the brave young girl, Bethany Hamilton, who had just lost her left arm to a shark attack a few months before.
Seoul is a complicated city. It bears vestiges of a colonial Japanese past with an imperial palace rebuilt to stucco over that legacy. It shows the strain of a city rapidly industrializing under the shadow of a totalitarian regime a stone’s throw away (with the discovered secret of multiple carved tunnels that the north covertly created to lead to rapid deployment of military southward at a blink.) For cosmetic surgery in Asia, it represents the height of both academic and clinical accomplishments, that have influenced my thinking and practice. It is also filled with warm and inviting individuals with whom I have bonded for life.
I wanted to tell the story of a good friend of whom I am very proud. Dr. Kim was recommended to me by Dr. Shu in Japan for me to visit and to observe. When I first visited him, he practiced out of a small, grayish clinic, and I remember very fondly that one night he wanted to take me out to an “expensive dinner” so he picked Bennigan’s. I informed him that I would rather dine on local fare, to which he first reacted with a puzzled expression that slowly gave way to understanding of sorts. Upon my return 2 years later, he had moved into a lavish new clinic and surgery center in neighboring Bucheon with a lecture hall and had been training fellows and international visitors. In fact, he even translated my book into Korean and got it published. I was wondering about the impetus behind his meteoric transformation. His wife confided in me that I had really changed his life by having him think big and getting him excited again about his work by publishing him in international journals. She mentioned that he had been suffering from ulcers and that his stomach conditions had since dissipated. I was thrilled that my initial short visit would have such a profound and lasting impact.
I remember that when I returned in ‘04 to lecture and to operate, we drove up to the Hilton hotel where the lecture series was being given. Dr. Kim had plastered on the side of the hotel my clinic’s name. I really had done no work to organize the meeting but that was what he thought of me and he had me sign all of the program certificates as co-president. Another great surgeon, Dr. Jung, invited me to go to lecture next year 2009 in China but I simply cannot make these long trips away from my practice. I loved training with Dr. Jung and had the good fortune to invite him as a special lecturer in Washington D.C. for a course for which I was the director last year dedicated to the Asian face. I really cherish Drs. Kim and Jung for their convivial hospitality, genuine goodheartedness, and brilliant surgical acumen. They are the core of my remembrance of Seoul and to me are the embodiment of Seoul. Tomorrow we get Shanghai’d to Shanghai.
I will admit that I am an unabashed Japanophile, and that fact made my 6 weeks in Japan a celestial experience. Some of my fellow Chinese still harbor resentment at the atrocities leveled during the Pacific War (i.e., WWII) and cannot unshackle themselves from that prejudice. Fortunately, I did not live through that time and so I can more easily extoll how clean, timely, and for a lack of a better word, intriguing, the Japanese people and their culture are.
The surgeons with whom I trained (two actually) engaged in both body and facial cosmetic surgery. On the days that they performed non-facial work, I took the opportunity to tour Japan in the maniacally fast and precisely punctual Shinkansen, or bullet train. I really enjoyed the Kansei region, including Kyoto and Osaka. The ancient temples of Kyoto collided with the industrial urban sprawl in a bizarrely haphazard fashion. Osaka’s treasure is their Kaiyukan aquarium, purportedly the world’s largest: the multiple-storied single fish tank measures 5400 cubic meters of water and holds several whale sharks, sharks, manta-rays and other leviathan. I really loved seeing the award-winning exhibition of jellyfish glowing against a kaleidoscope of neon and the human-sized crabs culled from the Sea of Japan perambulating on elongated stilt-like legs in a moonscaped, eerie chamber.
I traveled to Hiroshima and saw their Ground Zero and shed tears at the massive loss of lives, as I did when I walked through the German concentration camps years before. I visited Nagasaki’s atomic museum as well and in that same city I was fascinated to see the meticulously recreated civilization of Deshima, the only trading port that Japan had with the outside world (in this case with the Dutch), during the 250-year Tokugawa reign in which the practice of sakoku (isolation from the world) flourished and was celebrated in Clavell’s Shogun. These travels provided true focus for my undergraduate studies as a history major at Princeton where I focused on modern European history but also relished a single semester where I studied Tokugawa Japan from the late and great Marius Jansen.
My base camp, so to speak, during my time in Japan was a cheap Gaijin house up on a hill just outside of Tokyo. Although Tokyo was not my favorite city in Asia (that status is reserved for my native Hong Kong), it was a city that shined with diversity, from the raucous nightlife of Roppongi to the ancient Asakusa district. Tokyo is a pastiche of the sacred and the profane; the technological and the traditional; and the mundane and the sublime. Dining recently at a new soba restaurant here in Dallas recalled one of my life’s passions, freshly prepared soba, which I enjoyed in Tokyo.
I also remember traveling back on train up the violaceous mist of a seacoast that echoed a painting by Turner, as I returned from the Izu Hanto peninsula where I rejuvenated my very mortal coil in the famous onsen, or natural hot baths. These remembrances of Tokyo and Japan will stay fixed indelibly in my mind as part of the rich tapestry imprinted in my Proustian vault…Tomorrow we travel to Seoul!
December 2nd, 2008 in
Dallas Lifestyle,
Lam Facial Plastics | tags:
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I spent close to 5 straight months in Asia partly out of recreation and partly for my education in cosmetic surgery of the Asian face. My true travelogue came in the form of a published book (Cosmetic Surgery of the Asian Face, Thieme Medical Publishers) and about 10 published papers from my time over there. The series of blogs this week will be an informal and admittedly non-scientific remembrance of things past.
I wanted to start this week with my favorite Asian city of all, my hometown where I was born, Hong Kong. I have been back to Hong Kong on multiple trips starting in my childhood with my last trip just the past year when I lectured to YPO/WPO (Young President’s Organization/World President’s Organization). When I returned to HK as a child and adolescent I had a tremendous time with all my extended family and relatives. Little by little that number dwindled due to an en masse emigration prior to 1997, the year that the British returned their crown colony to the PRC. Fear of that transaction and any ensuing economic instability compelled many of my relatives to depart their hometown for the Occident.
My childhood remembrances were always centered around Kowloon. For the uninitiated to HK geography, the city is divided principally into the continental half, Kowloon, and Hong Kong island. Kowloon is suburbia but features such glorious landmarks like the Peninsula hotel, where I had my lavish 1-year-old birthday party decked out with a puppy dog birthday cake, as far as I recall from my mom’s recounting and worn photos.
It was my last two trips (including my extended stay in HK for one month during the 5 months of my Asia trip) that I would like to focus on. During those trips, I was able to see the insular HK side in much greater detail and really enjoyed the bustling urban scape that was different from Kowloon. “Central” is the name of the area that is the core of the HK side where the height of opulent commercialism is in full display: Armani, Loro Piana, etc. The nightlife in Lan Kwai Fong, the cobbled and terraced bar district, offers the insomniac their own Xanadu. Of course, the food in HK is nothing short of what I would consider divine ambrosia. It didn’t hurt that my best friend Timmy with whom I grew up stayed in a palatial residence overlooking the harbor and who permitted me to stay with him during my trip. This past year when I was lecturing in HK I stayed at the Mandarin Oriental (the original) and can remember fondly and vividly all of the grandeur of my stay: my daily ritual consisted of working out with the Kinesis system (if you haven’t tried this, you have to find one) overlooking the harbor, then going downstairs to sate myself on an entirely freshly made breakfast (preserves, eggs, coffee, wow!). My nights were spent with my cousins and friends who lavished on us expensive, elaborate repasts that would rival the feasts of kings.
If you can ever make it to my hometown, I would highly recommend it. In fact, Emina, my hair-transplant coordinator, just got back from multiple cities in the Orient and intentionally only saw little of Hong Kong so that she would have an excuse to go back to what she called her favorite city. I understand and concur. Tomorrow we travel to Tokyo!
There is nothing more sobering than thinking about writing your own eulogy or epitaph. What would it say? What is the reason that you were put on this planet? What do you want to be remembered by. Sometimes for clarity, I think if I were on my deathbed what would I want to be remembered by. I know many people think plastic surgery is a triviality. Those individuals that do not share my passion for changing people’s lives by bettering their aesthetic presence do not work for me, are not my patients, and really are not my friends. I have no problem with people who differ from me in their outlook in life but those who stay in my core share my vision and my passion. I would love to be remembered as a surgeon who always maintained his integrity with his patients, did what was right for them, and gave his entire breath to be the best on the planet by advancing the knowledge, science, and care for the facial plastic surgery patient. Of course, a chapter in my life that has not been accomplished is having a wonderful family of my own but I am confident that my dream will be realized one day. That is something that I know will become an essential part of how I would like to be defined and remembered.
I introduced briefly yesterday the concept of “purpose”. Yesterday’s blog however focused more specifically on the ideas of goal setting for one’s future, but the underlying meaning is why should you have goals. As alluded to, the goals are meant both for delayed gratification when they are attained but ultimately for a much longer delayed gratification which is when you pass on the question is have you left a legacy behind you that you would be proud of? Yesterday’s blog mentioned a “20-year goal”. However, the ultimate goal that hopefully should be kept in mind beyond 20 years down the road is how will that goal be evaluated when you pass on from this world. Would it not only have mattered to you but would it have mattered to any other living soul? That will help put your goals into perspective a bit. In a way putting your future goals in the past after you have achieved them is paramount.
My blog two days ago focused on the present time of seeing life as a journey. It really is. Life is meant to be savored, enjoyed, and experienced. When we remember an individual who passes from our presence, we hopefully don’t just remember their accomplishments but the journey they took with us. I remember when I was in college I made it a point that if I had a choice between studying or creating a memory with my friends, I would choose the latter. Because not only would I have some fun but I would remember that event and cherish it many years to come but I wouldn’t remember reading a dry text on Pascal’s Pensées. (Ultimately, yes, I did attend almost all my classes and was very applied in my studiousness too; and yes, I remember Pascal’s works.) Don’t pass up opportunities to create a richer life for yourself because you are overly bogged down by work. A balanced life is worth living.
Three days ago we talked about your past and how to learn from mistakes and how not to be imprisoned by past mistakes. My mother shared with me last night that her mother always lived in the past and that is how she remembers her. After the Communists took over China in 1949, my maternal grandmother lost her status, privilege, wealth, and all the trappings that defined her existence until that point. Upon arriving to Hong Kong and for the remainder of her life, she lived her life in bitter recollection of her glorious past so that her final years were a shadow of a previous existence. That is how my mother remembered her. When others sum up your total time on this planet, will they see you as a creature enslaved by past thoughts or a free bird that lived life gloriously and made an overwhelmingly positive impact to all those around you. Will you be like my maternal grandmother who dwelled on her lost baubles or will you be someone who made the best of the situation and looked forward to a better day?
I met with an individual last week, Jeff Crilley, who shared with me a lovely video that I think says it all. It’s called The Dash. Enjoy! And Happy Thanksgiving to all those who reside in the Unites States and celebrate this blessed holiday. For those who live outside of the U.S., I still wish you a Happy Thanksgiving too because we all should be thankful. To see what I am thankful for, you can read my new forum post on the subject.
We talked yesterday about life being a journey and how to savor our present time. However, if life is a journey, where are we going? Some people who relish the present so much in a hedonistic fashion do not prepare for the future or have no idea where they are going. I think part of being on a journey is knowing what should be our life’s destination. Are we moving along a path toward a goal or just going in circles? Sometimes we try too hard to know our future, which is unknowable but I like the saying, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” If you are lackadaisically living entirely within the confines of the moment, you may not have a future that can sustain your present lifestyle.
Also, meaning in our life is defined by having a sense of purpose. We will talk about this more tomorrow. However, in short, we actually derive pleasure in life to know that what we are doing on a daily basis is meritorious and beneficial for others. I think even the most hedonistic, self-centered person can feel a sense of joy in having a defined purpose in life. It can also help us limit our present fears and vicissitudes in our emotions when we know firmly where we are going in life. What are your 5-year plans? What are your 10-year plans? What are your 20-year plans? Do you have them? I do.
Once you define your goals you should then divide them into your BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) — to steal a term from Jim Collins — and your smaller goals. These goals should fit within your vision of what you want to be. (See last week’s blogs to understand what I mean by vision.) Your BHAG is your dream, perhaps unattainable, perhaps unrealistic but who cares. My BHAG is to be a household name across the U.S. and the world in facial plastic surgery. My steps to get there are to continue video production to disseminate my knowledge as an immediate goal; continue to improve my website as a twin goal; write a major laypress book published by a major publishing house to define a new paradigm and aesthetic; and become a speaker in the lay circles (not just academia) in major venues in the coming 5 years. Those goals are my 5-year goals. MY BHAG is my 10-year goal. My 20-year goal is to attain another BHAG regarding
