Yu-kai Chou’s Startup Blog

This is crazy. Happened in June in Mexico.

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Our company is attending the Virtual World Expo. Just the exhibit hall pass is close to $200 per person. Jun and I planned to spend $400 of company money to get in. Luckily, we found a promo code that got us in for free. There are only a few left, so you should take advantage of it if you want to check out everything that is associated with virtual worlds.

The promo code is : sivan4

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This is such a classic.

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This is hilarious. I’m glad we have heros in our country who want to help out poverty!

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A lot of organizations and companies I have seen hire people to fulfill a certain role, and when the company grows, these people get promoted, and they manage others. However, they might be bad managers and it completely ruins the culture of the company. Therefore, Future Delivery is applying an interesting hiring philosophy:

Only hire those who you feel comfortable working under.

This way we will make sure that, as the company grows, we will still be able to attract and hire people like ourselves, thus preserving the culture. Afterall, a huge amount of whether one likes her job or not, is the people she is working with.

The other philosophy regarding firing is a lot more common in theory but a lot harder to execute:

If the company becomes very successful, and this person leaves the company and wants to come back, would you rehire him? If not, fire him now.

This philosophy is good in the sense that, the only mistake bigger than hiring the wrong person is keeping the wrong person on board for too long. However, team morale is an incredibly important issue, and if you suddenly get rid of people with less-than-justified reasons, morale will be low and productivity will decrease. The only time this works out is if the person was dragging down the team, and everyone would cheer if he is gone. After all, having a person not pull his weight without consequences would only discourage those who do pull their weights. So our concluding philosophy on this issue is:

Fire those who wouldn’t be rehired by anyone else in the company when the company becomes successful.

That is the FD way of human capital.

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We just had our first screen shots from our 3D Models for FD World. Unlike the concept arts on our site, these are the real 3D files we are using. Hopefully plugging it into our 3D Engine will not make us suffer a big loss of quality.

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Two years ago, I thought it would be interesting if I compiled a list of the 100 weirdest/strangest/unique people I know. After some track keeping, I concluded that I knew about 1,500 people. Half of them are peers in the US, like friends and people I met from school. A fourth to a third are peers in other countries like Taiwan, South Africa, and cousins etc. And the last fourth to a fifth are elders.

To pick 100 out of that list isn’t an easy job. After 40 people, it became harder and harder who should be on the list, as people become more “normal.” It was hard too for the criteria on the rankings. At first I realized some people appeared high on the list because they were annoying (and hence their weirdness stands out). Then I decided that the dominant criteria should be “least likely to have existed.” Some people are strangely annoying, but you can find these annoying people elsewhere. The people on this list are irreplaceable by other fellow beings. I realize there is certainly no “normal” person, but there is usually a bell curve, and if your behaviors are few standard deviations aways from the average person, you are on this list.

Being on this list can be a good thing or a bad thing. It depends on what kind of life you want to lead. Many of my best friends and people I respect the most are on this list.
If you think you shouldn’t be on this list, then perhaps I simply know too much about you. If you think you Should have been on this list, then I’m sorry for not knowing you well enough. I’m a pretty straight forward person and I just put out what I observe. If I was on this list too, I would probably rate myself to be number 6.

This is a revised list to what I created 2 years ago. Let me know if I forgot you!

1. Steven Wallace
2. Mike Liu
3. Nicholas Perrett (2004-2005)
4. Thomas Timigravis Chan
5. Tim Rosenbaum
6. Mike Xu
7. Chan Hsu (2004-2005)
8. John Liu
9. Angel Poon
10. Michael Stevens
11. Wayne Silby
12. Felicia Hom (2004-2005)
13. Bryant Raminez
14. Elaine Chung
15. Plamena Pehlivanova
16. Jun Loayza
17. Jessica Cheung
18. Dave Liu
19. Tosen Morohunfola
20. Philip Chiung
21. Kelsey Williams
22. Damon Appleblatt (2004-2005)
23. Vivian She
24. Femi Morohunfola
25. Ryuto Kawai
26. Amy Tran
27. James Potts
28. Tim Chen
29. Gabriel Mizarhi
30. Winston Wang
31. Chen Mei
32. Lorna Apper
33. Mikhail Kats
34. Jacqueline Laird
35. Drew Steranko
36. Andrew Kwok
37. Amy Zheng
38. Jamie Lee (guy)
39. Fangfang Lao
40. Danny Lam
41. Sunjae Kwon
42. Michael Cox
43. Nicholas Chen
44. Shin Kadota
45. Hamilton Harn (2002-2004)
46. Vincent Lai
47. Ryan King
48. Austin Proll
49. Karl Johnson-Picket
50. Emmett Drummond
51. Ryan Geist
52. Thomas Chan
53. Dale Tolley
54. Vincent Chen
55. Mathew Crooks
56. Stacey Jer
57. Alex Adams
58. Fred Kim
59. Victor Shyu
60. Stuysonnie Lam
61. Zhetou Luo
62. Eagle Yeh
63. Justin Copp
64. Dart Scorza
65. Tina Han
66. James Han
67. Yi Chou
68. Chelsea Q
69. Roy Natian
70. Elaine Chung
71. Patrick Frickleton
72. Derek Sun
73. Crystal Durham
74. This Billy kid from South Pasadena High, Class 2008
75. Daniel Agalsoff
76. Charles Tian
77. Frances Au-yang
78.Derek Gillette
79.Jason Kuo
80.Jake Jacobs
81Christina Nock
82.Bo Han
83.David Lu
84.Felicia Chen
85.Amy Lee
86.Eric Min
87.Katherine Siew
88.Caroline Chen
89.Stephen Johnson
90.Pam Liu
91.Boya Fu
92.Curtis Cherrington
93.Christine Louis
94.Richard Guo
95.Michael Wang
96.Kevin Tran
97.Karen Chan
98.Kierstin Yang
99.Michael Moore
100. Jade Salty

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Our CMO Jun Loayza and his great buddies Steven Chen and Chris Lew is starting an awesome video project recording what goes on in our lives within the startup. We have a few weeks of footage but are not 100% sure it this is something that people actually want to watch. Let us know if you would like us to make more and get to know our team better!

FDCareer.com is doing awesome, and we’re excited to show the world how your career path could be a fun RPG game! Stay tuned for more FD.

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I was reading the blog by Alex Nesbitt, a guy that I met in one of the Digital/Tech events, and he pointed out that Dan Olsen made an excellent presentation at the Web 2.0 Conference regarding Web Analytics and Product Management:
I was reading the blog by Alex Nesbitt, a guy that I met in one of the Digital/Tech events, and he pointed out that Dan Olsen made an excellent presentation at the Web 2.0 Conference regarding Web Analytics and Product Management:

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This is the origin of the FD Lifestyle, living real life like a hardcore gamer, and I want to share it with people around to see if anyone wants to join in me in the passionate path of leveling up and completing cool quests that make a difference in this world.

So in 10th grade, I was a hardcore Diablo II player. I would spend a lot of time figuring out how would I build my character, assign the right skill points, assemble a team, and conquer difficult quests. Then it came to a time where my friends started quitting the game and move on, so I quit too. I was in that transition phase between quitting a game and moving on to the next one, and I felt extremely empty.
I spent thousands upon thousands of hours getting more experience, leveling up, getting more money, getting better gear, and now I have nothing. My account will be deleted after 3 months of inactivity, and a big part of my life is just gone.

So I started to think, what kind of game can I play that a lot of people are playing, and people can’t just quit when they are bored? The conclusion I reached was: it’s pretty much the game of life.

So, if I was my own RPG character, I wouldn’t stay in town all day, be idle, and walk back and forth back and forth. NO, I would go out and kill monsters, get more experience, level up, and conquer cool quests of course. So everyone is playing this game, but not everyone knows it and when they are still in town just being idle,(watching TV, partying, not doing much with life) I am already out there getting more experience, assigning important skill points, and leveling up. Then one day they will realize(out of college), they are playing this game too, and they need experience to level up, and by then I would probably be at level 16 or so.

Ultimately, my goal is to be the strongest player in my field on my server.

And you know how a high level player can help lower level people level up faster? That’s what I like to do too, get people that realize they are playing this game to level up to my level or even higher, and so we can help each other out in life(in FD, we call this Vertical Networking).

So I want to be the strongest in my field, and team up with all the strongest in the other fields. together we can complete cool quests to solve problems that the real world face(global labor shortage of talent, inefficient market, global warming).

In FD, we also call people who just want stability and comfort NPCs. NPCs become the environment instead of living passionately. They live everyday to support their existence and buying some cool stuff on the side. But why do you make money? You make money to increase the quality of life. But you spend so many hours in your life working anyway, that IS your quality of life, and it does not make sense for people to pay you a lot of money to suffer your entire life. It makes more sense to get paid a bit less, but to have your whole life do what you’re passionate about play for a living.

So this is what I do. I work over 90 hours a week. I also play over 90 hours a week. People I have FDtized also spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to become a stronger player while accomplishing amazing things for their age. Because I feel like I have a better life than most people without necessarily being better in person, I want to bring the philosophy of combining work and play to people, whether through myself, my company culture, or the services/products that it provides. I want people to have fun when productive by doing what they are passionate about. I want those who are extreme in what they do(like hardcore gamers) to be extreme in what truly matters in this world. So for those who want to play their entire life and possibly become wealthy on the way, I welcome you to join my FD Lifestyle.

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So there’s this well-funded site called Younoodle.com which is a site that rates startups and what not. We got a 3 year valuation of $128M. Not too bad but we could probably do better. I would be pretty excited to test it out every 6 months and see if their estimation changes. This is how Techcrunch describes it:

“The company, which is funded by The Founders Fund, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, uses detailed data about startups and a proprietary algorithm to make a guess on the likelihood of success of a startup. They even go so far as to estimate the value of the company three years out.

The key factors in determining likelihood of success are the team, financial factors, the concept and advisors. Details on the education, entrepreneurial experience and other information founder and key employee. The tool wants to know everything. For the founders, their age, education, previous startups (and how they did), and their long term relationship to the other founders. For the concept, YouNoodle gathers information on the business idea (probably extracting keywords for analysis), where it’s located, and lots of other data.”

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Throughout my career, I have been leading people who are older than me. In some occasions, these people can be more than a decade older. It wasn’t always like that. When I was a younger, I was the kid who everyone makes fun of while I worked my butt off to try to become accepted by people. The process had to start all over again whenever I move, as South Africa, Taiwan, Kansas, and California all had very different cultures. The turning point was when I started a chess club in high school, and during my sophomore year, was elected President. With a new sense of responsibility, I realized that the whole organizations success was dependent on my shoulders. I spent 4 hours a day making sure the young team is growing, and a culture of participation is maintained. And eventually the team became State Champions in my Junior Year (the team maintained the title for at least 4 years afterward and finished strong nationally). From that point on, I have been leading groups of great people, and accomplishing exciting things that make a difference in this world. After all, it’s all about making life more meaningful.

Leadership is, almost by definition, not something everyone has. It is like good writing: most people know how to write, but only few people can do it professionally. Most people know a little bit about leadership, but only a few know how to do it professionally. Some of the most intelligent people in the world are not good leaders, but merely fit to be advisors of the leader. Robert Kiyosaki says that, to be an entrepreneur, leadership is the only skill you MUST have. Being very young like I am, I cannot say that I am anywhere close to being the best leader I could be. However, I have put in a lot of thought into the issue, and have boiled down good leadership into 3 Pillars.

Before I dive into the 3 Pillars, I want to clarify that these are not the first 3 steps in being a leader. I believe the first step in being a leader is to feel comfortable about it. If you can’t even convince yourself that you are worthy to lead the group, how can you convince others? The second step in being a leader is being comfortable with others leading you, even when you are the leader. That means you need to trust peoples’ core competencies, be able to delegate, and believe in your team when you are the only person who supports a plan. In my opinion, a cohesive team with the second best plan will always beat a broken team with the best plan. Alright, now that your eyes are already tired, lets go into the Three Pillars.

1. A Leader must have vision, and an unwavering conviciton towards that vision. A leader must know what direction the team is headed towards, and what is the absolute goal people want to achieve. It is essential to have a strong sense of certainty because as long as you are doing something difficult or complex, team members will become lost in an ocean of tasks, distractions, variables, and uncertainty. This is when they look to the leader to bring them back to the big picture and understand where the group is headed towards. This also means that the leader must be very logical and be able to see the big picture. Members will challenge you with whatever they are uncomfortable about when they feel lost, and if you do not have the logical skills to justify everything the group is doing and connect it to the ultimate goal, you will fall apart too, let along convince the team. Finally, if the leader is not the most adamant and passionate person in the project, no one else will be. If the leader has a conviction of 10 towards the vision, his team members will have 8-9, and people working under them will have 6-7. If the leader has a conviction of 7, then the whole group falls apart. Know where you are going, and be sure of it.

2. A leader must have empathy towards the team and be able to connect with all the members. As a leader, you must emotionally and psychologically connect with all your teammates: what motivates them, why are they doing this, what do they care about, what are they insecurities etc.. You wouldn’t dare market and sell a product if you didn’t understand the demographics and psychographics about your target market, how could you lead a team if you don’t have the same information? When you sell, you understand the customer so you can effectively persuade them do something - buy your products. When you lead, you need to effectively persuade your team members to do thousands of tasks HAPPILY (bitter teammates are bad teammates), so there’s even more reason to know every little detail about them. With that knowledge, you can create the right culture and environment where everyone does things the best with the highest morale. The leader’s job is to make everyone else better. The best leader’s job is to make everyone make everyone else better. The environment is so essential to a productive team. I have seen extremely competent people become unmotivated and perform poorly because of the environment, and I have seen otherwise weak performers become highly competent in the right environment. Some people just need a “good job!” after some hard work, some people are interested in non-monetary incentives, and some people just want to tackle the hardest problem they can find. If you know how everyone feels and thinks, you can have everyone do what they want to do in the way they want, resulting in better productivity. At the end of the day, when your teammates know that you care about how they feel and what they think, they will give you their work, trust and loyalty. The smartest math genius in the world might be able to solve the most complex equations, but still have no clue how to please one person without pissing off another. You as a leader must.

3. A leader must know exactly what needs to be done to get the team towards the end goal and make absolute sure of progress. Now that the leader understands the far vision and knows everything about the team members, the final pillar is to get the team moving towards the goal. The leader needs to be the person who is accountable with execution, driving the group forward. In Good to Great by Jim Collins, Collin states that the best leaders (Level 5 Leaders) are usually not the charismatic ones, but often are very humble and non-exciting people. That’s because the charismatic leader always wants to do new projects and get everyone motivated and excited, but the Level 5 Leader keeps saying the same things over and over until it gets done. At the end of the day, if you don’t have stuff done, it doesn’t matter how great the plan is or who is participating, everything becomes meaningless. A lot of people have a tough time building a bridge between goal and the status quo. Many Y-Gens I know care about their career greatly, but never seem to understand what does it take to get them to their career goals. As undergrads, many people neglect getting good grades, internships, and self-development due to games, parties and the fun distractions you can find everywhere. As professionals, many people do the least they can do with a bad attitude, and become bitter when their “over-achiever” co-workers are getting all the promotions. Bridging reality to goal is not something everyone knows how to do, but that’s something a leader must master in order to become effective. Getting things done and focusing on action items is one of the concepts that don’t have libraries of how-to literature on, primarily because it is so simple and straight forward. Make sure everyone is accountable with their tasks and start executing! It’s that simple.

A lot of leaders out there possess 1 or 2 of the three pillars here, but VERY few of them have all. Some leaders are extremely passionate about the vision, connect well with all the members, but drive progress very slowly. Some leaders understand the direction very well, and are very good at driving progress but sometimes at the expense of pissing off team members. Fortunately, this is the type of leader that still produces results, but may not be the most effective in the long run (as people are not motivated both in work and commitment). Finally, you have the leader who connects with each member well and can drive progress, but has no longterm vision of where the group is going. These are often elected leaders who are simply picking up the past leader’s inertia.

Again, I am no where close to mastering any of these three Pillars of Leadership. However, I understand them enough now that I can continuously look at my own life and focus on improving these skillsets. Collins emphasizes on recognizing the Brutal Facts, and a leader must understand himself well in order to constantly improve himself and the group. Lets include “understanding him/herself” in Pillar 2.

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My girlfriend Amy and I went to the Digital LA event a few days ago, and met a really cool guy who worked at cars.com Albert. I also caught up with a few friends, including Fasttrackfundraising founder Harold Tam, James Han, and a new friend Albert Tong. We also met a pair of entrepreneurs that were building mobile games. We laughed together, as we pointed out we were doing the exact opposite things. FD is helping people focus on their REAL LIFE success when they are on their compuers, while that company is helping people focus on games WHILE walking around in their real life better. It was pretty cool.

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This is probably one of the most terrible trips I’ve had ever. Every single logistical detail went harmoniously wrong, including wasting over 5 hours of accumulated driving time, breaking my iPhone, and having public toilet water splash all over my face. The only saving points were two people that have not disappointed me in my life (semi-rare if I worked with them for awhile): Peter Suberlak and Michael Cox. Other people who have not disappointed me yet are my CMO Jun Loayza, and my super developer Stephen Johnson.

Anyway, for some context: I was planning to go up to Oakland from Los Angeles (7 hours drive) to get an interview with Green For All, an awesome awesome organization focused on environmental sustainability and how it helps produce green-jobs to disadvantaged famillies. I planned to stay up north for 2 weeks, so I can get into the environment and potentially meet people to help out with various things. I planned to go up Thursday. The arrangement was I would live at my friend’s Dave’s apartment (he is in Taiwan), but I had to first go to a place 50min away to find his keys in a secret spot. The apartment would be 10-15 minutes away from my interviewing spot, which would be perfect since it’s scheduled early at 9:30am.

So usually, for trips like these, you would want to leave early in the day. However, I needed to give my keys to my girlfriend to take care of the apartment, as well as take her to class from work, I decided to wait for 2pm, no problem. I had work to do anyway. When I took my girlfriend to the Getty Center (class), we realized we were 45 minute early, so we decided to get some food. We decided to drive one direction and find spontaneous food on the way. However, after driving 15 minutes north we did not find a single restaurant, and realized we didn’t have time to eat and come back. So we drove back without eating, and that was an unhappy 30 minutes of wasted driving. Afterwards, I drove for another 20 min, when my girlfriend Amy called again. That’s when I realized I forgot to give her the keys for my apartment. There you go, another 20 min back, and 20 min up, which adds up to another 60 minutes of wasted time.

The trip up is decent. Just very tiring. For the entire 7 hours, I was listening to business podcasts or talking on the phone. It’s somewhat like a 6 hour lecture with the podcasts. Made one 5-minute stop for Subway, and that’s about it. When I arrived at the secret spot, I was completely exhausted. It was 9 PM and I needed to make my Skype meeting at 10PM. I looked around and could only find a garage opener, but not the keys to Dave’s apartment. It was very dark but I kept on searching through spiderwebs and such, hoping to find that key. Didn’t happen. Now I will surely miss the meeting and need to find a place to stay late at night in a foreign city. I have a lot of friends in Norcal, but not that many who I can just crash at without notice, who also is within 30 minutes away.

This is when Peter Suberlak, somewhat of my mentee who helps a lot in Future Delivery, called to check up. Once he knew where I was, he suprisingly said, “Hey! I live 15 minutes from where you are at! Need me to go help you?” That worked out, I chilled at his place. I also realized that I forgot to bring my dress shoes, and he was very happy to borrow me his. A savior of the day. I was slightly late for my meeting, and could barely speak intelligently. This was when I realized my limits: I can’t really function well as a human being after 7 hours of straight driving while listening to business podcasts. After the meeting, I went straight to bed. Instead of being 15 minutes away from Dave’s apartment now, I was an hour away, so I needed to wake up earlier in the morning.

The next day I got to the interview 5 minutes late, mostly due to unfamiliarity with the parking in Oakland and complicated one-way streets. The interview went great, and I made a good connetion with Green For All. Since I was close, I thought I might as well use the garage opener to get into Dave’s apartment’s building and use his wifi to get in touch with him. That’s when I realized that didn’t work either. After I found a wifi connection somewhere else, I found Dave online and told him that I couldn’t find the key. He was in shock, and after some investigation he realized that someone changed the arrangement. The garage remote I had was for another house close to where I found it, and I was supposed to use that to open the garage door, go into the house, and get the keys. So due to that, I drove another 50 minutes to that place, got the keys, and another 50 minutes back (extra 30 minutes to drop off shoes to Peter). I got into the apartment and everything is happy. I could stay there for 2 weeks comfortably while doing some good work.

That’s when I talked to my Legal Representitive talked to me about my sponsorship in the US. Green For All seemed to like me and would like to sponsor me, but they are checking if that’s feasible for the organization. My LR needed me to go back to LA as soon as possible for some documents, and plus, I only have 2 weeks to relocate to Oakland if everything passes. This was Saturday morning when I realized I should be home (plus it’s good to meet my FD meeting). Dave told me earlier, if I needed to go home early, give the keys to a guy name NK who goes there every night to do work. Unfortunately, he did not show up Friday night (quite understandable)I facebooked him, emailed him, called him 6 times in 8 hours, and there were no response. I also couldn’t get in touch with Dave. After resolving a small issue within the company at 5PM, I realized I needed to leave, or else I would be driving in horrendous status. I decided that, at least I don’t want things to be worse because of my visit, so I would take the keys to where I found it. That’s another hour of driving.

Early in the day, I also called my friend who is taking over my apartment. Amy gave her my keys because she needs to show case it for potential subletters. I called her in the morning, could not get in touch with her, so I left her a message. Pretty much saying that I will be back and I need my keys so I will have a place to live. On my trip back, about 6pm, she called back and informed me she was actually at Las Vegas. Well, I guess I need to find a place to stay when I’m back home too now, or I could sleep on my car.

The best part comes here. While it was around 7PM, I became pretty hungry because I have eaten that day was a footlong Veggie Delite from Subway. The solution? Another Veggie Delite from Subway. I’m trying to become more veggie, since I’m not too picky on what I eat. I was listening to my podcast with earphones connected to the iphone in my pocket when I felt I should urinate before I go back on my trip. While I was unzipping, my arms dragged the earphone cords, and pulled the iphone right out of my pocket, straight into the public toilet. The splash was mild, swift and smooth. But the gasp to my mind was not. There was this 1/4 of a second “should I reach into the toilet and grab it??” before I actually executed it. I tried to dry it up, and it said that it could no longer detect a SIM card. It then finally completely shut off and died. I tried to get the water out of the iphone, but after some shaky, it didn’t do much. Then I decided to blow air into the iphone. That’s when a lot of water suddenly splashed out onto my face. It was quite a lot of water, and it certainly was not very appealing, especially when you know it’s public toilet water.

After my Veggie Delite (it was still delicious I must confess), I was driving on the road, knowing that I would be doing so for another 4 hours without business podcasts, and without communication to the outside world. What’s worse, I told Amy that I will pick her up from a friend’s place at 1AM when I get back, and I didn’t know where the friend was. Now there’s no way for me to coordinate with her when I get there. Things seemed rather tragic.

Finally another bright light in the dark night. I realized I was really close to Arroyo Grande, where my good friend Nancy owns a 600 acre ranch. Another friend who I worked with in the California Student Sustainability Coalition (where I was the Finance Director), Michael Cox, also lives there. I appeared at his place about 10PM, and saw that he was having a party. It was actually a tiny bit awkward for me, because I remember him inviting me to this party, but I said I couldn’t make it. When I showed up, people were like “Oh, Yu-kai! What a pleasant surprise!” “I didn’t know you were coming!” “Yay!” when in fact, “Oh, I’m only here to borrow a phone so I can call my girlfriend.” This was especially weird to me, because some of the people there I have only seen for the first time in my life. We have worked together on the phone, but never physically met, and that’s the best kind of “great finally meeting you!” I could do. Others I have heard about but it’s the first time we had any sort of interaction. I stayed for about 20 minutes to share my trip with Michael and Crystal Durham (ED of the CSSC), used the phone to tell Amy that I will pick her up at an exact location at 1:15AM, and left again.

At this point, I was getting somewhat tired and delirious. It’s not common for a person to drive 7 hours after an intensive work day starting 5PM. I almost got into 12 accidents, including driving off the ramp and what not. I felt like resting, but I wasn’t able to, because I had to catch the 1:15AM pickup time or else Amy would be left in the cold. When I finally go there, it was 1:15 right on the point. I couldn’t find her, so I parked the car, and fell asleep right away. Amy then woke me up, and made me realize that there was a misunderstanding, and she thought we would be meeting at 1:30.

Once picking Amy up, that concluded a very eventful trip. Life is still good, besides needing to replace the phone. Now I just hope my sponsorship issue would turn out to be no problem. Whoever’s reading this, I appreciate you actually getting to this line. Hope you have an awesome week and that you will be successful in every activity you engage in!

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(This was a blog I wrote late 2006. My blog got destroyed but I was able to retrieve this one. It also happens to be by far the most read one. Catchy title?)

Recent years, there have been many protesters on campus looking for diversity; as UCLA is University of Caucasians Lost among Asians, many minority groups are underrepresented. While I do think it’s great to have diversity, I think having the admission program go easy on some groups rather than others is not the real solution to a problem. I believe the problem extends from culture and value backgrounds of different groups. The university admission system is obliged to take students that are most fit to study and compete in an academic environment(which yes I will agree that the way they identify “fitness” is completely flawed, but they try), and in some cases, we probably all notice that schools also take the best fit people to compete against other schools in certain activities.

Now I’m not looking to be politically correct or incorrect, but I will state beforehand that this blog is going to be mostly criticizing some Asian cultures and values. I think if a kid studies all day long since the first grade, gets extra practice problems when finished of homework while others are outside playing, stresses about college and SATs since freshman year of high school, gets “illegal punishment” from berserk parents every time he/she gets a B in class, and takes on all those extracurricular activities like learning new instruments and languages he/she may or may not like, just to get into a good college, he/she probably deserves to get into a decent college, at least compared to the kid who just played games most of the time. I don’t think any group is really smarter than another, but just some groups have the cultural background to study like it’s their destiny so that they don’t embarrass their families, ancestors, and everyone that is affiliated with them. Asians aren’t really good at math; it’s kids who do 20 practice problems everyday after finishing their homework since third grade that are good in math(which regrettably or not, is not me) . Luckily, things like these for minority groups can change, and should change. I believe that providing a better education as well as promoting more studious environments and values among the minority groups from elementary school to high school is the true solution for diversity in college. With good policy making, these are all possible. If you want to speak about diversity(and discrimination) on things that can’t change, I propose that every NBA team be required to have at least 2 White guys and an Asian guy(which still isn’t fair in the absolute sense) on the floor at all times, as there seems to be a clear absence in diversity in substitute of being fit. We might even need to make a rule that the Asian guy should have the ball at least 3 times in a game, because that probably won’t happen without. We also might consider having diversity in physical attractiveness in the entertainment industry, because if you pay close attention to the industry often, you might notice that non-gorgeous looking people seem to be discriminated in getting lead roles in movies and such.

Ultimately, universities look for people that have the best potentials in being successful in society after graduation, so the reputation of the school would expand, as well as receive some alumni donations. It is true that by just looking at GPA, SAT scores, some extracurricular activities and a couple essays, you can’t really tell if one would be successful in society, but that’s how the university works even throughout college and into the work force, and until you figure out a better way that is cost-effective, there is no point in blaming the school.

So why do Asians study like crazy anyway? What’s wrong with them? It’s really ingrained in the Asian culture that studying is everything. Getting into a good college is more like an end itself, rather than a means to an end, which is to get a successful job. As I went back to Taiwan and saw my Grandfather(88), after six years of not seeing his only grandson, one of the first things he asked was, “when are you going to get your masters?” Oh yea, not being here for awhile, I forgot that whether I want to get a masters or not isn’t even a question. My aunt showed similar kindness as she innocently mentions, “when you get your masters in this degree, I’ll be blah blah blah” (blah is Mandarin Chinese, so don’t even try to read it). If I was still in middle school, whether I wanted to be a doctor or not would not have been a question either. These are just all assumed: if you can be a doctor, be a doctor, and if you can get a masters, get one. Now being an entrepreneur doesn’t require an obliterating amount of education, but I remained polite so I won’t piss off the whole family and put my parents in shame. They who started to save money for my education(almost $40,000 a year including living fees) since they were married deserve to have some peace.

So the reason why many Asian groups value education and degrees comes from the ancient traditions in China. During the old days, and I mean so old that I didn’t even know how to ride a bicycle, the only way to become rich and prosperous is to take this mammoth national exam, score well, and become a government official. During the time, most people were only peasant farmers and could not afford an education. The ones who did went for an education, which is pretty much a no-brainer even without the education. Once you score well on the exam and become a government officer, supposedly you will bring prosperity and honor to all your family and ancestors. You basically aren’t worthless anymore in a monarchy society once you have some kind of scholarly title. It has been that for thousands of years, and scholars were always the most looked up upon, as kings and emperors always listen to them(think Confucius).

In the US, things are a bit different. People look up to individuals like Bill Gates, who quit his degree at Harvard, started Microsoft and were able to pay his bills quite well, while having some extras for entertainment. The whole system of what is “great” and “prestigious” has some differences in the cultures. In the US, being prosperous IS prestigious, excluding activities such as drug dealing etc. At this point I shall admit that I have been talking in extremes and absolutes, and that a common idea of prestige and such is still shared among the cultures. I have only been talking on a relative basis, as a PhD is certainly prestigious in the US, just not AS valued as in an Asian society.

In many Western countries, education is the means to an end. You go to school so you can get a better job with your better degree. Many times you can evaluate is it worth the money to get that education(and I have learned in an econometric class, that according to some data, on average you only make around 46 cents more per hour after each year of schooling). But in Asian societies, getting a strong degree is almost like an end, for the strong social status(which is also created in people’s mind) of a high degree is the determination of if one is successful. I can almost say in modest certainty that many Asian parents would be prouder of a child who went to Harvard but for some reason couldn’t find a good job than one who went to a bad college but has an extraordinary job. For many Asian students, getting into an university is where life ends. Then another life independent of their past starts once they get out of college. However, there are some negative consequences to it, besides the high stress and suicide rates of students. Since getting into college is everything, once Asia students get into top universities, they start to slack and have fun all day, instead of really acquiring knowledge as they are there for. The system also makes it that your GPA hardly matters as long as you pass, so that’s all people aim for. Getting into graduate school is simply determined by another test at the end of college years.

Another issue is that since students only aim to get the most prestigious degree, few people really look at what they like and what are their talents in life. It’s a simple life-draining competition that determines a hierarchy in society. I plan to explain further the shortcomings of Asia’s education system, but seeing that this blog/article is long enough and no one will read it anyway, I thought I’ll give it a rest. This is just some thoughts based on the observations I have in society and an attempt to explain the origins of it. If you happen to disagree with anything and have better insights about things, feel free to criticize this and enlighten me. Have a great time!

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