Yu-kai Chou

Cold-Emailing is frustrating

Have you ever had the frustrating experience where you emailed someone you didn’t know very well, and never got a response? Feels pretty bad right? No one really likes cold-emailing, but in order to strive for more opportunities that wouldn’t regularly show up at your door (customers, mentors, advisors, investors, etc etc), you are often required to contact people you’re not already buddies with.

But what if they don’t respond? Should you email them again? But haven’t they already implicitly rejected you by not responding? Aren’t you annoying them? The entire experience can be very demoralizing.

A story of Yu-kai Chou RECEIVING cold-emails

However, before you give up hope, I want to share a couple quick stories. In 2007, I went to an entrepreneurship event hosted at the UCLA Anderson School called StartupLA. I signed up for the spontaneous 1 minute pitch at the event. After the event, I was catching up with a lot of work so I only made sure I followed up with a handful of key people that I had to meet.

However, I got an email from a struggling entrepreneur that the judges didn’t really like during that time. He said it was great meeting me and wanted to catch food/coffee sometime together. Being in my stressful catchup mode, I felt warm about the email but ultimately ignored it (I didn’t want to appear like an asshole and reject such a polite and sincere offer).

A couple weeks later, I received another email from him, saying that he knows I am busy, but it would be great if we could catch coffee sometime. I actually did kinda mean to respond to that, but it sat in my inbox for almost a week, and it felt a bit awkward responding with “Sorry I didn’t get back to you earlier…” so I also kinda let it go…

LUCKILY, this guy had the persistence of the Uppercut (will talk about soon!) and emailed me again! By this time, there was no excuse for me and I was compelled to respond to him IMMEDIATELY. We then scheduled to get some dim sum together.

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There’s always going to be people smarter than you and people dumber than you

Everyone wants to be successful in life. However, not everyone has what it takes to get there. Life is competitive, and to constantly keep up and excel over your peers is a tough and struggling battle.

Sure, some people believe that they can dominate everyone based on their natural abilities and intelligence, but you would be a fool to deny that there isn’t someone smarter and stronger than you out there (if you happen to be that one person who truthfully qualifies for that, email me and I’ll apologize to you personally). For most of us, gambling that you are the ultimate genius is a risky way of winning any battle.

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Influential people are generally too busy with their emails, meetings, tweets etc

There are always benefits when more influential people know about you and think positively of you. If they like you, they are able to give you shootouts, advice, connections, and all that good stuff. However, it’s often very difficult to get their attention since they’re always bombarded with all sorts of things.

Twitter creates that opportunity for you to contact them instantly. But still, you’ve tweeted out to them before, and either they completely ignored you, or they responded back, made you feel great, and you know they forgot about you right after.

Engage your followers those you follow

Most advice out there tell you to engage your followers. I can’t agree more with that. However, if you want to get non-followers to know who you are (read: not to “follow” you), you’ll need to do more than that.

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It is more blessed to give than to receive

Before I start to write about this topic, I’m going to assume that you are a good natured, helpful, and considerate person who is not trying to suck out the life blood out of everyone around him. If you think my assumption is incorrect, go back to the post where I talk about how Integrity, Sincerity and Optimism are the first three cores of FD Networking (out of six).

In order to level up in the game of life, you need to always be prepared to help others. When you are aiming to become powerful, you are not just yourself, but the group of people you have influence over. When that’s the case, peoples’ business is your business, and you benefit if these business are going well. You should always take others’ welfare to heart and strive to make the group better as a whole.

But sometimes you need help

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Your Core is your driver

It all starts here. Your Core. Without your core, you are easily swayed by others, you become a product of conformity, and you cannot be a leader. Your Core is what stops you from being an NPC (Non-playable character) and allows you to become the Hero.

Have you ever talked to someone and you instantly felt that there was something about the person that made him/her respectable or even intimidating? And that person may not be very physically large, particularly good looking, and he hasn’t said enough things for you to truly conclude that he is highly intelligent. Nevertheless, it seems like he is really smart, knows what he is talking about, and you can really rely on him. That is usually because he has a strong Core. He believes and trusts in himself, and that conviction spreads to others.

My own story on discovering the Core

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Become powerful within your existing friends

There are many people who are not interested in becoming powerful and impactful in the world, but almost everyone wants to be influential and respected among their friends and peers.

However, the majority of the people do not become that, mostly because they are so comfortable with their existing social statuses in their groups that they don’t know how to make it different.

Here are some guidelines to help you become more influential within your circle. Your circle could mean anything from your small group of friends, your class, your department, or your entire organization.

1. Become the best

This is the most straight forward but most difficult way to become influential. It simply means being the best at whatever your group is doing. In fact, most respectable and influential individuals from a group are the ones that have mastered their skillsets the most, whether it be basketball, sales, programming, or just video games.

The way to do this is simply matching talent with hard work and becoming the best. Nothing fancy. Interestingly enough, a lot of people who become extremely successful later on in life still highly respect their childhood friends who were remarkable in a game they played, even if the friends are not very successful themselves.

One key to note is that the activity you excel at must be shared by all the people in your circle. If you are the best at chess in a chess club, you will be respected since everyone is doing it. But if you are best at sales but your circle does marketing and finance, then it doesn’t work as well. Finally, conduct yourself in a manner that minimizes jealously (elaborated in another post)

2. Become useful

If you don’t have the ability to become the best at what you do (by definition the majority of the people), another way is to become useful. This means that you are always there to help everyone out, and always have the right resources handy when it’s needed.

This is much easier to accomplished because you do not need to be the most talented at something. You just need to be the most prepared and most available out of all. If you are the one that brings something when no one else thought it would come in handy, or you remembered a piece of information that suddenly was needed, people will start to trust you. Eventually, as you are there for everyone and people start to rely on you more and more, you start to gain in respect and influence.

One key to note is that you want to make sure you don’t do it in a manner that suggests people can simply take advantage of you. You want to make sure you maintain a strong core and are only helping because you want to help so don’t feel like people can trample over you. Learn how to say no when you have to.

3. Become audacious

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Power Coaching: Life Coaching for highly motivated and ambitious individuals

For 2010, I am starting a series on Power Coaching. That’s basically teaching people how to become powerful in whatever fields they are in and things they care about. It is similar to the common Life Coaching, but more geared towards ambitious individuals who does not just want to live a comfortable and stable life but want to become the best in what they do and become influential and impactful in this world.

This would be an extension to the FD Lifestyle that I created in 2005. (Check here to see my presentation at Google on it)

Is Power Bad?

I first want to make a disclaimer that “Power” has a slightly negative connotation, as people say “power corrupts” and how the rule of nature is the “powerful exploiting the weak.” However, I believe power itself is neutral.

Power just allows one to make something happen, so it could be used to do extreme good, or extreme evil. In the context of this blog, Power simply means being resourceful and influential enough to create an impact in whatever you care about.

Finally, since I like to draw analogies from the gaming world to this world, Power is just a common phrase in being really strong at something (and isn’t that where a lot of passions lie? Many people couldn’t do what they want in the real world so they decide to be a hero in a virtual world).

Again, I am not teaching you how to gain “freedom” or create passive income that allows you to chill at the beach all day. Sure, these would be very useful in becoming powerful, but that’s not the end goal. The goal is not to let you live a “free” life but to let you live a “fulfilling” life. It’s the life of “With great power, comes great responsibilities.”

If you were playing a game and you had absolute “freedom” in running around, going to town, the fields, eat and buy stuff, but you don’t have a mission, would that be fulfilling? Probably not.

This blog will be about how to beat the game.

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Today is the first day of a new decade.

Yes, some argue that 2011 should be the beginning of the new decade, but I don’t care. At least my bank uses the format 1990-1999 and 2000-2009 to determine one period. Perhaps if I failed on my goals this year, next year I will say “NOW is the beginning of the new decade. ROAR!!”

But lets hope not.

THIS is going to be the year. This is going to be the year where I straighten out everything in my life, where I finally launch the long-boiled fleet of Carriers, D-Web enabled Corsairs, handful of Arbiters, and of course a couple observers.

I’m not going to make a “New Years Resolution.” I don’t think they really get met much. It’s more like a joke that appends “expected to fail and renewed the year after” (and I do have high respect for those who actually meet their NYR for an entire year). Instead, I will create principles of how I should live my life in 2010, a “plan” or “strategy” on how to become a stronger character on my server, conquer harder quests, and beat the game of life.

Here are the things that I think are essential in 2010 for me to convert all the things that I have built up to into actual success:

2010 is the Year of Hustle

I like to think through a lot of things, contemplate how everything comes together, see trends, match personalities and parties, and analyze everything on each step while I am taking actioning. As a result, my execution might be slower than it could be. This is the year where I WILL improve my execution and hustling. After all, in our industry the first to market usually does not produce winners. It’s the ones that execute the best that are the winners.

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