Hanging In There

Author: Tommy Leung | 03.05.2010 | Category: Life

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Often times, the difference between success and failure can be five minutes or just 5 seconds. You were right there! You just called it quits too soon.

Sometimes, victory isn’t about beating your opponent. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of outlasting them.

So hang in there. You won’t fail until you decide to. Failure is in your control.

You can give up at any time. There’s no need to rush into it. Hang in there a little longer; the results may surprise you.

Fear is Good

Author: Tommy Leung | 01.17.2010 | Category: Life

Fear is bad. That’s what we believe. Fear isn’t a pleasant feeling. We’d much rather be happy or excited than scared. Our body doesn’t respond positively to fear: heart races, palms sweaty, hair stands on end, and thoughts go a mile a minute. This is not relaxing.

No one will blame us for avoiding fear. It’s bad. It’s sound advice to avoid bad.

But, fear tells us something. The more we fear something, the more we know we need to do it.

We don’t fear the things we know. Why would we? If we know we’ll perform fine, what is there to be afraid of? We can handle it. We only fear what we don’t know. We don’t know we’ll perform well. We don’t know we can handle it.

The catch-22 is that we’ll never know we can if we are always in fear. We fear, we avoid: nothing changes.

Right now, fear is telling you this is ridiculous. Fear wants you to think there is danger. Don’t listen. There is always danger. Going from crawling to walking was dangerous. Much safer on four limbs than two.

Fear is how we know what we need to do. What we know is safe. We might hate it. It might not be for us. But, we are familiar with it. There’s no surprises. It’s safer to complain about it than change it.

Fear makes the unknown look dangerous and the known look safe.

Once upon a time, the known was unknown. They are both dangerous. It’s a frame of mind. Change your frame of mind. Change your world.

Fear is good.

Awesome Tomorrow

Author: Tommy Leung | 01.02.2010 | Category: Life

There are past accomplishments that hold a special place in our minds. We were awesome then. These are the stories of great triumph. They make us feel good. It’s nostalgic. And why not? It is always nice to look back and know that we’ve done something.

We were awesome yesterday but, that doesn’t make much of a difference today.

There are moments as we live them that we know are awesome. Lives are changing right before our eyes. Someone is better off. This feels even better than being awesome yesterday. We can confirm that we are still awesome. It’s nice to know that.

We are awesome today but, it’ll be yesterday tomorrow.

Then there are moments we haven’t lived. Will we be awesome then? Or did we already live our last great feat? Is greatness going to be a tease now? The unknown is scary–maybe our best days have passed.

Or our best days have yet to come. We might look at yesterday and forget that awesome took work. No great accomplishments happened by pure chance of luck. We were awesome because we chose to be.

Choose to be awesome tomorrow because that’s the one that counts.

 

Do the Opposite

Author: Tommy Leung | 12.26.2009 | Category: Business, Life, Marketing

It’s that time of year again! Time for our personal Year in Reviews. We usually end up making New Year’s Resolutions that we keep until February and then it’s back to business as usual. It is not our fault, we are creatures of habit–good or bad.

2010 is going to be different. For starters, we can’t call it “oh-ten”. That doesn’t make sense. Are we going to call it “ten”? Maybe we’ll need to actually say the entire thing: “twenty-ten”. No matter what becomes the accepted way to say the year, it is a change from the last nine years.

And change is something we are all dying for. We thought we were getting change in 2008 but, 2009 has shown us that it was just wishful thinking. No change to be found! So that begs the question, are we looking in the right places for change? Maybe we shouldn’t be looking to others. Afterall, the late King of Pop told us to look at the Man in the Mirror.

And we all know a mirror shows us everything in the opposite. Maybe 2010 is the year to take a look at ourselves and see if our lagging endeavors need to be evaluated in a completely different light. Perhaps, we need to do the opposite.

The economy is suffering the effects of being stabbed a thousand times by a toothpick. You wonder if now is a good time to make radical changes. To that I ask, would it be a good time if we went back five years? We all know it’s not about the times–there is never a good time. There is only now.

Now is as good a time as any! And if not now, when? If there is never a good time, perhaps that’s the first thing we need to apply the opposite to: it’s always a good time.

Besides, the economy can use some opposite thinking right now. The old ways of thinking have sunk the Titanic. And as everyone carries on thinking the same way and doing the same things, the water keeps climbing!

We think what we know is safe. It could be killing us, but it’s familiar so we stick with it. Well, it’s time to do the opposite. Take the plunge. Take the leap. Just do it. Whatever jingle you like.

It could be the best of times or it could be the worst of times. It’s impossible to know. But, we do know what doing the same will result in: the same results we’ve always gotten.

Some of us will choose to do the opposite. Things are going to change. Some of those changes will be so dramatic that we will all feel it. We’ve already seen it in the past decade. Ask someone about Twitter or Facebook in 2000 and you’ll get a blank, puzzled stare. Social networks have become a part of everyday life and used in everyday language. And it took less than a decade.

We know one giant is opting to do the opposite in 2010. Pepsi is foregoing advertising during the Super Bowl to focus on social media. This could go terribly wrong or it could be a banner year for Pepsi.

Take Pepsi’s lead and do the opposite. At least you don’t have $20 million on the line.

Living Without the TV

Author: Tommy Leung | 08.26.2009 | Category: Life, Uncategorized

Image via CrunchBase

It has been almost two years since I’ve had any type of television programming fed to me through an actual television set. This doesn’t mean that I’ve watched any less television programming. I think I may be watching even more TV shows than I did before.

However, I am still getting more done and doing more productive things even though I may be watching more TV shows. Before Hulu had mountains of shows available, I was watching TV shows from the network’s websites. Any shows that I used to watch on TV and are not online, I have simply stopped watching them. I was a fan of SmallVille but, it is no where to be found online.

If it can be found, it is more work than it’s worth. I can live without the show. The networks that have decided to put their shows online have been able to reach me and sell advertising at the same time. There is little drawback for them. Either they were not going to have as an audience at all or have me as an audience online.

Being able to watch shows when I wanted to really helps with being productive. I don’t have to schedule my time around when a show is on. I can do the work I need to do and when I want downtime, watch all the episodes I missed. Sounds like a great deal for everyone!

I think it is fantastic and Hulu and YouTube are offering shows of all kinds. I feel the TV and cable model is a thing of the past. I don’t want to plan my time around the network’s schedule and I don’t want to pay for channels that I’ll never watch.

I would much rather pay HBO directly to watch their shows over the internet, on my time, than to pay for cable.

TV is so yesterday.

Hello Summer!

Author: Tommy Leung | 06.09.2009 | Category: Life

I haven’t written anything since the end of April. Part of it has to do with me being lazy and getting “tied up” taking Facebook quizzes–those things are addictive! The main culprit is how busy I’ve been at work. It only looks like its going to get even busier as we enter the second half of the year.

Since I wrote about my near death experience via bench press, I have joined Planet Fitness. I was making do with make shift workouts for a while–body weight exercises and the such. I can create a pretty good workout anywhere but, there isn’t a real substitute in the modern world for good old iron. I don’t spend my day hunting for my food. Most of my day consists of being seated in an office.

Planet Fitness isn’t the bodybuilder’s gym or the gym for the serious athlete–they just don’t have enough free weights. I’m not a bodybuilder or professional athelete so it’ll do. They are cheap at $20 a month for their premium plan and they are running a deal now for $199 for two years.

I usually have a whole plan of exercises and all that stuff. I decided to forgo all of that this time and aim to accomplish two things while I’m at the gym: work my entire body and be dead tired when I’m done. Of course, I also limit my workouts to around 60 minutes–the shorter the better. Some people swear by split routines and spend hours at the gym. I need the greatest gains in the shortest amount of time–efficient.

My main motivation to go back to the gym was when my good friend who saved me from my bench press death said my arms were bigger back in high school. What?! I was online that night researching gyms! I’m a little vain. It was good motivation at a good time. Doesn’t hurt to be in better shape when summer really rolls around.

The majority of my weekends of late has been filled with looking for a new apartment so that has taken away time from writing. I’m likely going to be a residence of Queens, NY soon. Moving is going to be a pain in the ass–it always is.

Image via Wikipedia

Aside from apartment searching, I also saw some of my friends on Pace University’s Advertising Team compete in the NASC. They were amazing and put together a fantastic plan. I’m going to write about it on my marketing blog, it’s just going take some time. Any ad agency or marketing department would do well to have any one of them working for them–the economy is making hiring scarce but, they are good and persistence will win out.

In other news, I’ve also “officially”  graduated from Pace University. I’ve had the degree for months but, I went to the ceremony and all that. They really need to not do graduation ceremonies so early, I’m not awake yet. I was almost a zombie going through the whole thing and then seriously just went to sleep after it was all said and done.

I will definitely write a little something about this Dora the Explorer game I’m working on once its finished and available on Nickelodeon’s website. This game is supposed to be on sale at retailers too–fancy. Now hopefully, I can find more time to write while work is keeping is busy. I’ve been restructuring my life a little recently as well so that hasn’t helped keep my entries consistent!

An Almost Death

Author: Tommy Leung | 04.29.2009 | Category: Life

I had almost died once. This wasn’t in a car accident or anything you’d expect to have a near death experience. I’ve had a pretty scary car experience too but, it never crossed my mind that I could have died. I’ve also never been in a war or been a police officer or firefighter. I grew up in a semi-dangerous neighborhood–to some people, the entire city of New York is dangerous.

This near death experience happened to me a long time ago. Back in high school, I often took Coed Advanced Weight Training. The other option involved a lot of mindless running around a track–they called that class Track. I don’t really like running and I do like weight lifting so that was a no-brainer. Did I mention it was coed?

So one day, it was after class and people had left. A friend and I stayed behind to do some more lifts. We had competitions in this class for max bench press, number of push ups, pull ups, dips, etc. Now this was a class near the day of the competitions so we wanted to work on the bench press.

I was never a monster bench presser. I was only about 155lbs and my max bench was at 185lbs. However, on this day, at this particular moment, I was not able to bench 185.

We did some warm ups and it was fine. We then proceeded to just do max lifts. I’m lying on the bench and have my hands on the barbell. My spotter is a good friend who has become more of a gym person than me. We pick up the weight and I proceed to do the lift. All of a sudden my arms just give and 185lbs of iron complied with the forces of gravity.

The bar dropped in line with my neck and at one moment I felt the cold metal of the bar touch my neck. At this same moment, my spotter grabs the bar and saves me from a beheading.

I don’ t know for sure if I would have died but, it was certainly not going to be pretty. There is no shortage of bench press accidents online and none of them look fun. To this day, I am still very cautious about doing bench presses.

I did lift 185lbs on the day of the bench press competition. That was not a winning lift–I believe it was closer to 215. I was happy that I did 185 that day. It was more about overcoming the fear than how much weight it was. You never really lose the slight dread that overcomes you when you lie under the bar to do a bench press.

I certainly do not try to do max bench presses anymore. The last highest weight I’ve benched was 215lbs a few times. I increase the weight of my bench at very small increments. I like to stay alive more than I like to have a high bench weight!