Harold's Blog

The guy’s expression is priceless at a Justin Beiber concert. 

- Source (BuzzFeed)

Explendables Infographic

Its an infographic kind of day. Still need to see this movie!

Cool SAT Infographic!

Via: SAT Prep Courses

Introducing the Creative Income Stream Challenge

Lots of people have big dreams of being financially independent and not having to work for the “man”. Inspired by Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad about creating passive forms of income I thought it would be fun to start my own Creative Income Stream (CIS) Challenge. The challenge is simple, earn $100 in a month through a creative/alternative means. The rules are:

1. Must be legal
2. Don’t harass family or friends
3. Must provide real value

The possibilities are endless, think about some of the skills you can provide or “things” you can put to work to help you generate an alternative form of income. Let me know if you are interested in joining this challenge and what your ideas are to achieving $100 in a month. Be sure to check back often or subscribe as I’ll be updating my journey to $100!

weheartmma:

Please help recommend WeHeartMMA for the Sports Category on the Tumblr Directory. We’d love to be a great source for MMA fans on Tumblr. :)

Thanks for all of the support!

—-

QUESTION: Have you recommended WeHeartMMA today?

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The last several weeks I have been in China with a team of 8 other individuals teaching elementary and middle school teachers computer skills. This has been an awesome experience and I enjoyed every moment of it. While I was there I noticed several things that American’s could learn from the Chinese.

1. The Desire to learn

The weeks leading up to the computer training camp we were expecting 20 teachers, but on the first day we had an overwhelming 57 teachers registered in a 45 person classroom! Some of these teachers came from remote villages hours away just to attend our computer camp. With a pen and paper in hand many teachers were doubling up on computers and excited to learn. All of our lessons were translated from English to Chinese, yet the teachers were still eager to listen and participate. Also keep in mind that this was their summer vacation and class started at 8:30am.

For some, this was their first time using a computer and tackling basic drag and drop mouse functionality was a stretch. Yet though our very limited Chinese and an awesome translator many of the teachers were able to manipulate images in Photoshop and produce animations using Flash at the end of the camp.

The desire to lean and continue to better oneself is strong in China. Learning doesn’t stop when we leave school. Learning is a life long journey. We are fortunate to live in a society where we can download books in 60 seconds, instantly Google answers to pressing questions, or attended world class universities. Continue to learn something new.

2. Don’t need to live in excess

Witnessing the daily lives of many Chinese I was able to see people living within their means and hardly ever wasting. Even though food is relatively cheap, we found many people usually eating in, meat is considered a treat, and portions are considerably smaller yet I found myself feeling full and satisfied. Even something as simple as napkins are not freely given out.

Coming back to hardwood floors, granite counter-tops, flat screen TV’s, and Big Gulps I feel somewhat guilty. We live in a society were we pride ourselves on bigger, faster, louder, brighter. Yet how many of these things do we really “need”?

3. Importance of Community

In China there is a great sense of community. Every night the city comes alive and there are community events for all ages. Kids are free to run around and gather across the river to play carnival games, teenagers catchup with one another while window shopping around town, old men sit and play music by the river, while in the town squares women gather in uniform lines for dance aerobics. These are not one-off occurances, people are gathering together daily to meetup and be part of a community.

We live in a hyper connected society with the ability to tweet, keep up with news feeds, share our plans, and check-into locations. Supposedly we are more “connected”. Yet strangely the several weeks without these mediums and an iPhone holstered to my hip I felt as though I was forming deeper more genuine relationships with the locals. We should take the time to evaluate and see if the tools we are using are a catalyst or an excuse from forming genuine community.

4. Hospitality

As we got to know our class better, we were receiving invites to visit their hometown villages. Due to our time constraint we were unable to visit their homes, so some of the teachers took us around the local village and paid for our meals and made sure we had a good time. Even though we had known some of them for a couple days they already felt like life-long friends.

The organization that we worked with also provides scholarship services to the local orphans. I had the opportunity to see the living conditions and visit the foster families looking after these kids. Most of these families are living in conditions that we would deem unlivable by US standards but they are doing everything they can to make ends meet. Simply put they do not have much, yet when we came to visit they lavished us with their very best foods and drinks. Nothing was held back.

5. Three Hour Long Lunch Breaks

This one requires no explanation :)

Blog post that I wrote on TeachStreet about my recent China trip. You can read more about the trip at the China Teaching Technology Blog.

It all began while sitting at the 2010 Seattle 2.0 Awards, and listening to Jonathan Sposato, CEO of Picnik (recently acquired by Google), speak about his experiences as an entrepreneur. Then it was the next week, where I heard Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger Network, speak at the 2010 UW…

Love this idea and looking forward to some good interviews! Just started to read Tony Hsieh’s book and it is fun to hear it from an Asian American perspective. 

Career Advice I Wish I Received 4 Years Ago

This weekend thousands of college grads proudly received their diploma and ready to take on the world. This exciting time made me reflect back 4 years ago to when I was sitting in Husky stadium, bright eyed with world as my oyster. This letter is from present day Harold (2010) to Harold (2006) of 4 years ago:

Dear Harold (2006),

Congratulations on graduating! I know you are super excited and scared to grow up and enter the world of adult life. This letter is written to guide you through and give you advice on what is to come. 

In a couple weeks you’ll be starting your career at Microsoft. It’ll be an exciting time where you’ll receive a corporate credit card, travel around the country, meeting really cool and smart people. They will even make you believe that Windows Vista is the best thing since slice bread (which it isn’t, and don’t install it). The perks and pay will make you tempted to stick around, but very soon when the clock hits 5 you’ll be walking towards the elevators thinking to yourself, “This is my life for the next 40 years”. This is the first lesson; pursue your passions. You have always enjoyed technology and entrepreneurship as a kid and in college. Reading and thinking about tech startup is what makes you tick, you don’t really care about what version of Exchange a company is using or whether or not they have the latest Windows patches. Run hard after what you love and what you do between 9-5 will not feel like work. 

The phrase carpe diem is abit cliche but reflect on it daily. I am still working to live this better out in my life but the second lesson is to just do it. You’ll have many bad ideas and some decent ideas, but instead of sitting around and wondering what if, stop and just do it. It’ll be better to have done something and taken the risk than looking back and have not done anything at all. You’ll probably fail more times than you succeed but don’t look at those moments as failures, rather life lessons that you can apply to your next venture. Keep hustling :)

The third and final lesson is to enjoy the moment. You wont enjoy life if you are constantly planning on getting out of your present situation, or living in the past. Enjoy the now. You’ll always be thinking that the grass is greener on the other side, but that is only because you have stopped watering your side. Make the most of your current situation and consider it all a blessing from God. Take mental snapshots of good times with family and friends and hold onto them; no money or prestige can replace those.

Best of luck with what is to come, and the boring commencement speaker will be done soon. Hold onto these three lessons and I’ll write back in another 4 years with three more lessons. 

Harold (2010)

PS. Invest your money in Apple stock, trust me on this one :)

daryn:

Dave, TeachStreet’s CEO, has a guest post up on TechCrunch today about our transition from a free to a paid service.

Dave calls out the following five tips to make the transition go smoothly:

1. Give your customers plenty of notice, and give them a (real) chance to comment/contribute feedback.
2. Price it ‘fairly’ (probably still at a deep discount)
3. Offer your customers a way to get your product for free
4. Provide Grandfather’d Pricing for long-time customers, or give them exclusive benefits
5. Make the transition gradual, if possible — people should only pay if you’re delivering value

He also shares a bunch of details about TeachStreet’s history and evolution - a.k.a. the story of my life. We’ve still got a long ways to go, and certainly don’t have everything figured out yet, but hopefully you can take something away from the article and our experience.

Whats the big deal about Social Media?

I met a lady this weekend that was reading “Facebook for Dummies” and was curious as to way someone would read up about Facebook instead of playing around with it; not to mention that when she has finished with it the material would be outdated. She mentioned that she was in charge of their Social Media marketing for a new church plant and needed to familiarize herself with Social Media. This lead to me think about the implications of Social Media for small organizations and startups.

“Social Media Experts” will tell everyone and their mothers that they need to have a blog, that connects with their rss feed to tweet out their post which is also connected to their Facebook account so that their Facebook fans will be notified. Not to mention that they should setup TweetDeck and monitor keywords so you’ll be able to participate in the Twittersphere and keep an eye on their brand. Big Whoop! Are you really generating new customers through this? Could your time and energy be used on other areas of your new business? I am not knocking on Social Media Experts but feel that the term is used too loosely and people better be able to show the goods if they call themselves an “Expert”.

During the last year while I was running a real estate business I thought that this whole Social Media thing would bring business beyond belief. Setup a blog, Tweet them out, engage in the social conversation, be relevant, meet the customer where they are, and let the good times roll. I started out with getting a Twitter account and following other real estate agents but shortly realized that other real estate agents are only following me in hopes that I’ll follow them back and read their tweets and be directed to their websites. Thats not going to work; in essence you are creating a following that is self-serving, “I’ll follow you, in hopes that you’ll follow me, so I can tell you about stuff that I’m trying to sell to you.” Well I don’t really want real estate agents because they are not my customers, let me setup keywords and find people in the Seattle area that tweet about “buying a home” “selling a home” “looking for an agent”. This too didn’t work as normal people don’t tweet in context about such things. Added to my dismal social media efforts, every blog post that I wrote and tweeted to my hundreds of real estate “friends” would receive no attention. 

I believe that my experience as an unknown brand just starting out isn’t uncommon for many new businesses and organizations. They hear success stories and want to get on the Social Media bandwagon. So whats the big deal about Social Media and how do you make it work? I believe Social Media is great for personal use and should be treated the same way for businesses. People don’t want to be sold stuff, they want to see the personality behind the business, they want to know who you are and what you are doing. Start out with creating a blog, follow your loyal customers, ask them to follow you back, and engage your users about your business. The ultimate key and where your time and efforts should be is creating loyal customers; customers that are raving fans and walking billboards that can’t say enough good things about you. They’ll make you relevant in the Twittersphere.