It's coffee time.

And today I thought it be fun to talk about my upbringing, how I was raised to become a mill in there as a milliner.

And that's an ex Google ex Facebook Tech lead, someone who has succeeded in both their traditional career as well as entrepreneur adventures.

I feel that my perspectives on life, the things that motivate me, my drive is just quite different from other people that I've seen.

And in fact, I think I'm probably one of the most successful people that I know in my family circles among my friends.

And the funny thing is, I've had the string of successes.

It wasn't just like a one time thing, some lucky break, But I've had success of my school, my career and many projects.

So I personally believe a lot of this has to do with my character, my upbringing, the way I view life.

And I wanted to share with you how I was raised and why believe led to my success.

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Looking back, I think one of the most interesting things was I was never forced to do anything growing up country to what you may hear about Tiger moms forcing their kids to take piano lessons filed in lessons or study all day.

My parents never asked me to do anything, and I spent a lot of my childhood just playing games, Actually, so pretty soon I realized on my own hard to balance my life, what was important, what I wanted to focus on, and I developed this internal drive for motivation.

There was no external motivation if I got good grades.

My parents didn't say much about it.

If I got bad grades, they didn't say much about that either.

So I was released out to impress myself, and it became this competition with myself to see if I could beat my own high scores each time.

So I really held myself accountable.

And meanwhile, I'm sure you've seen it, too.

A lot of other students, they start burning out right?

Maybe their parents forced them to do a bunch of study, and then as soon as they get to say college, where they're on their own, they just go party like crazy because they don't have that external force keeping them down.

They never truly internalize the reason why they were studied.

It was simply to impress their parents.

So you may ask, what motivated me and what continues to motivate me.

And I think it is identity, a vision of who you are, who you Maybe I remember one time my parents would say, What if I were a math genius and they were joking about that?

And I don't think I am, because I don't believe myself to necessarily be smart, but it made me try to fulfill that vision.

I may not be a math prodigy, but if I believed that I could be good at it, it made me try to fulfill that.

Later on, when I was working at Google, I had another vision of myself where, you know, maybe I could be the person who would know most about this portion of the code base, and then that would motivate me to try to be good.

That that it wasn't about accomplishing a certain task or finishing one project, but a vision of who I might be and back in high school, which, by the way, was a horrible nightmare for me, the worst time in my life.

I remember this defining point for me where I would always be looking at these other smart kids to help me with my homework assignments.

And then my brother said to me, Well, I was supposed to be the smart person.

Why am I looking to other people?

People are looking to me for the answers.

And then that's when I thought, OK, maybe I am supposed to be the smart one.

Maybe I am the chosen one and nobody else has the answers.

So if anybody has that, it should be me.

And I should just sit down and begin to the work to solve that.

And that may have just given me the self confidence and determination to push through.

Which brings me to another point, which is that I never believed myself to be smart.

I saw the other smart kids at school.

They seem to gift it like they would always get a pluses.

In fact, I was a beast did that all the way through elementary school until I decided to just start working harder.

And I thought to myself, Well, I may not be the smartest kid, but I could be hard working and I can match other people's.

Martin is by just put the end an extra one or two hours of additional work, which is why it annoys me a little bit.

Every time I read in the comments, people say that I must have a high I Q or I'm gifted or that I'm Asian.

I think that those air sort of scapegoat excuses to feed this answers because I know that's not true.

At least I don't believe so.

So, far more important than intelligence is persistence and determination.

When I used to do homework in school, there was this one interesting tactic my parents would say, which is that as soon as I finished my homework, I could go play my video games so I would just try to get my homework done as soon as possible.

And I would just work all the time in school and people thought I was actually a nerd, a bookworm, because I would just been on my recesses and lunch breaks, working on my homework such that when I got home, I have all my homework done already.

Then I would spend the whole afternoon playing games.

But I think that taught me two things.

Number one, the late gratification where I would first put in the upfront work, get my homework done and then I could relax and just enjoy myself.

The rest of that, they and the second was howto work extremely efficiently and fast.

And these healthy study habits of working fast using time, efficiently practicing work over a plate later became very useful when I got into college when there was so little time available and that just had to do homework almost the entire day.

And then my incentive has switched from being able to play games to just be able to get a good score.

As a kid, I had pretty geeky hobbies that really made me use my brain like playing magic, the gathering or reading science fiction novels.

You know, magic, the card game.

It requires a lot of strategy.

You have to memorize a lot of cards Min Max and optimize your strategies in the competition and probably have the vocabulary words that I know.

I learned from magic cards.

So I think that was quite a good hobby, actually.

And I wouldn't be surprised if anybody who played that game when I want to become successful milliners later on in life.

And as for those science fiction novels, I remember I would be the only kid in the classroom with this thick book, and I just had to get used to going to the bookstore by myself, going through the teens section and finding these books that none of my classmates were into and being sort of a pioneer.

And of course, I like video games.

I was fortunate that my dad's supplied us with a computer and I would get coding magazines were with copy code and put them into the computer.

One of my hobbies was making games for myself and my brother to play.

And then in college, Japanese anime was trendy, and I wanted to know what the characters were saying.

So I began learning Japanese.

So I think this culture of learning was just something I learned to enjoy.

I think that one of the defining factors about me is that I've never felt the need to be validated by other people.

I don't tend to seek socials that this and I'm quite comfortable with that.

I grew up kind of like a unpopular nerd in school, So I've always been kind of on the outskirts of society, and I think that character is that is almost necessary.

If you're going to go out and launch your own ventures and projects and publicly fail in front of your friends and family, you could be humiliated or embarrassed.

You have to be very comfortable with failure because for every one success I have, I probably have 10 other failures.

And if you really need social status, then chances are you would just go work a normal job.

If you read up on entrepreneurs, there's this fascinating characteristic that they have, which we don't teach at all in society.

And that is, ah, healthy disrespect for rules, which is absolutely necessary because you grew up in the society and that you need to be able to figure out which of these rules don't make sense and how you can reshape society in the better way.

We grew up in the society, defined in a certain way.

But the opportunity is usually lie in reimagining how things can and should be through some key insight that breaks all of the current rules that people are playing by.

For example, if you look at Cooper or Airbnb, they disrupted the entire taxi or hotel industries.

They didn't play by the rules that these industries had set.

And so this out of the box thinking could be something healthy to teach our kids.

I know that when I was in school, I was not like a goody two shoes teacher's pet.

I remember I would team up with my brother to do homework.

He would do the even problems, either the odd ones or we once got suspended in school for selling Pirated animation software.

And meanwhile, my brother and I, we would get into arguments all the time, and then we would come up with rules for each other.

And after a while there are so many rules that we just tore all the rules down and just didn't really like rules anymore.

We thought that they were just too complicated, and they were just arbitrary things that people have set up anyways.

Now That's not to say that you should just go out and break every single rule out there but have a healthy level of disrespect for them and think about why they're put in place and how you make it around some of these where there may be opportunities.

A lot of these rules, they're put in place to protect the current incumbent, the people who are already in power.

I remember one of the most defining points in my life was when I was in high school in the Computer Animation club and I couldn't figure out how to properly model and animate some character.

And I asked my mentor at the time, and he just told me he doesn't care.

He doesn't care how I get it done, just get it done and that's pretty much defined the rest of my life.

Actually, the fact is, there's no right answer with that.

I stopped seeking validation from other people, asking if I was doing things correctly.

I just adopted more of a get it done attitude where if the result look good, if it worked, it was pretty much good enough and then later on I could go back if I needed to to polish things up.

This technique tends to work very well, especially if you're breaking into new areas where people don't really know what the proper way of doing things are, and that allows you to just trail blaze into new areas.

And then, lastly, I think my family always taught me the value of hard work, taking nothing for granted, not being entitled, that if I wanted something, I had to go out there and get it.

My parents came to this country poor, worked hard every day we save coupons, took nothing for granted and showed me the value of making good life decisions.

Now one of the biggest trace for me has been learning.

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Let me know.

What traits do you think would raise somebody to become successful in life?

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