A New Beginning
Into infinite possibilities
There have been so many gigantic new beginnings in my life: leaving my beloved family and coming to America for education; leaving IBM and making a living as an independent agent; leaving Austin and moving to San Francisco for Tango. All of them involved a clear-cut ending and a new beginning because lots of stuff was involved, literally.
Though not all new beginnings are so clean and tidy.
In and Out of Being a Boss
The three of us eased into our first entrepreneurship experience quite slowly: working our day job while doing the garment trading business on the side. Until one day we made enough money and went full time, when renting an office space made sense.
Among the many hats I was wearing, I was the one to make sure our office space was providing us an environment to succeed. Every piece of our furniture, equipment like the phone system and fax machine, and stationaries like paper clips, all had passed through my hands, so had all the bills for electricity, rent, drinking water, and our cleaning ladies. All production orders also went through me as the head of merchandising of the company.
We were working 24/7, as our customers were in the west and our manufacturers the east. Every day there were a hundred fires to fight. Every day our bodies were at work for over 12 hours long. Our minds, endlessly. But it was fun. Because we solved any problems that came up our own way. We had to only answer to ourselves what was the best way to handle each situation, to find our clients, to ship the products.
The ending of my being a first-time boss was also not so clean-cut. When did the fatal mistake one of us make couldn’t be contained anymore? A Belgian client somehow convinced one of my partners, our sales and shipping head, to ship out goods without either letter of credit or payments. And that practice somehow became the norm with that client for an extended period of time. Only that partner and our accountant knew about it. When all these surfaced, we were already at the point of no return. But when did we let our employees go? When did we close the company officially? When did the debt collector come to our homes? When did my partners get kidnapped in China and I had to find someone to go rescue them? They are really good stories for another time.
Out of Depression, Into Happiness
My getting out of depression and finding true happiness also has a blurred transition:
When did I start realizing my thoughts were going against me?
When did I begin to challenge some of the widely believed concepts and values that made me feel undeserved?
When did I start contemplating life nonconforming to the status quo?
When did I start suspecting that my emotion and happiness could be turned up like a switch, and when did I eventually have a handle on that switch?
When did I start to understand my mind resource is as, if not more, precious than my time and money?
When was the first time I was able to stop my mind on command?
When did my thoughts become my best friend and is there for me, to comfort me when I need and to tell me that I am loved every day?
Into Infinite Possibilities
This writing you are reading marks one of those rare gigantic new beginnings for me and my company Upbeet. This time not as much stuff was involved but paper and notebooks and lots of pens.
In these writings, we hope to empower you to the infinite possibilities of life. Because life has always been infinitely possible. We were just told otherwise.
