terrorist dream

I had a dream this morning. I was at some type of seminar/rock concert/arena with my brother. Amidst the loud music coming from the center of the arena (similar to MGM grand's arena), the building began to fill with smoke that everyone could smell so I considered running towards one of the exits. But before I could, a group of men dressed in KKK attire flooded into the building from every door, firing their AK-47's into the air. I was so frightened and while you dream, you believe what's happening is real. I was shocked and terrified, considering making a run for an open door but was afraid I'd be shot attempting to flee so I stayed as did everyone else.

There was chaos, shouting and crying as the terrorists herded the people like cattle into manageable groups. In the middle of the crowd stood a man who seemed to be the leader, shouting a bunch of stuff while everyone became quiet and listened, fearfully. I tried to hear what the guy was saying but the crowd was too thick and i was too far away. i kept looking around at the exits considering running out but chose not to because that would be the easiest and fastest way to be shot.

i didn't know whether the group came to just massacre everyone or coerce people join them. I just knew there was a possibility of my brother and I being killed soon so almost instinctively, i pulled out my iphone. i was about to record what was happening on the Notepad app so investigators would later find and show my parents but then thought to myself, "stupid plan" and quickly decided to write it as an email, directly to my parents. While the leader was still rambling in the middle of the crowd, i stood behind a person to cover my phone while I type my email, hoping no one would catch me using the phone.

I began writing that I was at this event and subject to danger as terrorists have invaded, holding about 6,000 hostage. i expressed that my brother and i may not live through this ordeal and wanted just wanted to let my parents know that we love them very much. before i could finish the email, the KKK men began ordering everyone to split into two groups. The people who wanted to join the terrorists as leaders go to the right and the ones who don't want to join, go left. everyone was terrified to make a decision because despite obviously not wanting to the join the terrorists, we were afraid doing otherwise would mean harsher consequences. The crowd of people resembled a large washy blob as people tried to decide whether to move right or left. but gradually, the gap between the two groups became more visible as the majority of the people made their way to the left not wanting to join the group and the others went to the right, knowing they might be safer joining the group.

My brother and i were about to make our way to the left but began to think about its consequences. so i grabbed my brother's arm and said, "We have to join them. If we don't they're more likely to kill us. We need to gain power in their group in order to break them from the inside." my brother quickly agreed and we made our way to the group who were to join the terrorists.

we took a seat while the terrorist leader stood on the stage of a amphitheater and began shouting his plans. i continued to consider fleeing towards one of the exists but there were other terrorist members standing guard. everyone was not allowed to sit too close to one another so my brother was sitting about 5 feet way from me. we were sitting near the back and i took my iphone back out to finish my email. as i was typing, i was also making my plans to become elected the leader of this group through sheer confidence in my leading abilities, rise in power and change their force from bad to good. the leader on the stage (who previously had KKK attire on) now had scroungy military pants and a dirty black shirt with the sleeves ripped off, unshaven face and a military beret on his scuffled hair. a projector had videos of explosions and a crude animation of bullets and missiles firing out of someone's rear end - the leader kept on with his presentation. I typed as quickly as i could to finish the email, telling that if anything happens to my brother or i, "please don't be sad because you've been the best parents in the world and allowed us to live very happy lives." i finished with "love, thomas and alvin."  I was relieved i could finish the email and pressed send.

then i woke up.

Anthony Robbins, San Jose, July 2012

Tomorrow will be my first time seeing Anthony Robbins live. I've been following Anthony Robbins closely for about a year now, watching his videos, bought a CD from him. I am 20 years old, 21 next month (August). 

One question I wanted to reflect on is, "why am I here?" Here are a few answers I could come up with:

• I want to transform
• My interpersonal relationship with myself
• My mindset towards
• Happiness/spiritual: core values, develop an unwavering yet versatile internal constitution
• Family: unconditional love and support
• Friends: love people, contribute, positive influence, productive exchange
• Business: meaning behind every drive, true wealth, contribution and mass influence
• Influence: understanding communication, psychological, verbal, physical
• I want to condition my mind, body and soul to be healthy, effective, efficient and happy

I don't know what to expect from tomorrow but I am willing to do my utter best to absorb and learn as much value as I can from this event. For this event, I will clear my mind from all preconceived beliefs about myself and the world and just learn with a blank slate as humbly, non-egotistical, as I can.


End of First Day
Amazing... while it's still fresh in my mind, i wanted to pour my experience out in writing even though its 4am. i'll come back later to integrate everything from my notes - for now, to make sure i don't forget anything crucial, i'll draft everything out quickly. i feel a kind of free i haven't felt in a long time. a kind of freedom that only comes from within. and not a temporary hype or external amusement but rather finding harmony within myself and the strength to deal with any interpersonal dilemmas and can deal with any challenges. i feel an eternal transformation that has been unleashed from within - perfectly, the event's name is "Unleashing the power within."  today's main training was conditioning ones mindset, understanding strategies and tools to develop a strong mind, freeing ourselves from limiting beliefs and fears.


i now feel that i can take on whatever comes my way and to confront fear front on dead on its track. i can be grateful for everything that has happened in my life good and bad because i have control over their meaning. tony showed us that when we're grateful, we can't be fearful or depressed at the same time - i tried and it hit me like a blast of realization. and in these moments of gratefulness, we can harness that state by conditioning ourselves just as we can harness our state of courage in the face of fear and even dance with fear. 


two primary and universal fears are "Not being or having enough something" and "fear of not being loved, worth." the only things stopping us from achieving what we want is our fear. we may keep our problems because they satisfy our needs which may not always be good. often what we look for are only vehicles to what we think will bring us to our desires but often we misinterpret our own deepest desires (more money, more stuff, lack of something, doubting our past, etc.) but what must be done is tack the deepest desire directly - focusing on what we have control over and not dwelling on what we don't.


from the millions of people tony has met across the world, from all different kinds of culture, he find 6 core needs all humans have:

1. Certainty
2. Uncertainty/variety/surprise
3. Significance
4. connection/love (violence)
5. Growth
6. Contribution

3 of which can make you an addict to something good and bad. 
the top 2 that are most important to us drastically make up our life. worse 2: certainty and significance. best 2-3: connection/love, growth, contribution. (wrote down my top 2 current needs were uncertainty and need for significance. then wrote my top 2 ideal needs in life is connection/love and growth.


i learned that what makes our life are the stories we create for ourselves but the only and most powerful thing we can control are the meaning we create. life = decisions = states. the meaning we create are guided by our focus, language and state. state is influenced by mentality as well as physiology. we can either create stories as excuses (or like a circuit breaker) to achieving what we want and facing our fears and we can create stories that empower us - both may be true but have totally different meanings we give them.


at the end of the day, we did a firewalk, symbolic of breaking through all of my deepest fears, empowering ourselves through our state with YES! I succeeded in taking the hard first step and walk across the hot coal. i walked the firewalk because my fears are unnecessary and hindering me and i realized i dont need them, can control and decide to overcome them, in a heartbeat. we have the keys to our own happiness all along.




End of 2nd Day


Today was a riveting conditioning of our state, focus and language. we repeatedly rewired our thinking for where we see ideal selves, looking "back" at our current life as if it's in the past and how much pain there is, then snapping back to our true selves, owning our identity, freedom and happiness.


most of the content was taught by video clips of tony robbins. giving can bring the greatest fulfillment and aliveness. one can do more for someone they care about than they can ever do for themselves.


the people we choose to spend our time with shapes who we are. we can choose our "peer group," people whom can better us and keep us accountable because we care about them and what they think. family may or not be a reliable "peer group" so always love family but choose your peer group which can be different from family. 


we learned rapport, having commonality in the other person with will create rapport = total responsiveness between two people and connection. 


End of the 3rd Day


By the third day, my calves and for arms were sore from jumping up and down with my fists in the air. The program started at 9am that day but I slept in until 12 noon, just when people were coming back to the convention center from the lunch break. 


Tony began talking about being able to influence someone with enough "leverage" by breaking their pattern. I learned that to eliminate habits, including mental habits, by attacking the nervous system, associating massive pain to those habits or the pain to not overcoming fears. In a sense, making the pain, of not overcoming one's fear, greater than the pain of the fear itself. 


We do what we do because of our beliefs and values. Values determine the direction and destination in our life. And whether or not we reach our values are determined our beliefs. to rethink our pains and misfortunes as gifts and things that make us stronger.


Tony watched a film where a man was freed from all his constraints and fears through a process of associating massive pain towards bad patterns and reinforcing them with empowering beliefs. Tony called this the "Dickens Process." He lead us through the entire process which took about 2 hours and this changed my life. He first allowed us to write our our top 3 limiting beliefs within our life. Then turning down the convention center lights, he had us imagine the terror and pain of continuing these destructive patterns/beliefs - imagining ourselves with those patterns after several years and having to look at our selves in the mirror with extreme hate for ourselves. 


Then to break the patterns, by swinging our arms in the air, then putting our fingers in our noses and saying, "My old bullshit belief was ...... and it's such total bullshit!" we did this practice several times for each of the 3 old "bullshit" beliefs with a partner. the person who sat next to me was a girl who i thought was extremely beautiful, seemingly in her mid 20's, blond, slim, model-like face. next to her was her boyfriend but the girl and I happened to be partners for this practice and it was quite an interesting experience. following the practice, we stood facing each other, swinging our fingers into our nostrils and screaming at the top of our lungs about our bullshit beliefs.

to supplement it, tony instructed us to say those old limiting beliefs with a silly voice and say that's bullshit. he then lead us to imagine replacing every one of our limiting beliefs with empowering ones and imagining the results, seeing ourselves after  several years with such pleasure and heightened state of happiness and peace. He also lead us to imagine ourselves traveling back in time in a "bubble," removing all of our dark memories as tapes, burning them and walking over them like the "firewalk." 


Then replacing those memories with the memories we've always wanted, imagine those tapes were gold and platinum. He told us to travel back in time to visit ourselves when we were just toddlers, holding our baby-selves, coming from the future to say, "you've made it." and signing the song, You are so beautiful to our baby-selves. Afterwards, we all celebrated.


After dinner, we learned that when taking on a new skill, humans naturally reach plateaus. most give up or if they manage to overcome it, may continually hit other plateaus. Tony taught us to learn like masters - to accelerate the learning curve. Rather than hitting a plateau and becoming frustrated, masters grin, "Ah, plateau... to be expected."

1. Find someone who's an expert at that particular thing you want to learn and Model their Success. Tony learned from Jim Rohn that "Success leaves clues."
2. Totally and completely immerse yourself
3. spaced repetition

Tony told the story about how when he was in his younger, darker times, he wanted to learn from Jim Rohn. But to attend Jim Rohn's seminar, he had to pay $1,200. When Robbins asked Jim Rohn for an exception, Rohn declined and told Robbins, "You will get what you need. Not just what you want."


Near the end, while Tony was promoting the Mastery University program, he was introduced the coaches and one of them happened to be Chad Mureta! The camera shot to the back of the convention center and there he was, on the 5 large projector screens. I swiftly found my way to back to meet him. Seemed that not many people at the event knew who Chad Mureta was so there were very few people standing around him. I greeted him and told him that I bought his app training course, App Empire.

Day 4 
The last day revolved around health and the societies misconceptions about health. they talked about energy, nutrition and a healthy mind.




 

Thomas Chang | Meeting Amazon.com's Former Chief Scientist, Dr. Andres Weigend

Today, four of my classmates and I decided to drive over to Adobe's Convention Center in San Jose to hear Amazon's former Chief Scientist Officer speak about the growth and utilization of "social data." As we waited for the talk to begin, we helped ourselves to some pizza and wine in the reception area along with the some other 40 to 50 attendees. I saw a tall man walk towards my friends and I, immediately greeting us with a smile. At the time, I had no idea who he was but instinctively smiled back, welcomed him into our conversation asking, "where are you from?" and introduced him to my friends: Jeff, Stefan, Hilla and Abdul. Eventually, I realized that he was actually the keynote speaker, Dr. Andreas Weigend, because he whimsically leaned over to me and asked, "Hmm, what should I talk about?"

During the presentation, Andreas clearly outlined "8 Rules for Revolutionaries."

1.) Stop segmenting your customers:

2.) Become part of your customers' digital identities:

3.) Liberate your data:

4.) Don't worry, be messy:

5.) Focus on metrics that matter, your customers - not your accountants:

6.) Embrace information symmetry:

7.) Build your product for the social FAA era:

a. Does it help people make better decisions

b. Make it easy for people to contribute

c. Does it help people collaborate

d. Does it help people get attention

8.) Internalize the changed social norms of your costumers:

After the talk, a crowd of people were trying to speak with Adreas while my friends and I quietly socialized with the other attendees there, meeting employees from such companies like Yahoo and Microsoft. Shortly after, Stefan came tapping our shoulders to inform us that Andreas had invited us to have dinner with him that night.

Rare personality of utter kindness, social vibrance and inspiring intellect.

The significant change in comparison to the past.

Kept telling me that he was glad I came because he believed the psychology field of discipline held many of the keys to solving society's problems - bridging the technological advances with humans, understanding how people think in pursuit of improving human rights, political turmoil and cultural tolerance.

Invited my friends to dinner, then went out for a drink. "Drink before you drive" he would joke. (Notes continued...)

Thomas Chang | Friends and Stories

The people I've come to befriend and spend time with has been the larger highlights with the last few weeks. Rather than mentioning each adventure by event, I decided to divide the anecdotes according to each friend because they all have a distinct story behind my meeting them. Therefore, some events may overlap.

Abdulrahman: Abdul is an upcoming MIT freshman from Saudi Arabia. He has a curiosity that manifests in his relentless questions. As well, he has a dry type of a humor that has kept me laughing literally everyday. My friend Javier and I gave him the nickname of "The Pimp" for reasons I'm unsure of - it has just become something we found funny because he is nothing like a "pimp." We tend to laugh every time he's addressed as so because in reality, he's respectful, intelligent and

Ani:

Javier:

Larry Chiang:

Professor Tom Kosnik (Tom):

Andres:

Alex Stark:

Sourabh:

Today, like everyday I spend here at Stanford, has been action-packed. Our task over this weekend is to begin forming a team we'd like to work with on a collectively-determined venture. After class, we immediately started to sift through the crowd of people, asking our peers' about their backgrounds, skills and potential ventures they would like to pursue.

I had invited a friend I met the previous day who seemed interested in entrepreneurship Alex. We quickly formed a team between Andres, Alex, myself and two other indian girls.

Among us 10, we scheduled a meeting that night at 8:30pm to get a better idea of what types of teams and ventures we're interested in committing to. We met in a dormitory study room and after we settled down around the table, I suggested that we took turns briefly illustrating their backgrounds, their skills and primary venture idea a team could potentially pursue. My friend Andres, with a background in electrical engineering, began first and expressed that he didn't have a particular venture idea - likewise, willing to help a team with marketing or business development. I was next up and decided that I would like to put Vunia on the table for consideration. I described that Vunia is a venture my friend and I have recently been working on that allowed web browser supported video communication. We had finished the prototype and most of the next steps would include finalizing the design, ready for users and marketing.

Thomas Chang | Experience: Stanford

Every person I meet is so enthusiastic about learning, creating things and venturing towards what they love doing. I'm taking a course called Entrepreneurship Technology with Dr. Thomas Kosnik - though today, he demanded we addressed him as "Tom" instead - and the professor-in-resident is Larry Chiang who is a quite known blogger as well as author of "What they don't teach in Stanford Business School." The structure of the class is all about practice, application of theories and execution. It's great because it's no longer about simply memorizing theories. They bring in real-world Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in to speak and after every class, we gather outside of class to share ideas and network.

Today, Larry Chiang literally gave the class the assignment to crash a VC party. He, himself, was not even invited. So my friend Andres and Alex decided to carpool there. The address led us to some enclosed neighborhood road lined with gates on both sides and multi-million dollar estates behind them.

Thomas Chang | Culture: "My conversation with the middle aged woman"

I met a middle aged woman at a casual social gathering and found myself immersed in the conversation we had started. She was an adviser to the Chinese medical council, assigned to study in the United States for a year to research and write. Fortuitously through our perspectives toward the seemingly-remote topic of organ transplants, the conversation actually helped shed some light on how my life in the United States has shaped some of my paradigms. Our views were nonetheless rooted from the values of two very different histories and nations so I suppose it wasn't a completely remote comparison.

The morning of that day, though my flight back to Seattle from college for the summer duration was set for that afternoon of May 6th, 2011, I was confronted with a postponed flight shortly after I arrived at the airport. I rescheduled another flight for the next morning and anticipated on spending the night there since I didn't have a ride back to campus. Fortunately, I soon got a call from my friend, Shen Lin, who simply wanted to say goodbye but I told him about my dilemma so he kindly offered to give me a ride back to campus. I was so thankful.

Best of all, the international graduate house we called the "3333" was throwing an end-of-the-year party that evening so we had one more night to say all of our goodbyes. For that reason, I was glad my flight was postponed. It became a night I still remember as being quite sentimental because it was my last year at that college, spent with friends and experiences I'll never forget. As well, I had the chance to spend one last night with Emma, a young MBA student I had grown considerably close to over that past semester.

Upon meeting some familiar and new faces at the party, I also met a women who introduced herself to me as a scholar from China having been assigned to study in the law and philosophy department though her focus was medical based. She was only one of the many Chinese writers, teamed-up to work on a book about medical ethics. To describe her, I am guessing her age was about 40-years old, stood about 5'2" and spoke with a distinctively fragile and modest voice that only left me to listen and respond with the utmost respect in return. Though beneath her modesty, I could sense an enormous amount of wisdom, not to mention her previous position as a professor and her impressive degrees in law, medicine and philosophy...

She explained to me that her role in writing the collectively-built book was to find out what the American view on organ transplants pertained to. At which point, I learned that some seemingly simple medical ethics in developing parts of China were noticeably different from Americas'. This spurred medical leaders in China to send researchers like herself to learn more about these differences and in what practices they could adopt.

Basically, she expressed her impression of the American view towards organ transplants - specifically regarding whose decision should it be to offer or donate one's organ to another. And the general American consensus is that people should be given complete freedom to decide what hey want to do with their organs. I concurred with the American view but was surprised when the woman mentioned that it was different in China... I listened intently.

She explained that in some less developed regions of China, the idea of organ transplants required the consensus of the individuals' parents. While the parents and child were obligated to provide their organ to the counter-party if a surgical transplant was needed, the offering of an organ to a non-family member was actually frowned down upon. This was the part that perplexed me for a moment so I asked her why that was the case. She described how traditional views towards children is that, as a creation of their parents, their body is a reminiscent of their parents' and ancestors' bodies. To give away an organ to a non-family member without the consent of the parents was seen as a disrespectful act towards the family.

This is when recollections kicked in on the topics I learned at Berkeley and personal experiences as a Chinese-American. [CONTINUED...]

footnote:

Independent decision in America, same with most other things like studies and careers (my preference)

Shine some light on the western influences on myself

Difference between Chinese and English names (written order)