Cease

With feathered quill
of moonlit verse
i’ll betray you
again
as i rewrite
your sunrise.

you cease.

my pen strokes
inhale your breath
osculate you invisible,
my ink
devours you.

We can stand still

It’s okay to feel stuck every once in a while.

It’s okay to not know what the next step is.

It’s okay to get in touch with your emotions.

That’s where humans are different from machines.

We can stand still.

Machines cannot.

A machine has to run all the time. If it’s not working, it needs to be fixed.

Humans don’t have to run all the time. We can stand still.

In reality we have to stand still every once in a while.

Because if we don’t, we will break down.

Eventually..

Jazz

some days I want to
fly to California
with an aching in my heart
like Jimmy Page
singing on his acoustic
in the rain
but when the sun is bursting with love

that feeling only lasts for a day or two
a masturbatory moment
of ecstasy
then I crawl under the dark bridge
where the rock fusion rolling stones
set up in the corner
and rehearse

that sad sad song
melancholy drums and woeful guitar
brings me down
down down down

to swim in that blue stream
of broken notes and keys
that sound like fragments
of a guitarist mind.

Isolation

I left
the windshield wipers
on
and sniveled
to my heart

passing shadows
saw rivulets of raindrops
trickling down the glass

I was the center
in my storm of isolation.

Just show up

It’s easy.

Easy to NOT stick to a plan and be consistent.

Easy to NOT be on attack at all times.

It’s easy to complain and make excuses.

To worry too much about your losses.

It’s easy to just say,

“That’s the best I can do.”

Until you realize that you’re 100-FUCKING-% in charge of your life.

And instead of crying about the way you want it to be, you can react to the way it actually is.

You have to accept yourself and go all in on yourself.

No one else is going to do it for you. Ever.

And when you’ve done that, just show up everyday.

Show up everyday and work your ass off.

And then do it again tomorrow.

And the day after that.

And after that.

It takes nothing more, but more importantly, nothing less.

Hoping and dreaming will result in nothing.

Executing against your skills is how you get it.

Just show up.

And work.

No, you don’t

You don’t have to be the next Steve Jobs.

You don’t have to create a billion dollar company.

You don’t have to become a scientist.

Or a doctor.

Or a mechanic.

Or live in a fancy house.

Or buy a Ferrari.

You just have to be YOU.

And be self-aware.

And bet on your strengths.

You might be the next Steve Jobs.

You might create a billion dollar company.

And some of you might become scientists.

But most of us won’t.

And that’s perfectly fine.

As long as you know who YOU are and you try everything you can to do YOUR thing.

If it’s easy

We all want easy.

We all want the same thing. The easy thing. And the greatness of doing that thing is split among everyone wanting that thing.

Until there’s no greatness left in it.

Only mediocrity.

Mediocrity is the death of human potential.

When everyone wants the same, easy thing, our stories become the same.

And when our stories become the same, we all become the same.

We lose our uniqueness.

A great story told once is amazing.

A great story told over and over again is boring as fuck.

So next time when you find yourself thinking what to do, think about your story.

Think what will happen to it if it’s easy..

lakeside

down by the lake by the trees
where everybody goes to be alone
where you won’t see
the rising sun
down to the end we will run.

I can tell from your eyes
you’ve been by the lakeside
last night
to clear your head
or listen to your mind
in the air
as thin as the crescent moon.

you’re more than
just the piano dust
resting pitifully against the keys
and though it ticked feverishly
beneath your silk palms,
you dared not answer those red wires.

what happened wasn’t so bad
and though the past
is dead
yet somehow, we’re static,
the soul’s still not buried
but eventually
as the time goes by
and we near
the end
the shadows might
settle over
leaving only the memories
behind.

I love to fail

So it’s been more than a month since Spring Break passed, and with planIt, we were expecting that many TCU students will travel using the website and get started with creating trips online.

Guess what?

That didn’t happen.

We put out great social media content for over a month, used yard signs for advertising throughout the campus, and sent out emails to signed up members. Not one person gave a single shit about it.

Clearly, we’re doing something wrong. But what is it?

After thinking (too much) about it, this is what I came up with:

First, we aren’t getting the message across clearly. People are still doubtful on what is it and how it works.

Second, let’s say you go somewhere on spring break, so you need to return back too, and that’s highly unlikely to happen since the number of users is so limited on the website as of now.

In short, we failed. But not really.

I’ll be the first one to admit, it sucks. It sucks big time when you work your ass off on something that you HOPE people are going to use and they literally say, “Screw you.” But it’s okay. Not the end of the world.

This is just a micro-failure. It is recoverable. Just one of the few micro-battles that we lost. But what’s important is that we tried it.

Personally, I love to fail. Or at least trying to fail. There’s this struggle you have to go through when you’re trying something new, and chances are, 99.99% of the times you’re going to fail. And I love that struggle. That struggle alone has taught me most of what I’ve known about anyone or anything. When you’re in that struggle phase, you deal with things you never expected to face. So you throw yourself in this unknown territory where nothing is black or white but all gray and unclear. And there you take the most practical approach available to humankind.

Try. Fail. Learn. Repeat.

People ask me how I’m good at writing being a non-writing major, or how do we win business competitions with having zero background in it. Here’s a fun fact: for my first 100 posts or so, no one gave a shit about this blog. I’d post, and one or two random people bored on the internet would read it and not even say anything about it. At that time, it looked like I failed, but what that really was just micro-failing in order to get better at writing and learning how to use different platforms to reach out to more people. Same with business competitions, or any other aspect that I’ve spent time on.

Nothing valuable comes fast.

It takes time to build something out of nothing. Whether you’re trying to make your app work, or learning how to swim, or being great at basketball, it’s not going to happen overnight. All those micro-failures will one day result in your macro-win. You just have to know where you want to be and do the dirty work to get there.

With planIt, we want to create a social transportation network, where people utilize empty seats in their cars to make traveling easier for people looking for cheap alternative to get somewhere. This comes with a lot of dirty work to be done. And a whole lot more micro-failures. But that’s fine. If not in the first round, we will win the game in second, or the last round, but we’ll keep on trying.

Even if we lose the game, it’ll definitely make one hell of a story.

What it takes to get started

Nothing.

Not a thing.

Not money.
Not an office.
Not an expensive camera.
Or the newest laptop.
Or an investor.
Or a microphone.
Or rich parents.

You just need one simple thing.

You need to start.

And then, you should never stop.
Ever. Again.

Whatever happens, never.

And if this one thing doesn’t work out, do your next thing.
And the next. And the next.

Learn your lessons. Get back up again. Dust off your shoulders.
And don’t give up.

Until one day one thing works out.
Until it all finally starts to make sense.

Until the small pieces start to make a beautiful picture.
The picture that was there all this time but you just couldn’t see it, yet.

And that’s it.

That’s all it takes.