I re-watched the movie “17 again” with a couple of friends. There is this part in the movie where the main character came back to visit his old highschool (where he was the basketball star). The conversation started between him and a janitor. Somewhere in the middle the old janitor told him: “We all wanted to live in the past”.

I shrugged and imagined how would I ever think of my university life 5 (or even 1) years from graduation.
I regretted not to do something in middleschool when I got into high school.
I regretted not to live certain lifestyles in high school when I got into college.

It’s still my choice now to make the rest of my college life something unforgettable and unregrettable! (though I never regretted the best 1 year of my life spending in Sweden!)

People take parents, close friends for granted. They often make less effort to “please” / care for / think about them, as compared to new friends they’re making in the street.

Have you ever canceled a dinner with your closed friend for a meeting with a newly met (but potentially beneficial) one?

Or have you ever told your parents you’d be back home later than you promised them, just to hang out a little more with friends around?

I’ll leave Stockholm tomorrow.
This is it. One year passed in a blink.

You changed my life, NCST. You really did.

They say leave the best for last. I say live the best for every moment. I think I did.

So that’s it. Endless dinners, endless movie nights, endless parties, endless drunk moments, endless swears. It ends here. Jasvind walking skeleton, Amelia Liaoooooo, huiqiii, andrew ching ga ling ga ling, sankar the indian and the rest of batch 10. I’ll wait for you in Singapore in 5 months with a bottle of Vodka ok? Remember to SAY MY NAMEEEEEE

Had a wonderful dinner and bonfire with the rest of the team. That lasted and marked my last dinner in Lappis. My last moment to see Gamla, walking around Stockholm. OMG I love this place so much.

And I’ll take every moment and live it out loud. I know this is the time. This is the time more than a name or faces in the crowd i know this is the time this is the time of my life.

Business Plan competitions, if poorly executed, will dilute and change the perception of participants, mostly students, about running a successful startup.

I’ve seen by my own eyes 2 startups, won first and second prizes of a somewhat famous innovation award in Europe, collapse within 2 years.

Business plan competition, depending on how it is organized and tailored, may have very different impacts.
I was taking some entrepreneurship course a while back in which we were asked to write a full-flesh business plan. My team sent in our business plan to a famous national-level business plan competition. We were very excited to receive the feedback for the first few rounds. We brainstormed, made changes to the plan and submitted to the final round.
To our astounishing surprise, all the teams that are selected as finalist already have a company running!

Then what’s the point of that business plan competition? Why not just organize some VC-funding events?
And why do these companies apply for this competition? Free money.

You probably must have read a lot about what makes a startup successful. I am going to restate 1 of the most important factors: The team.
These business plan competitions, how could they examine the team factor. Judge through the individual CVs? That’s individual’s performance. The team’s working cohesiveness is something that only time could prove.

If we think along these lines, then i think a business plan competition is of little usefulness. The more useful things are incubation programs that seed funds small startups (like KTH innovation, NUS Incubator, YC or  NDRC Launchpad).

All these being said, it’s still good to participate in a business plan. You get to hear feedback from experts. You get to meet people that share the same dreams, and even better if you win, you’ll get some cash, maybe some funds to start your business.

Talking about winning competition. I also saw people who won some competition, and suddenly changed attitude over the night of competition – They think they are better (i.e. more talented) after winning the competition.

That doesn’t make any sense right? I mean, not like stock market, your intelligence/knowledge level can’t shoot over night, right? The only thing that changes is your own perception about your talent, being affected by external factors.

All and all, don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re talented when getting some prize over night. And be aware of business plan competition.

Until recently, I found out that is not true.

All those years, when I didn’t know what to write, it’s not because my limited literatur-istic” gene, it is because I didn’t have anything in mind to write. Reason: No reflection. No thinking-back. No synthesis thoughts.

That is the real problem. A big problem for me. Lucky that I found out.

Let me clear the misconception:

• If you are good at explaining, you should be good at writing.
• If you don’t know what to write (which is mostly the case for me – when it comes to writing report, blogging, all thing related), you weren’t observant / aware / clear about what happened, period. Nothing to do with your writing ability.

Maybe I’m taking the “good at writing” here literally. I’ve alway thought that “good at writing” is the ability to come up with flourish and lengthy things to add to your piece of essay, which, recently found out, is BSing.

The reason I had this misconception could date back to the 60s, during the time my Mom went to school. Her Literature teacher graded the essays by its length, using a unit of the maximum distance between the thumb and the middle finger when stretching the palm out. During my time, me and friends were usually (usually, not only) discussing how good the essay is in term of how many pages it filled. Same mentality, just that technology advanced a little bit.

I think there is no reason for anyone to not be good at explaining, if they are damn clear about the thing being explained. Someone might be better than someone else at explaining, but no one should be bad at it.

Again, I only realized this problem a couple of months back. For all those years, I’ve been looking at the wrong problem, thus has no solution in solving them. It is real dangerous had I not spotted this problem out.

So look back and reexamine your problems, are they really the real problems?

tl,dr: I found out I’m not good at explaning/writing because I wasn’t being observant / synthesis thinking, not because I can’t do BSing. It is important to spot out the real problem.

A reminder

Source: bitsofwisdom

We recently organized an TEDx conference. 1 requirement of the conference: each speaker is only given 18 minutes to speak. So we must put a count-down clock in front of the speakers to remind them how many minutes they have left.
And since we have no such specialized digital clock, I decided to write a small script to facilitate.

How the page looks like

Took me 30 mins to come up with the first version. Andrew took over and customize the script to allow specifying minutes and seconds through query string (thanks Andrew!)

You can try out the script here (though you might not see exactly in the picture since you don’t have the correct font): DS-Digital. You should try in the full-screen mode (keypress F11).

During the conference, we put the script in a 17″ computer facing the speaker and start it every time the speaker start his speech.

For those of you who are techie, you can download the source code (or you can just view source and see, it’s just some HTML, CSS and JS).

Thanks date.js, jquery, stackoverflow for the great help!

• 60 audience.
• 75 received applications (we even received 1 after the event ended)
• 480 live streaming audience.
• 400 gmail threads. 4000 emails sent among team members.
• Countless emails sent to sponsors, speakers, partners, publicity emails. Countless hours spent to correct every single details of the program, the template, the pdfs file, the sponsor kit, the speaker kit, etc.

I enjoyed every single second of it. Of course there were times I felt extremely low, stressed and busy.

Of course there are problems along the way. Lots of them. But I enjoyed facing these problems. It’s boring without problems, isn’t it?

For the first time in my life I become an MC of such a big program. I spent 2 days to prepare the MC script to end up not using most of them and speak from my own thoughts. That leads to a lot of “erm” “uhm”. I felt like I didn’t do that good as I thought I would. But I know that everyone enjoyed the commentary and the jokes I tried to come up with.

Some of the quotes that I could remember during the events:

If you are looking for sympathy, it’s in the dictionary – Bhavik Gandhi

We are all given a gold coin everyday. You are free to do whatever you want but it’s non-refundable. How would you want to spend your gold coin today? – Chrissy Phoong

This one is a complement by one of our BoA members:
I’ve never met so professional students in my life and I’ve been in the marketing profession for 10 years. You guys are amazing. Wow! – Richard Gatarski

I have only 1 little hope: our speakers would be invited to speak at TED.

And the thought has been bothering me throughout the last 4 months: how to bring TEDx to Vietnam?

It’s a TEDx conference that me and 8 other friends have been working really hard for the last 4 months. And next Tuesday will say it all. All our efforts spent in 4 months will be presented in 1 day, no, 1 afternoon…

For the first time in my life I’ll be the MC for such program… gosh I don’t have a very good suit…

Anyway, we have livestreaming for the event. So if you are not in Stockholm but want to listen to the talks (and you should!), catch the livestream next next Tuesday 15/06/2010, 6PM Vietnam time or 7PM Singapore time.

It turns out that this is a very interesting problem to think about.

Assuming the McChicken is better than the cheeseburger (1.5 EUR to 1 EUR). If you’re “enjoy first, suffer later” kind, you eat the McChicken first. If you’re the “suffer then enjoy” kind, it’s the other way round. Simple.

But if we look at it in another way. We know that your appetite is dependent on your hungry level. The more hungry the more appetite you have. So if I eat the cheeseburger first, I’ll feel half-full after eating, and that makes the McChicken less delicious. But if I eat the McChicken first, the burger will taste even worse. Which one should I eat first?

Then I recalled a TED talk I watched the other day, the speaker talks about experiencing memory and remembering memory. The idea is when recalling an experience, the last event plays a very important role in your impression (ending of a movie, last performance of a show, etc).
Which mean if I eat the McChicken later, I’ll probably have a better impression on the meal since my mouth will have better aftertaste. Which one should I eat first?

When I told my friends, they just said “huy, so complicated. just eat it.”

I ate the McChicken first in the end.