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and being shot up via a giant slingshot. I would have missed out on many thrilling adventures if I wasn’t able to drown out the self-doubt and overcome my fears. You’ve probably been through a similar first-time roller coaster experience. Or perhaps you’ve once talked yourself out of asking someone out, because you let your self-doubt convince you that you were not good enough. And if you add your self-doubt to the doubt from your haters and peers, then you have a recipe for failure.
    Curiosity may have killed the cat, but we’re humans and not cats. So be curious and ambitious, and take risks. You don’t know how many things you are missing out on by fearing the unknown. As long as you plan accordingly to keep yourself afloat in case your ambitions fail, you will be fine. And even if your ambitions do fail, it is not truly a failure. You will learn from it and grow as a person.
     
    Lifehack #2: Failure is not defeat.
    There have been many people in history who were deemed as failures in the beginning. When rapper Eminem first rapped at a club, he was booed. He admitted years later that he almost quit rapping after that night because it was both extremely traumatizing and embarrassing. He was also a high school dropout who nearly died from overdosing on drugs. And he attempted suicide because he couldn’t deal with the drug habit and poverty.
    The Beatles were infamously rejected by Decca Records when they first auditioned for the record label. In regards to their rejection, the Decca Records explained, “Guitar groups are on the way out… the Beatles have no future in show business.” They would later greatly regret that decision.
    At a young age, Walt Disney was fired from his job at the Kansas City Star Newspaper company because his boss thought he lacked creativity. He later acquired his own animation studio called Laugh-O-Gram, where he hired a vast number of animators. However, the studio profits were not enough to cover the salaries paid to the employees and his studio went bankrupt. But that did not stop him. He later started a studio in Hollywood, CA and the rest was history.
    As you can see, failing is not necessarily the same as defeat. It is more of a delay to your eventual success. If you try to shoot a 3-pointer in basketball, you may fail the first few tries. But eventually, with enough practice, you will succeed.
    True failure is never getting started in the first place.
    “Don't fear failure. — Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts, it is glorious even to fail.”
    – Bruce Lee

 
     
     
    3 Something from Nothing
     
    With nothing but the shirt on his back, my father, in his late twenties, moved from Hong Kong to the United States in the 1970s. Back then, the United States was very welcoming of refugees and gave my father a green card after two years of living there. He eventually got citizenship after living there for seven years.
    When he first moved to the U.S., my father was so poor that he resorted to sleeping at a YMCA. His living situation was basically a mattress among numerous other mattresses on the ground of a large dorm room. It was as close to homelessness as you could get without actually being homeless.
    But despite his poverty, he still had dreams of obtaining a better life for himself and his future family. He figured that he could do so by putting his skills at administering herbal medicine to good use in the United States.
    Since he was not formally educated on administering herbal medicine, he would spend whatever extra money he had earned on medical books. He owned shelves upon shelves of herbalist medical books. Eventually, he co-founded with his older brother an herbalist drugstore in New York City’s Chinatown. That was also where he met my mother through a mutual friend and got married.
    My mother also came from the slums. She and her family lived in the government projects in Hong Kong and had to borrow money to come to the United States in