Author Archives: alifeofknuckleballs
How do I convince people of my purposes, ideas and motivations?
(Originally sought out to answer this question on Quora.)
Original question:
How do I convince people of my purposes, ideas and motivations? What are your experiences in this subject? And how do I deal with this problem, especially when I have difficulty speaking?
Well, the experience I have in regards to this is when I first became an English instructor.
I got a job in a private college in Vancouver, Canada, teaching English to international students from countries such as Korea, Japan, Mexico, and Brazil. Initially, there were students from one particular country who complained to the director of the school, saying I wasn’t a “native speaker” because I looked Asian.
The director told me this and gave me a chance to prove myself to those students. I demonstrated to the students through my teaching that I was knowledgeable in English, I answered their grammar questions correctly without any hesitation, and over time they saw that I was a legitimate instructor.
I ended up being an English instructor for over nine years before switching careers.
The key is to have confidence, prove to the intended audiences your ability, and do not waver. I was not intimidated; yes, my skin colour was not what the students wanted as an ideal teacher. I perhaps had a slight accent – though not much, I would say – but in front of them I behaved professionally, made jokes with them, and had confidence. In the end, I was able to convince them I was the right person for the job.
I should also say that prior to this teaching job, I did not have any experience in public speaking. Perhaps I was not that great in my first few lessons. I remember the days when I was in high school and university where I didn’t talk much because I was very shy. I had a hard time talking to strangers, so I did have difficulty with speaking with people. But when I found out how much those students hated me – because of my skin colour – I became motivated and I was confident. I overcame any shyness or any hesitation that I had had before, and went out there to prove them wrong. Therefore, I would say that other than confidence, you need to have the proper motivation to handle this.
What 5 rules would help me become successful if I applied them to my life?
(Originally posted on Quora)
Original Question:
Psychology: What 5 rules would help me become successful if I applied them to my life? I’m not looking for specifics such as brush your teeth, I’m looking for more interesting principles that can be applied to a variety of situations.
Here are the top five rules to help you succeed:
1. Compare yourself with yourself, not with your friends / neighbours / colleagues. It simply isn’t worth your time to compare what you have and your results to what other people have and have accomplished. There are always going to be people ahead of you, no matter what. That doesn’t mean you’re not good enough. What it means is you should be focusing on yourself and on your own accomplishments. How have you improved compared to a year ago today? How will you continue to improve next week? What will you do so that you can be even better five years from today?
2. Learn how to be a good conversationalist. One rule that many people believe in for starting a conversation is you have to appear friendly. Don’t try to impress people right away when you start the conversation. What you want to do is show you’re a relaxed, friendly, sociable person who wants to have a pleasant chat.
One skill to keep in mind in being a good conversationalist is the ability to ask open-ended questions (not the simple “yes” or “no” questions but the ones where the other person has to give long answers). Also, you sound boring if you are asking typical questions like “What do you do?” or “Where do you work?” Ask different types of questions.
One of my bosses once taught me that you pay attention to the person’s interests so that you can build a rapport when you start a conversation. For example, before a job interview, he reads through the candidate’s resume and perhaps notices a certain hobby that the person has. During the interview, this boss would make the candidate feel relaxed by asking about that hobby and make the conversation interesting and not stressful.
3. Do not be afraid of failure. Actually, don’t even call it “failure.” Instead, label it as feedback and as a natural part of a successful life. Even the most successful people in the world have had their fair share of “failures” (oops I meant “feedback”) but they always keep bouncing back and try to learn from those experiences.
As former NBA great Michael Jordan once said: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career… Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
The important thing is to find valuable lesson learned every time you didn’t succeed in something. Ask yourself: What can I learn from this?
4. Always try to learn new things to improve yourself. There are always new skills and knowledge you can learn through the Internet. Instead of focusing on time-wasting habits (such as too many hours on video games / iPhone games / gossiping / TV shows), spend more time to pick up new things. You never know, these might be helpful when you are applying for a job. Let’s say the interviewer looks at the resumes of you and three other candidates, and all of you seem to have the exact same educational background and experience. If you have a certain skill that other candidates don’t, that might set you apart from the others if everything else is equal.
5. Know what you want and work toward achieving it. I’ll use career as an example, although this can apply to other areas such as relationships. But let’s focus on career here. The reality is that you have to take responsibility for your own professional development. Nobody is going to help you on your path toward your career goal, except for yourself. So, it’s up to you to understand what you want, why you want it, and be prepared to take action to make it happen. Don’t be passive about it or the opportunities will be missed.
Good luck!
What advice would you give to young adults about success?
(Originally posted on Quora)
Original Question:
What advice would you give to young adults about success: defining it, achieving it, etc?
There are a few things that are crucial for one to achieve success:
- Understand what it is you want out of life – only you can answer that – and set goals to achieve them
- Find a few good mentors who are willing to help you with advice on your career, and keep regular contact with them – I call this your personal board of directors
- Invest your time wisely; try to learn new things or ways to improve yourself, whether it’s languages or software skills, etc.
- Realize that other people’s definition of “success” will be different from yours, so do not attempt to follow others’ models of success
- Attend networking workshops if you can, to meet and mingle with people who might connect you with a job that leads to your career, and perhaps find mentors at the same time
- Avoid being around negative people because they may influence you into negative thoughts by their constant negativity
As for defining what success is, again, that goes to what you want to accomplish in life and it is something you might need to spend some time thinking about. It very well could be simple things such as having a positive mindset, being passionate about your work but not letting it stress you out, having a tough skin, taking care of yourself, seeing other points of views and not just your own, knowing how much money you need every month, etc.
However, that is up to you to decide. 🙂
When you are looking at product or restaurant reviews, which ones do you read and why?
(Originally posted on Quora)
Original Question:
When you are looking at product or restaurant reviews, which ones do you read and why? Do you only read the 1-star reviews? The 5-star reviews? The ones in the middle? All of them? Why?
For restaurants, I tend to read all of them but I start with the 1-star reviews to see if there is a pattern in terms of what people complain about for a particular establishment. If multiple reviewers have similar complaints about that same restaurant, then I will tend to ignore the higher-star reviews. Too many poor reviews would be a red flag for me and I would not want to visit that establishment if I have never been there.
Unfortunately, for some reason I don’t follow the same principle when it comes to product reviews. Several years ago, I saw numerous poor reviews on Amazon for a camera of a specific brand. I chose to ignore those reviews and bought it. Sure enough, that camera had the exact same defects that others had mentioned about.
I think the difference, though, is that with restaurants, you probably want to give them the benefit of the doubt since you don’t know, let’s say it was poor service, if that came on a night when they were short-staffed. Perhaps on other days, the service is way better. You just ever know. For consumer products, on the other hand, it’s probably more clear-cut. Somehow I have been doing it backwards when it comes to restaurants vs. consumer goods, hence my little situation with the camera.
Customer Service: Why is it important for a business to have quality customer service?
(Originally posted on Quora)
Nowadays, we all have a tendency to want to post bad customer service replies online for everyone to see, whether it’s taking screen shots and publishing it on blogs and whatnot, or tweeting about the poor service we received. There are even websites that rate companies in terms of the services they provide, giving them scores and letter grades (like A, B, C, etc.)!
Furthermore, with people having more and more choices with the advent of online stores and also doing a lot of comparison shopping, if prices are more or less the same, shoppers would be more willing to give their money to stores and business that treat customers well.
Given the number of choices we have as consumers, every little detail matters. Even things like taking too long to respond to inquiries reflect poor service. Here is one example I will provide below, where I finally received a reply from this particular company’s customer service department more than a week after I emailed them:
Hello KP,
We apologize for the long wait for a response to your inquiry. Due to a perfect storm of higher than expected support case volume combined with spring break in our local schools and a debilitating illness circulating through our office we are quite behind in response times.
As it has been more than 5 days since you submitted your request, you may have already found a solution and moved on; however, if you are still in need of assistance, please reply to this email and we will respond within 3 business days.
…
I found the response to be unbelievable on many levels, but yet thought it was amusing too.
If businesses do not provide quality customer service, they will find that customers will be willing to go elsewhere.,,, unless their prices are significant lower than their competitors’. If one does have to wait more than 8 business days to get a proper response, then yes, companies will find that the potential customers may indeed “move on.” 🙂
k. p. wee 