A couple of weeks ago I’d met up with a friend I hadn’t talked to for over a decade. He used to be an instructor at the martial arts school I’d taught at. Read about my opinions about that in my bio.

We’re both writers and we’d talked about writing the story that calls to us. With all the vampiric stories that are being churned both in the publishing and film industry, I don’t blame people for jumping on the band wagon.  But the point of being an artist is to express your soul.  And if your soul says write a vampire story, then write a vampire story.

When it comes to finding out what you want to do with your life, what story should be written, what path you should take, you need to be honest with yourself.  How do you be honest with yourself?

First of all, are you honest with other people? I’m not talking about being a saint, never telling lies, never doing anything wrong. Were human. But do you care about what other people say about you? Do care about what other people think about you? Do you put all your stock in your status in life?

Why is this important?

Because any of this, namely your ego, can block your true self.  You become motivated by the things that seem important–the size of your house, the German car in your massive garage, the name brand clothes you wear, the title of your job, bottled water.  Do these things matter?  That’s for you to decide.  Do they matter when it comes toexpressing yourself honestly? No.

When I went to the San Francisco Writers Conference, Richard Paul Evans, one of the keynote speakers said something that really hit home. Especially since he’s a New York Times bestselling author.  He said write your truth.  Don’t hop on the bandwagon. Don’t be a follower.  Lead by leading.

Bruce Lee said the same thing. Honestly express yourself.

Look at the things that you’re drawn to.  Do you love music?  Any particular kind?  Try that out.  Do you love software programming?  Try that out.  Do you love selling?  If you have an affinity for houses, maybe you should be a real estate agent.  Or if you love helping people get healthier, maybe you should try physical therapy, personal training, nursing.

Is there a common theme that runs throughout your life?

For me, I’ve always loved stories.  And I always loved fantasizing, putting myself in action movie roles, imagining what it would be like to be betrayed by a close friend, finding myself in a fantasy land where I’m a warlord.  Since my sophomore year, I’ve tried to write novels.  But when it came to deciding a major in college, I never thought of majoring in English or creative writing.  Why?  I’m not sure.  Maybe the things I had to go through as a person lent itself to writing the series of novels that I’m writing now.

I’m not angry about it.  Nor do I judge it.  I realize that I have stories to be told, and I’m telling them.

The hero of the 7th Province has a choice.  He either rebels against his close friend and former mentor, or join him in taking over the world.  Each choice ends in war.  That’s a tough place to be.  Is there a correct choice?  For the hero I’m not sure.  As a writer, the choices that each character makes, ultimately mine, is a crap shoot.

I love that.

Even though I’ve plotted my whole novel, each day I wrote brought new discoveries and challenges that made me giddy.  I’m never sure how things were to happen.  I just know they had to happen.  As a result, writing my fantasy was a huge adventure.

Is rebelling bad?

I have a secret.  It’s one of my favorite things about myself.  I don’t get along well with authority figures.  That doesn’t bode well since my day job is encrusted in a corporate empire.  The funny thing is they have a lot of propaganda that emphasizes their business values.  I won’t get into the hypocrisy of it.

Is rebelling not a good thing?

A parent tells a child to kiss Uncle Louie.  Child scrunches her little face and shakes her head.  Parents eggs the child on, saying Uncle Louie loves the child.  Child pouts her lips, turns, runs toward her parent’s leg, and grasps with all her might.  Parent gets upset, unhinges the child, pushes her to Uncle Louie, and forces her to kiss him on the cheek.  (I credit this example to my best friend.)

Is this wrong?

Hell yeah.

The parent just took the child’s power away, forced her to kiss a strange man, despite her not wanting to.  If Uncle Louie were a child molester, the parent just punched a large hole in the child’s ability to resist the attack.  In the child’s mind love is associated with force.  And we wonder why some women stay with men who batter them.

What if the child was just being a brat?

Firm discipline should take place.  You decide what firm is.  That’s different in each culture, society, family and individual.  But in the example above, the child is not being a brat.

Teaching a lot of adolescent kids made me realize one thing.  Almost every single one exerts their own independence.  Every parent exerts their control in an attempt to guide them.  It’s the nature of the ocean, the ebb and flow.  Parents think their kids are being a pain in the ass.  Offsprings think their parents are being assholes.  What more could you ask for in a relationship?

Think of a pendulum searching for their own center.

Parents often ask me to infect a behavioral change.  But that’s an impossible task.  All I can do is mentor them without limitation.  Tom Cruise taught me that.

He was on Inside the Actor’s Studio.  A great show by the way.  He said that his mother never limited him in what he did.  She was watchful, but allowed him to explore the world.  Now he’s some actor making at least twenty million dollars per movie, chump change.

As you sit in your day job, and if it’s not the place you want to be, then what are you doing about it?

See part 1 to this article.

One of the main character arcs that I deal with in my book is letting go.  In spiritual circles letting go means allowing things to come into our lives.  Allowing the things we want to manifest.  Letting go in the context of personal loss allows us to move on, to continue to live and not live in the past.  You see this a lot in cases of lost love or family death.  People tend to look at pictures or read letters of the past.

I think they’re trying to console themselves.  In the immediate moment after the incident it can help.  But if people do this after a significant time has gone by is it healthy?  And what is a significant time?  To a fruit fly whose lifespan is a day, then a few minutes could be pretty damn significant.

In UP by Pixar Carl has to deal with a difficult loss and broken promise.  It’s pretty evident that he can’t move on.  Life all around him represented by high-rise development is being built, life moving forward.  He just sits on his porch all day and sulks.

Then comes a little chubby Asian boy who helps show him the way.  His name is Russell.  Side note…

The movie never states the Asian boy’s last name, so I assume by his slanty eyes and straight black hair that he’s Asian.  Even IMDB has no last name on the chubby boy.  And if he is Asian, man, the boy speaks Engrish good.  I mean he speaks English well.  The writers had the forethought not to put an Asian accent with the Asian boy.  How revolutionary.

In both my book and UP the two concepts of letting go, which is really one, is dealt with.  Because in life you must let go if you are to create what it is you want.  You must let go if you are to move forward.  Isn’t that what we all want?

How do you let go?

I wrote a little about this in my Feel the Anger.

Should there be a mourning period?  Of course.  I think it’s unhealthy not to have one.  But what should it be filled with?

I’ve fallen in love many times.  Deeply.  When those relationships ended, even by my own doing, the pain that followed ripped through me.  I cannot describe how much the pain tore me up, how it made my life impossible to live.  Most of you who’ve loved and lost know.  It sucks.

Aside from filling my time with the good memories of my past girlfriends, I spent a lot of time learning from my mistakes.  I read books, observed other relationships, scrutinize my current behavior to see if I lived in the past or moved toward my future.  I took an honest view of my mistakes.

One of the things I did wrong was wanting to be right all the time.  That it was important to be right.  Another words, my ego got in my way.  Whether I was right or not wasn’t important.  My girlfriend had to understand my point of view.  Because, damn it, my point of view was important.  It’s the source of my happiness.  Well…

I’m the source of my happiness.

The only person who should care about my point of view is me.

Everyone has their own point of view, but it matters little to me.  I cannot be responsible for their happiness.  They can’t be responsible for my happiness.  We as individuals are responsible for our own happiness.

It is here that we find empowerment.

Had I truly learned this, at least half the arguments would have disappeared.

The sad thing is most live through other people’s eyes.  It is the source of so much conflict.

Isn’t the meaning of life to be happy?

Being able to move forward can definitely facilitate that as UP shows us with humor.  The end of the movie shows that when we let go we get what we want and more.  Watch it as it teaches an important lesson.

To rebel or not rebel.  That is the question.

The hero in my book is confronted with a choice.  His close friend and former mentor wants to brutally take over the world.  The hero is given the safe and easy position of being the right hand man.  Doing so would kill tens of thousands of lives through war.  Rebelling against his mentor would kill tens of thousands of lives through war.  Probably more.  Nice choice, huh?

I was watching a documentary called Slanted Screen. It chronicled the stereotypical and racial barriers Asian actors have to go through and endure in order to be successful in Hollywood.  I enjoyed the documentary, but I have a serious problem with it.  More on that later.

The main message was rebel.

One of the main reasons Asians are not seen as much in Hollywood is that acting, singing, dancing, the arts, are not considered practical choices of occupation.  I know.  My family detested my decision to study acting, and at times isn’t the most positive when it comes to my success in writing.

Actor Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa has been in tons of movies such as Mortal Kombat, Rising Sun with Sean Connery and  Wesley Snipes, and in upcoming movie Tekken.  The list is just huge.  He said something that I connect to.  If your heart is in the arts, and your family doesn’t support it, then don’t listen to your family.

Rebel.

I think too much in life we succumb to the norm.  Afraid of marching to our own drummer.  Wary of listening to our hearts let alone follow it.

I wrote a post about themillion dollar question. It asked, if you were guaranteed to make a million dollars a year, what would you do?  Does it match the work you’re doing now?  If not, can you spend an hour a day, five days a week on it?  If that’s too much time, then reduce it to 45 minutes a day, five days a week.  Or 30 minutes, five days a week.  Four days.  Three.  Just start.

What happens, if you truly love it, or like it, is you’ll naturally spend more time on it.  You’ll sacrifice precious things like hours talking shit in the bar, or watching television.  Have your own vision.  It happened to me.  I started writing around five hours a week.  Then it grew to ten.  Suddenly, I was spending an average of 15 hours a week writing.  I loved it.

We all have bills.  We have to eat.  Take care of our families.  Have laundry that we have to wash on the rocks by the river bed.  After we clothespin the laundry on the clothesline, what do we do?  We sit down on the couch and watch TV.  We watch reality TV.  Watch others chase, attack their dreams.  We see a lot of them succeed.  Then we go to bed, sleep, wake up the next morning, and start the circle all over again.

This is called complaining, playing the victim, blaming things outside of ourselves, when it is us who stopped us from chasing our dreams initially.  And that was the problem with Slanted Screen.  A lot of people interviewed said being Asian made it hard to succeed in Hollywood.  Really?

Have you heard of a small guy namedBruce Lee?

Rebel.

Last post I asked how does someone know if they’ve chosen their right passion(s), be it vocation, hobby, career, etc. For everyone it’s going to be different. Some will tear up at the thought, others are ecstatic and jump right in, and when they do time flies by without notice.

For me, all of the above were true. But there was one other indication. I’m not a disciplined person. Motivation is not my specialty. What I’ve learned to do is to allow things to happen. Once I found my love of the 7^th Province, I wrote an average of fifteen hours a week. It was a driving force. No matter how tired, how busy my normal life became, or what was going on in my life, it carried me. There were days I felt like a robot, driving to Borders, setting my laptop up, getting my coffee, taking a moment, and diving right in.

I was never this disciplined in school!

Ultimately, there should be a high level of happiness, content, peace, fulfillment, serenity. A certain silence or calmness can be felt mentally, physically and spiritually.  And there may even be a sense of urgency to jump right in.

Think about children at play. They think nothing of time, parents, cleanliness, safety, or anything that would get in the way of their fun. Master artists can only match the joy in children’s eyes, the pleasure in their laughter and their elation in their imagination. Have a childlike quality in life and explore.

If you’ve read my bio, I went through different passions in my life. I became aware of what worked for me and what didn’t.  There were things that I did just for fun, and there were things I had to do in order to find what I loved.  It’s been said many times.  Life is a marathon not a sprint.

Just be highly aware of your likes and dislikes, be aware of your fears and work through them. Humans are born with two real fears, height and predators. Any other fear is a hallucination.

Brad Pitt. A friend on mine told me a story about him. We were talking about how we’re surrounded by people who’ve not only chased their dreams, but have achieved them. What most people don’t see is their perseverance. Pitt had dropped out of college, moved to the city of angels, did a lot of odd jobs like wearing a chicken suit to promote El Pollo Loco for years, before he landed his first major roll in Thelma & Louise. Now he’s one of the biggest movie stars in the world.

There was a study done on a high school class. The study followed late into their adult lives. It found those who stuck to one career path had earned and attained more than their combined classmates who didn’t. This story has floated around the self-help industry for many years, and is rumored to be just a folk tale. But its prevalence tells us a truth.

I was talking to a friend, and she’d reconnected with one of her long time classmates who works for Coke. This person is about ten years younger than I, but has climbed much higher on the corporate ladder. I’d always moved from job to job. She’s worked for Coke since high school, about eight years now, and illustrates an important point about consistency.

A few years ago, I went to a Renaissance Faire. I love them. My girlfriend at the time and I were watching a turtle race. Each person would place bets on a turtle of their choice. The race started. Contestants yelled and screamed, urging their turtle to crawl faster. One turtle, slow and steady, made great headway and was literally one step away from crossing the finish line. Then it stopped with one foot stuck in the air. All it had to do was place the foot down, and, bam, it won. It just froze. Another turtle from behind took the win.

So what’s the point? Once you find your passion in life, follow through with it. Whether success is truly overnight—it does happen—or takes time, love the process. If you love to act, go into every audition and act! If you love to work on projects for your company, or love reaching sales goals, go in every day and love working.

For the process is really what we love. The goals matter little. Why? Well what happens once an actor becomes a huge movie star like Pitt? What happens to the sales executive who reaches their ultimate sales goal? They continue to act, continue to sell, continue their work. All of them display a high level of dedication (knowing what they want), focus (loving what they do), and take each step toward their dreams (doing what they love).

Love your work. The goal will come.

One of the things I indirectly explore in my fantasy is age. I was out with some friends the other night and one of the girls harped on my age, worried I’d be the oldest. Among the group, I was the oldest. I’m thirty six. It’s a freakin’ number. Mentally I feel real good. Physically I feel fantastic. Spiritually, I feel present when I want to be. I’m still learning. Maturity wise, I’m in my early teens. I laugh at farts. I crack up at groin shots in movies. I tell jokes no one ever gets. Or if they do they don’t want to let me know cuz it’ll show how imature they are. It’s part of my sensibility.

One thing I don’t do is think about my age. I love writing my book, working on this website, fantasizing about my stories, watch almost half of the movies that are released, including the crappy ones. I do things that I love, I eat healthy six days out of the week, exercise 4 days a week, and laugh as much as possible.

This, to me, is how to be ageless.

Stop thinking about it and delve into what you love. For age IS a number, never a state of mind or a place in your life. There are teenagers in the world who are millionaires. Who’s to say they can’t be because they’re so young?

Don’t place limits on yourself because of age.

Look at all that Bruce Lee has accomplished. He graduated from Washington University. He started a small chain of martial arts schools. Got married and had two kids. Developed a philosophy of martial arts that is still prevalent today. Did some tv acting. Through that he became a huge movie star in Asia that gave him the opportunity to star in a Hollywood movie when most industry leaders said he’d never make it as a leading man in America. He’d published several books. All this and more was accomplished by the age of 32.

Don’t focus on your age. It doesn’t matter. Do what you love, and love what you do. And if you allow it, everything else will fall info place.