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When you go to a concert
You're there to listen to the music
The Musicians are there to entertain you.
Nothing Else
I am the same way
I am simply here to provide you with knowledge and perspective
of individuals about what it takes to live alone.
I want to make clear that this is a conceptual speech
and not necessarily a step by step manual
so open your minds
broaden your perspective and enjoy
I am an entertainer
i want to start off by asking you what made you sit here today
Do you need to move out?
Have you moved out?
Or are you just simply curious?
This is important because I want to view this presentation from a
particular perspective
And here it is.
Remember the last time you had an argument with your parents.
And remember the last time that involve you,
making a threat
to move out of the house
Now have you actually imagined this?
Considered it?
perhaps even planned it?
And then succeeded. Hi,
My name is Abraham Kim
And this is my story
You See
I am like most of you, going through the public school system.
Elementary, middle, highschool, then college.
But then I came back, you see
I went to a four year university, for a year, before I came to this community college
why?
Because I wanted to get away from my parents and their
constant nagging and pressure for me to do well in school.
but of course the culture barrier made it hard for me to communicate with them.
So I didn't understand what education was for.
I didn't see it as a privilege but
saw it as a duty that I had to fulfill otherwise I would have life repercussions.
I didn't think about my knowledge
or the career
but instead the grades that I had to sustain in order to satisfy my parents.
So I felt trapped.
And I wanted to escape.
So when I got to the university, I felt this unfamiliar sense of freedom
But no consideration of responsibility.
So at the end of the year,
I ended up with a mediocre GPA
A huge debt
and 15 more pounds on my body.
But most importantly,
I didn't know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
So I took a year off.
I spent full time working at my father's martial arts academy and I experienced life without school.
but I wanted it
I learned a lesson
more valuable than any textbook can offer
At our academy,
uh... a newcomer can't become a student automatically they have to go through a set of trials
and why do we do this? For two reasons, number one
it's for the academy to learn about the student
and number two, for the student to learn about the academy.
and when the academy looks at the student, we look for three things,
number one, is their interest level.
how much they like it
and number two is their learning ability.
how well they can learn martial arts.
and number three, is their behavior
the relationship between other students
and their instructors.
now our classes are hard, they follow a military culture and etiquette. Yes sir, mam, are taught to the students.
and these are ages from five to thirteen.
of course we've had students that were too young,
too old,
kids with ADD, ADHD
and yet, these kids are willing to commit
for more than not months or weeks, but years.
one to five year in order to get what? A belt?
A trophy?
Now let's go back to the three things the school looks for
interest level, learning ability,
and behavior.
Can you guess which one is the most important?
The desire
The want is what makes the student. That is what we look for the most.
And so these kids are willing to commit
but who knew? That I, the instructor
Didn't learn my own lesson.
I didn't have my own trophy
I needed to find my own belt, my own desire,
my own want.
So at the end of the year,
I knew what I wanted to do.
and that's to go back to school.
Now what the trouble was,
my father and I got into a disagreement about how I should spend my next year.
With my academic history, he thought it would be more appropriate to not go back to school,
but travel to Korea, and capitalize my taekwondo skills competitively
I on the other hand
Wanted to get my bachelors and become an entrepreneur so I can
improve the economy its self.
Finally,
I realized that there was no agreement coming to and end
so I wanted to move out.
So before,
the reason why I found it hard to move out before was because I was unwilling to face the unknown challenges in the outside world.
I didn't want to leave my own comfort zone in my own house.
So how come so many of us, find it so hard to move out
but more importantly
Want to move out?
One day, I was going across the internet
and I found this blog post,
take a few moments
to read what's on here.
And..this is the title. And this was
the top comment
Now, what are these
These are called life skills
And these are skills that you learn, through experiencing, life.
So how does this relate to our aspiration to move out?
Well,
You need these life skills
And please understand that we are the most entertained generation.
Ever.
We are literally choosing to live in each other's lives through social networking, blogging, tweeting,
etc.
Do you remember when video games used to have an end?
Where there would be one objective and you finish that objective. You put down the gameboy and leave the arcade and hug a tree
Or smell the grass or whatever.
So as you can see ever since the
Merger of global telecommunicatios
And the entertainment industry
we spawned multiple distractions
multiplayer, global tournaments, and the most power distraction of them all, Netflix.
Now most of you might say,
You're suppose to learn this along the way, or your parents are suppose to teach you.
I agree
However I believe there are solutions today that could have been
applicable to the issues we had yesterday. For instance,
the 99 percent in occupy wall street,
do you think they would have taken out those student loans if the knew about credit scores,
or interest rates?
Or tuition rates?
What about parents who come outside of this country?
How can they possibly teach their kids who to vote for or which political party to support?
What about parents who work both jobs?
who can't spent time to teach their kids any of these issues. Ask yourselves
When was the last time you had a conversation with your parents on any of these topics? What about
children who don't have parents at all?
So I want you to understand that there's a growing problem today and that is lack of life skills.
Now some of you might say that money is the biggest issue
Let's look at some numbers.
This is the tuition cost for one year, on average, in the United States for the past 25 years.
From 1976, to 2010.
Now if we take a look, this is rising and it doesn't
look like it's going to stop.
In fact the rate of increase,
is increasing, so it's an exponential rise.
How many of you are going to UCONN?
Alright good enough
Let's take UCONN's tuition for one year right?
And we want to find out
How many hours do we need to work
In order to make up those kind of money.
In one year.
So how many of you get 10 dollars an hour?
Good enough. So most of us get 10 dollars an hour hypothetically speaking
And we divide that by the total amount of money we need to make.
And we get the really big number right? The total amount of hours that we need to work. But this doesn't
really mean anything yet,
so let's find out many days we need to work
So we need to determine
How long, each day, we're going to work
How many of you do six hour shifts
Awesome, now we're actually getting somewhere.
So six hour shifts right? And we try to answer this question:
So how many days do we need to work, throughout the year in order to make one year of tuition.
Last time I checked,
there was 365 days within a year
So what this is telling me is that we need to work more than one year
in order to get one year of education.
so how does living by ourselves
come even fathomable to our minds if getting there seems financially impossible?
Let me show you what I did.
I simplified.
In the 1900's
there was a psychologist at Colombia University named Abraham Maslow
He stole my name
and he studied self actualization
of the human will. What motivated us
to reach our full potential.
What separated us from animals.
And he came up with this triangle called the hierarchy of needs.
And what this does
is organizes the human will from the most important, to the least important,
from physiological needs
to self actualization at the top.
Now here's the discovery
when I move out I did something
called adaptation
and what I did was simplify my needs
when you move out,
this is all you need to worry about.
each of these things are needs and you can solve them in two ways, number one routinely,
or number two, permanently.
for example breathing, oxygen is free
So I'm pretty sure you're set.
but how about at the end that excretion. That's pooping and peeing. And so we have toilets, we have public bathrooms, bathrooms at home
bathrooms at school
and you solve this need routinely, everyday, 3 times a day hopefully.
so
that's what we do, we simplify our needs
and that is when we start to live on our own.
Now,
once you learn about the basics for example the tuition problem we had before
Once we have that problem and have prior knowledge
we can start to think about solving it
for instance, filling out a financial aid application. Or
Looking for scholarships
Now, this is what I do, in any case, task,
problem, project, even this presentation
in order to simplify of what I have to do.
But first I ask myself three questions
Number 1 is
What do I need
Number two
is what I have
and number three is how do I get the things I need
with the things I have.
For example
The First Question
What Do we need?
For example, when I was given a month to move out of my house, I thought about what I needed, in order to live somewhere.
So let's check about what we need in our household, in order to live.
Pretty basic right?
It's this kind of basic thinking that will help you understand this question
What do I need?
Now how can I begin to look where to find these things?
Or a place to live
When we first move out?
And this brings us to our next question
What do I have
There are two things in this world that everybody has. The internet and motivation.
I want to talk about the latter first because that's the
most important factor, for living on your own. If I were to ask you what your motivation is today,
What would it be?
Would it power? Fame? Money? Freedom? Family? Think about
truly what you want to do for the rest of your life.
There was a philosopher in the 70's named Alan Watts who helped students answer this question.
He answered with a counter question
What if money were no object?
Think about that, what if money were no object
That the concept of currency didn't exist in our world.
What would you do then?
Would you travel?
Would you paint?
What would you do?
Because if you think about it,if you choose a job that gives you
A lot of money so you can live longer,
You're doing that job because you don't want to
but yet you want to live longer doing that job.
It makes more sense to live a short life, doing what you like doing,
Than a long life
Doing what you don't like doing
Because if you really think about it
Doing what you like doing,
Is something that you'll stick with
Even though it is hard.
And eventually, you become a master at it
And that's when you can charge a good fee for it.
and maybe even become famous.
Your parents would be proud,
you made money,
and you didn't what you wanted to do.
I am a manager at YB World, the Martial Arts Academy
and I was interviewing for a job
the first question I ask my interviewees is
Give me a top line analysis of my company
A better a simpler question would have been
Why do you want to work here?
So think about what you want to do for the rest of your life.
And once you have that, you have what's called, a dream
And once you have a dream, you add a deadline, and that's called
a goal
My goal is to make sure that young adults like us, can do anything.
Not do anything, do anything.
occupations are merely a label
No one is born a lawyer,
or a doctor, those occupations didn't even come to exist
Until recently
The only way to determine what you want to do in life,
is to make sure we have the basic life skills
and how do we get these life skills, previously I mentioned that global communication was the downfall of our attention span right? The internet? Netflix?
But have we understood the power, the real power, of the internet?
Global Communications, public access
Can you think of a better way to distribute information?
This is where I want to include google. Google has transformed the way we look up this information and access it.
For example,
Society has transformed
Not just by encyclopedias but forums, blogs, for us to answer our questions.
It has literally transformed google into an answering machine
Now what do I mean by that?
When I was looking for a place to live, I looked up: places to live.
And I got houses for sale or something like that.
But when I typed in the actual question in my
thought process
"How do I find a place to live"
into google,
I looked at the first link and it was yahoo answers
yahoo answers, wiki answers,
these are basically websites that make elementary homework worthless
they can directly answer your question
For me,
they just suggested I look on craigslist
And that's exactly what I did. So let's
create our own answering machine for life skills.
When we look on amazon,
when you look for an item, what's the first thing you look at?
The reviews
You look at the public opinion
Of the item and why do we do this?
It's because we trust the majority
And so yahoo and wiki answers are the most reliable source we look for when we're looking for a question or an answer.
The internet
Simplifies, for us.
So I created a webpage, this is my project
This facebook page
Is composed of all the issues that concerns with living on your own.
This can be tweeted, sharing, blogged etc.
And what this creates is an opportunity for the public
to make a source
by the public, for the public.
And how do we develop this into a real reliable source.
This is where I introduce
the cycle
We post a question on the page: how do we live by ourselves?
and we get a public response
question or answers
by the public
and once we develop them and publish them once again
We understand that times are changing, society is changing,
and therefore our answers are going to change.
that's why, we pose a new question constantly and thus,
we get
our cycle.
Now most of you might question
What would motivate people to do this?
Why would people do this
Who knows it's going to be a success?
Let me tell you something about motivation. 20 years ago,
Microsoft hired a team called Encarta, how many of you heard about Encarta?
Alright good enough. So encarta was an encyclopedia, made my engineers,
typists, schedules, professionals.
They were paid,they were on time,
and they had all the right incentives.
recently,
the same thing was done
except this time
the team
was the world
if you compare these two companies
which one is the most successful, and which one was composed of what is thought, to be right team.
the right team
So let me wrap up.
There is a reason why it seems hard to move out.
It's because we simply don't want to.Why?
It's because we're lacking life skills.
So how do we solves this?
Create a source, made by the public
For the public
And thus augment our skills
and create our dreams
Into goals
and maybe these goals can be the changes we want to see in the world.
So I'll ask you again
Are you ready to move out?
If so, what then? Thank you.