Transcriber: Queenie Lee Reviewer: Cristina Bufi-Pöcksteiner
OK, so first of all,
I'd like to thank everybody that set this event up.
This is pretty cool.
When I was given the invitation to speak,
I kind of didn't know what I was going to talk about.
But I came to the realization
that I really don't have to make anything up.
I can just give my story,
and hopefully, that'll be inspiring to a lot of people here.
So my talk today is going to be on:
how to find your passion and inner awesomeness.
A lot of people in university, especially if you're students here,
you're in that transition point
where you really don't know what you want to do,
and you kind of have to make changes and decisions
that are going to dictate your entire life.
So it's kind of daunting, it's kind of scary.
But before I go into anything,
I want to give you guys a chance to get to know me a little bit
and understand a little bit more about me.
I was born and raised in Harlem.
Now, Harlem is in New York City,
and Harlem starts at 110th Street and goes all the way to 159th Street.
Now, when I was growing up in Harlem,
there were a couple of things that I had to learn quick, right?
I had to learn how to be charismatic.
I had to learn how to speak fast.
I had to learn how to be real quick and witty.
But I also learned that it's good to have an imagination.
When I was young, I had an awesome imagination.
And I'm sure that many of you - think about it,
go back, when you were around six, seven, even younger than that -
you had a great imagination.
So who used to draw? Anybody? Show of hands.
Who used to draw when you were younger, right?
These are a couple of things I used to draw.
But do you remember when you used to draw that a lot of those things sucked, right?
But nobody told you they sucked, like you would give your mother the drawing,
and she really didn't know what it was, but she would put it on the refrigerator.
Nobody ever told you that what you did wasn't good.
Nobody never told you that you were -
that you were not awesome.
So you stuck with it.
OK, so me, I used to draw, I used to sketch,
I used to do photo manipulation,
and right there on the bottom left, that's actually an animation I did.
I used to spend hours creating these elaborate stories,
coming up with characters, coming up with plots.
And nobody never told me that these things weren't cool.
So I continued to do them.
So I had fun and I took a risk.
So if you look at this right here, don't get scared,
but on the left, this is a competition that me and my fraternity brothers did.
We used to do performances every year for the university.
I went to Florida State University,
and I'm a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Incorporated.
So on the left, we're doing Resident Evil.
We did our kind of reenactment of Resident Evil,
it was Zombies versus SWAT.
On the right, we did Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory,
and we had some sick twisted thing,
and all the auto polluters
were kidnapped by Willy Wonka and forced to work in a factory.
But nobody ever told us that this wasn't cool.
And it came to our -
people loved the performances we did.
We performed in front of thousands of people
and won these competitions.
So I was always told to be a rebel and question everything.
So if you guys look at this picture,
this is actually a very funny picture to me
because if you see me right there
I'm the only one making a really silly face, right?
And if you go to my parent's house,
you actually see that this is the first picture you see
when you come into my mother's house.
And what was cool about this picture was,
before we actually took the picture, the teacher told me, she said,
"Everybody, when the photographer says smile, smile."
So I said, "Teacher, why do we have to smile?
Is there a reason we have to smile - we're young kids,
why do we have to wear suits?
Why all the guys in suits, all the women in dresses?
We don't want to be adults."
She said, "Don't worry about it, just smile."
And I said, " OK, if you don't want to tell me why I have to smile,
I want to do something funny."
So when the photographer said "cheese," said "smile,"
I did that face.
OK, but something happened.
When I grew up,
and I started to get older and older,
I forgot that I was awesome.
I'll get to what this code means in a second.
But I was in a Fortune 500 leadership development program
when I got out of college, I was "corporate."
I had a title; I was an account manager;
I was making good money, I was making $60,000 out of college,
so I could brag to friends.
My mother was proud; my father was proud.
I could go on trips once a year.
But I realized that this isn't what I wanted.
Now back to this code: eh976a.
This was the actual code that I was identified by in my company.
So when they wanted to email me,
they didn't email me at Eugene Hennie,
they emailed me at eh976a.
When they wanted to look up my sales records,
they looked up eh976a.
I started to think why don't you guys just call me eh976a.
Because that's how you identify me anyway.
So I realized I was a part of a system,
I was no longer a person, I was no longer Eugene.
So this is what society wanted;
they wanted the clean-cut Eugene,
they wanted Eugene that wore suits,
that wore glasses, that wore specs;
I was all proper, but this is what I wanted.
I wanted to do flips; I wanted to travel; I wanted to hang out with cool people;
I wanted to experience life.
I had to escape life's cubicle.
I was working nine-to-five, I was young and I hated it.
I was putting on something that I didn't want to carry, every day.
And I will come home emotionally drained, spiritually drained
because I was trying to please everybody else
instead of pleasing myself.
But then I got an email from an angel,
and she's going to be mad at me, be mad at me for doing this.
This was from my girlfriend, Jasmine, sitting right there.
You guys give Jasmine a round of applause.
(Applause)
And because of that she sent me an email for the world's most awesome job.
So I came home from work, I was kind of pissed off,
but she sent me an email.
So I opened the message, and I clicked on the email.
It took me to a website,
and the website said,
"Do you want to work in the world's most awesome workplace?
Do you want to be the world's most awesome people?
Do you want to travel?
Do you want to work on projects you love?"
And I was, like, this is a scam.
That can't be true,
because I make $60,000 out of college, right?
You're telling me I can make money, travel, do cool things, meet cool people,
go to all these cool places and still be happy.
That's not true.
So I deleted the email.
What happened next was something pretty cool.
A buddy of mine, he worked for a bank.
He sent me an email, he said, "Hey Eugene,
we want to go to South America.
We want to go on a cool trip to South America."
And he said, "Hey, do you want to go?" I said, "Yeah, man, I'll go."
So I went home, booked the ticket.
Fast forward a couple of weeks,
I'm sitting on a plane, and I am petrified when the plane is about to take off;
this is the first time I've ever been out of the country by myself.
Every negative thought in the world started going through my mind.
What if I go there?
I don't speak Spanish, what if I get lost?
What if they kidnapped me? What if the plane doesn't take off?
All these just thoughts started going through my mind.
So I sucked it up, down on the plane, took off,
and the result was something amazing to us, it was beautiful.
I had the best time in my life.
So I saw beautiful cities, I hung out with the locals,
we white-water rafted, ATVed the volcanoes,
ziplined across jungles,
and we did all this cool stuff.
I look at this picture, like, those are me and all my friends,
and you see the lady right there, she has a baby, and she's [inaudible] with us;
like that was cool, very awesome.
So what I decided to do was I quit - I quit my job.
This's me in the parking lot after I quit.
That's me putting up pictures of my actual travel ticket on Instagram.
I was so excited.
I said, my life is about to change
and all these cool things are about to happen.
So needless to say that when I came to Kuala Lumpur,
I was mind-blown,
because the company that I was around was amazing.
Over 30 different nationalities were represented
in the company that I worked for.
I had people that loved art; people that loved music;
people that loved the design; people that loved business.
Everybody was embracing their passion,
and I said, this is cool, this is awesome.
So something happened, a side effect happened,
and I started to do awesome things again.
I enjoyed entrepreneurs; I enjoyed talking to entrepreneurs.
The guy in this picture right here,
his name is Justin Harrell,
I had a chance to meet him.
He started a company with $50
and eventually sold it for $80 million.
And so now I can see guys like this and be inspired by guys like this
every month, when we organized these events.
The first time I actually spoke since being in Kuala Lumpur
was at an assignment event.
My buddy, ZeiKrew, he is going to be talking about that a little later.
They gave me an opportunity to speak,
and that was my first time speaking in about three years.
I started a website AntiWantrepreneur.com,
and that was pretty cool because we created an online community
where entrepreneurs can come
and listen to interviews with other entrepreneurs,
download how to guides and get all this awesome cool stuff.
Even after that, I started a podcast,
and that was kind of ironic because I was this guy from New York,
this guy from Harlem, that came to Kuala Lumpur;
and now, I'm doing a podcast.
I never thought that I would do a podcast.
OK, I started traveling.
When I'm in America,
the only time I've been out of the country was when I was around 23.
But within six months of being here in Kuala Lumpur,
I went to four, five different countries.
So I had to ask myself why?
When I took a chance, and I just stepped back,
and I decided to ask myself why.
Why did all these cool things happen?
What decisions did I make?
What principles, what code, what commandments?
What was I following that made all these things happen?
So the first thing I would ask you guys -
tell you guys to do - is to know yourself.
Who are you?
What are the things that you like, the things that you dislike?
What pisses you off? What makes you smile?
A lot of people don't know this.
I'm sure that if you were to ask your neighbor,
you know, "Who are you? What do you like?"
A lot of people, they have a hard time,
they don't know what it is that they like.
Number two, embrace yourself!
And I love this picture
because if you're a nerd, embrace that you're a nerd.
If you're an athlete, embrace it,
because once you embrace it, everything in life becomes easier.
It's easy for me to come up here
and speak to you guys without getting all shaky
because I've embraced who I am.
I'm a guy from New York that came to Malaysia to do great things.
And so, my talking about it makes it a little easier
because I've embraced it.
Surround yourself with encouraging people.
I love this photo because this photo shows you that the company you keep
is going to kind of dictate where you go in life.
This is Barack Obama with Steve Jobs, with Mark Zuckerberg,
the CEO of Netflix, the CEO of Twitter,
Yahoo!, Oracle.
Imagine what they're talking about, must be talking about cool stuff.
A quote says, "You're the average in the five people you keep around you."
So if you surround yourself with cool people,
successful people, inspiring people,
you're going to be inspired, cool, successful, motivated.
And if you surround yourself with people that suck,
that people that always want to put their negative energy on you,
you're kind of going down spiral.
Number four: Know what you want.
Now you have to know yourself, but you have to know what you want, right?
Some people think that they want $1 million,
when in all reality, they don't want $1 million,
they want to be able to travel, they want to buy their mothers a house,
they want security, they want some freedom.
So know what you want.
Number five: Work your ass off.
And this is cool
because if you guys don't know Gary Vaynerchuk,
he is kind of like the king of social media.
And he started when he was really young to sell online,
and his advice, he calls it Hustle 2.0.
If you like something, work hard.
That's all you have to do. Lose sleep.
I have a couple buddies, they are my age,
they're about to be best-selling authors.
I have buddies that have products online
that make thousands of dollars because they work their ass off.
They put in the time, when everybody else is out partying,
they are in the house, they are in the lab working on things.
Now make the impossible the new possible.
Now, what do I mean by this?
To me growing up in Harlem,
it was impossible that I would go to college.
But it happened.
It was impossible that I will get a job working for Fortune 500 Company
but it happened.
It was impossible that I would live in another country
and work with cool people
and start a podcast and meet millionaires.
But it all happened.
It became possible,
so my standard went from here to here.
The question became -
it wasn't how could I do this, it was how could I not do this?
So every time I look at a new task, on a new goal, and a new obstacle,
I ask myself: Eugene, you're capable.
You've made it this far, how could you not do this?
Number seven: Fail hard and fail often.
People don't like to fail.
Think about it guys, how many times have you failed?
You had a lot of fails today, but you don't remember your fails.
You remember all your successes, right?
So you have to fail.
Think about coders,
I love to use coders as an analogy, because coders fail all day.
They're at the computers, just coding away, coding away.
And they have bugs, breaks, and code,
but they just try to fix it, fix it, fix it.
At the end of ten hours, or however long it takes coders to do things,
they have a perfect product,
they have a perfect application, because they failed.
If you fail a lot, the successes will be greater.
Number eight: Beat on your craft.
Will Smith said before,
he said that he doesn't feel he's particularly talented at anything.
He doesn't feel that he was like a natural talent.
But he does feel that he has an uncanny ability to work hard.
He has a crazy work ethic.
So I like to use the analogy of - I like a lot of computer games.
I play Elder Scrolls a lot,
and in Elder Scrolls,
you have to build swords,
but you start with the raw material, you start with iron ore;
and you have to make an iron sword.
So think of your talent, your God-given ability
as that raw material.
You have to take it and beat on it.
You have to perfect it, you have to sharpen it;
you spend hours doing this;
and soon, you'll have a weapon you can use to go out and conquer the world.
Number nine: Learn to embrace confrontation.
Now, how many of you guys want a raise at work?
You guys want something from somebody,
but you're afraid to go confront them about it.
A lot of people hate confrontation,
they try to go around it, they go the opposite way.
They'll try everything that they can do to try to avoid confrontation.
But it's when you meet confrontation face-to-face, great things happen.
I had to embrace confrontation coming here today.
I thought, what if I slipped on stage,
what if the projector stuff didn't work, right?
But when I got here,
I embraced it,
and all that fell off me, I kind of left it down there.
So learn to embrace confrontation
because we start taking these risks and meet confrontation head on,
great things are going to happen.
And number ten: Do what's right.
I don't believe there's a grey area when it comes to doing what's right.
I believe there is a right way and a wrong way.
I can go to somebody from another country, that doesn't speak my language,
approach him, say something;
whether it be negative, I can tell how they takes it,
if I said something right, or something wrong.
We all have innate human sixth sense to know what's right and what's wrong.
When you do the right things, good things happen to you.
So when I started this presentation, I wanted to -
I asked you guys a question: How do you find your inner awesomeness?
How do you find it?
The answer is: you don't have to find it, you always had it;
it's inside you.
But the media, television, your friends, your loved ones,
they want to mold you to be something that you're not,
when deep down inside you already have all the tools that you need.
There was a point in time where we wanted to fit in,
remember everybody wanted to fit in, wanted to dress alike?
But now we have to come to that transition and go to standing out as an individual,
because when we find our inner awesomeness,
great things are going to happen.
Thank you.
(Applause)