My mentor’s business shut down through a pipe dream of lies and he ruined a lot of lives for people with amazing potential. I think that was his worst crime.
He because extremely apathetic and blamed everyone but himself it seemed. At the end, I cursed him out and we haven’t talked since. His final parting was the painting from my LinkedIn post. It’s full size, hanging in my Grandmother’s house.
In another case, with so much traveling, I couldn’t have time to manage the meetup group. There was this girl who always came to the meetup and she was my best friend and acted as a very valuable support pillar, but then she decided to spend more time with her other friends, so I lost that pillar of support. At first I didn’t mind it, but it hit me hard that she was really important to me. I ended up telling close friends in that group I wanted to leave and felt trapped, which probably didn’t help. In hindsight, they didn’t really support me, they just nodded, and probably told their friends I was going to do something bad.
So the meetup group ended up where a click started to form and they would hang out with themselves than on the meetup group. Of course, this leads to trouble. A lot of trouble. Letting this fester can just lead to a lot of drama. This had happened with the shy guys and girl’s group and things got ugly. I didn’t want to deal with the pain. Frustrated and worried, I asked three of the most sociable people in the group to take charge. I left. I needed a break, and it was the only way I could think of to cause less drama in the long run.
The sad part is, no one really talked to me about that. When I would sometimes see them in a group, they would ignore me. If I caught one of them, we’d make superficial small talk, but nothing skin deep. The only person who said “why’d you leave?” Was a 70 year old Asian women who would go to our dim sum events.
I became depressed. I lost all of my friends.
But My Food Job Rocks saved me from that depression.
Week after week, I interviewed people from all over the world about the food industry and kept on getting more and more inspired by them. Having the isolation to work on my craft was also nice, and I built the website, and its followers to what it is today. Eventually, the passions of my guests seeped through me, and I started feeling better. I became more focused at work, this was now the point where the CSO of Isagenix became my mentor, and would teach me the art of product development. Every week, we had an excitingly hard project, and I would go in there and start a ruckus. Those times of climbing tooth and nail to get recognition slowly got easier and easier. I started hanging out with my coworkers more.
As the podcast kept on going, as the guests got better, as sponsors started to notice us, this caused a spark in entrepreneurship so I started to see if there were likeminded people like me.
One dude in particular was the CEO of Spic and Span, a square jawed polish immigrant in Phoenix. I quickly became friends with him and we discussed so many awesome things like Risk and taking over the world. That’s the power of speaking business.
I used the same tactics to find new friends in the entrepreneur circle and did a pretty good job. It was so refreshing talking to this new group. I met a lot of people I still talk to today.
I also focused a lot of my time volunteering. The Chinese community in Phoenix is quite interesting and I wanted to know more about it. First I started with the Yee Toy Fong Association and quickly gained their trust being the only young man in the org. The Chengdu Sisters City Org had a few people my age who became good friends of mine. The funny part of the community was that it was so diverse. There were people who were not Chinese who spoke better Chinese than me.
This eventually allowed me to host barbeques at my newly bought house. I just invited everyone. I didn’t give a shit who came. I started reaching out to friends and asked to bring their friends. I did this every month. I invited people I hated, people I liked, anyone. Maybe it was for redemption, or maybe it was to say “suck it, look how popular I am”.
Once you start hosting these monthly, the same people come and support you. We’d spend hours in the back yard, with a home made firepit, talking. It was so peaceful and calm staying outside, looking at the stars in the back of my yard that I own. I could do things like grow a garden, spit roast a chicken, and deep fry a turkey. I loved this house. I thought I was going to live there forever.
Rebuilding from the depths of despair is always an interesting experience and I learned a lot about people. It made me lose faith in people to be quite honest.
However, exploring the new groups I’ve hung out with, or the people who stuck with me after the parties at my house, those are the people I want as friends. I don’t need a large group of friends, but maybe 5 good ones.
However, I don’t follow my own advice. I realized that I am addicted in making friends because I just want to be surrounded by good people. Even leaving Phoenix, I have so many friend groups all over Sacramento, the Bay Area, you can even say the world. But I love catching up with people, I really do. I would rather meet someone I haven’t met in months than someone I should see often.