Do this and you'll be MENTALLY BULLETPROOF | Hey Tablo Ep. 2

Hey Tableau. Hey Tableau, I've seen you hit bottom like dead on the floor, not breathing rock bottom, but bounce back every time. I want to be resilient like that. Please share your secret. Hey Tableau. Welcome to Hey Tableau, already your favorite podcast. To make this a reality, please, please, please share this episode with friends, family, and rate review and all that good stuff. Give it five stars. Is it five stars? Is that the best? Whatever. Give it full stars. Don't be cheap. Okay. So today's topic is resilience, strength. And the reason why I bring up this topic is because my daughter is turning 16 this year. And I know what you're thinking. You're so old Tableau. Yes, I am. She's going to be celebrating her sweet 16 this year. And that age seems to be when you struggle the most with, am I strong enough to handle this? Am I strong enough to handle that? Why does this bother me so much? Why is this failure hitting me so hard? Why am I not able to get out of this, you know, thing that I'm in? And it puts me in a position where I have to advise her a lot. Also, a lot of my musician, Hu Bez. So Hu Bez is like younger musicians. They will reach out to me during difficult times and ask me for advice. I swear even Hu Bez that I don't know personally. They will get my number from someone and then call me, which I welcome. Because if they need help, I want to be able to give it to them. I was in the same position many times. And unfortunately for me, I didn't have any sunbees that went through what I went through. So I didn't have anyone to really advise me during difficult times. Anyways, the reason why a lot of these people come to me for advice is because I have this image in the industry as someone who went through a whole lot of research. It's not a title that is, you know, a fun title to have, but it is something that people see me as. And they also see me as someone who is mentally strong. In Korean, they say, I'm not sure if it's accurate because I wouldn't say that I'm mentally strong. It's just that I am somehow, for some reason, really good at going to zero and then coming back up. I have no idea when this started or if I was born with it or if it was something from my environment, but I do have that. I am very confident that I can lose it all and then get it all back through hard work. I am very difficult to break. My wife, if she's listening to this podcast right now, will think to herself, "Wait, what?" Why is my husband talking to you about strength, about resilience? Because my wife has seen me in so many moments of weakness that she probably won't believe that I'm talking to you right now about this topic. Because she's seen me afraid to get in a car. She drives. I don't know how to drive. I'm in my 40s and I still don't know how to drive. I've never learned because I'm afraid of speed. You put me in anything fast and you will see me at my weakest moment. Be at a car, a rollercoaster, a plane, anything that moves fast, even an elevator. If it moves, I swear. Skiescrapers, the elevators tend to move a lot faster. I'll be glued to the wall because I'm scared. I'm afraid of speed. I'm afraid of heights. I can't go to tall buildings. I've never gone to the Empire State Building, like to the top of the Empire State Building. I love New York and I've been there so many times but I will never go up. Even if my friends always go, they're like, "Let's go." I will never go with them. I'll just wait for them down there because I am afraid of heights. I'm afraid of insects, I'm afraid of big, like really big animals. I'm afraid of a lot of things and my wife has seen all of it. She's been with me for a long time so she's seen me. Also, I'm afraid of water. I'm afraid of swimming. She's seen me at my weakest moments so she'll be surprised that I'm talking to you about strength and that so many people come to me for advice but she will agree that I am mentally strong. She will agree that I am able to rebuild things that have been toppled by others or sometimes by myself and get back to where I need to be even if I hit rock bottom. She's seen that as well so she acknowledges that but everything else, she does not see me as strong. So what I'm trying to say is, if someone like me who's scared to be in a car, who's scared to be on a plane, who's scared to go up a building, who's scared to ride a fast elevator, can be mentally strong. It clearly means that mental resilience and mental strength has nothing to do with that kind of strength. It's something else. It's something unique and it's something in its own category. So when who bears and my daughter, when they come to me for advice on this, it always gets me thinking, where did this start? Where did this confidence that I can rebuild myself begin? When did I get it? Was I born with it? Was I raised in a certain way? Recently, my daughter asked about how I went through what I went through. For some of you that don't know, I went through this thing called Tajinyo in Korea and it was a huge scandal. I don't like to use the word scandal because it was more like a huge conspiracy that went on for years with me right at the center of it and it made me lose my job and made my family lose their jobs. It completely destroyed everything I had built up to that point and almost everybody had agreed that there was no way that I would be able to get back up. But I somehow did and my daughter came up to me and she's like, Dad, I'm going through this thing and I know I should be okay, but I can't get over it and it's kind of getting in the way of me moving forward. What do I do? I was like, maybe talk to mom. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. She was like, you went through that horrible time and you made it through, how did you do it? You seem to have done it so easily and I was like, first of all, how do it was not easy? It was far from easy. It took forever and it was very difficult, but you can do it. And then I started thinking back to moments in my life that may have made me the resilient person I am. I don't think it's these big events that really made me who I am, but tiny, tiny moments in my life that may seem inconsequential or just straight plain or ordinary. But like mundane moments in my life may have made me resilient. So I'm going to share that with you today and hopefully that helps. I want to throw out a disclaimer. I am not a professional. I am not qualified in any way to talk about this. I'm a rapper. Slash YouTuber. Do not come to me for professional advice. I am just going to share moments from my life and stories from my life that may have made me resilient and maybe it might make you think that there are moments in your life that can make you resilient as well. First of all, let's define the word resilient because it might mean a lot of things to a lot of different. to different people. So we got to agree on a meaning here. Resilient. Great! Resilient is spelled correctly. Thank you. Meaning, able to recover quickly from difficulties emotionally or physically strong, able to return to original form after being bent stretched or compressed. Oh, that's a pretty good way to describe it, because I was bent, stretched and compressed. And I got back to original shape. Examples. She is incredibly resilient after everything she's been through. This is not helping me. Do you need help using it in a sentence? No, I do not. Okay. I love how my AI thing treats me like I'm five. Great. Kudos to you. So the first memory that I have where resilience was required was in elementary school. I had a paper route. I think I was in the fourth grade. And for some of you who don't know what a paper route is, they're long time ago, long time ago, there used to be this thing called a newspaper. It was like literal paper with the news printed on it. And people would wake up in the morning, get their morning coffee and go to their front door. And it would be waiting for them if they subscribed. And then they would read it like off the paper. So it's like being subscribed to someone on socials. And you know how it pops upon your feed, except it was actual paper. And they had to physically hold it and read it. And that meant that there was no algorithm or computer code that was sending it to their feed. It was a human, a human child, me that had to deliver it to that front door. So I was basically a human algorithm. I was a human code that was delivering the news to a lot of people in my neighborhood. And this was in Canada. And the reason why I got this paper route, it wasn't because my, you know, Asian dad was like, you need a job. You're in the fourth grade now. You need to start putting bread on the table. It wasn't because of that. I applied for this job and got it. I actually found the, found the wanted ad in the newspaper that my dad was reading. And I was like, oh, I can deliver paper and, and make some money. And the reason why I wanted to make money was this is going to sound super wholesome. Like wholesome to the point where it might seem like I'm lying, but I'm not. I swear to God, I signed up for this because I wanted to save up money to buy my family members Christmas gifts. I was a very wholesome kid. I'm not, I wasn't who I am now. But so I wanted to get this job and work for a year. And at the end of the year, I wanted to be able to buy my family members, my brother, my sister, my mom and my dad, Christmas gifts. So I got the job. And it was really fucking hard because you have to wake up way earlier than anybody else will, right? Because their newspaper has to be at their front door by the time they wake up. And some of these people wake up at like six seven, right? So I would have to wake up at like five or something. And then I would have this delivery of papers. And then there was like a metal cart that I could carry them in. And I would have to go around my block and the next block and the next block, just a section of my neighborhood and deliver all the papers, right? And I'm assuming there were other kids or other people that were delivering in nearby areas. So every morning you had to do this. And just to give you a case of how difficult this was for a fourth grader to do, this one time I was at the far end of my route. So the furthest I could be from my house, right? And eventually I would deliver papers and then return home. But I was at the furthest distance from my house. And I had to go to the bathroom, right? And it was pouring rain. I had to go to the bathroom. I started knocking on people's doors to see if I could use their bathroom. But it was really early. So no one was awake. And in my head, I was doing like millions of calculations. If none of these doors open, will it be faster for me to just attempt getting home, right? But if I go home, the problem is I have to come back to deliver all the papers I don't deliver, right? So I'm like, okay, I have to move fast and deliver the papers faster than usual and somehow still make it home. Let me just end the story by saying I didn't make it home. I could see my house far away on the horizon. I could see my house, but I didn't make it. And it was raining and it was really bad. It was really bad. Anyways, that's how difficult it was. But I did it every day and I saved up money for a year in a small box. I had like a shoe box. And I was going to buy gifts with it. My brother, who's eight years older than me, right? So he was grade like 12. He had learned to drive and I guess wanted to drive. So when my dad wasn't home, he decided to take my dad's car out to hang out with friends. I guess that's what he wanted to do. But this guy pulled out of our garage with the passenger seat, passenger side door open. I guess he was putting something in and forgot to close the door. So he pulled out of the garage with the door open and the door got caught on the, you know, on the, on the, whatever and bent backwards, right? So he's like totally fucked. He apparently knew about this shoe box that I had. So he took everything to get the car fixed before my dad could find out, right? So oh my god, I'm going through it again. When that happened, I obviously didn't have a choice in this matter, right? It wasn't like a discussion. He just took it by force. And it was the first moment in my life where I had worked really hard for what I perceived in my mind as a noble cause. And it had been completely destroyed. And the funny thing was that one, a portion of that money was to buy him a gift. So if you're listening right now and you have a brother, you have an older brother, you know what I'm talking about. You probably went through what I went through. In that moment, it felt like my whole world had been taken away. What was worse is that Christmas was coming and I could no longer buy gifts, right? I couldn't surprise my family anymore. It wasn't just that I had to go back to zero and all that work, you know, pooping on my pants. All of that was for nothing. Needless to say, it was hard for a fourth grader kid to deal with. It wasn't, it was like, there's no way I can get back from this, right? But the next morning came and I had a choice. I could continue to do the paper route or I could just be a terrible person and not go. But the papers were there waiting for me and I just went and I started delivering the papers again. And by Christmas, I hadn't saved up enough, right? I didn't have enough time to get it all back. But by the next year, Christmas, I was able to save up enough to buy my family gifts. And it took a year, but once I was able to buy gifts again, it was the first moment that I kind of felt like all you can get back from going back to zero, like you can lose everything and still return. It just takes a lot of time. I don't think I thought to myself, hey, I'm resilient. Oh, I'm strong now. Later on in my life, this will help me get through anything. I didn't think these things, but I did think that it's a good thing that the next morning, I made the decision to keep going and I made the decision to not just abandon my responsibility and I just put up with it, right? Because a year later, when I was buying gifts, it felt as good as whatever if I did it the year before. And also, my brother got his ass kicked by my dad. By the way, He tried to go fix it, but my dad could easily figure out that the car was not in the garage. So, even before he could fix it, my dad found out, and my brother had already taken it to the shop and paid. So, it was too late for me to get my money back. But, anyways, that was the first time that I experienced having my heart broken, but also piecing it back together slowly. That was also coupled with the fact that at around the same time, I played football. Look at me. Do I look like someone that can play football? Like American football. Yes, American football. Oh, you thought soccer. No, American football with pads and everything. I played a position called safety, and it's a very difficult defense position. And, unlike the paper route, the football thing was my dad wanting me to play a team sport. And of all the sports he could have chosen, he decided to put me in the one sport that could get me killed. So, I played football, and obviously, I was the only Asian kid on the team, and I was the tiniest kid on the team, and it was a lot of being tackled and crushed. And, at one point, I got tackled so bad that I hurt my back, and I couldn't play, but I wanted to prove myself. So, I kept playing, and I even, this is the full circle moment, but I even was featured like after one game where I played so well, despite being injured, I became sort of like the MVP of that game. And because it was so surprising, like people were, even the article was like, surprisingly, Daniel Lee, anyways, it was featured in the paper that I was delivering. What I'm trying to say is, having your heart broken, and also your body broken, at times allows you a chance to make the decision to recover, to rebuild what you've lost, to come back from a fall. And I think that was like the first moment in my life where I experienced that. And then there's a second event in my life that may have made me, quote unquote, strong, and it's the first time I tried min chocolate chip ice cream. I told you at the beginning, I'm not going to talk about like fantastic, extravagant events. I'm going to talk about mundane, small moments in my life that may have made me strong. It was the first time I tried min chocolate chip ice cream, and I remember exactly, I went out to eat with a bunch of friends from school, and we went to the mall. During those times, kids just went to the mall to hang out. That's all we could do. We didn't have phones, and I wasn't allowed to play video games at home. My parents were super strict and super conservative. They're what you just imagine any Asian parents from jokes, jokes about Asian parents. Those were my parents. I wasn't allowed to do anything at home really, so we would just go out and around that age going to the mall was the best thing to do. And we wouldn't go to the mall to buy anything. We would just be walking around all day and like playing tag in the mall, just eye shopping and just hanging out. Anyways, we went to this ice cream place and they had a bunch of flavors. And someone was like, what kind of ice cream do you want to get? And ice cream itself was a novelty for me. I wasn't allowed to eat sweets. I swear. My parents are like, you want me to spend that much money at a dentist because you got cavities? No sugar, no sweets for you, right? And so even ice cream was a new thing to me. And there were so many flavors and I had never seen that when I was growing up in Korea, you would just have a few choices of ice cream. But this was like more than vanilla and chocolate, right? At the most, I had seen vanilla chocolate and strawberry. But here, there were so many flavors that I had never seen. And my friends were like, what are you going to get? I'm going to get this. Hey, Daniel, what are you going to get? By the way, my name was Daniel. Just in case you've been listening this whole time thinking like, who the fuck is Daniel? Table used to be Daniel. Anyways, they're like, what are you going to get? And I looked at my choices and I chose the weirdest looking one. I was like, if I'm going to have this forbidden fruit, if I'm going to have this, this sinful treat. And I'm probably going to go home and somehow they're going to know and they're going to get mad. I'm going to choose the weirdest, most fantastic looking thing. And it was, first of all, it was green and it had all these like chocolate chips in it. And it looked like it seriously looked like like an alien planet in my eyes at that age. So I was like, I want that one. And someone was like, if that's mint. And I was like, it's mint. There's mint ice cream. That's that's so awesome. And I got it. I tried it and my initial thought was that it tastes like toothpaste. But I fell in love with it because I was like, this is so foreign to me. And it's, it's got chocolate chips in it. It's like a neat color. It stands out. And I really like it. And from then on, I just kept having mint chocolate ice cream. Anytime I was able to like sneak and ice cream into my stomach. The reason why I bring up the story is because recently there was, there's a, you know, do you know the rapper Lupi? There's a famous rapper in Korea named Lupi. And he has this show. And someone sent me this clip. And I don't even remember the event that he describes in this clip. But Lupi, according to Lupi, he was, before he became a rapper, he worked at coffee bean. This was a time when I was already established as an artist. And so he was working at coffee bean and then suddenly Tableau walks in. Suddenly I walk in, right? So he's like, oh my god, it's Tableau because he was a fan. And he's like, oh, so I walked up apparently. And Lupi asked Tableau, what would you like? And apparently I said, what is the most unpopular thing here? Or what is the most like, you know, disgusting thing here or something like that? I said something along those lines. And I got that because he was like, this, this is the most unpopular one. And I was like, I'll get that. And he told this story to describe his first moment of realizing that you need to make unexpected choices. You need to make unpopular decisions, right? And how that makes you memorable and stand out. I probably didn't even intend that, right? And I don't, I seriously do not remember even doing this. It's been pointed out to me multiple times by my bandmates, my EPICI members. If you guys watch our YouTube show EPICASE, you'll see it all the time. Whenever we're ordering something, Mithra or Tukas will say, Tableau, you have to now decide and choose the weirdest thing on the menu. Because I often do that. And it all started with this mint chocolate chip ice cream. After taking the risk of trying the weirdest looking ice cream and loving it, I think it became sort of a thing in my life where when I'm presented with different options or like different choices, I will quite often choose the most unpopular or unexpected or in my eyes the weirdest option. And I think that sort of became a habit of mine where for example, if I had to choose a book at school to do something about, I would quite often choose of both the new. no one else would choose. I would choose a book that just has a weird title or for some reason other people were turned off by. I would choose that book. Even my taste in music and film, I would sometimes go out of my way to watch movies that have bad reviews or that. I know this sounds weird, but I still do it. I will sometimes go to Rotten Tomatoes and search the lowest tomato scores and watch those movies. Because I don't know how to put this in a way that makes me sound at least a little sane, but if there's a fork in the road, I like taking the one with more risk. And it's not just the simple like, "Yo, high risk, high reward, bro." I'm not one of those bros, but I will take the, like if there's a fork in the road and I'm with 10 people and the 10 people all tell me they've been down the left side and it's great so you should go. I will probably ask, has anyone been down this side and if everyone's like, "No, then I'll go there." And at the end of that road, there might be a bear. There might be like a cliff, but I will go down that road because I'm just curious. This affected the major I chose in college. I went to a college that was predominantly, at the time for engineers and for computer scientists. And I chose English lit. Like, I chose to write poetry and short stories. I chose that. I just felt like it was something that nobody was really doing around me and I wanted to do that. Even now, when I'm making music, I'll quite often make decisions in the songwriting process that no one else will. For example, I'll incorporate genres that may not really mesh well with hip-hop, but I'll just do that because no one else is doing it. And I'll take that risk knowing that it could turn out bad and that the song could flop, but then I won't know until I do it. I think that all started with this mint chocolate chip ice cream thing. I know it's a leap to go from mint chocolate chip ice cream to becoming friends with risk. But I honestly think that this habit of mine made me very resilient to unexpected outcomes. To things going off the rails or things going wrong. Because it's the norm for me. My norm is for something to not be the norm. So when I do things on a daily basis and my staff knows, when we create this podcast together, when we create our YouTube show together, everything that can go wrong goes wrong, right? Every episode, there's something that goes severely wrong. And when it happens, I don't really panic too much. I just go, okay, that's sort of expected. It's to the point where if everything goes right, we start getting nervous, right? Yeah, my team knows. All of us, if everything goes right, we're like, you know, it's kind of weird that everything's going right. And then something goes wrong and we're ready for it. Because we have become friends with risk. And I think taking risks and being comfortable with whatever outcome life hands you is something necessary to become resilient and to become strong. And I don't mean taking risks that may have fatal consequences. Do not ever do that. Don't knowingly put yourself in danger. But if you are able to take a fork in the road and take the road that's not been traveled, of course, there could be a bear there, but there could also be a very cute Samoa dog, right? And you could become friends with this dog. What I'm, you know what I mean? You have to take risks to broaden your capability or your ability to handle the unexpected. And that is necessary for strength. The third story I want to tell you is a story about my Sunday school teacher telling me I'm going to go to hell. This was, this was when I was in Korea. And there was a, there was a church very close to my house. I sort of was forced to go. All right, my, my family's, I told you, the very strict, very, very religious too. So they sent me to church every Sunday. And after the church, you know, the sermons and everything, there would be like this Sunday school Bible study thing where you just had to attend. It was mandatory. It was me and maybe like, maybe like six, seven other guys, right? Like eight people. They weren't really friends. But one of the, one of the guys was sort of a teacher's pet. And the Sunday school teacher was like a middle aged woman. And I'm like, I'm just realizing that she may have been the same age I'm now. Back then, it was, I was just like looking at her. Like, look at that boomer. I'm her. I'm her now. Oh my God. OK. Anyways, so one of the kids was a, was a teacher's pet that I don't think he was trying to be a teacher's pet, but she really liked him for some reason. She definitely didn't like me. As you will see shortly. There was this one class about predestination. And she was teaching us about how in the Bible, there's this concept of predestination where it's already decided where everyone's going to go. Like if you're going to go to heaven or hell. And no matter what you do, you can't really change your course. That's how she was teaching it. And as I was listening, I was like, that doesn't seem right? So there's nothing like we can do to alter our course. Like if we do good things, like we can't, we can't go to heaven. I'm like, that's, that's kind of weird. And I was thinking that. And she decided to, I guess, really hammer this point to us and decided for some odd reason to use us as examples. And she was like, so what I'm telling you, is that him, this guy right here, so the teacher's pet, she, she was like, he's going to go to heaven. He, it's already been decided that he's going to go to heaven. And this guy, me, this guy is going to go to hell. Like, my Korean name is Seon-hungi, I have too many names. My Korean name is Seon-hungi. Seon-hungi is going to go to hell. It's already been decided that he's going to go to hell. Obviously, I was like, the fuck? Right? What? Why me? Right? Immediately, I was like, OK, this must be an example. She's just trying to, you know, she's just, it's a bad decision to use us as examples. But she's just saying it as like an example. So I was like, you mean as an example, right? And she's like, no, I mean your predestined to go to hell. And I'm like, huh? So I actually said back to her, then what's the point of me coming here? There's nothing I can do. Bye. And I got up and left. And there was this whole drama about this one because I went home and my parents were like, why are you back so early? And I was like, because I'm apparently going to go to hell. And there was a huge drama over it. So I didn't go to church for a while. And then eventually, I had to go again. So I went back to church. Rumors had already spread that I'm the devil, basically. Did you hear? So while I was away, everybody was like, did you hear? So I'm just going to go to hell, right? So because these are like kids, right? There's a lot of kids. There's a lot of young people. And they heard the story. So they're like, OK, then if he's going to go to hell, it must be like a demon or something. So everybody was like sad. I'd eyeing me and it was just, it had already been kind of decided that I didn't really belong. The funny thing is, shortly after that, the teacher's pet guy, I think it was like he got caught for smoking or something bad. I don't know the specifics, but he got caught for something apparently terrible, right? Which could be a number of things, considering it's a church, right? He could have just like, Jay walked, but at one point he, so he had done something really bad and the tides had turned, where everybody was now calling him, quote unquote like a devil, a demon who's gonna go to hell, right? And I could hear it. I'm telling you the story because I think this is the first time I realized that people generally don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Like they are terrible judges of people and should not be judging people. That quick turnaround. So I was like, okay, so he was predestined to go to heaven now. He's not. Oh, we can alter course. So I was like, okay, I'm not gonna go to hell then, I'm gonna be a good person. I think that was like a big realization in my mind, that it really does not matter what other humans, other fallible humans, think of me because they are just as clueless as I am and they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. And I'm glad I experienced that then because it really affected the way I dealt with high school drama. You know in high school, you always have someone talking crap about you and every day you go and it's someone with new rumors and 99% of the time is not even true. But once everyone's talking about it, it's pretty much over for you. Of course that happened to me a lot during high school as well, but I just simply didn't care. I think I adopted this notion of it's good to be hated by bad people. If someone is judging you to the point where they're deciding your fate when they are not qualified to do so, they aren't good people. And if they don't like you, then it's great, right? Because I don't have to deal with being friends with this person or being acquainted with this person. Being told that at such a young age, being told that I'm going to go to hell was maybe one of the best things that happened to me though because it was so extreme where like it was about my soul, right? Like someone literally pissed my soul, you know, it was just the most extreme thing possible. At such a young age, really was good because I don't mean good, but like I'm glad it happened then because after that I had to deal with so many different things like being in Canada I had to deal with racist comments. I was called stir fry, I was called stir fry for about a good three, four years because I was one of the few Asian kids in class. This one kid kept calling me stir fry, like he didn't just slide it in during class. He's like, he's stir fry. And from that moment I was stir fry, everybody was calling me stir fry and it drove me insane. It only ended once I kicked them in the nuts, but it didn't have the effect that he probably intended because I was like, bro, my soul was dist. Getting my race is a step down from there, I think I can handle this. And then later on in high school, with like high school drama, people making shit up about you going to college, and ultimately to the tajinho thing, the public thing, which was seriously just this blown up, right? Where it was, it was seriously like everyone had turned into a middle schooler. It was the most, it wasn't just ridiculous, it was just sad because everyone had suddenly become like a middle school or a high school gossiper. And of course it affected me because it affected the reality of my life, right? It took away my job, it hurt my family, and it had fatal consequences. So of course that affected me, but what people were saying didn't affect me. The fact that terrible judges of other humans were judging me, it allowed me to withstand it better. And I think I really thought to myself, hey, I'm hated by pretty much everyone right now, but I mean, it's possible that everyone is bad. So maybe it's good to be hated by someone that's bad. And I got through it. So thank you to the Sunday school teacher for dissing my soul. Anyways, this, I don't know if I can put a word to it, but it would be like self assurance. I am the ultimate judge of who I am. And there is no predestined thing that I can't alter with my own decisions and actions, right? But even if the entire world is talking shit about you and hating on you or saying that you're this type of person, if you're not, then welcome is really how I think the last story I want to share, I think this might be the most important thing for strength. It might actually be kind of surprising, but let me tell the story first. It's the Mexico Coca-Cola story. When I was in, so the summer between 9th and 10th grade, I was sent to Mexico by my parents. It was a camp for some of the kids that were getting into trouble a lot. It was like a summer camp for, I'm assuming it was for kids that were getting into trouble a lot because the three people I went with from Korea were trouble makers to make a long story short. We got there and I realized it was probably a cult because I've told this story before, and I haven't really gone into details, but it was this place called San Simón in Mexico. It was a very, very poverty-stricken area. We get there and first we were in this weird, just like a cult-looking camp. It's the only way I can describe it. Immediately, they shaved our heads because apparently if you have long hair, they'll perceive us as the devil. I had a weird child, and I was just saying, we got there and there was this pastor figure and we would have to take turns going up a ladder into this solitary confinement kind of area. Basically, a wooden box and it's completely dark and we would have to go in there and pray for like 12 hours and stuff, and kids would come out of there kind of crazy. Anyways, it was insane, but let me get to the beautiful part of this story. Everything was insane. Week 1 and 2 of this camp, as I remember, our task was to dig small cactuses, cacti, out of this mountain, completely get rid of all weeds and cacti. Is it right? Cacti? Is cacti right? Cact, plural, cacti, cacti, yeah, I'm right. Oh, apparently cactuses is okay, too. Anyways, there was this hill mountain kind of thing with a bunch of cactuses all over it. And we had to dig them all out because they were going to build a church on top of it, or we were going to build a church on top of it. So we did hard labor for the first couple weeks and then eventually towards the second half of this camp. quote-unquote camp. We got paired with families that were like local families, me and this guy named Charles. I still remember these names because it was such a fucked up experience. Anyways, we got paired with this one family, this one like farming family, farmer family. And we had to stay with them and live with them for quite a long time. And we would have to help them with work. We got there. First of all, there was no roof. It was like a thin blanket over the house as a roof. And Charles and I shared a bunk and this one time I scorpion stung him. So he got carried away to whatever hospital. It was that kind of condition, right? And the whole area was almost like a desert. Every day the family would go out to work. And we would hang out with them sometimes at work, sometimes at the home. Just help with household chores and stuff. And every meal was just tortilla and beans. Very rarely you would get like a jalapeno, right? And that would be like for dinner maybe. But it was always the same meal. It was great though. I really liked the food and I really liked the family. The dad was sort of like my dad, but Mexican. He kind of didn't like me. I think he was just disapproving of me kind of. Anyways, it was, the conditions were weren't good, but we learned to adapt, you know, young people adapt quick. And by then we had already experienced the first half of this camp and we were used to hardship. They had shaved our heads, made us like sit in solidarity confinement and all of this stuff. So it was just nice being with a family. It was like being home in a way. And if you leave the house, like all the houses are like stuck together. But if you go out, there's this really long dirt road. And then there's only one store, like one supermarket kind of thing. But it's not even a supermarket. They have very basic items there. Sometimes me and Charles, we would go out and some of the kids would be playing soccer or something. And we would go to the store and the store would have Coca-Cola, which was for us, it was like finding water in a desert, right? Because we had been away from home for so long. It was just seeing a familiar brand was like, you know, seeing water after traveling in a desert for like 40 days. But we noticed that the Coca-Cola was there, but it was like untouched. They had the two leader bottles like still packaged, but it was untouched. Meaning no one could buy them, right? No one was buying them. They sold other stuff there too, like the tortillas and stuff. And people would buy those, but they wouldn't buy the Coca-Cola. After staying with this family for a long time and a lot of bunches shit happened. Like I can't even, this is crazy. Anyway, so a bunch of stuff happened. And then last night of our stay with them. And this was going to be our last stay there. And then we would go back to the original camp and then eventually be allowed to go home, right? And last night there was crazy. They brought out the tortilla and beans. And then the sun there, they had a really young sun. He brought a two liter bottle of Coca-Cola. And we were like, what's this? Why are we getting Coca-Cola of a sun? And they poured us the Coca-Cola. And that was their farewell gift to us. Like they wanted to kind of treat us by giving us this Coca-Cola. At first I was like confused. I was like, do they maybe sometimes drink Coke? Or have they been drinking Coca-Cola, but just not giving us any? I was kind of confused at first. But once it was explained to me that this was their treat for us. It was seriously like the best Coke I've ever had in my whole life. And it made me extremely grateful. Like someone could give me a stake. And it wouldn't mean anything more than that cup of Coke. Do you know what I mean? Because I understood that this was a big spend for them. Because I had seen them working every day. And I knew that no one was buying the Coke. But they got it for us. So I knew how grateful they were. And that also made me super grateful to them. And we had a pretty good party there too. Like the dad brought out a guitar. And he started playing. He was singing. He was pretty awesome. Anyways, what I'm trying to say is, after leaving that home, well, of course, we had to go back to the original camp. And so after the camp ends, we had to drive to LA and then take a flight from LA to Korea, right? While I was away with this family, the pastor who was in charge of this cult-like thing, had gone through our bags, our original bags that we brought from Korea. I guess he discovered about $400 in my bag. And I had those $400 because at the time, you couldn't order books from Amazon. So if you wanted to get SAT books, you had to buy them in the States and take them. That was a cheaper way, right? So my dad had put $400 or something in my bag for me to buy books in LA before I get on the plane. Anyways, he discovered this money, I guess. He calls me in to this weird room. I mean, it definitely was a cult. Okay, the way he was sitting in that room, I go in there and he's like, "You're trying to buy drugs." And I'm like, "Sir, I'm in the ninth grade going to tenth grade. I don't even know what you're talking about. Those are for SAT books." And he was like convinced that I was going to buy, charted by drugs to take back to Korea. It was insane. But anyways, that aside, eventually I got back to Korea. And let me just say from that experience after that, anytime I have a Coke, it's impossible for me not to remember that night. Like the look on the kid's face when he brought it out, the way he wanted to surprise us with this big gift, just the feeling I had when I drank it, it's impossible for me not to remember it. So every time I see a Coke, I sort of say thank you. Does that make sense? Even now, I still somehow feel grateful about it. And what I'm trying to say is, I think it's really important to be a strong person. I think it's really important to feel grateful easily. And the reason I say that is quite often in what I'm assuming most of you listening, the way we live, we have some fantastic things and we usually take them for granted. We have super computers in our hands. Let that sink in. We have literal super computers. The phones that we all have, the phone that you're using right now to listen to this podcast, has a far more advanced chip than the chip that got us to the moon. But we don't really think of it, right? We don't really think about it. And how this relates to our ability to be strong is if you don't have like moments of gratitude on the way to achieving something, you just will not be encouraged to do it. If you set your bar so high that you need to get to the end of whatever you're achieving to feel grateful, there's a high chance you won't even get there. Because it's like a marathon, right? Life is a marathon and you're running. Every once in a while you still want to see somebody cheering for you. Every once in a while you want somebody handing you a bottle of water so you can just take one sip. You're just running completely in the dark because you have decided that you have to get to the end of the race to feel your delaying your ability to be grateful. Then it's that much harder to get there. I think that experience with the Coke kind of helped me be grateful, like easily grateful for a lot of things. And even in my career, I am really lenient with my milestones. You know how some people like have to win like a huge award at the end of the year to feel satisfied. EpiKai, my team, we set like really dumb milestones. Our milestones are, if anyone saw a list of our milestones, like what we consider milestones, when we started our YouTube channel, for example, I was like, if we can hit 20,000 views, we made it. And then we hit 20,000 views. You would think like I would move it up to 50,000, right? I was like, next to 30,000. And then 40,000, 50,000. Like we celebrate all those moments and I'm grateful for all those moments, right? I'm very easy to make grateful. And I think that's that's really necessary for strength. Because like I was saying with the other stories like, when you experience something extremely difficult and you have to get back up and you have to go from losing everything to regaining some of it back, it takes a hell of a long time. And it, it requires you to wake up every single day, not knowing you will get there, but just going day by day. And if you're not allowing yourself to be grateful for that at each moment, at every moment, trust me, you will not want to wake up the next day. Because you just don't feel that it's achievable. So if you condition yourself and train yourself to feel grateful for tiny things, for little things, for things that you otherwise would have taken for granted, it will truly help you be patient enough to get there. You know what's funny? It's this Mexico story that I told. When I first told someone this story, I was like, "It is sort of a little cultish." Right? And then the second time it's so someone, I was like, "May have been a cult." But now I'm like, "It was a cult." I am 1,000% sure it was a cult. Did my parents know? I think they did. Anyways, of course, I had many other experiences other than just choosing men's chocolate to ice cream. But I think the reason why I chose to tell these stories, and the reason why I remember these moments when my daughter asked me how I became strong, is exactly because they're so mundane. They're so ordinary. If we need, if we as humans need fantastic things happening to us, and big struggles happening to us constantly to become strong, I actually hope that you don't. I actually hope that you don't ever need to become strong, because some of these things will crush you. I don't want you to go through some of the big things I went through. But if we changed the way we think, and we remember that even choosing men's chocolate to ice cream, even being called a bad name, even having your brother take all your newspaper route money. Even these small things can make you strong little by little. I think if we think of mundane things as big events, you don't have to wait for that big struggle that'll make you strong. Think back to moments in your life. You just need to be able to recognize that those were opportunities for you to learn, and for you to come back from, and for you to persevere, and for you to know that you can do it, that you are able to be strong. With that in mind, I'm sure that tomorrow and the day after, something will happen. Some little thing will happen, and it'll be a chance for you again to become resilient. Am I making sense here? Yeah, don't expect or wait for big things to happen. They don't need to. Like these tiny moments in your life, these things that you might just pass by without a thought, I think all of these are opportunities for us to realize how resilient and strong we can be. I hope these stories that I share today help you. I really do. But if you still need someone to hear you out, or if you have something to share, you can comment on our video. Also, if you have any other topics you want me to talk about on Hey Tableau, please leave a comment on our YouTube, or you can, I don't know, just on any Instagram video or whatever. You can find me everywhere. So just don't do it on our epikaze videos, though, because I mean, you can, but they thrive in two cuts, especially two cuts. I think he's sort of insecure about me doing something on my own, and like jealous. So keep it here, keep it on this channel. Thank you. See you next week. Hey Tableau.