by Wong, Allen
Lifehack #11: Embrace your haters.
Behind every successful person, there lies someone who hates him for being successful or hates what he does.
I had haters even early on in my life. One of those haters ripped my name tag off of an artwork that I spent months drawing. It was so well drawn that it ended up in the front lobby of my high school. Someone at my school didn't like that. And the fact that it was my name that was ripped off made it clear that it was a personal attack.
Haters are just another incarnation of bullies. And I always find that the easiest way to get bullies to stop bullying you is to get to know them and befriend them. I knew that there was a reason for their anger towards me, and usually it's because they were dimwitted, jealous, and/or came from a broken family. A lot of the bullies had parents who were divorced. This left them with an alpha male attitude, because they grew up without loving parents to coddle them. They learned to fend for themselves and probably held much anger towards society for not giving them a better life. Without the proper guidance, this usually led them to express their anger in displays of dominance and strength in order to gain validation from others.
And then there are the bullies who have parents who spoil them. These are usually wimps in a real life fight, but their snobbish and condescending attitude towards others is no different from physical bullying. These are the kids who call people derogatory names and get away with it, because they don’t receive retaliation for it. Usually it’s when they themselves get knocked down a few pegs, do they ever stop their bullying.
Thus, most of the battle is won by getting to know your enemy. By relating to people, you learn to speak to them in a way that makes them want to be your friend rather than your enemy. This is why I had to be a chameleon in order to befriend the people in the different groups.
Sometimes, to stop the haters, you really just have to stop doing what they hate you for. At a young age, I used to brush off criticism for my work, because I was still egotistical and thought that my work were masterpieces. Eventually, I learned to accept constructive criticism and even welcome it. Criticism helped me grow because it showed me more about what the markets wanted. Now when people offer suggestions and criticism for my products, I listen.
Nowadays, I don’t have many haters in my life, because I left them with nothing to really hate on. I was once hated for being arrogant and egotistical, but now I try to be humble and modest. I was once hated for showing off my wealth, but now I try to hide my wealth as much as possible. Instead of fighting the haters and giving them more fuel, sometimes it’s better to just take away the fuel and leave them with nothing to hate you for.
Lifehack #12: Know your enemies and know your market.
Since I was such a big target for bullies, I had to adapt to survive the school system. Knowing how to interact with different people from different backgrounds is the key to good marketing. Your social skills will translate to better sales. And they are especially important if you want to create good business connections.
I know many programmers, IT technicians, and web developers who are great at what they do. They can arguably code better than I can. But they lack the social skills necessary to create good business connections. There can be a number of reasons for this. They are sometimes condescending, and they cannot relate with the common man. They see regular people as inferior for not understanding technology, and therefore do not bother interacting with them. Sometimes it’s because they spend so much time at their computers coding that they do not spend enough time socializing with their classmates after school. Sometimes it’s because the parts of their brains that deals with logic and reasoning (important skills required for coding) have been so developed, that it causes the part of their brain that is responsible for socializing to be underdeveloped. And finally, sometimes it’s because programmers don’t have fashion sense, and/or they’re seen as not cool. Thus, their classmates shun them, and they don’t get to socialize even if they try.
When I started high school, I was a part of this group of computer geeks who didn’t socialize that much. I went to a specialized high school that required you to pass an exam to get in. Only a few people from my junior high school got in. Thus, I didn’t know that many people at the school, and everyone kept mostly to their own cliques.
The only people I socialized with regularly were the other socially awkward kids at school. I was a pretty shy kid when I was younger – possibly because I was small in stature and thus lacked confidence. And my shyness made it hard for me to make the effort to speak to others. The other kids at school also saw me as a nerd (yes, even in a school full of smart kids), and thus I wasn’t considered one of the “cool” ones.
That all changed when my best female friend in high school started going out with my best male friend in high school. I was deeply attracted to her, because she was one of the few prettier girls who bothered to speak with me, even though I was a vertically-challenged Asian nerd. And both of them knew that I was attracted to her. Needless to say, that relationship broke my 16-year-old heart, and that’s when I knew that things had to change.
By the time this all happened, I had a pretty good grade point average in my high school. Thus, I knew that I could afford to give up some of my time spent studying in exchange for time spent socializing with other people. Shifting my focus away from school and more towards socializing did lower my grades, but it was worth it. It helped me develop better communication skills later on, and allowed me to understand people more.
One of the first things I had to change was the way I presented myself. I had always been dressed by my mother, who had horrible fashion sense. She picked clothes based on how cheap they were rather than how good they looked. I ended up wearing a lot of bootleg Mickey Mouse shirts and other embarrassing pieces of clothing. But she grew up in the ghetto, so I couldn’t blame her. The worst of all the nerd accessories I had was the pair of granny glasses that I sported throughout high school. Even though I was only near-sighted, I wore big glasses that could fit bifocal lenses. I ditched those for contact lenses in my fashion transformation. I later got laser eye surgery to fix my vision permanently.
I also started buying my own clothing using the money I earned from my summer jobs. I chose clothes based on what the cool kids were wearing, but I also changed it up enough to create my own style. My hair used to be a mess as well. In an effort to save money, my mother only took me to the barber once every two months or so. I ended up sporting a small afro, because my hair was naturally spiky and I wasn’t cutting it often enough. To change this, I started going to a better barbershop and styling my hair with gel. This was my way of adapting to the very superficial and critical world of high school students.
This entire transformation happened over the summer between junior year and senior year. And the transformation was quite astonishing. People at my school no longer recognized me. Even my own cousins did not recognize me at family gatherings. The transformation was so drastic that the senior girls on my school bus, who rode with me for three years prior, had asked me who I was. I ended up dating several girls that year, even though I never had a girlfriend in the previous years.
This experience was my first lesson in marketing. In this case, it was marketing my own image. My character never changed. I was still the same person as before. The only difference was my presentation. I exuded confidence.
This was a lesson to teach me to get to know my market. I had to give them what they wanted in order for me to get what I wanted. And having just good content or a good product was not enough, because first impressions were important. When you buy a bag of dog food, do you look at the packaging or do you taste the food to see if it’s good? Most of the time, you’d buy a product based on its packaging.
On the other hand, most people get turned off by a product because of how poorly made their packaging is. If the packaging is bad, you start questioning the quality of the product inside. Thus, presentation is what a lot of the app develop
ers need to learn.
App development tip #1: Presentation is key.
I often see many great apps in the app market that don’t do well in sales. The problem is that they lack presentation. Potential customers are already turned off by the icon, so they don’t even bother tapping on the app details to investigate the app further.
I once developed an app called “Cop Radio” to prove that presentation was important. The icon was a very vague black icon with the white/blue letters ‘C’ and ‘R’ on it. The icon looked very good, but it didn’t really tell the user what was in the app. The download rate for the app was in the hundreds per day, but nowhere as impressive as I had hoped.
Unsatisfied with the sales, I changed the icon to a bright blue color with the words “Police Scanner+” on it. I also changed the name of the app to “Police Scanner+”. The app itself did not change at all. It was still the same app underneath. Yet, the download rate was now in the thousands per day instead of the hundreds. It shot up to being one of the top 10 most downloaded news apps in the App Store in 2012, when Cop Radio barely broke the top 100.
Let my experience be a lesson that the icons and screenshots are some of the most important marketing tools you have for selling your app. And I am sure that this applies across all businesses. Although many of you probably knew that presentation was important, you probably did not know how important it was. I certainly didn’t.
I was taught from movies that personality and the content of a character was the most important in getting girls to like you. This was probably true if we were looking at a long term relationship. But, in order for someone to even notice you, you have to look approachable and decent first; then she’ll give you a chance to show off your awesome personality. And in the realm of the App Store, icons and screenshots are in the forefront of presenting your apps.
There are many cases where people buy apps based on just the icon and screenshots alone. They don’t even bother reading the reviews or description. There was a brief period of time in the App Store when there were apps being sold as “cell phone trackers”. The premise was that you would enter a person’s phone number, and the app would tell you where the phone was. In the icon, it showed an image of a radar screen like the one you would see in a submarine. In the screenshots, it showed a place to enter a phone number, and then showed a map rendering of where that phone was located. Both the icons and screenshots were very professionally made.
While that would have been a really nifty app, the actual app did not work as you would have assumed. In the description, it said something along the lines of, “This is for entertainment purposes. The app will prank your friends into thinking that it works, but it only shows your own location when you enter any number.” Nobody bothered reading the description. If they did, then they would have figured out that it did not work in the manner that they assumed. And in the reviews, there were thousands of negative reviews saying that they felt ripped off and that they should have read the description or reviews first before buying the app.
Those apps ended up in the Top 100 paid apps list for the App Store and made thousands of dollars. This may have been an extreme case, but this goes to show that presentation can be more important than the content of the product itself. And this was not an anomaly. There were other apps that had misleading screenshots and icon. For example, there was once a string of apps that made you think that you could lock and unlock your iPhone using your fingerprint. Obviously, this was impossible, because the iPhone did not have the necessary fingerprint scanning hardware on the screen. But a lot of people still bought the app anyway. The presentation was there, and they fell for it.
And if you think that this was a great way to make money, then think again. Most of these deceiving apps don’t last longer than a month in the Top 100 list of top paid apps. To stay in the Top 100, your app had to be both presentable and have great content. My “5-0 Radio” police scanner app stayed in the Top 100 paid and Top 100 free apps for over two years, because it had both the presentation and content to back it up. If the content was bad, the success of my 5-0 Radio app would not have lasted longer than a month. Instead of making the millions of dollars that it made, it would have only made a few thousands of dollars.
7 COMPUTER SCIENCE
I chose computer science (C.S.) as one of my majors, because I had already been making websites and coding C++ and Java programs in high school. I created my first website in junior high school and learned how to build my own computer even before that. As a child, I was always curious about how things worked, so I would take things apart and put them back together. That was how I learned to build my own computer, and why I also majored in computer engineering. I was one of the first people on the internet back when I was still in elementary school. And I was also one of the first people in my school to have his own website.
Because our family used to be so poor, my brother and I used to go around the neighborhood during trash day and pick up computers that people had thrown away. We would salvage parts from the computer and either use them as spare parts or add it to our existing computers. I did not even get to buy my own computer until I was in high school. To this day, I still build my own computers and try to stay on the cutting edge of technology by learning and adopting new technologies on my own.
My family’s first computer was a Commodore® 64. Even before I knew what “load” meant, I was typing commands into the Commodore 64 and running video games that my brother borrowed from his friends. To learn how to use the Commodore 64, I watched what my brother did, and it intrigued me.
Eventually my brother bought a computer with a Windows® operating system and got himself a dial-up modem. Before there was even the World Wide Web, my brother and I would attach the phone line to the computer to join what were called Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).
A Bulletin Board System is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using text commands. Think of it as a message board that you have to call directly from your computer to send and get messages. My brother used BBSes to download new software (such as demos for video games), chat with friends, and get updates on his friends. It was a precursor to the World Wide Web, and social networking websites.
Eventually, my brother got AOL® on his computer, because his best friend loaned him his AOL account. We were too poor to afford having an internet subscription, so we didn’t even pay for Internet access until I was a senior in high school. After my brother’s friend stopped loaning us his AOL account, I used a free internet service called NetZero®, which allowed you to go online in exchange for viewing advertisements. When I got my first email account during elementary school, I was excited to even receive one new email. I used to sign up for newsletters just so I’d get daily emails. I remember that the first thing I did after I came back from school was check to see if I got any new emails. Nowadays, I try to minimize the number of emails I get, and actually enjoy it more when I don’t get emails.
Since the computer was in my brother’s room, I usually had to sneak in there to use it. My brother didn’t like me being in his room. So every time I wanted to use the computer, I had to turn into a covert-ops agent and sneak my way into his room without anyone noticing. When I heard him coming, I quickly hid in his closet or behind the door.
This kind of taboo behavior around the computer only piqued my interest more. When I finally got my own computer in junior high school, it was like discovering Pandora’s Box. It was the old computer that my brother was using before he won a laptop from a raffle. But, it didn’t matter to me that it was old and slow. I wanted to learn everything I could about the machine, and the internet was my guide to everything.
I created my very first website in the 7th grade. All of the other websites looked pretty bad back then with their animated flaming gifs, Times New Roman black font and blue under-lined links. People didn’t know how to code websites back then, so they all used website templates or “What You See Is
What You Get” (WYSIWYG) HTML editors. A WYSIWYG HTML editor basically hides all of the website coding and lets you create websites by simply dragging and dropping the elements you want onto the WYSIWYG editor. I wanted full control over the codes of my websites, so I learned how to code a whole website by hand without using a WYSIWYG editor. To this day, I still don’t use WYSIWYG editors much. Just using a basic text-editor was good enough for me.
High School
Throughout my school years, I had trouble taking English tests. Since my memory wasn’t that great, I had trouble memorizing vocabulary words. English was also my second language, and people only spoke Chinese in my house. Also my parents didn’t buy me any English books, and the nearest library was too far from my house. Thus, all of these disadvantages meant that I wasn’t very good at taking any English exams.
When I took the NYC high school entrance exam, which tested middle school students on Math and English, I had only been accepted to the second best high school in New York City, Bronx High School of Science. I was only one correct answer away from being accepted into Stuyvesant High School, the #1 high school in NYC. Because of my financial disadvantage and high exam score, the New York City Board of Education offered to allow me attend Stuyvesant High School if I attended a summer school. I opted out, because I did not want to be one of the dumbest students in that school.
By choosing to go to Bronx Science, I was among the top students going there. My 96% GPA was among the top student GPA’s of the school and it could have been higher if I didn’t get distracted during my senior year there. Although I did not get to be valedictorian or salutatorian, they did give me a school award that had a large college scholarship attached to it. Only one student per year won that award. For my financial background, having the extra cash to pay for college was a better award than being valedictorian.