For months, a persistent voice in my head pestered me to write this piece. It started like a pushy drug dealer.
Hey, you need to write that thing.
What? No. I can’t. I’m swamped.
Yeah, you should write it. You’re going to like it.
Nah, I’m an engineer. I don’t write stuff like that.
You really wanted to be an English major.
How do you know that?
Just write it. It’s going to change your life.
The voice was good. It sent people I trusted into my life to convince me to write it. Finally, it broke me down. Reluctantly, I started writing.
With each word I wrote, a perceptible buzz slowly grew inside of me. I wrote faster. More buzzing. I wrote furiously. Furious buzzing. I felt alive. Connected. I wrote and wrote and wrote until eyes wide, I slumped back in my chair and breathed for the first time in forever. The piece was done. The act of writing had indeed changed me. I felt it.
Then the voice.
People need to hear this.
Shit seriously? Not again. This piece was just for me.
People need to hear this.
They didn’t need to hear it for the past 20 years.
Now they do. Just put it out there.
Out where?
I sighed and opened my phone. The first Facebook post in my feed was this:
OH COME ON.
So I submitted my piece to TEDx MileHigh.
800+ brilliant applicants across all of Colorado. No chance I’m getting picked to audition anyway.
They picked me.
Seriously? So I memorized my piece. I practiced and practiced. I drove down to Denver. I did my power pose. I walked into the room and auditioned for two wonderful people. I instantly felt the now-familiar buzz electrifying my body as I heard myself speak my heart’s words out loud… to real people. It went beautifully. I felt alive. I felt connected. I walked out, got in my car, and bawled. For no understandable reason beyond the act of speaking my truth. Maybe for the first time.
Life resumed. I dared to see myself standing on stage sharing my story. A week passed. TEDx MileHigh didn’t pick me for the show.
For a hot second, I allowed myself to feel the heat of disappointment in my stomach and then landed in pure gratitude for the entire surreal journey.
But the voice and buzzing were relentless.
[Buzz] You’re just going to stop now?
What? It was an incredible experience. Thank you for pushing me. I’m truly grateful. I’ll remember this forever.
[Buzz] You literally run a company that helps businesses reach the right people. Go reach the right people.
And who the hell is that?
[Silence]
Damn it. All right. Let’s do this.
To whom it may concern (If you’re the “right” people, apparently you will know),
I created this website to reach you. Below is my piece. It has jammed inspiration, growth, and deep connection into the heart of my life. I believe it will bring you the same.
– Angus
p.s. In the off chance you hear the voice… While kind of a dick at times, it’s very much on point and brings a strange, poignant wisdom.
HOW DATA POINTS WILL CHANGE EVERY HUMAN INTERACTION YOU’LL EVER HAVE.
I am a 6 foot Asian named Angus.
I find that I TOTALLY screw up data points for the people I meet. As a data engineer, I’ve discovered that screwing up people’s data points actually attracts the deepest, most meaningful human connections in life. This, in turn, has the unique power of cutting through the fears that keep all of us from becoming the people we truly want to be.
When I was 18, something happened that pushed me to create a methodology that has helped me consciously screw up people’s data points. It’s something that I’ve been practicing for nearly 20 years but have never told anyone about. Not even my parents. I just quietly integrated it into my life. Today, I want to show you how it works.
But before that, the story about what happened when I was 18.
My buddy and I had gotten into a 5-on-5 pickup basketball game in our quiet little North Jersey hometown.
We played hard. Our team lost. Badly. It was a fucking train wreck. We were completely outmatched and no one on our team could do anything right.
As we walked off the court to wait for the next game, a 45 year-old man who had been on our team approached us and said, “You guys don’t belong on the same court as us.”
Confused, I looked around. Yep, he was talking to us. Insulted, I cleverly replied, “I didn’t see you doing anything out there either.”
Nice one, Angus.
The man continued, “You might be really good with a calculator, but you don’t belong on the same court as us.”
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh. You see, I was Chinese (still am). And my Filipino friend and I apparently didn’t belong on the same court as him and his non-Asian buddies.
I paused and looked at him carefully. Taking a deep breath, I put my hand on his shoulder to make a human connection and said calmly, “I get that you’re pissed about getting destroyed out there. We all are.”
Then I guided the conversation towards his words as opposed to him as a person.
“That phrase about calculators makes me feel very really uncomfortable because it makes a lot of assumptions. It lumps every person that looks like me together and assumes we’re all the same. I think that’s a dangerous and unfair way to treat people, especially people you don’t know. My friend and I paid our money and have every right to play on this court and we’re going to do that until we’re too tired not to.”
Things were pretty tense. So I decided to use a little humor to de-escalate things, “I mean, I’m a six-foot Asian named Angus. I don’t think you’re ever going to meet another one of those.”
It worked. He laughed and laughed. Eventually, he apologized and we ended up playing the next 3 games together, winning all 3.
OK. All that happened in my head. I didn’t say a single word of it out loud.
In reality, I COMPLETELY lost my shit and like a crazed hyena, immediately ran to tackle the man. Absolutely insane and drooling everywhere, I screamed, “FUCK YOU! YOU PIECE OF…!” Well, what I said isn’t important. I don’t recall the finer points I made. But I’m certain it was incredibly clever.
Thankfully, my buddy latched onto me and dragged me out of the gym telling me over and over again “He’s not worth your time. He’s not worth your time.”
I went home, cooled off and reflected on the experience. It eventually dawned on me that every day, we all go into the world and continuously create our own stories about everything we encounter. Different ethnicities, political parties, kale, divorce, bad drivers, we create stories about everything.
And I realized that each story is the average of all the individual experiences, or “data points,” that relate to that story in our life. The way a parent pulled you closer as a child when you walked by a certain type of person. The way every cab driver in every movie you’ve ever watched is played by the “same” type of person. These are the data points that create our stories.
That day in the gym, I was a really shitty data point for the man. Not just shitty, but inaccurate of the person I was and wanted to be.
My data point simply perpetuated his story of young Asian males. He went home, told his family over dinner about our horrible interaction, mentally confirming the accuracy of his story. Asians are powerful when armed with a calculator, chopsticks, or the military genius of General Tsao, but are utterly useless in athletic endeavors. And now we were violent and unpredictable to boot.
I could have been a new data point in his Asian story that day. Maybe my data point would have just sat there alone on the opposite side of his graph forever staring across at the mountainous cluster of stereotype-based data points that had formed the foundation of this man’s Asian story.
But maybe… Maybe my data point could have been the FIRST data point in a new massive cluster of data points created by athletic, self-aware, articulate Asians who crossed this man’s path in the years to come. And maybe eventually when an Asian teammate missed a shot on the basketball court, his first reaction would be to offer up a layup drill and not a TI-85 calculator.
Can your one single data point move the ENTIRE average of someone else’s story? Maybe. Maybe not. Could your data point just get thrown out by some people as an outlier? Maybe. But maybe not.
That day, the man and I had both acted and responded out of fear. For him, fear of things that were different. Things he didn’t understand. For me, fear of not being enough. Fear is a powerful storyteller in our world and it creates data points that don’t truly represent the people we are.
That day, I decided I was going to become a more accurate data point for the people in my life. So before I interacted with someone, I would remind myself, “You’re about to become a brand new data point for this person with the power to change their stories.”
Simple, right?
An amazing thing started to happen. When I was able to do this, I found myself 100% present and mindful during that entire human interaction. More importantly, I found those moments of pure awareness and mindfulness to be the ones that continuously resulted in the most genuine and heartfelt interactions of my life. The types of interactions capable of cutting right through stories of fear. You cannot have a truly genuine interaction with another human being and simultaneously create a story written around fear. It’s impossible.
I’m eternally grateful to my sweet friend for pulling me out of the gym that day. However, he was wrong about one thing. That man was worth my time. In light of the many recent, tragic shootings driven by fear and stereotypes, I believe making the effort to be an accurate data point for another human being is worth my time, and worth everyone’s time.
I fail constantly at this. But the beautiful part of this methodology is that every new interaction breeds a brand new data point for someone. Meaning there’s always another opportunity to do better. Even with the same person.
So I ask that you try this with me.
Create a list of all the important stories YOU have the power to accurately represent and change for the people in your life. And when you walk out into the world today, remind yourself that you are about to become a new data point for every person you meet, whether you’re with them for 10 seconds at the checkout line or for an hour at work.
The things you say. How you say them. Whether you look into a person’s eyes. How you listen. How you respond. These are the things that make up the data points of our world’s stories. And you have the power to change them.
My name is Angus. I’m an Asian. I’m a male. I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a father. I’m a Coloradan. I’m an only child. I’m an engineer. I’m an immigrant. I’m an American. And of course, I’m a fucking awesome Asian basketball player.
