Chester’s Tips for Success

Today I completed my first Toastmaster’s speech in my new club. I thought about writing a whole new speech with a similar theme, but a different angle; however, as time crept up, I realized that I had too much on my hands to write up a completely new speech.

According to Google Analytics, it seems that my first Toastmaster’s Icebreaker speech received one of the most number of views of all the pages on my website. So for those of you who enjoyed my first speech, here’s version 2.0

I didn’t have much time to practice my speech and thus ended up winging most of it. Fortunately the subject matter is something that I am very familiar with so it wasn’t too much trouble to just pull the anecdotes from memory.

However, one important area that would have benefited from practice was pacing. I spent too much time working the introduction that by the time I was three minutes in, I was only a third of the way through my speech. One of the problems with winging speeches is that you may have a very inaccurate sense of time. I ended up spending too much time explaining my opening reference to Being John Malkovich and not enough time charting the progression from young me to adult me.

Overall I was pretty happy with my performance. The main areas that I need to improve in are projection and using the space more. When I speak, I tend to stay in place, but since I was always taught to speak that way, it’s become a habit.

Well, here’s my Toastmaster’s Icebreaker speech version 2.0. Enjoy!

By the way, if read aloud, I believe this would go over the maximum six minutes allowed for an icebreaker speech. This is why you should always time yourself when you’re practicing.

Being Kevin Chester Kuo

For those of you who are avid film fans, you may recognize the reference in my speech’s title. It is inspired by the movie, Being John Malkovich, written by Charlie Kaufman, one of my all time favorite screenwriters.

The main protagonists in the story, a budding puppeteer and his zany wife, find a special portal that leads into the famous actor John Malkovich’s mind; though the experiment lasts only a few minutes in the beginning, as they continue to enter Malkovich’s mind, there ability to control him strengthens. It is a movie about relationships and voyeurism with a little bit of existentialism thrown in. My kind of movie.

I chose this title because I wanted you all to try and imagine what it would be like see the world from my perspective. Since there is no special portal into my mind, the best I can do is to tell you about it.

I was born on January 12th, 1985 in NYU hospital. My parents immigrated to America from Taiwan in the early 1970s studying first in Illinois and then moving to New York City. As a child I grew up with an insatiable curiosity and a love for stories. Naturally I gravitated towards movies, television and video games. I loved to dream about epic medieval battles between knights and wizards, passionate romances between princes and princesses, and the bold and courageous deeds of superheroes. I straddled both my imagined world and the real one, never living fully in one or the other. Though I preferred the world of my own creation, my parents had other plans for me.

My story starts with my father, Sheafen Frank Kuo, who came to America with a dream of becoming, famous, wealthy and influential; he studied Computer Science and Mathematics and eventually stumbled upon the world of inventing. As a child I remember watching my father constantly working in the basement amidst a mess of wires and gears; the only time he wasn’t in the basement was during dinner, work hours or when he was sleeping. Though I didn’t understand my father’s work, I remember how focused he was and how he excited he became whenever someone asked him about his inventions; during middle school he developed the bad habit of forcing my friends to sit down and listen to him talk about his inventions. My father’s passion was so contagious that during my final year in high school, I decided to work with him on a research project and that was the first time I understood the power of passion; through his passion for inventing my father was able to develop technologies most people could never even dream of; it was his passion for envisioning better technology for a better world that gave him the power to turn his ideas into reality.

When I started college my dream was to graduate with a degree in Computer Science and start a successful company with my father; however, four years later, I graduated with a degree in East Asian Studies and had a new dream of becoming a world famous writer and film director.

This 180-degree turn came as a shock for many people, but when I look back on my life in its entirety, it all makes sense. In college I stumbled upon the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a famous American philosopher and writer who wrote a well-known essay Self Reliance; in it Emerson says: “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.” His words became the impetus for my self discovery and as I began to pursue my own interests and passions fights with my father escalated; he wanted me to follow a similar path as he did, but I resisted. He believed in my ability and wanted to see me follow in his footsteps. For almost two years, I struggled between the path that my father had set before me and my own.

It would have been easy if I was simply unable to do what my father asked of me, but the truth is, if I disciplined myself I would have been able to graduate with an engineering degree and gotten a well paying job at a prestigious company. But instead, I rebelled. I rebelled because I understood the truth of Emerson’s words that one could never imitate and succeed. My entire life thus far was a history of conformity mostly because I lacked the courage to take a stand. But college was the turning point and even though my father threatened to disown me, I insisted on myself. We didn’t speak for over half a year.

When I look back on the last few years, I am surprised to see how far I’ve come. In many ways I am still the dreamer and the romantic that I was as a child, but I’ve also developed wisdom that has helped me to see my own shortcomings and correct them. My tendency to dream big, to take risks and to blunder my way to either failure or success has brought me a wide variety of experiences. I’ve lived abroad in three different countries, and speak two other languages in addition to English fluently.

While I’ve kept many of my childhood traits, since then I’ve developed a few more. One of guiding philosophies of my life is that you should never say “you can’t” until you’ve tried. If you told me fifteen years ago that I would travel half way around the world to live in Japan and end up learning to speak the language, I would have laughed. And yet since then I’ve developed a passion for traveling to new places and meeting new people. As a child I used to be afraid of looking people in the eye or speaking to strangers and now I regularly do both. Insisting on living life on my terms was the first step towards a deeper and fuller self-awareness.

Though I’ve only lived for 23 years, by following my interests I’ve had the good fortune of stumbling on a number of truly fascinating people in my life: I’ve met a UN interpreter who could speak 16 languages fluently; I met a couple in China that was forced to spend ten years of their life during the Cultural Revolution farming land in the northernmost region of China, a place so cold and desolate that nothing would grow; I’ve met a man who was a drug dealer as a teen, got shot three times in the head, survived and then decided to dedicate his life to helping ex-convicts like himself.

Being me is like living a constant roller coaster ride. My brain is always spinning and if you give me the chance, my mouth will too. There’s never a dull moment. If I find a mountain blocking my path, I find a way around it. To quote another famous movie, I think that life is like a box of chocolates, and it is our job to find the sweetest and tastiest chocolate in the box. It may take us a day or fifty years, some may stumble upon it serendipitously while others may strategize their way towards it; but regardless of the methods we use, it is important, I believe, that we remember the truth of Emerson’s words. Be yourself. And never settle for any less.

Related Articles

• No Related Articles

If you liked this post, make sure to subscribe to my feed via RSS , or via e-mail.

Tags: No Comments