Eugene Hennie: How to Find Your Passion and Inner Awesomenes at TEDxMMU (Transcript)

And I’m sure that many of you think about it, go back when you were around 6, 7 even younger than that, you had a great imagination. So who you used to draw? Anybody? Show of hands. Who you used to draw when you were younger?

These are a couple of things I used to draw. But do you remember when you used to draw on a lot of things that you drew they sucked, right? But nobody told you they sucked, like you would give your mother the drawing and she really didn’t know what it was but she will put it on a refrigerator for you, right? Nobody ever told you that what you did wasn’t good. Nobody never told you that you were — that you were not awesome. So you stuck with it.

OK, so when I used to draw, I used to sketch, I used to do photo manipulation and right there on the bottom left, that’s actual animation I did. I used to spend hours creating these elaborate stories coming up with characters, coming up with plots. And nobody never told me that these things weren’t cool. So I continued to do them.

OK, so I had fun and I took risk. So if you look at this right here, don’t get scared but on the left this is a competition that me and my fraternity brothers did. We used to do performances every year for the university. I went to Florida State University and I’m a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Incorporated. So on the left we’re doing Resident Evil. We did our kind of reenactment of Resident Evil, it was Zombies versus SWAT. On the right we did Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and we had some sick twisted thing and all the [open workers] were kidnapped by Willy Wonka and forced to work in a factory. But nobody never told us that this wasn’t cool. And it came to our — when we did the performances people loved it. We performed in front of thousands of people and won these competitions.

So I was always told to be rough when I questioned everything. So if you guys look at this picture, this is actually very funny picture to me, because if you see me right there I’m the only one making a real silly face, right. And if you go into my parents house, you actually see that this is the first picture you see when you come into my mother’s house. And what was cool about this picture was, before we actually took the picture that teacher told me, she said everybody when a photographer says smile, smile. So I said, “Teacher, why do we have to smile? Is there a reason we have to smile? We’re kids, we’re young; why do we have to wear suits? Why all the guys in suits, all the women in dresses? We don’t want to be adults”. She said don’t worry about it, just smile. And I said, OK, well you don’t want to tell me why I have to smile. I want to do something funny.

So when the photographer said, cheese, said smile, I did that face. OK but something happened. When I grew up and I started to get older and older, I forgot that I was awesome. I’ll get to what this code means in a second. But I was in a Fortune 500 leadership development program when I got out of college, “I was corporate”. I had a title, I was an account manager, I was making good money, I was making $60,000 out of college, so I could brag to friends. My mother was proud, my father was proud. I could go on trips once a year. But I realize that this isn’t what I wanted.

Now back to this code: eh976a. This was the actual code that I was identified by in my company. So when they wanted to email me, they didn’t email me at Eugene Hennie, they emailed me at eh976a. When they wanted to look up my sales records, they looked up eh976a. I started to think why don’t you guys just call me eh976a. Because that’s how you identify me anyway.

So I realized I was a part of a system, I wasn’t no longer a person, I was no longer Eugene. So this is what society wanted. They wanted the clean-cut Eugene. They wanted Eugene that wore suits, that wore glasses, that wore specs. I was all proper but this is what I wanted. I wanted to do flips, I wanted to travel, I wanted to hang out with cool people. I want to experience life. I had to escape life’s cubicle. I was working nine-to-five, I was young and I hated it. I was putting on something that I didn’t want to carry every day. And I will come home emotionally drained, spiritually drained because I was trying to please everybody else instead of pleasing myself.

But then I got an email from an angel and she’s going to be mad at me, be mad at me for doing this. But this was from my girlfriend, Jasmine. She’s sitting right there, you guys give Jasmine a round of applause. And because of that she sent me an email for the world’s most awesome job. So I came home from work, I was kind of pissed off but she sent me an email. So I opened the message and I clicked on the email. It took me to a website and the website said, “Do you want to work in the world’s most awesome workplace? Do you want to be around the world’s most awesome people? Do you want to travel? Do you want to work on projects you love?” And I was like this is a scam. That can’t be true, because I make $60,000 out of college, right? So you’re telling me I can make money, travel, do cool things, meet cool people, go to all these cool places and still be happy. That’s not true. So I deleted the email.

What happened next was something pretty cool. A buddy of mine, he worked for a bank. He sent me an email, he said, “Hey Eugene, we want to go to South America. We want to go on a cool trip to South America”. And he said, “Hey, do you want to go?” I said, yeah man, I’ll go. So I went home, booked the ticket.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, I’m sitting on a plane and I am petrified, because the plane is about to take off and this is the first time I’ve ever been out of country by myself. And every negative thought in the world started going through my mind. What if I go there? I don’t speak Spanish, what if I get lost? What if they kidnapped me? What if the plane doesn’t take off? All these just thoughts started going through my mind. So I sucked it up down, the plane took off and the result was something amazing to us, it was beautiful. I had the best time in my life.

So I saw beautiful cities, I hung out with the locals, we whitewater rafted, ATVed the volcanoes, ziplined across jungles and we did all this cool stuff. I look at this picture like those of me and all my friends and you see the lady right there, she has a baby and she’s ATV with us, like that was cool, it’s very awesome.

So what I decided to do was I quit — I quit my job. This is me in the parking lot after I quit. That’s me putting up pictures of my actual travel ticket on Instagram. I was so excited. I said my life is about to change and all these cool things are about to happen. So needless to say that when I came to Kuala Lumpur, I was mind-blown, because the company that I was around was amazing. Over 30 different nationalities were represented in a company that I worked for. I had people that loved art, people that loved music, people that loved design, people that loved business. Everybody was embracing their passion, and I said this is cool, this is awesome.

So something happened, a side effect happened and I started to do awesome things again. I enjoyed entrepreneurs, I enjoyed talking to entrepreneurs. The guy in this picture right here, his name is Justin Harrell, I had a chance to meet him. He started a company with $50 and eventually sold it for $80 million. And so now I was able to see guys like this and be inspired by guys like this every month when we organized these events.

The first time I actually spoke since being in Kuala Lumpur is an assignment of it. And my buddy [Jacquer], he is going to be talking about that a little later. They gave me an opportunity to speak and that was my first time speaking in about three years. I started a website AntiWantrepreneur.com and that was pretty cool because we created an online community where entrepreneurs can come and listen to interviews with other entrepreneurs, download how to guides and get all this awesome cool stuff. Even after that I started a podcast and that was kind of ironic because I was this guy from New York, this guy from Harlem that came to Kuala Lumpur and now I’m doing a podcast. I never thought that I would do a podcast.

OK, I started traveling. When I lived in America, the only time I’ve been out of the country was when I was around 23. But within six months of being here in Kuala Lumpur, I went to four, five different countries. So I had to ask myself why? When I took a chance and I just stepped back and I decided to ask myself why. Why did all these cool things happen? What decisions did I make? What principles, what code, what commandments? What was I following that made all these things happen?

So the first thing I would ask you guys — tell you guys to do is to know yourself. Who are you? What are the things that you like? What are the things that you dislike? What pisses you off? What makes you smile? A lot of people don’t know this. I’m sure that if you were to ask your neighbor, you know who are you, what do you like? A lot of people, they have a hard time, they 0don’t know what it is that you like.

Number 2: Embrace yourself and I love this picture because if you’re a nerd, embrace that you’re a nerd. If you’re an athlete, embrace it, because once you embrace it, everything in life becomes easier. It’s easy for me to come up here and speak to you guys without getting all shaky, because I’ve embraced who I am. I’m a guy from New York that came to Malaysia to do great things. And so me talking about it makes it a little easier, because I’ve embraced it.

Surround yourself with encouraging people. I love this photo because this photo shows you that the company you keep is going to kind of dictate what you go on life. This is Barack Obama, with Steve Jobs, with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Netflix, the CEO of Twitter, of Yahoo!, Oracle. Imagine what they’re talking about, they have to be talking about cool stuff. So there’s a quote that says, “You’re the average of the five people that you keep around you”. So if you surround yourself with cool people, successful people, inspiring people you’re going to be inspired, you’re going to be cool, you’re going to be successful, you are going to be motivated. And if you surround yourself with people that suck, that people that always want to put their negative energy on you, you’re kind of going down spiral.

Number 4: Know what you want. Now you have to know yourself but you have to know what you want, right? Some people think that they want $1 million when in all reality they don’t want $1 million, they want to be able to travel, they want to buy their mothers a house, they want security, they want some freedom. So know what you want.

Number 5: Work your ass off. And this is cool, because if you guys don’t know Gary Vaynerchuk, he is kind of like the king of social media. And he started when he was really young to sell online, and his advice he calls it Hustle 2.0. If you like something, work hard. That’s all you have to do. Lose sleep. I have a couple buddies, they are my age, they’re about to be best-selling authors. I have buddies that have products online that make thousands of dollars because they work their ass off. They put in the time when everybody else — and when everybody else is out partying, they are in the house, they are in the lab working on things.

Now make the impossible the new possible. Now what do I mean by this? To me growing up in Harlem it was impossible that I would go to college. But it happened. It was impossible that I will get a job working for Fortune 500 Company but it happened. It was impossible that I would live in another country and work with cool people and start a podcast and meet millionaires. But it all happened. It became possible, so my standard went from here to here. The question became — it wasn’t how could I do this, it was how could I not do this?

So every time I look at a new task, on a new goal, and a new obstacle, I ask myself: Eugene, you’re capable. You’ve made it this far, how could you not do this?

Number 7: Fail hard and fail often. People don’t like to fail. Think about it guys. How many times have you failed? You had a lot of fails today but you don’t remember your fails. You remember all your successes, right? So you have to fail. Think about coders, I love to use this example and this analogy of coders, because coders fail all day. They’re at the computers, just coding away, coding away. And they have bugs, they have breaks, and code but they just try to fix it, fix it, fix it. At the end of 10 hours, how long it takes coders to do things, they have a perfect product, they have a perfect application because they failed. If you fail a lot the successes will be greater.

Number 8: Beat on your craft. Will Smith said before, he said that he doesn’t feel he’s particularly talented at anything. He doesn’t feel that he has like a natural talent. But he does feel that he has an uncanny ability to work hard. He has crazy work ethic. So I like to use the analogy of I like a lot of computer games, I play Elder Scrolls a lot. And in Elder Scrolls you have to build swords but you start with raw material, you start with iron ore. And you have to make iron sword. So think of your talent, your god-given ability as that raw material. You have to take it and beat on it. You have to perfect it, you have to sharpen it, you spend hours doing this. And soon you’re going to have a weapon that you can use to go out and conquer the world.

Number 9: Learn to embrace confrontation. Now how many of you guys want a raise at work? You guys want something from somebody but you’re afraid to go confront them about it. A lot of people hate confrontation, they try to go around it, they go the opposite way. They’ll try everything that they can do to try to avoid confrontation. But it’s when you meet confrontation face-to-face great things happen.

I had to embrace confrontation coming here today. Oh I thought what if I slipped on stage, what if the projector stuff didn’t work right. But when I got here, I embraced it and all that fell off me, I kind of left it down there. So learn to embrace confrontation because we start taking these risks can mean confrontation head on, great things are going to happen.

And number 10: Do what’s right. I don’t believe there’s a gray area when it comes to doing what’s right. I believe there is a right way and a wrong way. I can go to somebody from another country that doesn’t speak my language, go up to him and approach him, say something whether it be negative, I can tell how they take it. I can tell if I said something right, or if I said something wrong. We all have innate human sixth sense to know what’s right and what’s wrong. When you do the right things, good things happen to you.

So when I started this presentation I want to – I actually asked a question: how do you find your inner awesomeness? How do you find it? The answer is you don’t have to find it, you always had it. It’s inside you. But the media, television, your friends, your loved ones, they want you — they want to mold you to be something that you’re not, when deep down inside you already have all the tools that you need.

There was a point in time where we wanted to fit in, remember everybody wanted to fit in, everybody wanted to dress alike. But now we have to come to that transition and go into standing out as individual, because when we find our inner awesomeness, great things are going to happen.

Thank you.

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