PP 681: Choose to be the Champion of Your Life with William Hung
“Take personal responsibility for your own progress.” -William Hung
Rejections in real life are more painful than a big fat “NO” from Simon Cowell. But what if you received both? If you’re a fan of American Idol, you’ll love today’s conversation with William Hung. You may remember him from season 3 with his version of “She Bangs” and how he raised to fame after receiving that dreaded “NO”. If you’re wondering what he’s doing now, you’ll be surprised to know that he’s serving on a different stage as a motivational speaker. He helps his clients uncover and share their inspiring stories to the world. In this episode, Kim and William talk about facing rejection with grace, “gamifying” your business, life hacks to be more free, and a better way to look at mistakes. If you’re thinking of becoming a speaker one day, listen as William shares the secret to a good speak in presentation!
Highlights:
03:52 Exploring The World Of Speaking
08:58 Professional Poker Player
14:15 Word NO Is Not The End
19:20 Champion By Choice
24:14 Be Open To New Ideas
31:28 New Opportunities
34:35 Turn Stories To Inspiration
35:58 Mistakes: Own It!
Resources:
Book
Inspirational Quotes:
05:29 “When you’re speaking, people will remember what you say and what you teach them for the rest of their lives.” – William Hung
14:39 “When you hear a ‘no’ in that moment, maybe there are other open doors that you haven’t thought of in your life.” – William Hung
24:14 “Be more open to try new ideas or new ventures that people may not approve and might not recognize.” – William Hung
24:34 “There’s nothing easy out there. Everything you want to see in your life, you have to fully commit to it.” – William Hung
36:20 “Be honest with yourself.” – William Hung
36:28 “If you’ve made a mistake, own up to it.” – William Hung
36:48 “When you see a mistake, it means that you have something that you can develop and improve on.” – William Hung
About William Hung:
William Hung was the former singer who gained fame in early 2004 on the third season of the television series American Idol. At the time of his audition, Hung was a civil engineering student at UC Berkeley. After his spirited audition to be the next American Idol, he won the support of many fans. He brought his own career as a musician to an end in 2011. William accepted a job opportunity as a technical crime analyst for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and decided to pursue law enforcement instead of music. In early 2017, he started learning everything there is to learn about professional speaking. Then on, William started doing outreach campaigns and he got his first critical speaking opportunity from the Asian Realtors Association of America. Since then, this was the beginning of his professional speaking career.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:
Kim Sutton: Welcome back to another episode of Positive Productivity, this is your host, Kim Sutton. My friend, I don’t know if you’ve been listening since the beginning. Today’s episode is number 681, and I can hardly believe that I have gotten this far. But if you’ve listened since the beginning, you may have heard in the earlier episodes that I was often flabbergasted. There’s a better word than flabbergasted, but in all of speaking with the people that I was speaking with, because as a new podcaster, I didn’t feel like I had the right to speak to people. Today’s guest is a podcaster, speaker, coach and so much more. You may have heard about him back in the late 2000’s when he was a contestant on American Idol, that is going to be only a minimal part of our conversation today because of where he’s gone since then. But our guest today is William Hung. William, I’m so happy to have you here today.
William Hung: Hi, Kim, how’s it going?
Kim Sutton: I’m just thrilled to talk with you. Because seriously, William, when I started my podcast in 2016, I didn’t feel like I forgot that people are people. Does that make sense? You have been on national TV, you’ve been a sensation, you have sold like over 200,000 copies of your albums. In four years ago, I would have forgotten that you’re a person the same as me, but I finally got that through my thick head. So it’s an honor to speak with you just because I love where your journey has gone. If I can share, when I was 17, 16,that was my first time behind the mic. I was running for treasure in my junior class. William, my voice started shaking so bad that people in my huge school, I went to a suburban High School but there are 2000 kids. Oh, I thought that I was crying and it became a joke for a while so it took me another 20 years to get behind the microphone again.
William Hung: Oh, wow.
Kim Sutton: That’s why I love seeing where you have gone. I’m not saying that your story is anywhere close to mine, but I love seeing how you have transformed. So for people who haven’t met you, William Hung before, would you mind giving a brief introduction, especially sharing what you do today?
William Hung: Yeah, absolutely. So as people know, I did auditions on American Idol back in 2004. And then what happened was, I somehow went from an average student Civil Engineering student to overnight celebrity. But after that, I traveled and performed all over the world for about four years, then my life slowed down. My entertainment career slowed down and then I had to make the choice. Do I want to keep going to showbiz? Or do I want to keep a stable job? I chose a stable job. I thought it’s okay to just get a government job that pays good benefits. But then I feel something is missing in my life. Something unfulfilling. I feel like I’m not living up to my fullest potential so that’s when I started exploring speaking because speaking gives us a platform to enjoy ourselves. That’s how I saw it for many years.
Kim Sutton: Absolutely.
William Hung: Yeah. And then as time went along, I felt like I could do so much with speaking. Because when I was doing entertainment, I just entertained. People have fun. They enjoyed my signature song, She Bang, and other cover songs. But then don’t forget, for the most part. But when you speak, people will remember what you say and what you teach them for the rest of their lives.
Kim Sutton: You hope? That was actually part of my fear of speaking, that people would forget who I was today. And it’s not just the, I don’t want to say just speaking, and not to timestamp this episode, but in just like a week and a half, you and I will be at the same event speaking at the same event. When I have a confession, this event will be the second time I’ve ever spoken. Second.
William Hung: What?
Kim Sutton: Yes. So I spoke it. And just so listeners know, because these are events that happen every year. So in the fall, I spoke at She Podcasts.
William Hung: Yeah.
Kim Sutton: That blew my mind because 600 people had registered, 70 signed up for my session. I mean, the morning of, I didn’t know if I was going to be sick or pee my pants. Like, oh my gosh, there’s gonna be a packed room. So I just went in and was myself. I’ve been to a lot of events and seen a lot of speakers, and I feel like the worst speakers. And I don’t want to say that there are bad speakers, but some just aren’t as good as others when they’re trying too hard. I would love to know your opinion. But I went in as myself, and I got awesome feedback. So now this event, which is Podfest, over 2000 people registered. I don’t even want to watch the numbers that are registered for my segment this time because I just want to be me and not be afraid of numbers. I think people are often just way too concerned. I mean, you sold albums, were you watching the album sales the whole time?
William Hung: No, I don’t.
Kim Sutton: Okay, good. In watching the download numbers or anything like that, like I got too wrapped up in the numbers. What do you feel makes a really good speaking presentation?
William Hung: Oh, I love that question because it’s something that I studied for many years. Meaning, when I first started working for that government job, I worked for the sheriff’s department in the Los Angeles area, and I thought it would be one of most exciting jobs in my life because I thought I’ll be one of the people in the Crime Scene Investigations, CSI. But instead, I was checking crime data from police reports about rape, murder and burglary, not what I signed up for. So outside of work, I found a Toastmasters Club right across the street. So that’s when I started learning about speaking, doing a lot of speaking eight years ago. Using that experience, plus the three years of building and growing my speaking business, I would say, best speaking quotation, they inspire you to take action. They feel like a gift to you, they feel like something that you want to listen to over and over again and not get tired of it.
Kim Sutton: What do you want people to take action on when they listen to you?
William Hung: I want people to discover and leverage their talent. That talent could be something that the world might not recognize you for. One of my major passions is poker. And there’s a lot of stigma behind poker, especially for me. I’m not trying, but I already am a professional poker player. So whatever the passion could be, it could be some video games, it could be table tennis, it could be something that you really enjoy, but the world might not recognize that.
Kim Sutton: Listeners just so you know right now, William is traveling for a poker tournament. I absolutely love how your interests are diverse, and you are engaging in all of them. Because I see way too many times, and I’ve done it myself that when I became an entrepreneur, my whole life became my business. My family got put on the backburner, my hobbies got put on the backburner, my home got on the backburner. I mean, I was so thrilled. This is just a funny little side note, but I was so thrilled to put up a new window blind last night. It was in my kid’s room, but it was just one of those neglected things that got put on the backburner. We forget that outside of our business, there’s a whole life to be explored, and often that life can feed into our business. But if we’re stuck behind our laptop all the time, it could be stunting our growth as entrepreneurs, as people, as community members. Not just community members in our local town, but global community members. When did you get into poker, by the way?
William Hung: I started playing poker about 15 years ago.
Kim Sutton: And how did you get on to the professional track?
William Hung: Wow. I played poker for fun for many, many years. I started playing online. I remember the very first time I played, I actually played at a live Casino in Reno, Nevada. Back in those days, say the $1, $2 limit games, and I somehow made $300 in one night. It’s like, Whoa, that’s so amazing.
Kim Sutton: Yeah.
William Hung: Yeah. And then I played a lot online back then when online poker was very popular in the United States. And they mentioned, it isn’t unlawful. I didn’t say anything all the time. And then I play a lot like poker. I will say the last couple years is when I feel like I want to take poker very seriously. The reason for that is because, Kim, I always love math and numbers. I want to apply that talent somewhere, and I feel that poker is one of the great ways to do it.
Kim Sutton: I never really thought about poker with math and numbers, except for I believe, and I’m not going to ask your age because it’s none of my business, but I’m 40, and I remember watching Rain Man with my parents growing up, and I think they were playing blackjack, but Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman’s character was counting cards. Oh, which I know is not, I don’t think it’s illegal, but I know it’s highly frowned upon and you can get kicked out of casinos for it.
William Hung: That’s right, that’s right. It’s legal right now. The casinos are raised very sharp. They have surveillance, they have like [inaudible].
Kim Sutton: Yeah. Can you explain more? I’m just really intrigued, poker with math and numbers?
William Hung: Yeah. Because poker, the way to make the best decisions is based on numbers. There were a certain number of possible combinations, the way that the game is structured, they’re slipping hands trip, things like that, so it’s all based on numbers.
Kim Sutton: Yeah, I guess I haven’t played enough poker. Plus, I don’t really have a poker face. I gotta be honest, I saw one video of you sitting at a poker table, and I don’t believe you were wearing sunglasses.
William Hung: Nope.
Kim Sutton: Nope, okay. So you have a good poker face? You don’t need to hide your eyes.
William Hung: I think I do. Okay, yeah, I would say that people are letting me get away with love. I’m getting paid when I have good hands, so I think I’m doing okay.
Kim Sutton: But my husband doesn’t gamble, he never has, but I’ve let him know time and time again, you will never play poker because your poker face sucks. He gets this little twitch in his mouth when he’s telling a half truth. Like, yeah, try again sweetie. Because I can totally see right past that. So I want to go back to the entertainment, just the entertainment part of your career. I saw, and I’m curious, because in my opinion, you’ve had an amazing story of success and also resilience because your American Idol audition went, not how you would have planned for it to go, but also way better than you would have planned for it to go.
William Hung: Of course.
Kim Sutton: So what recommendations do you have for people who may not have had the expected outcome initially in how to keep on going even when they hear the NO?
William Hung: Sometimes when you hear a NO in that moment, maybe there are other open doors that you haven’t thought of in your life.
Kim Sutton: Yeah, I found that often my nose, even if they’re not coming out of my mouth, when they’re coming out of somebody else’s mouth indicates that there’s an even bigger YES coming down the way.
William Hung: Yeah.
Kim Sutton: The house that we live in right now actually was one of those situations. My husband and I weren’t able to buy a house. When we first started the business, buying a house, for listeners who are entrepreneurs and just starting the journey, buying a house as an entrepreneur can be a little bit tricky. I definitely recommend getting somebody to help you shop around for mortgages if you’re in that situation. But we were looking into rent to own situations, which there’s plenty of in our area of Ohio. And we were waiting back to hear about another house. I had forgotten that I had put on a Craigslist ad, even before we heard about this other house that we were looking at, and the day, just hours before we heard NO on the other house. I got a response to my ad to come check out the house that we now not only live in but own. It was just so serendipitous. I mean, we got home from looking at this house for the first time, and realized that we loved it even more than the other. Got home, we were planning on telling the other guy, you know what? We changed our mind. But instead I had an email telling us, No, we didn’t qualify. Because it’s crazy to me, I don’t know if you’ve experienced this at all, but a lot of people look at entrepreneurial income, small business income is unstable. When in all actuality, I think often it is even more reliable. Because if something doesn’t work out, we can find a way to make something else work out. Give me a couple hours and I can get money. Legally, I need to say legally, okay. But I can go and approach any number of my contacts and say, Hey, I have a special going on. I don’t like to do that because I don’t want to commoditize or belittle the value of my products. I have this opportunity, that sounds like a scam. I know, but I don’t mean it at all like that. Whereas, somebody who’s employed, they could get the pink slip today and be out of a job, and not even have a business setup where they can go, bring in extra income right away. So anyway, entrepreneurial income can be a little bit tricky when shopping for homes and cars. When you were working for the government, is that where you met your wife?
William Hung: I would say during that time frame, yes.
Kim Sutton: Yeah.
William Hung: But the way I found my wife is through a Chinese online dating website.
Kim Sutton: Oh, my gosh, I love that. I actually met my husband through Craigslist. And I’m still alive, William. I was looking for furniture for my apartment, and I found him instead. But what does she think about your career? Does she travel around with you?
William Hung: Wow, it’s a long story. But unfortunately, we end up in divorce.
Kim Sutton: Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that.
William Hung: Yes, yes. But the good news is that I am single and ready to mingle again.
Kim Sutton: There you go. Okay, so when I started my first business, I was married to my high school sweetheart, and we just never should have done it. That was not intentional, but I hope you don’t mind. I’m just gonna run with it. I realized that was another one of those nose that opened up into the bigger YES. Yes, I met my husband on Craigslist, but he’s my soulmate. There is no doubt about it. He is absolutely my soulmate. And if I hadn’t married my high school sweetheart, then I wouldn’t have wound up in Ohio, the Dayton Ohio Craigslist site, looking for furniture because I was leaving my ex. So everything for a reason. Well, there you go. Don’t discount Craigslist, but now you’re traveling so much. The next one is ready for you when you’re looking for. I know there’s a few months before this episode airs, but what are you most excited about in the year ahead, or a couple years ahead? What is big and looming on your bucket list?
William Hung: I don’t really have a bucket list. But the thing I’m most excited about is to see where my [inaudible] by combining my multiple passions like speaking coaching, playing poker, I even came up with a book called Champion By Choice back in October. So I’m open to change, I’m open to see where everything takes me.
Kim Sutton: Champion By Choice, can you expand on that? Is that about poker or life for everything in general?
William Hung: Everything, yeah. It’s like a self help motivational autobiography, I think that’s the best way to put it. So yeah, I talked about how you can choose to become a champion in your life.
Kim Sutton: Was the family that you were raised in positively inclined people, or inclined parents like, did they have a positive mindset and teach this to you? Or is that something that you learned along the way?
William Hung: I would say my parents are definitely positive and salient. They don’t have the highest paying jobs, but they somehow made it. I can say that they genuinely made it because they don’t have that great education, but they found nice, stable government jobs, working for LA right now. And then now they could afford to travel, they could afford to finally live the life that they want.
Kim Sutton: Amazing. Yeah, I grew up on the East Coast in western New York. And by the way, I saw that you’ve seen for the Jays, was at the Toronto Blue Jays?
William Hung: Yeah, yes.
Kim Sutton: I know that’s not New York. I do realize, listeners, that that is Canada, but it was the closest Major League Baseball team that we had growing up. But I noticed that the mindset and the mindfulness that I encountered growing up was basically slim to none. I don’t mean to say that life was miserable, it definitely wasn’t. But compared to friends who were born, raised and grew up on the West Coast where spirituality and mindfulness seemed to be a lot more present, it was a completely different experience for me. I’m learning about the law of attraction and positive thoughts. It sounds silly to say, but I never thought about positive thinking until I was 30. A friend asked me if I have heard about Abraham Hicks and The Law of Attraction. I’d never given thought to my thoughts before, and I’m embarrassed to say that. But now, that is something as a mom of five, I work with my kids to make sure that they understand that life’s hiccups are just that, think positively. There’s something better coming. That’s not necessarily so easy when you have teenagers who break up with girlfriends and they’re like all mopey, and Mom, that’s not what I want to hear right now. I have a 14 year old who’s had three girlfriends this year. It’s just yeah, he doesn’t want to hear it. But the next day, he has a new girlfriend again. I like, to be young, but anyway, going back to all the kids, think positive, this is just a glitch. It’s just a speed bump of life. If you could go back and tell your younger self anything, would you want to? And if so, what would you tell your younger self?
William Hung: I always say, be more open to try new ideas or new ventures that people may not approve, people might not recognize, like I mentioned earlier. Now, it’s much easier. It’s definitely a lot of hard work, by the way. I’m not saying it’s just really easy. There’s nothing easy out there. Everything you want to see in your life, you have to like fully commit to it. But now there are Esports, there’s a lot of people doing very well for themselves playing video games, there’s a lot of people doing very well for themselves, pursuing knitting. So anything seems possible nowadays. But before, I didn’t know that, I just thought that I have to be an engineer, or a doctor, or lawyer.
Kim Sutton: I feel like you are stalking me. I’ll expand. I knit my wedding dress when I married my husband. My husband is a video game designer, our whole family is gamers. Oh, my podcast is about productivity, but in full disclosure, I play video games every night.
William Hung: Yeah, what do you play?
Kim Sutton: Okay. Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe I’m absolutely or I’m actually admitting this. We play ARK: Survival Evolved, have you heard of that?
William Hung: No.
Kim Sutton: Okay, so it’s been out for four years. Oh, my gosh, listeners, you got to let me know that you heard this so I know that you’re listening. In four years, William. I have 5000 hours clocked on the game.
William Hung: What?
Kim Sutton: Okay, I have to expand on that a little bit. This game, you get plopped on an island, basically is how you start, and there’s dinosaurs everywhere. And either get attacked by them, or you attack them, or you team them. And after you start taming your dinosaurs, then you can breed them and you build your structures. But in order to build your structures, you have to farm all the materials. So all we play on public servers with people all around the world, and we trade dinosaurs, and now there’s all these other maps that we can go to. We found just a great like online family, but it’s a whole, it’s something that my whole family does together.
William Hung: Wow.
Kim Sutton: Yeah. And we’re four years in, so I have people joking about how I could be twitching, talking about my business, the fact that I do marketing automation and talk about productivity, I could weave it into my Ark time. Somehow, I don’t really have an interest in doing that. In full disclosure, I like keeping my gamertag completely separate from my business. You will not find my gamertag anywhere on my website. But I gamify my business so that I have goals that I want to achieve every day while I’m working, it allows me to have the time at night. And I must say also, those 5000 hours, as I mentioned, you breed dinosaurs. There was a two year period of time on breeding dinosaurs, you actually had to take them through a baby stage. I had a separate computer on my desk that I would leave open just so I could feed it, because if you did not feed it, it died. So you could have two weeks of real life time invested into a baby dinosaur that dies because it starves. I know I’m a little bit older than you, but I have a brother who’s 10 years younger. I remember sitting in my senior year, final math exam with his little digipet in my pocket, do you remember those little things?
William Hung: Which one?
Kim Sutton: It was maybe like a two inch little pod that you had like a dinosaur on, ironicall, a dinosaur, and the egg would hatch and then it would beep or vibrate when you need to do–
William Hung: Okay, I could relate to it because I used to play Pokemon.
Kim Sutton: Okay. Yeah.
William Hung: Yeah. Sometimes people carry those things in order to be like pikachu, candy and whatnot.
Kim Sutton: Yeah. So he gave me his pet to take care of because his school wouldn’t allow it. So I was sitting in my senior year math exam, and the thing went off.
William Hung: Oh, no.
Kim Sutton: I had to quickly take this little pet out of my pocket and feed it underneath my desk, hoping that nobody caught me because I could have been putting cheat codes for the math exam. Yeah, I’m a gamer. But as I said, I’ve gamified my workday now. So I look at everything that I do. I feel like so many entrepreneurs and people, in general, take actions mindlessly, subconsciously, oh, I’ve got a new email. Let me go over there and look at it. Well, I turned off all those notifications. My text notifications are off. I’ve actually uninstalled Skype from my computer. My Gmail notifications are off, like everything is off. So everything that I do is intentional. For the gamers who are listening, World of Warcraft, you enter as a level one character, let’s just say level human. I’m thinking that I’m a level one entrepreneur, what experience points do I need to earn today, this week, this year to reach level two entrepreneur? Those most important tasks that I take every day, I’ve assigned experience point values to them. I have a weekly goal of 250 experience points. I have yet to hit 250 experience points in a week, but I’m finally getting stuff done. I’m ditching the excuses, and I’m taking the prioritized purposeful actions instead of, and I’m just gonna say the word pardon the cuss word for kids who are listening, but instead of getting shit done and taking prioritized purposeful action, we don’t need to get stuff done, we need to take the important actions that are going to take us to the next level. Like writing the book, like getting on stage and impacting people, like sharing our messages.
William Hung: That’s right.
Kim Sutton: Yeah. Scrolling for hours, there was a point in 2014, 2015 when I was a member of 180 Facebook groups.
William Hung: Oh, geez.
Kim Sutton: Yeah, thinking that that’s where my next client was going to come from. So I would sit here at my desk for hours and hours every day, every time a notification would pop up that a new post had gone up, and I would just run to see what that new post was. That is not the way to grow the business.
William Hung: Yeah.
Kim Sutton: What business in life have you come up with that really helped you?
William Hung: Well, I would say the biggest transformation, something that I shared very often yet is, I finally decided to quit my job, like one job as of January.
Kim Sutton: Congratulations.
William Hung: Yes. I finally handed in my resignation letter, I decided that I was just gonna go for it. I trust that my multiple sources of income from speaking, coaching, poker and whatnot will be enough.
Kim Sutton: I think that’s amazing. Because how many hours have you gained back now, every week? 40 plus, plus commute.
William Hung: Yes, yes. So the most amazing thing is that, now, I’m starting to feel the freedom. Freedom doesn’t mean that you don’t need to do anything, otherwise you will be right up for an unproductive human being. I don’t want to be an unproductive human being. But the best three are rewarding, now I can wake up the times I want because I’m not a super early person, but I like my mornings. So waking up around anywhere between 8:10 Am seems ideal, but my job requires it. I need to wake up at 6:00 or maybe 7:00 at the latest.
Kim Sutton: I don’t even want to imagine what a commute in LA is like.
William Hung: Yeah, it’s like an hour.
Kim Sutton: The convenience of the minute and a half commute. I just had to watch out for cats who like to grab my feet as I’m walking from one room to another. It’s amazing. The longest part of my day is just waiting for the space heater to warm my office. But I’ve spoken with a few connections, friends who wanted to know how to become an entrepreneur, how to become rich entrepreneurs. I was like, well, what do you want to do? What I meant was, what are you really passionate about? What message would you like to share with the world? How would you like to impact the world? And there was this one person in particular who, the only answer that he would give me was, I want massive stacks of money on my desk. Like, dude, you’re not giving me anything to work with you on here. It’s not just like snapping your finger and you’re gonna have wads of money on your desk. What do you want to do? He’s like, well, that’s it. I just want the massive wads of money on my desk. I was like, you know what? This conversation is done. And I gave him a list of books to go read. I was like, after you read these books, come back and talk to me. But if you’re only concerned about the money, then I’m not going to be helping you with anything. I have nothing to help you with until you figure this out.
William Hung: Yeah.
Kim Sutton: What would you say as your purpose?
William Hung: Hmm. I would say that this is something that’s still evolving, but as of right now, I want to help people uncover their inspiring stories within them. I talked about personal stories where you may have experienced power or frustration, and then how to turn those stories into something that could be valuable for your audience.
Kim Sutton: Is American Idol one of those stories for you?
William Hung: Yes, definitely.
Kim Sutton: I just want to say that you are completely inspiring to me because, well, number one, I can’t sing, period. I already told you, at that point in my life, even though it was 15 years at that point since I had been behind the microphone, I couldn’t even comprehend getting it behind a microphone again. By the way, listeners, when I started getting behind the microphone, again, was actually because I was gaming with my husband and they wanted me to be on a channel with them while we were doing boss fights. But I was so scared to even get behind the microphone for that because I was afraid I was going to mess up. Do you think there’s such things as mistakes? Or do you think they’re growth opportunities? Because I don’t think there’s mistakes.
William Hung: I definitely see mistakes as mistakes. I see the world for how it actually is. I remembered I hadn’t had a chance to address the earlier question like, what’s the best mental hack of this, whatever. I think the biggest thing that has helped me so far, being an entrepreneur, again, to be honest with yourself, and that’s something I learned from the poker table. So it translates very well in life. If you’ve made a mistake, own up to it. You didn’t make a mistake. I definitely make mistakes. I don’t play perfect, okay. Nobody plays perfect. But taking a step back, a lot of people, what’s holding them back as entrepreneurs is that they are not being honest with themselves. When you see a mistake, I agree with you, that means that you’re very self aware, it means that you have something that you can develop and improve on.
Kim Sutton: Thank you for sharing that because I just said that I see, I don’t necessarily see them as mistakes. I see them as learning opportunities. In 2019, 2018, I was in chronic yes ma’am mode, where I was saying yes to everybody and everything, and giving up too much of myself, and then ended up coming back and biting me really hard. And for a short while, I was really resentful to the other parties and really angry. But when I finally owned up and realized, wait a second. Of all people, I probably have 98% of the blame here. That’s when my business started to really shift because I could have done things differently. I could have said, no. It wasn’t their fault for taking advantage, it was my fault for allowing them to.
William Hung: Yeah.
Kim Sutton: That was huge and eye opening to me. I think, well, there’s the resonating arc over this whole conversation. No, is not a bad word. There’s so much opportunity that can come out of nose. William, where can people find you online, get to know more about, what you’re doing today and connect with you.
William Hung: People can go to my website, willhung.com, W-I-L-L-H-U-N-G.C-O-M. They can also find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.
Kim Sutton: Fabulous. Listeners, all those links will be in the show notes which you can find at thekimsutton.com/pp681. I want to thank you William for giving me the opportunity to be totally transparent on how many gaming hours I have. I can’t believe I’ve been holding out for four years now to admit that number. I feel like so many times, it’s a dirty number, but it really isn’t. It only becomes a dirty number if you don’t know how to control it.
William Hung: Don’t feel bad Kim. I lost over 1500 hours as of today playing poker professionally. I lost over 1000 hours of poker last year as a side hustle before I chose to quit my job. So don’t feel bad, it could actually be a good thing.
Kim Sutton: Oh, my gosh, thank you, that just made me feel so much better. We all got to remember that our business is not our life, and our life should not be our business. So yeah. What parting piece of advice or golden nugget can you offer to listeners?
William Hung: Well, one of the common themes throughout our conversation today is take personal responsibility for your own progress. I learned that for all the things that I do, I feel like when I take personal responsibility for my own progress, it feels so much better. I stopped blaming on other people, I stopped blaming on ex wives, I stopped blaming on circumstances, I am much happier. And you can do it too.
