Woo, right, hands up if you've seen the film.

Okay, Okay.

What do you all waiting for?

Its available on iTunes and all that if you haven't seen the film, the story is essentially about the differences in the values and expectations between Western and ears and culture.

And the film is actually based on a book.

Now, a chapter that really stands out to me in the book is when the protagonist best friend goes to get the tea or the hottest gossip on her boyfriend's secretly faller family.

Now, while the metaphorical T is being poured, the book goes into a really deep detail, but the many steps it takes to pour the literal T if you're doing it the traditional way, that is.

But I'm gonna boil it down into three simple steps for you except one prepared.

Choose your flavor.

Boil your water, get your cups pretty self explanatory.

Right.

Step two awakened.

What does that even mean?

So I didn't know this until I read the book, but this is the process of taking your hot water, pouring it over the leaves, rinsing that, pouring it out before you actually pouring the water that you're actually gonna drink to make the tea.

Now, this is done to awaken the leaves to reveal their full aroma and step three.

Finally, you enjoy rinse and repeat T, as you know, is traditionally served hot.

But what do you do when you're t goes cold?

Do you drink it as is to add hot water or deport out and threw something new?

Similarly, when you're out a crossroads in life, do you continue just doing the same thing waiting, hoping and wishing that path will eventually come clear?

Or do you take matters into your own hands and pivot?

I'm gonna share with you a time in my life when I decided to put my tea and steep something new.

But before I can tell you my story, I have a bit of a confession.

I'm a millennial, you know, the generation that ruins everything.

That's right, that's that's us from humble bragging about making a home cooked meal because hashtag adult ing to using weird words like seeing foam oh, yellow and describing things as it's lit.

I didn't come up with that one, but I've never used it until this, like just this moment.

I swear to you, we even found a way to glorify working ridiculously long hours to the point of burnout hands of if you've been there.

Now the burnout thing is really interesting to me because well, why, you know, why do we push ourselves so hard?

Well, you know it's not gonna be news to you, but I'm to call it out anyway.

There is a complex set of expectations that we put on ourselves and on others to have something to achieve something by a certain stage in life, like by the time between 30 for example, some of these expectations may include going to school, getting good job, working your way up in that job to pay for expensive gym membership.

Maybe buy a place, start a family, eat a lot of avocado toast, all the flex for your 400 followers on instagram.

These expectations are based on values Now.

Values are your guiding principles.

They are what help you make decisions, prioritize.

They help you shape your end understanding of what's right and what's wrong.

Now, for the longest time, I thought that my values were security and perfection for at least as close as I could get to it, because if you do things perfectly, no one can say you don't belong now.

I was born here, but my grand parents weren't and growing up.

Every weekend we go to dim sum with them.

You know, if you've ever been a dim sum, you know that it's your job to order the tea and every single time.

For us, it was always the same thing to impede or jasmine tea.

Now is jasmine tea my favorite tea?

Not particularly, but you always order the tea that you know your parents will like.

Your brand parents will like and everyone drinks from the same teapot.

It's a collective experience now.

This is different than let's say, Western culture, where you get to be an individual in my generation have popularized going to coffee shops in taking a good 30 seconds to order our hyper customized drinks.

Mind, for example, is a tall green tea latte with soy, no foam and half sweet please.

But the expectation in Asian culture is that you do what's best for the family, the collective, whether that be making choices about T a dim sum or in life like choosing a safe career path.

Pop quiz.

Who can shout out a safe career path?

I heard a doctor.

A lawyer.

One more.

Whoa!

Okay, that was a lot of an engineer.

I have to have it.

I can't see you all out there, But are you all easier?

Something because congratulations.

Congratulations.

You just named some of the only acceptable career paths for Asians.

Yeah, I call them career expectations.

T, as we already established, is usually served hot.

And to me, that represents playing it safe because safe means you can't fail, right, because failure would bring heartache and shame and worry.

It's your family that's worked so hard for generations to build a life for you here in Canada, the immigrant family guilt is really all.

It's true.

There's immense shame in failure in Asian culture, whereas in Western society it's for the most part accepted, expected and sometimes even celebrated.

So how do you mitigate the risk of failure?

Well, naturally, you do what you're supposed to do, right?

Try to do things perfectly, but I learned the hard way that even if you do things perfectly, that can actually will lead you to failure.

Here's the story in 2060 my life seemed pretty good.

Um, I was working in marketing and a leadership role at a cool tech company.

And to be honest, I was living that avocado toast life.

And while a few months into the job, my direct report left and that left me holding the bag, a bag filled with stuff that I wasn't really good at and didn't particularly enjoy, and more, more often my boss would actually give you negative feedback on the quality of my work.

This has never happened to me before, and so I kind of freaked out.

So I thought that OK, maybe if I just, like, work more, I could get back to the track of perfection.

I would work 10 hour days, five days a week.

And even though I was physically there, I wasn't mentally there.

On a three day trip to Chicago, I was running on fumes like literally, I would probably had, like, eight hours of sleep in total over three days.

When he finally got a chance to sit down, I got a message from this girl I went to high school with.

It was a picture of a letter that I'd written to myself in Grade 12.

But Red, I want so much out of life and I know how to get it.

The hard work doesn't scare me.

Not succeeding does see at that time in my life I had these big dreams of becoming a TV personality one day and having my own talk show.

But I chose marketing as my path because well, and probably guess because it was safe.

Now, reading this letter to myself after working nearly a decade and marketing made me realize that I still wanted the same thing.

Yet I hadn't done anything about it.

And more than that, I realized that these values of security and perfection they weren't actually my values.

They were a reflection of my fear, my deeply rooted fear of failure.

I didn't actually know what my real values were.

It wasn't awakening.

I had let the tea steeps for too long without having rinse the leaves.

I had to for my tea and Steve something new.

Now, upon this realization, I decided to go on a mission to figure out what my real values were, and in my research I came across three ways how you can identify what your values are, and I'm gonna share them with you.

Firstly, you can take a look at your peak experiences in life.

Now these are the times where you felt the most well filled, the most accomplished, the most proud.

For me.

A pattern that arose was it was always been connecting, connecting.

You can also take a look at your code of conduct what have things that you absolutely have to do in your life or else a part of you will die.

You know, for some people, it might be, you know, fitness, meditation or spending time with family.

For me, it was always about being creative creativity.

I think about the times you felt the most upset and then turn that around.

Think about why, what values were being suppressed.

These are your suppressed values for me.

In that job, I felt like I wasn't really being myself, and I was trying to someone that I wasn't.

So I realized that my third value was authenticity.

Once I discovered my values, I sought to create these things in my life.

I did fund video projects and I scored a sweet internship producing and hosting for a TV station, and eventually I got paid for it, too.

I was legit, and I was hashtag living my best life well after work.

That is because I was still working that marketing job.

You know, where I wasn't progressing.

Wasn't improving, definitely was not doing things perfectly.

Two weeks before my 29th birthday, I got fired.

I lost my job unless my job, because it wasn't performing.

I wasn't performing because I was depressed.

I was depressed because I wasn't living in line with my values.

To my surprise, my immediate reaction was gratitude, gratitude for no longer having to live a lie and gratitude for the opportunity to start fresh.

Now I very well could have gone to find another marketing job, but I knew that that wouldn't make me happy.

And I was determined to make sure that the next thing I did would be in line with my values that are.

We're now so clear to me.

So I took some time to explore that teenage dream of mine and during my time of fun employment, as I called it, I continue to work for that TV station and I found myself covering the Vancouver Asian Film Festival.

And for the first time I saw myself on screen like not really on screen.

But I saw faces of people who looked like me, whose experiences were similar to mine and somehow, without words at all.

I knew exactly what these characters were thinking and feeling and why they did what they did.

I was deeply connected to their stories, and he thought that Okay, well, maybe my story was worth telling so that people could feel connected to themselves as well.

So I did a bit of a pilot, and I wrote a block post about a block post about how I lost my job, discovered my values and tried to build a life more in line with my values and not just the expectations I allowed myself to be influenced by.

And through that experience, I learned that failure was not shameful.

If it leaves, you, tell learning and growing.

And I got an outpour of support for sharing my story, people telling me that they, too, had gone through the same thing or that in reading my story.

But they learned something about themselves and about others.

So then I took it a step further and night, knowing that I wasn't the only one that had a story to tell and buttered my friends to tell their stories as well.

And the same thing happened words of support and encouragement.

Together, our stories would create cold tea collective a media company and community for by and about Asian millennials, sharing our experiences of how we navigate our identity, growing up in Western society, a cultural mosaic.

And more than that, you were giving something back to our fellow Asian millennials, giving them something to connect with, to feel, seen, heard and understood.

Over the last two years, we've shared over 100 stories of people just like me and maybe even just like you, of how we're living between cultures in between our collective and our individual hopes, Dreams and fears, including the cast of crazy rich Asians and more Throwing up between cultures constantly begs you to choose between a set of values, expectations and behavior.

And then the simple question of which tea to drink.

A dim sum reveals a deeper struggle of identity.

But the beauty of being Canadian is that you don't have to choose a side you can choose to live in the in between and that the only expectations you should live by are to live in line with your values.

I'm gonna leave you with one final thing and know what's not howto live the perfect life because clearly I'm still working on that.

But what I will leave you with is just a very simple guide as to how you can live life more in line with her values, and it's the same as pouring tea.

Prepare by arming yourself with skills, knowledge and experience.

Awaken yourself to infinite possibilities and let's really important to you.

And lastly, enjoy, rinse and repeat.

Thank you.