A farewell to a car, Cornetto, face babies

I’ve always believed that the purchase of his first car marks a significant milestone in a man’s life. Think about it. The entire thing means so much more than you acquiring a wheeled contraption that would transport you from point A to point B. It’s also a statement that the dust has settled and you survived the financial tumult that came along with the entire moving away from your parents’ house and getting married thing.

It tells everyone that you’re done laying down the foundations of your new life on layers upon layers of financially-stable granite. Hell, you just purchased a home for you and your wife–a home that you’d pay mortgage for for years to come–why not purchase a ~PhP 900,000 vehicle that would put you in even more debt to top it all off?

My friends, that is the plan

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Disrupt: A solid business idea that would allow me to GTFO of the rat race

I just finished reading Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business, a provocative book by Luke Williams that utterly destroys the typical strategic brain storming models employed by today’s businesses.

His argument is that in order to come up with a truly innovative business model, business strategists shouldn’t be afraid to throw in ideas from way out in the left field. Otherwise, you’d end up processing contaminated information using data you already know and come up with the same shitty business idea hundreds of people already came up with years before it even crossed your mind. (i.e. “That buffalo wings place around the corner is doing well, why don’t we put up our own buffalo wings place. Only ours is cheaper. And has more sauce. Bitches love sauce”)

It’s similar to the entire concept of the curse of knowledge popularized by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Made to Stick (another totally boss book).

I love it even more because the ideas Luke present are parallel to the ideas Sir Ken Robinson presented in his TED talk about how our educational systems undermine creativity as opposed to nourishing them.

Essentially the book teaches you to identify opportunities by addressing “tension points” and following a simple template:

There’s an opportunity to provide [who?] with [what?] that [fills what gap?] and coming up with a hypothesis to challenge an existing business cliche from way out in the left field.

A real-world example can be seen in the resounding success of the Nintendo Wii in a playing field supposedly dominated by the XBOX 360 and the Playstation 3:

Cliche: Gamers are lazy couch potatoes who do not want to move more than they have to while enjoying games with kickass, realistic graphics.

Disruptive Hypothesis: What if there’s a significant segment of gamers who would enjoy  laid back games with their friends using an unorthodox input system that would require them to get off their couch and move?

Insight: Some casual gamers are actually intimidated by realistic graphics and complicated controls.

Opportunity: There’s an opportunity to provide casual gamers intimidated by current generation games with a gaming console offering laid back games which they can play with their friends using a motion controller.

Again, this book contains a lot of valuable insights. Insights which, if I were aware of about the time I graduated college, might’ve given me a shortcut to the financial empire I am going for. Obviously, the path I took (one that involved a call center job and dancing half-naked in front of a clothing store in exchange for vegetables) was the longer route.

But, as my mom used to say: “Gumising ka na, hindi ka hihintayin ng pari. Naglasing ka nanaman ba?” (The rough equivalent of which in English is: “It’s never too late”.)

Using my learnings from this book, I came up with an airtight business idea that would undoubtedly propel me to within striking distance of the financial empire I’ve been longing to build. And maybe a couple of lawsuits. (Whatever. Again, like my mom used to say–never mind. Too much effort).

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Comebacks

This month saw a bunch of celebrities making comebacks of sorts. The Rock has come back to the WWE, and David Pomeranz and Stephen Bishop also made localized, annual Valentine’s day comebacks

(seriously guys, why leave when you can stay and land gigs co-hosting Sunday noontime shows singing Lady GaGa covers with local celebrities and live like kings? We love you guys! Also, you have no idea how many guys have gotten restroom prom beejes thanks to your songs but whatever right)

What many of you don’t know, however, is that crying somewhere in the heart of Pasig, another former, overweight (The proper medical term for which, as I learned from my company’s recent Annual Physical Examination by the way is “Obese Class III”)celebrity has been plotting his return.

The former celebrity I speak of is none other than myself. Mike Villar, Rising Washed-up Internet Star.

“Why return now? lol and where have you been?” You might be asking yourself. And the answer to your question is because I want to and because I can. So you better check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Where I’ve been? Nowhere really. Most of my time between my last post and now was spent chilling in the barren, cold abyss that is called “being married” subsisting mainly on depression sandwiches and an endless supply of human tears on tap.

I kid! What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been happily married for over a year now and, for those of you who aren’t married yet, the most important thing you need to know is that for most people, deciding to, how does Beyonce put it?  ”put a ring on it”, means biting the bullet as far as all the responsibilities of adulthood would go. This means you’ll have less free time and the little free time you have won’t be spent dicking around in the internet but rather accepting additional jobs so you could pay the utilities and afford those fine decorative balusters you want for your house.

That said, there will be plenty of changes in regards to this blog’s content. Long-time readers of this blog would probably get turned off but come on guys, you have to admit that penis jokes could only be stretched so far. (There are still going to be penis jokes. Albeit, more refined penis jokes. Did you honestly think I could stay away from penis jokes? I love penises!)

To illustrate:

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Super Massive Timewarp

Listen, I don’t know exactly how it happened, but somehow, I think there’s some strange discontinuity and irregularity going on in the reality I move in. We’re talking weird, crazy ass Twilight zone-type shit here people.

This morning, I woke up in a residential condo unit in the Pasig area next to a woman whom I later identified as Maffy, my best friend/love of my life who I publicly announced my engagement to a couple of months ago–or was it? I honestly don’t know. If you ask me what the date is, I’d say it’s mid October, 2009 because that’s what it feels like and apparently, that’s about the last time I was cognizant of anything.

Between then and now, I have no recollection whatsoever of what happened to me. I have vague, fragmented memories that, when pieced together, does not form a cohesive story, let alone one that makes sense. Let me run these memories by you guys and hopefully, you can help me make sense of them:

Memory fragment 1: I’m married?!

This really doesn’t come much of a surprise to me as I know for a fact that I am engaged before I fell into the entire time warp shit I was in. But, it appears that I’ve now been married for three months. I found this photo while rummaging through iPhoto:

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Taxi driver dude, wtf?

For the past 5 years or so, I’ve always driven myself to get around. On the average, I would say that I only take public transportation or cabs thrice a year.

My stress levels, however, have gotten to a point where I strongly detest driving on account of me getting pissed off by other drivers a little too easily, and a lingering fear that the bouts of road rage I have would, someday, end up in homicides. Multiple, violent homicides.

So yeah, earlier this week I was invited to attend a press event over at hotel near where I work. Since the venue was only 3 blocks away from the office and I really want to avoid driving as much as I can, I decided to take a cab to get there.

So I flag down a cab, get in and–before I go on–a disclaimer:

A lot has been said in this blog about people from the provinces but, truth be told, I have nothing but respect for them.

I mean really, how can you not respect people who leave their quaint little home town and cross the seas to find a better life in Manila? These people do seventy-hour weeks in department stores or factories so they can buy Magic Sings so they’d have something to entertain their drunkard friends the next time they come over the small-ass apartment they’re renting.

All this while overachieving people like me get high paying jobs landing on their laps, spend their time magically turning a good chunk of their salary into alcohol and end up blowing almost PhP 5,000 pesos on various sexy girl webcam access sites because they’re stressed and miserable. And horny.

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