Not only are we born with creativity, but we also have the power to become more creative with effort. The more creative you are the happier you will likely be. There is a tremendous amount of fulfillment when you create something from nothing.

Being more creative could make you more money as well. It takes creativity to solve problems and start companies. Once you shift more from being a consumer to a creator, good things start to happen.

After all, we are living in the “creator economy” where anybody with enough courage to put themselves out there has the ability to make money online. Sure, we might get ridiculed. But those who ridicule are too afraid to try themselves!

Making money only from your day job is so 1990s. Now, having a side hustle that harnesses our creativity to bring in extra income is more commonplace. With extra income, we could ultimately achieve financial freedom sooner. And once we achieve financial freedom, then we can take even more creative risks!

Are you an underdog looking to succeed in this brutally competitive world? Do people ignore you, discredit you, think you’re dirt, or even hate you for just being you? Well, welcome aboard!

I’ve been the underdog my entire life. The number of rejections I’ve experienced is too large to count. But you know what? I love it! I want you to love rejections too.

In this post, I’d like to share some underdog success stories. Hopefully, they will motivate you to embrace suboptimal situations and keep on going.

The one constant theme from these stories is that when nobody expects you to amount to anything, you are free. And once you are free, you can soar!

When Nobody Expects You To Win

I bumped into the captain of our club’s 5.0 USTA team (top level) the other day and excitedly told him our 4.5 team had won the San Francisco city championship. We had gone 0-7 in 2021, the bottom of the league standings, and had a miraculous turnaround in 2022. I thought he would have been happy to hear the news.

Instead, without missing a beat, he responded, “Oh yeah? We just got done winning the 5.0 league.”

There were no congratulations from him at all, only oneupmanship. Sigh. But I still gave him props anyway. I liked his unsupportive response to our victory because it reminded me how difficult it is to be happy for someone sometimes.

For well over a decade, the 5.0 captain has prided himself on captaining winning teams. He also disapproved of the club starting a 4.5 team for years because he knew we weren’t very good.

The 5.0 captain is in his 60s, retired, and is very focused on league tennis. So to hear of us winning, where he was not captain, might have made him feel less than. It is strange because we all belong to the same club.

One of the best strategies to get ahead is to convince people you stink when you’re actually pretty good. By posturing yourself as inferior, you lower other people’s expectations of you. Once people think you’re not much of a threat, that’s when you can better navigate your way to victory!

This post is for those who:

• Want to get an edge in this hyper-competitive world
• Want to look on the bright side after being discredited, passed over, or slighted
• Are curious why you are perceived in a different way than you really are
• Feel a level of anxiety and dread before doing something challenging
• Enjoy competitive sports and the dynamics involved in team sports
• Want to reduce emotion from clouding making better decisions

As a kid, I loved watching martial arts movies. Drunken Master starring Jackie Chan was one of my favorites. So when I stumbled across a new old show called Kung Fu starring David Carradine, I was thrilled!

I was eight years old and attending Taipei American School at the time. Each summer, I’d go back to my paternal grandparent’s home in Honolulu. In the mornings before breakfast, my grandparents would let me watch TV. I’d usually just stick to watching the cartoons like Thundercats or GI Joe. But not this particular morning.

The first thing I thought when I watched Kung Fu was why was this show so slow and gloomy? The second thing I thought was why did the main character look so strange? He looked like a white guy trying to play an Asian guy’s role. Ah hah, he was a white guy playing an Asian monk! As a kid, the topics were also too advanced for me, so I quickly lost interest in the show.

It wasn’t until I was older did I learn about the controversy regarding Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee’s widow asserts that Bruce came up with the show’s concept and expected to be cast in the lead role. But Warner Brothers supposedly stole the idea and shut him out. The studio thought it was too risky to have a “non-American” be the lead.

Apparently, Kung Fu was a huge hit with American TV viewers in the 1970s. However, I just didn’t get it as a kid who grew up watching much more amazing martial arts shows in Taiwan and Malaysia.