Why I Went Back to Piano

My debut recital as a pianist at Harvard University with the River Charles Ensemble

I think throughout life we’re always asking ourselves, “What is my purpose?” If we remove religion, responsibilities, the concept of destiny, and societal norms, it’s still hard to discover what is really our purpose. The answer is not always clear: it’s like looking through a foggy lens. Every moment we think we know “the answer”, life throws an egg at our head. We end up getting desperate for solutions, so much so that we’re willing to subject ourselves to anything— even spending money. There’s a multi-billion dollar industry built on self-discovery apps, self help books, and vacation/travel packages modeled after Eat, Pray, Love. But do any of these work?

Ever since I was 5 years old I thought I knew my purpose: build a company. My dad was an entrepreneur and when I could finally sign my name, he would take my brother and I on business trips. In a way, he apprenticed us on the craft of entrepreneurship. My dad was Daniel Plainview, and I was H.W. (There Will Be Blood reference). 

My brother (right) and myself (left) with my father (middle), holding our hands while he walked us throughout his factory (my mother is the lady in the white blazer and she’s a rockstar).

Even in college, during my freshman year at Harvard, I thought I was destined to be a startup wunderkind. I sabotaged my grades to start a venture. It came, it launched, and got conquered. I lost everything: all my money, my reputation, my credibility, and worst of all, my friendships. I remember just feeling like an absolute Eeyore while my classmates were competing in the Olympics, curing cancer, or raising a Series A with Sequoia Capital.

For some reason, my butt decided to get up and it moved my body to a concert on campus. The Boston Philharmonic was performing Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and I sat in the fifth row. 

My skin suddenly felt cold, then fiery hot, like jumping in a cold bath and then a deep plunge into a Japanese hot spring. My pupils dilated like I just ingested LSD. My hair popped up like a meerkat in the Serengeti. It was in that moment I knew I wanted to be a musician. The ability to craft an emotional experience existing purely in the present fascinated me. I went to the Dean’s office and switched my major from Applied Math to Music.

“I remember just feeling like an absolute Eeyore while my classmates were competing in the Olympics, curing cancer, or raising a Series A with Sequoia Capital.”

You would think a few years later I’d be some sort of performing artist touring the world. 

Well, I got side tracked.

In the midst of that psychedelic passion, the gargantuan number of hours spent practicing, and those mindless all-nighters, I lost sight of what I was doing, and why I was doing it. No matter how many hours I contributed to Gladwell’s 10,000, I could never rival those artists at the mountaintop. Success as a performer was out of reach. Climbing Everest at 18,000 ft. felt the same at 1000 ft.

I started panicking. And what happens when we panic? We run and hide. We run away from our dreams, our fears, and our roadblocks. We go back to what we are used to. So, I went back to business.

My sensei and co-founder of Giant Robot Media, Eric Nakamura (second from the left). Also in this photo, artist James Jean (left), Juliana Di Simone from tokyobike (middle) and Kota Kobayashi from Ippon Matsu Beer (second from right)

My brother, Ted (middle) and I with the entire Coral Robots Taiwan team. These people were my family for almost 2 years. With just a few of us, we made some pretty badass robots.

During that period, I launched two companies with two incredible people: Giant Robot Media with original founder Eric Nakamura, and Coral Robots with my brother, Ted Ko. However, both businesses fell on the knife-edge. And so I returned to the same place I was that sophomore year in college. I worked, I launched, and got conquered, again.

So I asked myself, “What is my purpose?”

I didn’t come to a great epiphanic resolution. All I knew was this: I enjoyed playing the piano. It makes me happy. And I made people happy playing my music.

“I started panicking. And what happens when we panic? We run and hide. We run away from our dreams, our fears, and our roadblocks. ”

I also knew the road to becoming a full-time musician was going to be hard. Money will be tough to come by, and in the meantime I have to work at other jobs to maintain the day-to-day. But one thing was for certain: if we really only have one life, and we only have a set number of years, why not try doing the thing that makes us excited?

So that was that. I once again tossed aside my past, my successes, my failures, my personal brand as a tech entrepreneur, and emerged as a guy who plays the piano.

So what is my purpose? Well, I still don’t really know. All I know is life is really hard. It’s not fair, it’s filled with ups and downs, and nothing really goes according to plan. The only thing we can control and manage is what we want to do and how we do it. After that, it’s all up to entropy.

So instead of finding your purpose, go find what makes you happy. Try it out for a little bit.

If you panic, it’s ok.

A recording of Frédéric Chopin's Etude Op. 10 No. 3 in E Major Played on a New York Steinway Model D at Harvard University's Paine Hall.