Patrick King is a lawyer turned successful Asian American online entrepreneur who teaches people how improve at social conversation and dating, avoid awkwardness, and improve charisma.
He helps people through his site patrickkingconsulting.com, conversationtactics.com, and his Amazon E-books.
He’s been featured in top publications, including Forbes, Coffee Meets Bagel, GQ Magazine, TedX, Forbes, NBC News, Huffington Post, Business Insider, Men’s Fitness, Inc., Real Simple Magazine, and Creative Live. He’s been shouted out by SJ Scott, a best-selling author on Amazon E-Books in self-help, on the James Altucher Show.
In this article, I interview Patrick, touching on his Asian American upbringing, how Asian Americans can succeed socially, how to start and validate an online business idea, his top business breakthroughs, and how to figure out which guru to trust.
How has your Asian upbringing been a hindrance and/or a benefit to your success? What have you done to manage this?
I think it’s overall been a benefit to my success because I had a very tough and disciplined work ethic installed in me since I was young. For better or worse, I learned that I had to get things done myself, and excuses didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. You can imagine how this benefits me while running my own company. When you are able to look past your ego’s defenses and realize that X or Y simply needs to get done, it becomes clear how you’ll need to spend your time.
It can be seen as a hindrance because I know for a fact that people discount me in certain ways. But I can’t control that. All you can do is accept it and use it as a source of motivation and drive. You can’t change people’s minds, but you can control what you do in reaction.
Asian American Millennials tend to be shy because of their emphasis on academics and lack of focus on social experience growing up. But they have a strong ambition to become wealthy and succeed socially. How can they overcome their setbacks to improve their quantity and quality of friendships and dates?
This is difficult because it is cultural, mostly coming from immigrant parents, whose path to prosperity was quite literally tuning everything else out and succeeding academically.
In a sense, the parents are completely correct to emphasize what they do. Thus, this process can only begin after you move away from your parents. The most important lesson to learn for better relationships and friendships is that no matter your work quality or ethic, your social relationships and friendships matter more. Understand that working quietly in a corner won’t get you where you want to be. The first time people sense that life isn’t a meritocracy is when they will begin to change.
What are your top 5 tips for Asian American men to succeed with charisma, confidence, and conversation?
(1) Don’t put people on a pedestal because that will force them to treat you as beneath them.
(2) Listen to conversation-based podcasts. [It’s the] best resource for starting to verbalize your thoughts and understand the kind of personality you want to skew towards.
(3) Understand that if you try to please everyone and never offend anyone, you’ll become a most unremarkable social presence. Have opinions and don’t be a doormat.
(4) Become comfortable with discomfort. Have the expectation that you’ll feel embarrassed or awkward. It’s part of the process so you can’t avoid it forever. Embrace it and you’ll improve quickly.
(5) Stop reading and planning. This is all procrastination geared towards saving your ego. Just do!
Not all of our readers live in a big city. How do you recommend they get enough practice when they only interact with a dozen people throughout the day?
A dozen people is a lot. For the sake of argument, let’s assume you only interact with 5 people a day. That’s 5 potential interactions. Start by employing a mindset to shoot for 10-second conversations with people. That’s just asking people how they are or complimenting them. Level up next time to another question or statement. That’s all you need to get started. Keep a low expectation and goal to make it easy to start.
How’d you validate your first business idea(s)?
Quite literally by writing a bunch of content and ideas and seeing what stuck. It’s pretty easy these days to get instant feedback on anything you want, be it through an email list, video views, CTR, paid ads, etc. Just do something (something you can do tomorrow, not something that must lead to your abstract ultimate goal) and see what happens. Stop planning and just do.
What ah-ha moments helped you overcome plateaus in your business?
It’s like you hear with actors giving a speech after they receive a reward: I am nothing without the people and market I serve.
The focus must always be on them; if you can speak their language and solve their problems, that’s all they care about; you are only the vessel for it.
No one cares about you. Once I was able to internalize this lesson, things went much better.
What has worked the best online for getting traffic and making sales?
Copywriting is one of the most valuable skills you’ll ever learn. Start with understand the elements of simple copywriting formulas and then apply them.
How do you differentiate between good and bad advice online that actually gets results or wastes your time?
Look at the advice-giver. Have they done anything real? If so, did they accomplish it through their own means and learning, or was it essentially gifted to them? Advice without a component of action are just empty platitudes.
Further Resources
- A 50-minute interview with Patrick
- Check out Patrick’s E-Books. If you purchase through this link, I get a commission at no extra cost to you.
What was your biggest takeaway from this interview?
