“Let me help you create an unforgettable experience at your conference.”
As an experienced keynote speaker, Vinh knows that what transpires on stage is not about him. It’s 100% about the audience. It’s about the life-changing lessons he’s been so fortunate to learn along the way and sharing them in a manner that transforms people. That’s where magic happens.
My family are refugees from Vietnam. They arrived in Australia in 1981, March 31st. My dad has always shared with me a simple concept – life is a miracle. He used to tell me:
“Son, do you know how ridiculous it is that you are alive? If your mother or I died in the war, you wouldn’t be here. If your grandparents didn’t meet, you wouldn’t be here. Heck, lets take it back 50,000 generations. If a cave man ate a poisonous fruit and died, that’s our entire bloodline vanished from this earth.. It took millions of years of serendipitous events for you to be here, and now that you are here, you are alive for 80 years on average. When you compare how long it took for you to get here versus how long you are here for.. it’s like you are alive for 1 minute. It’s a privilege to be alive. In this life of yours,remember to do what you love and jump as high as you can in life. As long as I am alive, I will forever be your net.”
What does success mean to you? Has your definition of it changed over the years and if so, why? | Success as a metric to me is days at home. This career path has made me financially successful but happiness poor. Because the more successful I am as a speaker, the more I am away from my family. I’ve since updated how I measure success 🙂
Success to me is being able to do what I want, with who I want. I love working on cool projects with cool people.
What drives you? |
My family.
My purpose; Helping people amplify the best parts of who they are with their instrument (their voice).
Peak Experiences
Where do you think your ‘MAGIC’ comes from? | My ability to connect with others and my ability to play my instrument.
What is your LIFE-MISSION in one sentence? | I want to help the invisible become visible.
What do you think is often the difference between people who are good at what they do and people who are great at what they do? | Consistency, discipline and self-awareness.
What has been your biggest failure / learning experience? | Don’t always seek shortcuts, take the longer path and always work towards mastery. Mastery always wins the long game.
What is one talent or strength of yours, which has been critical to your success? | My ability to connect with others.
What do you believe are the characteristics, actions, habits and behaviours that you both have and use, that have helped you achieve what you have been able to achieve? |
- Getting up early.
- Being kind to myself.
- Exercising.
- Living below my means.
- Always looking for teachers/ mentors.
- Reading.
- Reflection.
- Allowing myself to change my mind/ direction in life.
- BBQ’ing haha
What are the principles and values that you believe are important to live by? | Ah, this I have in a doc. I’ll screen shot it for you.
What are the critical skills that you have used and worked on improving, in attaining your success? |
- Communication skills
- Magic
- The ability to distill knowledge and simplify the complex
- Coaching & Teaching
- Humor (So gross saying this but humor has helped me a lot).
What is your biggest weakness? |
- Workaholic
- Get too obsessed about wealth creation which leads to the above.
- Trying to be the hero all the time. Fighting battles that are not mine to fight.
On a psychological or mind-set level, how do you use your mind and how do you think in a specific way to help you achieve your goals and realize your ambitions? | I use a lot of mind maps. They help me think and see between the lines.
What are the most important lessons you have learnt so far, in your career or life journey? | Work to live, don’t live to work.
How do you deal with self-doubt, fear or negativity? Can you share a time in which you either doubted yourself the most or had great fears, yet faced up to them and conquered them? | Before I taught my first workshop. I was teaching a room full of 30 executives from all around the USA and they each paid me $3,000 each to be there. I felt imposter syndrome and it was terrible. I felt so inadequate. The solution to this was for me to prove to myself that I was worth it. I needed to prove to myself that I was a master of my craft, and I set the goal of being paid $40,000 USD for a 1 hour keynote. If I could do this, it meant my communication skills were up to scratch. By setting a conscious goal, and achieving it. I was able to overcome the feeling of inadequacy and I started to feel a lot more confident.
I realize for me. I need to continually be working towards mastery otherwise the feeling of inadequacy and the imposter syndrome creeps back into my life. I love the Japanese Philosophy Kaizen (the relentless pursuit of perfection – while realizing it doesn’t exist).
What are you most afraid of right now? | People in my family getting sick and dying.
What do you want to achieve next and what’s in the way? |I want to spend more of my time teaching my communication skills workshop.
How do you ensure you are always feeling energised and performing at your peak? | Exercising 5/7 days a week. Sauna and Ice baths. Eating my wife’s amazing cooking 🙂 and mums of course!
What resources (people, books, environments, movies, music etc) do you use to keep yourself inspired, informed and growing? | Too many to list. My goal is 1 chapter every 2 days. This helps me always feed my brain with new information on a weekly basis which keeps me feeling good. Growing your mind is such an important part of inspiration.
As a high performer have you ever had to struggle with happiness and contentment? | Yes, most definitely.
What is the best advice you have ever received? | There’s nothing amazing about you. Don’t put yourself on the pedal stool, put the lessons that have made you who you are on the pedal stool.
- My mum lol she teaches me humility. Without her, I’d be a massive wanker.
What’s one deeply honest thing that most people don’t know about you? | Growing up extremely poor, I am obsessed with wealth creation.
Who inspires you and who are your role-models? | The person that inspires me most doesn’t even exist. It’s the teacher that Robin Williams plays in dead poet society – John Keating.
Would you consider yourself a happy person? If so, how do you cultivate your daily happiness? | Yes, by living in alignment with my values (screenshot above). It took me years to define what my values were in my life. When I am out of alignment, I am unhappy. When I am in alignment – I feel amazing. The trick is to keep in alignment and realize you will fall out of alignment and when you fall out of a alignment be kind to yourself and just get back in alignment again without being a dick to yourself.
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