Imagine Something Witty

TAEYANG’S SHOUTING OUT TO THE WORLD - PART EIGHT

Translator’s Note: This is the last part of Taeyang’s Shouting Out to the World, a translation from the Chinese translation of Shouting Out to the World by Big Bang China. This is merely a fan translation and is not affiliated with YG Entertainment or the publisher Sam and Parkers. This should only be for the fans’ personal use and should not be reproduced, modified, nor redistributed for any commercial purposes. Please do not take out/repost elsewhere without my explicit permission.

Credits: Chinese Translation by 元@BBCN

Enjoy and follow me @amandajaclyn18 at twitter if you want to talk to me! :)

********************************************************************************************

“People will grow according to the path they’ve chosen”

President Yang Hyun Suk often says, “We are not creating singers. Instead, we are helping you make use of what you were given.” However, the times wherein I truly grasped the meaning of this occurred frequently during my trainee days.

I did not become a trainee because it was my interest, but because I wanted to allow myself to adequately and substantially grow during the training period, in order to become a professional with results. The road I chose to take is a cold and unfeeling career path. The childish mentality of “I already did my best. Why doesn’t anyone understand?” won’t be acceptable. Everybody’s doing their best. There’s not one person who hasn’t faced obstacles in their career, not one person who’s without worry. Everybody has experienced being cold or hungry.

Because it’s work and the start of a career, the feedback received during training were already cold and unfeeling. If you are not willing or unprepared to calmly accept objective criticisms about your efforts, you would find out that you won’t be successful in anything. However, ultimately, we are human and we have emotions. It’s normal to feel disheartened after getting negative feedback. That was a very miserable time to the point of wanting to just cry out loud.

It was when BigBang Documentary was about to start filming that this conversation arose. Because I have never seen a documentary before, they had to explain how we were going to go about it.

During May of 2006, we had to be supervised and receive feedback daily to prepare for the finalization of members which was happening that June. One day, President Yang suddenly called all the trainees together for a talk, like he was about to speak about problems with the recording submitted the day before.

President Yang asked me a direct question, “Aren’t Youngbae’s and Jiyong’s duration of training just about the same? But I anticipated that Youngbae would be the one who sings better. Why is it then that Jiyong’s level of singing suddenly caught up with you? How did that happen, Youngbae? You should do better. Youngbae, what do you think is your biggest problem?

“Little Seunghyun (Seungri), your problem is your foundation is insufficient. If you don’t work on that you’d be just like Youngbae.”

You’d. Become. Just. Like. Youngbae.

That was so humiliating. I wanted to crawl into a rat hole and hide. I’ve been training for 6 years, yet a younger brother was warned about becoming like me. I felt my heart die at that moment.

However, I did not decide to be hopeless that night, and instead chose to train for the entire night. This is why I feel both fear and respect towards President Yang, because he knows which aspect trainees should set their sights on and train harder on. I am very thankful to have a mentor like him.

It’s natural to feel hurt when hearing criticisms. Yet there are people who would convert this into a motivating force, and there are people who would take this as poison and just give up. It would be better if one could calmly and objectively judge his own results, compared to receiving strict feedback from others yet being unable to judge himself, thereby leading to hurt feelings and pain. Knowing where the problem lies would make it easier to solve.

Jiyong jokingly said, “Whoever points out a certain something where Youngbae is lacking in, Youngbae would work on that something for a hundred times when he gets to the dorm.” More accurately put, it’s not just because I’m prudent, but because I am a perfectionist.

If I receive a criticism and feel bad after, I would focus on that problem and analyze it. I feel bad because I feel uneasy, so I need to find the reason behind my uneasiness. I would analyze the situation from a third person’s point of view. Looking at problems objectively, an abstract or gigantic problem would gradually take form and become more manageable. The next step would then be the most important part, which is solving the problem.

If I feel down because of a certain thing, I hope people won’t think that I’m beaten down, but that I am in the process of analyzing the problem. This is because if I don’t figure out the correct direction in order to solve the problem, I would end up in an unrelated place and waste precious time and effort.

“As much as possible, set your dreams higher. Because dreams give every person equal opportunities”