Haegwan Kim – What is your definition of success?
Vienna Teng – I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’ve made a number of career changes in my life. You’re actually catching me in the middle of one. I’m about to stop doing music full-time to go back to school to study sustainability. For me, success is the ability to live your life on terms that you enjoy. It’s not necessarily all about control but having the freedom to pursue the things that you really want to pursue and to have those opportunities open to you.
HK – And you said you’re now in the middle of a career change. I saw your website saying that you’re going to business school… what happened to you?
VT – [Laugh] This is something that I always wanted to do but it seemed like it wasn’t really possible to pursue that and music with full commitment at the same time. So it was just a matter of deciding which one I would do first. It seemed like music was something that I had to do immediately when I was in my 20s as the right time to do it. Going back to school felt like it could happen at a later… And I realised, oh, it’s later now.
HK – [Laugh] For you what does business mean to you? Why do you want to pursue the study of sustainability?
VT – I think the idea that all these environmental issues that we face are things that can’t really be solved just by non-profit organisations or even by policy. I think the energy in business and in capitalism is so powerful. Business is concerned with efficiency; it’s concerned with having something be sustainable in the long term and be able to support itself.
HK – So changing your career to business is not for earning money?
VT – No, it’s not for personal finances. If it were just about enjoying myself I would say that my career in music is already enough for that.
HK – Why do you care about things outside of your personal issues?
VT – I think I always had but I didn’t know how I could contribute to it. I should add another thing to success. I don’t think it’s true for everybody, but for me, success definitely has to do with making it a real, tangible or very real contribution to the society and the environment that you live in, to leave it better than when you came in. And that has to do with making a contribution to the greater good; that to me is an important part of what I would consider success to be. If I made a lot of money doing something I had fun with, I don’t think that would be enough for me. I would also want to do something that changed other people’s lives on a systemic scale for the better in some way.
HK – Weren’t you satisfied with your achievements of music?
VT – Yes and no. I think part of being an artist is that you’re never satisfied; you’re always thinking, okay, well, now I want to do something even better, or now I want to do something that goes in a different direction. That part of my brain is still going; I still have all these musical projects that I want to do, and I’m not sure when it will happen. But on the other hand I’ve been doing music professionally for about eight years and those eight years have felt really good; I think I’ve established myself artistically and gotten to express myself creatively. For that period of time I already feel very lucky; so in that sense I feel like it’s enough.
HK – What’s the secret to be a successful musician or a successful singer?
VT – I think success is always a combination. I think you have to have some innate talent, some ability to do something that not many other people can do in this particular field or media. Then you also have to have put in the work to develop your craft. The third element is that you have to have a little bit of luck. It’s true there are people who have a lot of talent and have worked very hard but still they wait a very long time for certain kinds of luck to come their way. So I think I happened to have all three of them, from when I was very young I just had a certain musical ear, like there were some things that came easy to me musically. But then I was also pushed pretty hard in a good way by my piano teachers, by my parents who encouraged me. But then a lot of it was also luck, like I was not very good at the business part of it, because I was not good at promoting my music but then a record label just found me without my trying very hard. So that part was very lucky.
Back to when I was in high school, I knew that I wanted to do four or five different things. Going into a sustainability was one of them and doing music was another one of them. I also wanted to be a writer which I haven’t done yet. And then the fourth thing was being a doctor, I wanted to go into medicine and I went into college thinking that’s what I would do, but about mid-way through, due to a lot of different things I decided that actually wasn’t that important to me. I knew I wanted to do music but Stanford is not really a school that you go to study music to if you like popular music. At that point I wasn’t really sure what to do, and I just kind of fell into computer science by accident because of Silicone Valley and everybody was taking really interesting programming classes.
HK – So, you were influenced by geeks?
VT – [Laugh] So just took these classes for fun and I thought, well, I know I don’t want to do this forever, but if I graduate with a degree in computer science, it’ll be very easy to find work. And that way I can save money to do music. That part wasn’t… I never would have thought I would be doing computers.
HK – Has your knowledge on computer science helped your career as an artist?
VT – Strangely enough it did, in two ways. One, like I said, it was easy to make enough money to save up to do music, so for the first year of my music life, I didn’t have to worry about money too much because I had enough money saved up. Then the other thing was, strangely, the press was very interested in me as a musician who also is a computer programmer. I don’t know why it was interesting, but in a way, sometimes people still bring it up. So it helps with the publicity.
HK – Living in the 21st century, do you believe knowledge as a computer science is necessary to achieve success or promote yourself?
VT – It’s a huge tool, absolutely. I don’t think I would have a music career if it weren’t for the internet, because I don’t think I could have found my audience otherwise. I don’t get played on the radio that much and there’s no real way for people to find out about my music except on the internet.
HK – So the way to promote yourself in the music indust is constantly changing by the development of the web or internet?
VT – Absolutely. I really love seeing how certain artists get very creative with how they promote themselves in whatever new medium.
HK – Final question, I want you to give me your advice to achieve success in general, not as a musician or computer engineer, but in general life.
VT – I was thinking about this recently and I would tell people to do what my piano teacher told me to do. My piano teacher actually changed my life, not only teaching me music, but one night he actually said, in high school, I want you to tell me what your dreams are, so write down what your dreams are, very general. I wanted to be a musician, and from there came up with the goals, like what do you want to achieve in order for that dream to come true. And then from there come up with strategies, like how are you going to start to achieve those goals. What’s interesting about is once you have a roadmap, nothing ever happens according to how you planned it; it never happens that way.
But it’s actually very important to have the plan because once you have the plan you start to see things and when opportunities come your way, you recognise them. And in a way it almost starts to seem like things happen to you, like the luck begins to come to you. It’s a very powerful thing, and I’m really, really glad that he had me do that when I was in high school, because it’s really how I have lived my life ever since.
Haegwan Kim is a writer who was born in Osaka, Japan in 1989 and grew up near Tokyo where went to a Korean school for 12 years.
