Success is happiness and has nothing to do with how much money you make. It's how much you enjoy your lifestyle. For me, I have a lot of free time to do what I want. I love my job and I can do the work whenever I want. Whatever I do, it has nothing to do with money, but inner happiness.

I've always wanted to be a martial arts instructor since I was eight years old. When I came to America I was 15 years old and I started taking karate and tae kwan do, but I started judo and Thai boxing when I was eight.

My main goal for coming to America was to find freedom. With freedom you have limitless options. So I decided to do what I liked and to go for it and open a karate school.

I didn't have a specific plan of how I would get to this goal. I just wanted to go day-by-day. Because I had come from a Cambodian refugee camp, I was just trying to survive in America--to live in America. When I saw a karate exhibition in college, I thought that running a business would allow me to be successful and reach that goal. So I go for it!

It has to do with your personality and attitude. You have to be hard working and friendly and willing to change and caring for other people. This is how you can find success in life. You have to care about other people to reach success. That's what martial arts teaches you: to respect yourself and others. This is a good philosophy not just for martial arts, but in business, and life in general. I've had a few students who were gang members, but through martial arts, they learned to respect themselves and others and are no longer gang members.

Successful people take risks and fail. If a person tells me they never fail, then they are probably not successful because they have not tried.

You have to know exactly what you want. You have to go out and do it. When someone comes to my school to sign up for martial arts classes, I ask them why they want to take classes, what do they want as a result? You have to identify what outcome you want. Do you want more confidence or do you want to lose weight. By knowing this they can use the tools they learn to reach their goal. They don't have to guess. That's why it's also important to be specific, not "I want to lose weight," but "I want to lose 10 pounds in four weeks." And you need to set the goals to make sense so that they are reachable, not "I want to lose 100 pounds by tomorrow."

If a student says they don't know what they want, they have not searched inside enough. Everybody knows what they want, but they can't express it or don't have enough confidence to find it. It is my job to help people find that if they do not know and encourage them to make a commitment to find it.

Decide what you want to do. Everybody has interests. You have to do something that you are good at and that you are qualified to do, but don't go for the money, go for the heart and success will come. You have to do it and you can't wait. The sooner you do it, the sooner you learn. The sooner you make mistakes, the sooner you learn. Trust me, people who make mistakes are successful people because they are trying and learning.