“What we do in Life echoes an eternity.”
- Russell Crowe from the movie Gladiator
Ed Kang
Ed Kang is the creator and co-founder of the Re:LIFE Group which was born after his first book Re:LIFE & The Myth of Motivation. He is also the creator of the M_DNA Strategy and co-founder of Iamsynchronized.com. Besides being an author and strategist, Ed is also a speaker, mentor and trainer.
Ed’s personal mission is the redemptive synchronization of society. To do this, he has created proprietary strategies, intellectual properties, and authored books that help individuals and organizations achieve success and fulfillment through their purpose, passions and potential. His strategic strengths fall in the ability to identify principles and patterns for high leverage results while motivating people to action.
Ed has played many roles in his career. He has been a comic book artist, animation director, pastor, corporate chaplain, entrepreneur, business manager, social activist and even CEO of a publicly traded company. He has assisted start-ups across a multitude of industries from dot-coms, education, children’s entertainment, advertising and social “philanthro-capitalist” businesses. His passion is to work with entrepreneurs and brands, to engage in social responsibility and maximize market leadership strategies. His work has won several awards and different industry accolades. Ed also leads humanitarian excursion groups to Nicaragua through the social organization The Journey of Discovery.
Ed Kang resides in Calgary Alberta with his wife Tae-Young and sons Orlando and Julian.
Below is Ed Kang, speaking at an event for entrepreneurs.
Winner of Calgary Avenue Magazine’s ‘Life Re-Imagined Award’
Article from Calgary Avenue Magazine January 2011 Issue:
“Fulfillment, for me, is living who you were meant to be to the maximum potential.” —Ed Kang
Ed Kang has packed a lot into his life so far. He’s 34 years old and has been an animator and an entrepreneur. He worked in marketing and for a dot.com company, making and losing a million dollars on paper through the boom and bust. He got married and had two children, took a company public on the stock market and even worked as a pastor.
Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? Kang would be the first to admit that, as of a couple of years ago, he was a burnout with too many loose ends in his life, and too many unmet obligations to work and to his family. “It was a ‘Who are you?’ situation,” says Kang. “You’ve tried all these different things, the spiritual route, the business route and what do you have left, really?”
A friend who had travelled to India with a charity called Impact Nations suggested Kang do something similar in Nicaragua, and that trip in 2009 is what led him to reinvent his life. “It was two weeks of opening medical clinics and feeding centres in the poorest parts of the country,” Kang says. “I was a bouncer; I had to do crowd control; we’d go into a village and set up some tents and awnings, and they would line up and you’d get through as many people as you could.”
On the flight to Nicaragua, Kang says, he knew things were unravelling at home in Calgary, both personally and professionally, and a part of him wished he didn’t have to go back.
“My business was failing because of the economy and the sub-prime mortgage crisis. It seemed like there was an unending train of pressure and I felt powerless and with no purpose,” he says.
The trip to Nicaragua was the catalyst. Ten days in, Kang had a meltdown, begged off the planned outing that night and went back to his hotel room where he decided to make a change in his life.
Kang wanted to redirect his life to focus on social change, but decided to do it in a micro way. When he got back to Calgary, for example, he took advantage of his skill in the kitchen, where he makes a mean lasagna. Whenever he cooked lasagna for his family, he would make eight more, freeze them, and look for families in need who could use the food.
“People would ask to come in and cook; we called them impact kitchens,” Kang says. “That idea caught on, I realized there was really no competition for just helping someone in your community, going next door and saying, ‘Can I help you with something?’ I realized that was a niche and it’s fun.”
Out of this, Kang created a community in 2009 called Re:Life, which stands for Regard for Life. Re:Life is a community of more than 100 like-minded people who work for social change. So far, the group has sent people to Uganda, Haiti and Nicaragua on humanitarian projects. It has raised support for an orphanage in Burundi and a mosquito net project in Tanzania. Closer to home, members also regularly volunteer at the Calgary Drop-In Centre. And, of course, they make lasagna, too.
As for his work, the friend who originally steered Kang to Nicaragua is now his boss. Kang works as a corporate chaplain and business manager in Calgary for the Goliath Group of Companies. Kang says he’s now fulfilled, although he doesn’t equate that with being happy.
“Fulfillment, for me, is living who you were meant to be to the maximum potential,” he says. “People come to me and say, ‘I’m not happy.’ I ask them if they think the point of life is to become happy and they say, ‘Yes!’
“I believe the point of life is fulfillment, and the by-product of that is happiness.”
