This site began with a quest.
The quest was for stories. To make a little boy with an insatiable appetite for tales happy as he asked every night, “Dad, can you tell me a story?”
I thought back to the stories of adventure and tales from history that my Dad would tell me when I was growing up. Some were just cool and fun stories to hear. Others had some kind of lesson for me, something my Dad wanted to impart to me via the vehicle of a story.
So I started to collect and write down my own stories to tell my son. I collected the stories that I received from my Dad. But I also sought out other tales, from history, from biographies, from current events. And my collection grew.
And as my collection grew, I decided that it would be a shame for me to keep the tales to myself. Humans, in general, learn best through experience. But the next best thing is a story. It is, after all, kind of a way to experience something vicariously.
The sources of the tales run the gamut. Many are from the books that I read. Others are verbal, told to me by parents, grandparents, teachers, friends. Still others I’ve collected from the vast collective repository of human knowledge we call the Internet.
I’ve tried to provide references where applicable and where they can be found. I’ve done my best to dig into the story as much as possible, but this blog isn’t a journalistically researched tome. Walter Isaacson or David McCullough I am not.
Now a word about the theme of “awesomeness”. I think we all have an idea of what awesome is. What an awesome person is, or an awesome event. Ask ten people for a definition and you may have fifteen different answers. But as someone once said about porn, “I may not be able to explain it, but I know it when I see it”.
But hopefully these tales will be entertaining. And I hope they will be informative. I hope they will be inspiring, perhaps uplifting, and most importantly, thought-provoking. If you walk away from the blog and say to yourself, “huh, I didn’t know that before” or “I never thought of it that way”, then I think I’ll have done my job.
So here in this little blog I present to you my collection of tales. These are tales that I discovered that I found inform, inspire, and motivate me. I hope they do the same for you.
— Kieun
