Teepagorn “Champ” Wuttipitayamongkol, 28, is a digital age Renaissance man, having achieved success with Thai blog platform Exteen.com at an early age. He then went on to become a cartoonist, an author and is now set to host a new travel show on TPBS.

Computers were not a part of everyday life when I was growing up in Nakhon Sawan. It was all pen and paper. Computers were so expensive at that time and yet my dad managed to buy me one.

I became addicted to video games. But one day I realized I wanted to create a game rather than just play one. So I started reading magazines about this stuff and created a game while I was still in high school.

When you’re young you just have so much energy to create stuff. I built Exteen.com with my friend in three days while I was a sophomore at Kasetsart University. I saw a friend’s blog, on a foreign website, and I thought, I want to do this here. It was a great way for people to share their views with others.

Actually, a blog is even more fun than making games. With a blog or website, you get feedback in real time. There’s an art to making people become attracted to your blog.

Adapting fast is the key to growing fast. We delivered new functions to people on our blog as fast as possible. In some case, people would ask for something one day, and get it the next. That’s one of the reasons why we became well-known so quickly.

I just keep getting offered jobs, even though I’m not looking for work. I’m interested in many things so opportunities just keep knocking at my door. That’s how I became a cartoonist, a writer and now I’ll be a TV host for a travel show on TPBS, this June.

My new book Universao (Sad Universe) is about a boy exploring the universe in search of happiness.

Sometimes we have everything, just not happiness. That’s what I’m asking, what is happiness?

I think the best way to find happiness might be to just list the things that make you feel like time passes fast when you do them. Well, I haven’t found happiness, not exactly, but I’m at the point where I’m quite content.

I start things for fun. But then they always get pretty serious. It’s a bad habit of mine, even if it’s also good for me in a way. Like, I started Exteen.com for fun, as well as writing and drawing. And now I have at least five pages on Facebook with over 100,000 likes. It’s a headache to handle them all.

When there are too many people in one place, conflicts always arise. In the beginning, it’s so much fun to get people on your Facebook page. But then the page outgrows you, and it’s not such a fun thing anymore. I’ve had to deal with the police twice because of things people did on my blog platforms.

It’s quite stressful being online these days. There are many conflicts and lots of negative stuff. I choose to avoid those things as much as I can.

People are rarely the same online and in real life. Being semi-anonymous on the internet makes people have a bad mouth. The internet is the key to unlocking people’s true opinions, or their real character.

Social networks are designed to be interactive and instant. You increase those two things enough, and you get less and less reason.

Social networks are very special for Thais. It’s a space where they can express their opinions freely. But sometimes it’s too just too much. I feel some issues should just be discussed in private.

Safety. That’s what’s lacking online these days. Too many online victims, people who don’t know how to protect their identity, and people even getting in trouble with the police for things they do online.

Our internet laws are new and quite hard to cope with. Once, a person visited a factory and made negative comments about it online. The factory forced him to remove those comments. It makes you wonder, can’t we tell the truth?
When talking to people who have a different background from your own, or who think differently, you need to start by listening to them.

Things go too fast with the digital world. Try to slow down. The new trend is to take a ‘digital sabbath,’ when you vow to stay offline for a certain amount of time. It’s about breaking the addiction, just like when people go on meditation trips.

My dream is to create an alternative media on the internet. Many people want unproductive, uncreative things, so social media emphasizes these things—and it generates stress. But I want something that removes stress. I want something that enhances one’s creativity and reasoning.

Bangkok is like the internet. It’s like you are fed up with malls but you’re still going anyway. You feel better and brighter in the countryside but you still live in Bangkok. It’s convenient, and it has so much going on.

Change is good. Change is adapting, it’s reaching for balance, finding out what we like or don’t like. Failure is just a way to find out what you don’t really like.

It’s easier to fail than to succeed. Being lazy, selfish, ignorant—it doesn’t take any effort. But if you set your mind to work, that’s the push that drives success.

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