Amy Li was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer in the prime of her life; during her recovery, she found solace in her childhood passion for music, dance, and the arts, which ultimately inspired her to invent Dance4Healing, a patent-pending "tele-dance" platform that pairs people with chronic diseases, older adults, and their caregivers, with compatible buddies to build lasting healthy habits through tailor-made recorded and live video creative arts classes (imagine YouTube, Zoom, and eHarmony for health buddies). Dance4Healing has won >20 awards, including AARP's CES Annual Pitch "People's Choice Award," and was one of the top 10 Diversity & Inclusion startups to exhibit at CES 2023, where they launched a study funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. In addition, Amy founded the Stage IV {Wicked Wisdom} Multi-Media Platform, which includes her upcoming book, a web magazine, and an "Experts Voice" interview series; she is a UX and behavior strategy expert in innovation and AI for global brands such as Yahoo, AT&T, VW, and Sony, earning multiple patents for her work and featured in prominent news outlets such as The New York Times, NBC, Yahoo!, and Gizmodo. A Singularity University graduate and board member of Humanity+, a non-profit renowned as a top global think tank in AI, robotics, longevity, and bio-hacking, Amy has been recognized by TIME magazine for her non-profit work and featured in major Chinese media; she also serves on the American Psychological Association COVID-19 task force and was recently chosen as one of the first two Asian women leaders for the Cultural of Health Leadership Institute for Racial Healing, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program.
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Stage
By Amy Li
There are different stages of life:
The stages of your professional life,
The stages of your personal life.
Whether you realize it or not,
You are playing the character of your life
On that stage
There is the stage of performing arts
Where you sing, dance, tell jokes, recite poems,
sharing intellectual wisdom and ideas
in full spotlight
you may or may not able to see
the audience in front of your stage
each of them playing the characters of their lives
smiling, laughing, crying,
surprised, amazed, or intrigued
and taking every single thing you say, every single thing you do,
home
to empower or challenge that character of their life
Then there is the stage
Where numbers really really matter
for you and your loved ones
because you are battling for your life
and you are praying the number will be as small as possible
Stage I, Stage II, Stage III, what? Stage IV
Oh, guess what, you luck out, because you are stage IV A
So your life is saved from cancer because God, or some genius out there,
decided to put an A, B, or C after the IV.
In Indian culture
every 25 years is a stage
so Stage IV is the last stage of your life,
so live it fully, love wholeheartedly, smile beautifully,
sing, dance, tell jokes, recite poems
Share intellectual wisdom and ideas
you don’t need a full spotlight
because you are playing the character of your life
enjoy while it lasts,
take a deep breath.
Suck it all in.
Stage IV can be just as beautiful as Stage I,
or any stage of your life,
professional or personal
In or out of spotlight
with or without an audience.