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"HDPE is Awesome" and the Story of Career-Oriented Entrepreneurship

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Recently (December 2025), TikTok exploded with the "HDPE" trend featuring very trendy catchphrases:

This trend originated from videos shared by Uncle Hien about his HDPE plastic manufacturing business (and perhaps he also took advantage of trending on "TopTop" for marketing and finding partners for his business ventures).

In fact, I had known Uncle Hien about a year prior (late 2024) because the videos I usually watch on TikTok revolve around finance, business, and entrepreneurship, so his videos occasionally surfaced on my feed. As someone who knew him beforehand, I realized that his trending status on TikTok wasn't accidental—it was the result of persistent video posting over two long years.

Even more interestingly, if we focus on what he shares in his videos or livestream sessions, I believe we can extract some very valuable lessons from this "HDPE Uncle."

1. Career-Oriented Entrepreneurship

We live in an era where the slogan of innovative startup entrepreneurship is trumpeted everywhere, especially in university environments. Students desperately search for a startup idea and daydream about it. However, the majority of young graduates who launch startups end up failing, realizing they are still too inexperienced and that real life is vastly different from what they imagined while sitting in lecture halls.

"Uncle HDPE"—while still possessing an entrepreneurial and ownership mindset—offers a safer, less romanticized, yet highly practical path with a much higher success rate: Career-Oriented Entrepreneurship .

In short, after graduating (high school, university, etc.), young people usually have very little real-world experience and social exposure. Therefore, instead of daydreaming about founding something grand, go work for someone else as an apprentice to acquire skills and understand the industry before jumping into the entrepreneurial game.

Specifically, the steps outlined by Uncle Hien are as follows:

  1. Orientation: First, choose the industry or trade you want to develop in.

  2. Apprenticeship: Select an established business in the industry or a skilled owner to work for. Initially, accept working even at low pay, and treat the first 3-4 years of employment as a tuition-free apprenticeship period to learn and master the trade you wish to pursue.

  3. Accumulating Experience: After mastering the trade, don't rush into starting a business yet. Continue working for another 2-3 years, but request rotations across different departments to understand the entire production process, value chain, workflow, and business model of the industry—including, but not limited to, everything you can learn from marketing, sales, accounting, HR management, and more. This is precisely the period of learning how to be a boss .

  4. Entrepreneurship: Once you "know the trade" and understand the industry's value chain, identify a missing link in that chain (a product/service with high demand) to launch your business and become an owner. Additionally, in the initial phase, you can work a job and run your startup side-by-side for financial safety (always giving yourself a retreat path when testing a new direction).

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I think this is a path worth learning from because, from an objective standpoint, it balances safety with a high success rate and can be applied by any young person.

2. Additional Lessons

Apart from that, there are a few mindsets from "Uncle HDPE" that I found insightful and noted down for everyone.

Life is Decided by Your Free Time

In life, very few people get to work in a job they love right from the start. In that case, we must always dedicate time to self-exploration and discovery to see which field we truly want to grow in. Finding and pursuing a career you love will make success much easier to attain (as I explained in the article How to Have a Successful Career? ).

So when do we explore and upgrade ourselves? - Free time!

We don't need to cut out all entertainment activities after work, but we can reduce activities that don't add real value in order to explore and upgrade ourselves.

Cutting down one hour of scrolling social media each day gives you 365 hours a year dedicated to learning something useful. And if you can set aside 3 hours every day to seriously study the field you want to pursue, you will accumulate over 1,000 hours of experience per year in your chosen subject.

Working hours earn your living and survival in society, but your free time is what decides what your life will look like in the future. Allow me to quote a great sentence from one of Uncle Hien's videos:

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"Luck is merely the residue of daily design!"

Dive in to Experience and Learn, but Always Keep a Retreat Path

Life is like a maze; every decision (big or small) leads us to a different turn. However, some turns lead to dead ends filled with traps. Therefore:

  1. Always cultivate your knowledge to recognize dead-end turns and avoid them.

  2. Never go "all-in" on a single decision, and always leave yourself a path back to the nearest turn so you can choose again and restart.

5 Factors for Career Success

Ranked from most important to least important:

  1. Intellect and Health

  2. Skills and Experience

  3. Quality Relationships

  4. Degrees and Grades

  5. Money and Assets

Therefore, having lots of money and assets does not guarantee future success; nor does being smart or academically gifted. The person who succeeds in the future is the one who persistently learns and accumulates experience from their own stumbles.

Bottom Lines

In addition to the career mindset orientation lessons above, I think you can learn many other business experiences from Uncle Hien, such as:

Turns out, if we pay a little attention, we can learn a lot of interesting things from others, can't we? 🙈

Thank you for reading my article!

Kim,