2-3-4 Friday: This bus driver put a soft toy on his bus

‘Seeking to spark the most potential within you per word of any online newsletter’

1 thought

PropNex CEO Ismail once shared an interesting story. His wife wanted to start an F&B business. It sounded promising but he told his wife to let him do some research first.

He went to Subway, and applied for a job. When he was asked why he needed the job, he said it was to feed his wife and 3 children.

He promptly got the job. But after a few days, he finally realized how difficult it was to run a F&B outlet successfully. You had to stand long hours. You had to constantly market your business to get constant customers. What’s more, you had to face up with the scale of bigger players out there, who wanted to earn the big Singapore dollar. So he went back and told his wife that he couldn’t do it.

When I heard this story, the first thing that stood out for me was the idea of choosing the right business model. choosing a competitive business model like F&B, with low margins, would not scale that easily.

Instead, Ismail chose PropNex, which could scale like a MLM, where one agent brought in more agents, and the service (brokering housing) would always survive because people always need homes.

So great models work.

Some of you would know that today we do 3 differing types of businesses.

1. We publish books for authors, and charge them a fee for it.
2. We design long form content like commemorative books, and printed newsletters for clients, and they pay us.
3. We own 4 media sites like liveyoungandwell.com (adulting), savethesocialworker.com(helping social workers gain practical tips), and medialede.com (how to create memorable content), gutenhag.com (how to write books) and use that to drive traffic to our clients.

A successful business friend I have told me these models may not work that easily, and that I should consider finding a more scalable model. I agree with him. These models don’t scale that easily.

And I still earn $900 per month, which doesn’t work well in an expensive place like Singapore.

So what keeps us going, beyond just pure heart?

1. Because we believe that society is fragmenting, and we want to be able to communicate the work of government and non-profits in a way that restores trust in our societies
2. We want to spread the best of ASEAN’s wisdom.

Okay, big words, what do they mean?

And what do they mean for you?

Well, for one, it means that we continue to believe in the role of human centered content in an AI-hyed world. One says we are sentimental, but I think the chief reason is because humans have a pretty sensitive bullshit sensor.

And as we move towards more and more AI-generated emails, articles, people will find something lacking within them. The article is good… but it doesn’t really mean anything. It rarely triggers anything beyond words on a page.

And this is why I’ve kept doing this - even though much of it is undignifying. Recently I got chased out again from another place where I had overstayed my welcome, and it made me think why I was doing this to myself. Why bother with saving money, so you could continue to write human content?

Why bother waking up at 530am so that I could interview a bunch of cleaners (who turned up late?) Why bother speaking to that bus driver who had a cute soft toy at the display window of his bus?

Why bother with creating more effortful content?

For me, it’s a fight for our own humanity. It’s not an AI vs human debate - rather, it’s been a lot more about thinking about our value-add as humans. If we can’t relate better, feel more deeply, then we deserve to be destroyed by AI.

1 talk

1 tip

Recently I was at a talk with the National Arts Council Chairman and CEO, who run the statutory board helping our arts population grow. Why bother with the arts, when there were so many other ways to put your money? Singapore has even kept funding to the arts constant, increasing over the years, despite the economic headwinds.

Because artists help us express the dull, differently.

They draw, they act, they write, they perform, so that we can see our world a little differently.

So much so that even Julian Lee, a 3rd year medical student, quit his promising career in medicine to do community theatre.

He spoke of the risks we take in starting businesses, or any ventures,

in those risks we take,

His palm snakes through the air and he continues,

there’s life that surges through.

That’s really true. Often we face an existential threat like AI, and we knuckle down and we think of how we can prompt better, use the machine better, and get better results with it.

All that is important, but maybe it’s also vital to think,

1. What are the risks we can take?
2. What makes us human, and what can we do that reflects more of that?
   1. For example, I’m making more effort to do the relational things, like conversing, naming difficult things, and trying my best to improve on those.

Don’t fight the AI - just be more human.

And if we lose, we lose. At least we tried to be who we were, rather than who we weren’t.

John

Live Young, Live Well - Work Your Love