2-3-4 Friday: 6 months have passed...

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

1 thought

It’s 6 months into the year. How are you doing? No seriously, how are you? If you’re glad at how far you’ve come, then good on you. I was recently looking back at the first half of the year, and wondering how I’d come to achieve all these over the years.

Not that I think I’m particularly great, but it’s precisely because I know that I’m average, not smarter than most, that I wonder just how I’ve gotten to this place. For example, starting out without any business knowledge, and contacts in the media industry, I knew it was an uphill battle to build any sort of content agency. But being able to sit down week after week, and ask myself two simple questions.

1. What was working, and why?
2. What was not?

This helped me to see that just sending cold emails to people asking if I could market for them, was a waste of my time. Doing SEO, was probably more worth it.

So building what I have today is because of God, but the other part is because of this persistent desire to reflect, and learn.

I used to think myself crazy for just shutting myself in a random room on university, writing down all the things I was proud of, and what I could improve on. I was living in the most beautiful part of England, and I just couldn’t seem to enjoy it. I did enjoy the pushing of myself though.

So life is not lived in the setting of goals, but the constant resetting of them. We often forget this in our pursuit of life. So it’s easy for me to tell you,

Hey, do this review every month. At a set time.

Despite us knowing it’s good, we don’t do it. Why? Because we think,

ah, this will take some time. I will need a quiet space.

But really, you don’t need anything special.

You just need to want change enough.

1 talk

Life is not the setting of goals, but the constant resetting of them.

1 tip

A few weeks ago I was talking to my friend about how we chose partners. I told him that I would prefer that we shared the same Christian faith, and as he steered his Bentley, I could see that I touched a raw nerve.

You know, sometimes these things, you can’t really force it. If you grow up with little, and you have the chance to be happy, you should just go for it.

It made me think a lot about the lengths we would go to chase something.

Especially for both me and my friend, who grew up knowing that scarcity was around the corner. In our elite school, in our class of 30, we were the only two kids whose parents didn’t have a car. In Singapore, it’s not as common in other places, especially when the basic certificate of entitlement (before the car’s cost) is $100k.

What made our lives converge was the fact that our parents had good times before. So it wasn’t how we started, but where our families were when we matured.

At 6, my dad was making good money, flying to the US quarterly to set up big logistics factories. But then when I turned 12, he started going through a consistent period of retrenchments. We had to take free donations of rice to survive.

The adjustment was big. We went from living with a car, and a helper, and regular taxis around, to eating once a week at the hawker centre, and spending the rest of our meals at home.

So it wasn’t how we started, but how our families’ circumstances changed over the years. That’s why both of us share the same view.

Life is an adventure, meant to be lived.

So even when the going gets easy, you’d quickly find us finding a new business venture, a new thing to do, to learn and grow. As I’ve met more people, I realise this isn’t the case. If most people can, they would choose to do the same thing, over and over again.

Change is not what they seek. Perhaps a better question to ask then is,

how do we be more open to change?

Maybe the most important thing has been to take myself less seriously. When I first travelled back to Singapore for the summer holidays, I thought of myself as some bigshot, high-flying student. After all, I was flying places! I would talk in a stilted accent, thinking I was a representative of the best Singapore had to offer.

But I never did anything truly scary. I’d thought of a business for years, but had never done it.

So when COVID came, and I found myself with really, nothing to lose, I just went ahead, even though there was no business model - nothing.

At the end of the day, when people talk about the concerns they have about my business, I think,

okay, sure, but even if things go to shit, I will still take care of myself.

As we always have done.

So if you’ve looked back at your toughest moments, you got through those. 

And the next change you try, you’ll get through that too.

John

Live Young, Live Well - Work Your Love