Every morning I wake up, I ask myself: How do I be someone valuable to society, and how do I create things that are valuable to society? Ever since I was a child, I think that this question has been a part of me – the part that wants to create something that’s of my own in service of the world in which I live through imagination, thought, and the machinations of a mind that will not sit still.  Some may argue that choosing to make a difference is a matter of disposition. I don’t want to give to society. I want to live for myself! Why should I care about what other people think? I consider people entirely able to make such statements and accept that they exist don’t disagree with that – human beings are different and naturally abide in different worlds; bearing different personalities, we approach the world through myriads of different lenses built from different world views, cultural backgrounds, and educational experiences. In such a world, might someone not argue that becoming societally valuable is merely one of many pathways. Surely that is an overgeneralization?  Personally, I feel that that is not so, purely because society is a large and far-ranging concept. Rather than an abstract and faraway entity, it is something that is close and begins from those closest and dearest to us before it extends outwards into the world. Society is fundamentally made up of individuals – our friends, our family members, the people who make up the sum and total matrix of people whom we know and love, and those whom we have yet to know whether near and within our communities, or far away and outside of them. To bring value to these people and by extension to society is not so grandiose as ending climate change, eliminating inner city crime, or resolving […]

The journey has been pretty interesting in a whole bunch of different ways. Amongst other things, I’ve received a partnership with GerakBudaya, and also in conjunction with the American Universities Alumni Association of Malaysia and the National Assembly of Malaysian Students in the United States of America (NAMSA), we are organizing this event. Here’s the event PDF to showcase that this is quite real. Honestly, even the term Corporate Pathways is a bit of a misnomer. I don’t know how corporate this event is going to be, primarily because it’s mainly going to be focused upon experience sharing and how people thought about their lives in the course of GLC in relation to the education that they received while they were in the U.S. There is a whole backstory to this that goes back about a month or two months or so, but has led me to a place of networking, meeting different people, and establishing friendly chat after friendly chat, rather than transactional moment after transactional moment with a bunch of different people with whom I probably never imagined at the outset that I’d be on casual speaking terms with. Anyway, here are some of the people who will be on the panel. GLC Panel: Nick Khaw, Head of Research at Khazanah and alumnus of Harvard University. Aik Chong Phuah, previous CEO of Petronas Digital and alumnus of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Brendan Yap, Senior Executive at the Securities Commission and alumnus of NYU. Athirah Azmi, former Manager, Client Coverage at Maybank Investment Bank and alumna of the University of Chicago  Private Sector Panel: Audrey Ooi, co-founder of Colony Coworking Space and an alumna of Mount Holyoke College, also known as @fourfeetnine. Dato’ Vincent Choo, Founder, Urban Ground Group, Franchisee Subway; alumnus of Eastern Michigan University. Yen Ping Teh, APAC Product Partnerships at Google and an […]

From a very young age, I had always understood businesses as entities that bring value to society in meaningful ways that otherwise it would not receive – and that’s one of the many reasons why the bookstore had always stood out to me as one of the ultimate business forms; after all, what could deliver more value to society than the transmission of knowledge itself for the profit of mankind, far above and in excess the monetary value that is paid for them? There is a huge camp out there of people who think that knowledge should be free and fairly accessible – I don’t dispute this to be a valuable point of view, but I also consider it to not be tenable; sure, we can say that society is the core issue and that knowledge *should* all be made available to the universe, but the fact remains that creating and obtaining knowledge is a costly effort, and if nothing else, the process of assembling something together whether through study or physical organization is something that manifestly should be rewarded. A critic might very well say that that’s the capitalist in me speaking and fighting against all the tides of justice, but I believe that life is about managing circumstances, finding spaces in the interstices of ideals and reality where there is a happy balance, and pushing forward in the thrust for existence. In my ethical system and paradigm, that bookstore is the most moral of the businesses out there – maybe a little strange if you consider that Amazon had started out as an online bookstore perhaps, but that’s what we’re working with here x) Anyway, I’m very happy to announce that I have a brand new partnership with the online bookstore GerakBudaya, for whom I’ve begun writing reviews – most immediately, a review of Dr. Toh Kin Woon’s “Malaysia’s […]

If there were a flaw that I would observe about myself, I think it would be this. That I am someone who thinks a little too much about what other people think. What this means sometimes is that I tend to not want to release things because I fear that they won’t be appreciated, people won’t like them, or anything else of that nature. And granted, that doesn’t happen across everything. If it’s just an Instagram story, for example, I just enjoy releasing dumb, interesting things that reflect the different random things that happen during the course of the day. But when it comes to more extended creative projects, I think that I am restrained in some ways by feeling that everything needs to be perfect. Everything needs to somehow just match up with the best. And in some ways, that is kind of negative, because if you were to just try for things that aren’t always good, if you’re a new perfectionist, then what ends up happening is that, sure, you might end up creating a good product, but what will probably happen also is that you’ll just not release anything. And believe me, that does happen quite a fair bit for me. I am the kind of person who tends to hem to haw, to just kind of let things go by because I think, “Oh, it’s not ready. Oh, I shouldn’t release this. Oh, more needs to be done.” And that’s just my nature. I tend to be pretty careful with a lot of different things. But at the same time, I’d like to try to get past that and I think that that can happen in at least two different ways. One is that I reach a level of ability whereby the things that I do end up matching what I consider to be a nice standard. […]