Happy Malaysia Day to all of you who are from Malaysia!
On another and related note, those of you who know me probably know that I am a big fan of Lee Kuan Yew.
Well, that’s a bit of a small understatement. I mean, it would have to be for someone who was somehow so moved that he decided to write an entire book about Lee Kuan Yew, which is by the way exactly what I did.
This Malaysia Day, 16 September, I’m very happy to announce the release of “One Date, Two Destinies: Lee Kuan Yew and the Birth of Malaysia and Singapore”, at a (Malaysia Day) discount!
This was a fun project to engage in, writing about the entire track of Lee Kuan Yew’s history from his birth up until the end.
I think it is crucial to look back at the past to understand history better, and this is one of the first things that a person will understand, I think, if they look just a little bit beneath the surface of Malaysian history and that which we call Malaysia.
I don’t think that there is quite a project that is like this, but I think that it was an extremely fun one – It contains many of my own personal reflections about Mr. Lee and the role that he played in Malaysia and Singapore, and in our shared history together, one that was born from a time of what can rightfully be called trauma.
I hope that you will find it meaningful and valuable for your own personal development and growth even as you reflect on these stories.
Thank you for your support in advance if you would like to purchase the book!
Once upon a time, Descartes articulated a simple and famous philosophy: I think, therefore I am.
His idea was simple: Life is ambiguous, thoughts can be interpreted in wildly different ways; the entirety of the senses can be fooled, turned into illusions, and at the end of the day there is so little that actually can be known in this world that really, all you can say with certainty about who you are and where you come from is nothing, really – but as you think, therefore you exist.
I’ve pondered this insight for a while, and it makes sense to me – but in my life, I feel that a small and slightly less abstract addition applies:
I create, therefore I am.
It’s no secret to a lot of people that I do create, and quite a bit – it shapes my identity, who I am seen as to the world, and a whole range of other things that are inextricably linked to a public persona.
In slightly more practical terms though, creating takes up the time that life is made of, and that time in turn shapes the person you are and who you may become.
Spending hours creating a single video unquestionably shapes your day, for example; how could it not, if it structures how you choose to experience your hours?
Thinking about the content of what you’d like to say unquestionably makes a little part of your brain rewire, reset, refresh, and think about new possibilities; how could it not, if it reshapes the way you think about the world and how you look at it?
People measure life a little differently, even as biology and the archetypes (weird phrasing maybe, but I like that stuff haha) bind us to the common experiences and the life tasks; I create, therefore I am – I define myself by that act of creation, I think of life as a succession of creative experiences, and I create often for hours, always a little faster, a little more meaningfully, and hopefully a little more engagingly.
I create, therefore I am: That seems to be the seed that life has handed me – my nature, my personality, who I am and who I was put to be in this universe. There are so many things that revolve around that central seed, that have evolved around it as it’s geminated – not always in the best possible of ways, and sometimes with some distractions – but it’s continued to go on, moving to that nature.
Different things make us feel alive and in the moment – for me, this is one of them.
It feels like an era since I last came back here, and it has been. I’m sorry I haven’t been present, but a lot of stuff happened: I went to Japan, I got so much more serious about YouTube, I got a lot faster, and I guess I got caught up in a whole lot of different ways. Which in retrospect maybe I should have integrated a little better with my schedule, but well it is what it is, and here we are today.
Tomorrow I’m going to be talking a little bit about why I got into podcasting, and here I am, writing this little post to think about what the reasons really are.
Let me list them.
Understanding the world around me.
Making podcasts and videos isn’t just about creating a video and sharing it to the world. It’s also about trying to understand the world around you on a level that’s deeper than what people around you would normally accomplish – which means learning and reading. That’s always come naturally to me. So for me, this is really just a way that my routine kind of plays out as my nature brings itself out into the world.
Having some control over my environment and the people who listen to me.
When I talk about things, it helps me renew my thoughts, and it gives me the sense that I’m constantly talking to real people with their own thoughts, their own feelings, their own dreams, their own desires. Somehow podcasting just makes it feel a little bit like I’m able to shape the way that the people around me think and change a little bit about how the world around me operates or is run. Whether it’s by the chance view from a politician, a policymaker, the masses on the street, or the dozens who end up commenting on Facebook, it gives me pleasure to just feel that somehow they’ll listen to me and end up going in the direction that I believe is correct or right.
Receiving validation from the people around me.
It’s nice to feel like the people around you care about what you think, who you are as a person, what your preferences are. It’s also nice if they’re not strangers but actually real people around you. Content creation does that to some degree, even if it’s imperfect.
Expressing my voice.
Talking out loud is basically just using your instrument in a way that you know that other people are going to hear you, regardless of the way you express yourself. It means also that you’re constantly on a stage and that you’re learning how to come up with the things that make sense in the moment and bringing them out into the world, casting broadly your net upon the world.
Getting better.
Learning how to express yourself is a skill – there’s no two ways about it. The way that you think, the way that you express yourself, all of those are things that you can actually get better at, whether it’s how you structure your thoughts or how you take in knowledge and information to create something that you can share with the world. For me, I think that’s meaningful and I think it’s beautiful to think about how to better connect with people, to appreciate the mind, psychology, and so many other things on that journey of learning to show yourself to the world.
Building a career.
Creating content allows you to meet lots of people and it also allows you to make a living through the person that you are, the way you think, how you grow with and confront the world. For me, I think that’s the very best thing that you could possibly do because you’re just constantly learning how to make your personality come out in that day-to-day experience of just talking to a camera, improving and doing things along the way – I also really enjoy this constant feeling that I’m getting better at speaking and thinking, so for me, I think that’s really cool and something that I want to keep on doing until I learn how to master it.
Becoming me.
It’s always felt like learning to express myself and to understand different parts of my consciousness has been part of this journey of becoming me.
I’m sure that a lot of people find themselves in quiet spaces in the deeper contemplations. But for me, somehow or another, becoming me has always been tied to learning how to express different parts of myself, to learn how to play this vocal instrument, to use this brain that God gave me to bring down the realizations that somehow I had gotten from the deeper parts of myself, delivering them into the world and transmuting them into my very core and being.
Somehow it feels like whenever I speak, think, and talk, I am becoming a little more of me, even if I know that this is all temporary and it will all fade away.
Somehow, there is a sense in my mind that through bringing all of this out, I mattered, it mattered, and it will go on into eternity as an echo and imprint of who I was, who I am, and who I will be in the future.
All right, all that was probably a little prosaic, but it was helpful for me to get that out and to think about things. I promise to write a little more soon and catch you all later.
THERE AREa few reasons that a person could want to make content – some people do it for the money, which is a very real aspect, some people do it for the fame and some for the validation (Tim Tiah’s position); I am a little bit different, though.
I do it because I can feel my mind changing, and I enjoy watching it happen.
The demand of content creation is that your mind understands what appeals to people, and the turns you must take for your desired guest; it also requires that you understand what is relevant to people and can catch on to the correct trends and the constellation-universe of possibilities that you may encounter along the way, whether it’s making better videos, engaging with your audience, dealing with undesirables (unfortunate but real), and generally looking at the world in a way that is valuable.
Of course, a spat of luck in being able to do exactly that is nice and everything and it might not necessarily indicate skill in some way (I could be irrelevant in five minutes – who knows?), but I do feel that in this whole process of making videos, doing research, understanding what Malaysia as a country and the world cares about in this collective experience we all have, little parts of me are changing in an interesting direction.
I’ve been called a range of things – let me share some of them.
…And also through the rest of my work, whereby I’ve been told on various occasions that maybe I should stand for parliament – and not in a small way, or just a single time.
Here’s an illustrative example.
I was unable to give this a heart emoji.
It’s not because I don’t like the comment. @RCRC-g9u, you receive the Order Of The Sepup 👑 but no, I cannot give you a heart emoji.
You know why?
It’s because I don’t know how to deal with that possibility.
For all you know, that could happen – I consider it a little unlikely, but you never know how the bell will toll and what exactly will transpire on the journey, but haha it’s interesting to see that there’s this demand out there.
But you know, I like to think that I’m self-aware, and with the little self-awareness that I have, I know that there are certain joys associated with doing what I do and restraints associated with being a Member of Parliament; I am certainly aware also that some people might just consider me a mere opinionated ruffian with nothing else to my name apart from an overly-opinionated personality.
To me, that is actually fine as generally I don’t care too much what people think about me and I am unable or even occasionally terminally unwilling to pander to people’s egoes – perhaps that’s not a great perspective if you want votes? Haha, who knows. Didn’t stop Trump, did it?
sup bro
Returning from the grandiose turn, I’m not a huge creator; 20,000 subscribers on YouTube is nearly nothing compared to the big boys – but it is not insignificant either. I thank each and every one of you new and old, wherever you are, in whatever capacity you’ve discovered me, whether by accident or by choice, and express deep gratitude for what you’ve chosen, even as I recognize that subscriptions correlate with but do not determine impact, and understand that each of you have equally deep, rich, and multilayered mental worlds within yourselves than that which I have chosen to showcase on the internet and that I have the privilege of bridging to your own.
I won’t put the link here – if you want to consider what I’ve done by an act of choice, I think you know where to go.
Whatever it is, it’s not the fame (which has manifested in some strange and interesting ways and that I have my own thoughts about) that most motivates me; it’s not the idea of being ‘influential’ in terms of shaping social outcomes, although that’s assuredly a part of my hopes though one constrained by self-confirmation biases and algorithms that seek profit in a polarized world; I am most enduringly fascinated by the way this process of creating content has shaped and continues to shape me as a human being.
It’s been interesting to watch myself engage with the world, speak a little more clearly each day, and pretty much just vibe with the world and everything it’s given; the world is deeply and almost infinitely interesting to me, and it has become more so in these days that one day I will imagine ring as the halcyon days.
There is something special about riding on the wave of the thoughts of a generation, to exercise your agency – to shape others in the ways that you can, to shape yourself in the way you deem ideal; to articulate what you have known and shall actively come to know as the way the world is, has been, and must be.
If there is something good that may come from this and that you, the (human!) reader, consider meaningful, I would love to engage further with you whether on this platform or on the others – please don’t be shy to write to me, whether on YT or here (I will respond if I see genuine comments, though I’ve had to block the comments from bots), or on Instagram, where I tend to yak a bit when I’m not making videos or meeting people 🙂
