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 budgetary constraints on a macroeconomic scale, even if those things are desirable – To share laughter that enlightens your spirit is to be societally valuable – to make others cherish you through your words, thoughts, and actions is to bring social value – to create products, ideas, thoughts, and things that inspire others to take action, to make a difference, and to think just a little differently is to bring social value into being and to create something that is meaningful to society. On all levels and in all ways, the barrier of entry to contribute towards society is not so high, and it certainly suffices to play one’s role well as a son or a daughter, a father or a mother or a friend, alongside the numerous other things that a person might choose to do in their careers.

In all likelihood, even if for some unlikely reason we were unsociable and cold or we knew nobody in this world, the ability to create societally valuable things is a key component of survival in the world. Creating things that people value is the key reason as to why people would sacrifice resources for that thing, whether time, energy, or money – it is the reason that people take part in exchanges to mutual benefit, which is impossible to do if one doesn’t discover traits, attributes, or qualities that allow them to be beneficial to the world at large in the social context in which we live, especially in a capitalistic context where survival rests upon the exchange of resources and growing them to meet our ever-increasing set of wants transformed into needs.

There are so many different ways to satisfy the needs of a person in a capitalistic context that command their instincts, willpower, and personal volition together as part of a project of building something that is unique to themselves, yet it is not only in service of capitalistic needs that we create things. 

I think that I could have written this in more relatable language and with a little more engagement, but this is what came out of me today – I’ll write a little more later 🙂 

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 alumna of Mount Holyoke College.
Brian Soo, Chief Innovation Officer of Firefighter.my and an alumnus of the University of California, San Diego.

It’s been a whole whirlwind of experiences from trying to ensure representation, meeting different alumni clubs, encountering representatives of the different organizations dedicated towards Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on and so forth. All I can say is that it’s been interesting and unique to see what’s been going on develop over the course of time.

Didn’t think that it was going to be possible for me to organize something like this before, but I guess it was… And here I am with just another iteration of the thoughts that I had before.

“Now that we’ve done this, what can we do next?”, goes the thought.

Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that question, but what’s for sure is this:

The universe has placed me in a unique position, I think, to make a difference, to bring people together, and to create new experiences that are valuable and meaningful towards members of our society at large. And so long as I am here, and that universe continues to give me strength, I will endeavor to create better ones, and to level up along the way, so that I can do good to my country, and contribute towards it, rather than constantly complaining, failing to take action, and sitting immured in a prison of my own doubts.

I look forward to seeing this happen, and the interesting developments that lie ahead 🙂

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 New Economic Policy In Its First Decade”, casually titled “The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions” (not by me, but by the admin!!!)

It was super fun to reflect on the New Economic Policy, to meet a thinker who had dedicated his academic career to something so crucial to Malaysia’s society, and to become sufficiently capable of understanding as to develop a viewpoint valuable to society.

There are many things that have been happening recently – too many to contain within the margins of this page alone. Can’t wait to see how things will develop in the days ahead 🙂

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. Maybe that’s a bit of a cop-out because that requires me to get to a certain level whereby pretty much anything I say or do just becomes acceptable as a creative product. It’s not really that sort of change of heart that I was kind of going at along the way earlier, but it’s one possibility, really.

I genuinely believe that people who can produce prodigiously, many of them are at that level partly because I think that that is the level that I would need to be at.

Maybe that’s a limiting belief.

Maybe in reality, the vast majority of the things that people make out there in this world are just not particularly good.

Maybe I’m just a little too self-concerned, conceited, caught up in my own thinking when actually there’s no enemy.

But who knows?

What’s for sure is that there is a sort of limiting belief that has been operating in my life, and I think it’s a good time to let it go – one of the reasons why I’m treating this website sort of as a group therapy session at the moment.

But in the future, I do genuinely hope that somehow or another, a little part of me is going to change. A little part of me is going to transform. A little part of me is just going to develop that skill, that pride, that recognition of something worthwhile to share. Maybe so worthwhile that it doesn’t matter even if I come out imperfect, even if it’s not ready, whatever – Because what matters most is the contribution and not perfection.

Who knows? Anyway, life has been interesting, and I’m kind of looking forward to what’s coming up here and there. So many different things to update, lots of ideas to share along, and a whole range of things I never thought that I would ever experience.

I’m very grateful for what the universe has brought, what it brings, and what it will continue to bring. Let’s just put it there.

Today, I did my very first GRE at home, and let me tell you – that’s a fascinating experience to have.

It was my first time experiencing at-home proctoring, which the test agency, ETS, carried out by means of a proctor who did some of the following things:

1. Checked my ears
2. Checked my hands and arms
3. Asked me to look under my bed
4. Asked me to close the doors, turn on the lights, and everything else.

If you haven’t heard of any of this before, rest assured that you’re in good company – I hadn’t either!

Either way, not too sure what actual score I’m going to receive, but the test was an interesting one (as interesting as your standard issue GRE can be); it was a little bit disappointing to see the unofficial score that I’d received, given that I’d done a bit of practice and had done quite well, but I was shocked to see the result that had appeared on the screen – an estimated 320, despite PowerPrep Plus practice test scores of 331, 334, and 330 previously.

I have no idea how well ETS performed the estimation, but rather than reject it, I’ve decided to take it seriously and take action along the way, because what this result showed me was that maybe I had been a bit too presumptuous about my own strengths and abilities to the point that I thought that I’d be able to game the test.

Still, I think it was a shock and a wake-up call to try a little harder and not to give up and, accordingly, to carry on with the articles of mental development that the GRE has brought about – because the GRE certainly has brought about many of these things in the week or so that I’ve spent preparing.

#1: To become more efficient at writing.

The GRE has definitely taught me to write much more efficiently and to structure my writing – to get much better at deciding what parts of my argument should be supported – and to make sure that things are logically organized; in that sense, it’s been truly a boon for my writing skills, on platforms such as this one.

#2: To become much faster at mental calculations and better at verbal reasoning.

The GRE is a test of mental math and verbal reasoning – things that I might have considered myself to be strong at in the past. The test is fast, and it stretches your brain – but perhaps most importantly, it forces you to reason very quickly and efficiently; in that sense, it’s a real challenge with a truly insane curve that forces you to dramatically level up.

#3: To consider further ambitions.

The GRE is a test that is taken for graduate school. I’m not saying that I *will* end up going to graduate school, but taking it has made me think about who I am becoming and who I wish to become through the training process, which has been nothing short of a whirlwind of progress and development.

#4: To acknowledge where I am.

Realistically, unlike the SAT, the GRE is the kind of exam whereby you compete not just against people from a single country or untrained high schoolers, but with legitimate and hungry people from IIT’s, China’s top universities, and many other places around the world that are interested in demonstrating that they’re ready for graduate school.

Because it is an international competition in which the best and the brightest participate, the GRE is not a test for the weak – rather than pity you, it is more of a test that, if it had a spirit animal, that spirit animal would be a cat. Moreover, if it were sentient, it would probably look you in the eye if you give the wrong answers and simply tell you that you should die.

The exam doesn’t particularly care about what you think about and who you are or what sort of life history you’ve lived out so far – all that matters is whether you get the questions right or not.

Accordingly, it has led me to think about where I am, and where I will be in the future.

#5: To refrain from making excuses.

It would be very easy to talk about how the test was rigged or provide any number of excuses for why X didn’t happen, Y did, or Z will or won’t happen.

To be honest, I am tempted to talk about practice tests, external validity, the constraints of the clock, the deceptively easy verbal section… But I recognize that that is unbecoming. At this time, I’m accordingly reminded of a quote by the late Bruce Lee:

“Ask not for an easy life – but for the strength to bear a difficult one.”

It is very tempting to blame the universe, to think about the external factors that could have come into play, the curve, and any number of other things – but when challenges come and if they should amp up, the logical solution is not to whine and complain: It is to level up.

I’ll be taking the GRE one more time, and will be looking forward to the mental growth that this process and the many other things that are happening in life now will bring.

Thanks for reading – Here’s to much more ahead!

What an interesting year it has been, and what an interesting year it will, no doubt, continue to be.

I’ve met many people in the past year, some of whom are famous, some of whom are less so, but every single one unique, interesting, and educational in a hundred different ways that have transformed my life in ways that up until now I still can’t comprehensively elucidate. New roles have come in as well, as have new responsibilities, including the responsibility of managing the AUAM’s LinkedIn page, and to continue onwards with opportunities to meet many different people, often of tremendous qualification and bearing. Continuing onwards with a trend that somehow began last year and has continued in ever more improbable scenarios along the way.

A funny thing that has changed is that somehow, my soul’s resonance doesn’t echo so much with the need for financial gain anymore. It’s hard to say that I don’t need money, but it’s just that that is not my primary motivation.

I think that there was a time when, in the past, having more and more money was really the goal. And I’m not saying that it isn’t needed.

But somewhere along the line, I think that this should change.

It moved away from having every dollar and cent and having every inch of capacity towards being able somehow to make a difference in different ways towards being able to fund my goals and aspirations, ambitions one after another.

I’m not a greedy person, I don’t think. Not a particularly flashy one either.

I don’t have grand aspirations of having the most gigantic house in this world or the most incredible car.

Rather, I think I’d rather just live a simple life with the capacity to get most things that I do want with the ability to travel, and various other things of that nature, and to enjoy the small gifts that life has such as friendship, new experiences, and many other things along the way.

I think that there comes a point in each person’s life when they begin reflecting on these things, and they realize that many things in this world are not either-or, though.

Sometimes opportunities come into your life, like lightning, once certain conditions have been met.

Maybe your mind has reached a certain level that you’d not anticipated before.

Maybe you, as a person, have become someone capable of delivering certain kinds of experiences, value, or outcomes into the world that you should be compensated for it.

Whatever the case may be, at least for me, it’s still a time of patent reflection and many new joys. Some of which I hadn’t considered at an earlier point, but that are coming into my life one after another.

The friendships that I thought I’d abandoned.

The learning that I thought I would never have.

The opportunity to meet my heroes and to greet them as peers.

The expansion of horizons that hitherto were very shallow.

The universe seems to have blessed me in many ways that I had not taken account of before and as such, it has given me certain revelations that are unique to me and previously, in my mind, unprecedented.

I take each as a new seed, upon the soil that is my consciousness.

What flowers and fruit these seeds shall yield, nobody shall know.

But whatever it is, I know that if I look at the evidence of the past, I have seen good from this universe – and I have no rational reason to say or believe that it will not be so again in the future.

– V