Did a Malaysian really become the first Asian to ever win an Oscar in history?

That aside… Did I really not write in this blog for like a week?

Did I really judge a business competition?

Do I really have 200+ students in my online course?

Is my book really releasing tomorrow?

Did a company really approach me to ask me to work on a legal industry chatbot?

Gosh.

What a wild ride these couple of weeks has shaped up to be 🙂

Here’s to the next moments of this insane journey ^^

This past weekend, there was a large variety of different events that relate to the entrepreneurship and startup ecosystem in Malaysia; while I didn’t go for the first one, I did get the chance to go for the second one, which was Jobstreet’s Seekscapes – it’s not exactly related to entrepreneurship exactly and more related to the idea of employment and seeking a career, which does reach at the core issue that’s at hand when we think about jobs but isn’t completely related.

There were two groups of people that I wanted to meet.

The first? There were Tien Ming and Wei Fong; Tien Ming I’d known from the time that I offered free JPA Scholarship consultation and guidance sessions, and Wei Fong started looking for people who understood how to code in Developer Kaki.

Tien Ming I’d known for ages but not met in a while, and he’d reached out again with a quick “PM Tepi”, after which we’d decided to meet – I wasn’t too sure where to meet him exactly, but figured that since Jobstreet Seekscapes was happening on the day that we’d agreed to meet that we could meet there for lunch – we ate at this Indian restaurant that served some pretty unique food, laughed about gimbals (there was this dude who kept touching my gimbal but thankfully that didn’t persist for too long).

Anyway, it was a great decision, leading to many productive connections and also to a ton of learning!

There were two days during Jobstreet’s Seekscapes, but I could only go for the second one because I had a few commitments and clients to meet on Saturday, which meant that I didn’t have the time to show up…

But show up I did, which gave me the chance to meet the second group of people:

The speakers, Chen Chow and Daren.

Both had very different perspectives to share, both of which were valuable and interesting for me and no doubt for the rest of the audience as well.

Beyond Chen Chow’s present role as one of the co-founders of Fave, I’d known him for many years since Recom and @usapps days; I will try not to overstate things but will say that what he has done to support education in Malaysia is difficult to estimate and ever-compounding, and the man’s work has touched lives far beyond himself across dozens of different organizations across Malaysia and certainly beyond it as well.

Daren on the other hand is founder of Developer Kaki, the largest developer Facebook community in Malaysia – we’ve not known each other for very long, though he’s clearly ambitious, talented and hardworking, will no doubt get where he wishes to go, and has good taste in chairs (apparently he discovered my chair persona a while ago LOL)

The challenges of entrepreneurship and the inevitable tests of character embodied in challenges that are inclement to building something meaningful – the idea that life is a game with rewards and choices through which we must fight to initiate on a limited time scale; both of these sessions were valuable in different ways.

Beyond this, there was yet another twist: The third group of people.

On the left, we have my Taylor’s juniors, and on the right, you have another three new friends who came along to speak with me at the session – both groups I met completely by chance on account of stuff that I don’t completely remember anymore.

The first? I met them through a free math workshop that i conducted for charity for Taylor’s for A Levels a while ago, and the second through a conversation that I was having with Luno’s Jeroni Khoo after his Partnerships and Affiliates session, during which they decided to ask me about the AI podcast that I’m interested to start 🙂

What unites them both is that they’re groups of people that I was asked to support at a random time – I don’t think I was fully ready back then to support the Taylor’s kids yes, but I wasn’t fully ready to teach the kids on the right about AI either – whether you go left or you go right, what remains seems to be that I was brought into a position whereby I had to provide my support through my mind and the things that I do in ways that I wasn’t entirely prepared to.

It’s funny, because I remember that during our lunchtime conversation, Ming and Lean quizzed me how I got into entrepreneurship, asking if there was a specific moment in time when I knew that that was what I wanted to do:

I answered that I didn’t know if there was a specific moment – things just happened the way that they did one moment and one opportunity at a time, and before I knew it, I had just become an educator and had started serving people in the best way that I could, even if I don’t know at the moment what the best possible ways to do so happen to be.

Still, I guess I stepped up at that time and I’m happy about it and the opportunity to enlighten many young minds 🙂

Cheers and thank you for reading!! Can’t wait for the next days ahead!

Have you ever wanted to learn and know how to use something so bad that it almost hurts? That’s the reality that I’m dealing with at the moment.

Trying to get smarter, learning how to make things, watching my mind upgrade… All of that requires time and the ability to finely balance it.

I’ll be first to admit that I’m not the best at that, but also say that it’s something that I do want to do with all my heart, soul, and spirit.

I had a bit of an internal fracas today as I was about to hire someone to create my website for me – good old Imran, the man who designed this very webpage that you’re reading at the moment.

There was a bit of an ethical dilemma on my part, because as I was trying to decide on the hiring decision, Si Eian had come in to recommend me a high school friend of his who wanted to do the job for a little more cheaply than I had been planning to work with Imran for ($400 as opposed to $500).

It led me to think a little bit there – would that $100 help me out a bit and would it save me? Would it not be prudent to save a little bit of money?

Well, I decided to go with Imran.

Partly, it’s a question of ethics – I did already tell Imran that I wanted to go with his services – but partly, it was also a question of quality and making the thing happen within a reasonable timeframe because the other freelancer was only able to deliver in two weeks; I’m not one to have a project delayed, so I went with the more expensive option.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that this guy offered his services and came out there to make me the offer – it just felt wrong to give up on someone that I’d promised that I was going to do something.

Over the years, I think I’ve changed a little bit – one of the things that has changed, from what I can see, is the way that I value small things; common decency, trustworthiness… All little things that circumscribe the way that I interact with people and make choices about who to stay with.

Nowadays, as I walk through this world, I do ask myself a bit – do I want to be a decent person, or do I simply want to gain everything that I can in this world?

Once upon a time, the latter would have been the default answer, no question – but now, the former seems a little better.

Can’t wait for the developments of the next couple days 🙂

This week’s started out pretty interestingly – I’ve decided to set out on a new business amid the constant push inside me to start yet another ChatGPT course, mainly because I think it’s important to start creating a legacy.

With that in mind, there is a small project that I’ll be creating for a subject that I’m pretty passionate about:

I started collaborating with a couple of teachers to make this happen, which has been pretty nice and interesting – I don’t know if this is going to make money and honestly it could end up losing me a pretty chunk of change, but I think it’s something valuable to do that I would do even if there wasn’t money involved in it; think of it as a chance to go through the process of skills transfer or something else of that nature right there – an opportunity to create something that’s actually valuable for the community and that people will think of with a sense of joy.

I think frequently about the idea of transgenerational change and about the things that we’re passing down, and as time goes by, I increasingly see the importance of somehow making preparations to make it happen.

When I think about it, I’m not too clear about what I’ve managed to pass down so far as a heritage to the next generation, but I know for sure that I’d like to leave a deeper mark in the lives of people in this short time that we have on Earth.

This is my small attempt to do so – look forward to it!

It’s been a very tiring week, but a very rewarding one as well.

Spoke at a conference yes, and now that’s in the past – what did it leave behind? A whole ton of new connections, memories, friends, and a ton of gratitude for people like Daniel, Richard, the mentors that’ve come by, the people who’ve shared knowledge with me, and the people whom I will work with as well.

It feels strange that this is the kind of thing that I’ve been missing out on for a while, but it also feels deeply like it was timely – a period of coincidences whereby things have just started to align with each other along a pattern that I can’t fully say that I understand but that perhaps Johann (hi if you’re there) might call “Manufactured Serendipity”.

It looks like a lot of great things have been happening to the people around me, and I’m pretty glad for that – also, maybe the sample space is skewed, but I’ve met some really great people who as it turns out are pretty down to earth and chilled out in many different ways that I’ve to learn more in days ahead, but that also carry fires within that I realize that I wouldn’t have seen if I’d maintained the facades and the lack of humility that characterized my earlier days.

When I look to the sky and to the world, I see how much more there is to learn – how infinite the seeming expanse before me.

The time is not infinite – far from it; it is quite limited, and I am but a single human unable to absorb it all.

But I will keep on trying, looking forward to what the world will bring – knowing fully well that it has brought good, and that it will continue to do so. This was truly a life-changing week, and just know that if you saw me and you met me this week, just know that you’re all some of the many reasons that I felt inspired this week by the sheer wave of talent and inspiration that constantly surrounds me 🙂

Thank you for being there and following my journey, and I’ll look forward to bringing you more in the days ahead!

Have you ever had this feeling that something was not quite right?

A sense of surrealism that you were being called to do something that you weren’t even supposed to? Well, that’s exactly how I felt when I was called to speak at BIZ Gear Up.
I mean, me? Speak at a business conference about artificial intelligence?

Well, if I think about it, it seems like it doesn’t make sense, but at the same time, I have been teaching people about ChatGPT for a while, and I do have a strong awareness of how it could actually be used in a business context. But it still feels a little surreal somehow.
I guess that they call this imposter syndrome.

You know, that feeling that you get when you do something and you’re just like, not sure
how you managed to do it in the very first place?

It takes a lot to be able to take someone who’s unproven to be able to speak at a conference
at a conference this important, but somehow or another I was selected. Was it an accident? Maybe. Did it happen? Yes, though that wasn’t the way that I was treated.

Somehow or another, Daniel Cerventus decided upon it, Mr. Money agreed, and I responded to the call.

And frankly, I just thought to myself, throughout this entire experience, what is this?

What kinds of people am I sharing the stage with?

I was punching way above my weight here.

But as I thought about it, I realized that knowing about imposter syndrome isn’t really helpful because
you can question and you can question and you can think about so many different things
that you could do, but it’s not very helpful.

Which is why I thought to spend the bulk of my time learning, to really seek inspiration from many of the people that I saw there, people who
have gone along a business journey that’s been not just meaningful, but also tremendously
successful as well.

Like Datuk Henry Goh, the founder of MacroKiosk: I listened to what he had said
about the difficulty of running a business, and it was insightful, intelligent, calm; he essentially observed that there was no such thing as a difficult year because every single year in business is difficult – in a time of low economic activity, it’s obvious that people wouldn’t really spend that much. But even so, in a time when business is booming, you still have to show people why your product
deserves attention.

From Lennise Ng, founder of Malaysia’s second startup to hit Y Combinator, on the other hand, I listened to what it was like to actually deal with the day-to-day challenges of changing the way that people behave, and it was interesting to watch that whole discussion go on because these were clearly consummate business professionals who had overcome much of the world in order to do what they’re doing.

When it came to time for my session though, I guess it wasn’t really very much better
because the person that I had to speak with was essentially this incredibly popular social
media influencer named Richard Ker, who posts these pithy graphics and images on Facebook
and Twitter that get thousands of likes each.

But somehow or another, it all faded away when we got on the stage.
Daniel shared and moderated throughout the course of the entire session; he’s wonderful at moderation, and I think I may have been a little too passionate at times when it came to this entire session
right here, but I hope that those of you who were listening enjoyed the time and everything that I had shared and prepared 🙂

I did do a ton of research in preparation for this and did my very best in order to
make certain things happen that otherwise might not have, and I’m very grateful to every single one of you out there who has been following this journey as it has been going on.

Thank you for being a part of this blog, as well as my experience as a human being, and I can’t wait to serve you guys more with even greater content in the days ahead.

There’s so much more to say, to do, to feel, to think, and I can’t wait for what’s gonna
come next!

Until then, sweet dreams!