One thing I’ve always felt captivated by is the strange feeling of realizing that you’re able to do something only after you’ve done it, not before – it’s weird because you don’t know how you’re going to have done it, but somehow or another, by the time you’ve actually done it, you’re left with some weird and heady mixture of feelings that just make you think…
Whoa.
Did I seriously do that?
The feeling’s always the same – like a sort of explosion of color, a sense that something happened that I can’t quite grasp; the world has changed, but in a way that was wholly unpredictable.
It’s kind of weird to see myself change, and frankly there are times when I look at myself and it seems like I’m just an observer looking inward – but there’s a lot to be thankful for.
Who would’ve thought that this would be such an interesting ride, in the way that it chose to manifest as an interesting ride?
I want to make this space more into an authentic space, so here’s me trying to put more of my thoughts into place.
I wish that there was a way to hack consistency, to make it so that a person could just automatically do the things that they wish to do without any fear and without any barriers to entry; if there were such a thing, I think that life would be so much easier – we’d be able to show up every single day without any fear and without any favor whatsoever, and things would just become infinitely simpler day in and day out.
Unfortunately, there isn’t really a short-cut to doing that, though – showing up on a day to day basis is a given, yes, but in order for a person to show up every single day to create things, they do need to have the willpower to show up every single day.
I’m not writing this to rationalize my not being consistent or anything of the sort – these aren’t justifications for a lack of consistency, but rather they are an acknowledgment of the actual difficulties that would face anyone who wants to try to become consistent; I list them below.
To show up every single day, you need discipline and a process.
In order to show up every single day, it’s essential for you to have a schedule in order to make things happen in the correct way and at the correct time – if there isn’t a regularity to the things that you do or your whims just adjust you in some direction that puts you conveniently out of reach of the things that you want to do, you’ll slip away and from slipping away, you’ll immediately fall out of what you aimed to do in the first place.
To show up every day, you need self-confidence.
Self-confidence isn’t the easiest thing in the world to develop – but it’s the most crucial thing to develop – the ability to just shrug off the slings and arrows of the world, to shrug off your own ego, to somehow be brave enough to have every single part of what you’re saying, thinking, and doing become a part of the record of the world.
In other words, there are a couple of subdivisions of self-confidence that we have to think about:
a) The ability to not receive any positive feedback or any sort of encouragement for what you’re doing, potentially over a very very long time.
As human beings, we naturally want our work to be acknowledged, and we derive a lot of pleasure and joy from the affirmation of others; our work doesn’t take place in a vacuum, and it’s only natural that we would want others to celebrate us in some way, shape, or form – but what if that doesn’t happen? What if we never receive the audience that we expect, and this happens for a very long time? This isn’t something that most people can naturally bear.
b) The ability to actually be good at what you’re trying to show up for.
The reality is that no matter what area it is that you try to be good in, you’ll need to have some degree of skill in order to show up pleasantly, to receive good feedback, to actually create something that’s great by industry standards or something else; it’s not something that happens by accident, and certainly not something that occurs when your fingers trip and fall and cascade into the process of creating a novel.
The reality of this world is that being good at something is not just about being consistent at doing things – it’s also about having a certain degree of talent.
Those of us who say that you need to only just show up day after day seem to miss the possibility that well, it’s possible that a person might actually just *not* be talented at some of the things that they enjoy or want to succeed at.
I mean, we want to deny that in many cases, but that’s possible, isn’t it?
It’s reality and you can’t fight that.
c) The ability to not self-criticize or drown yourself out with criticism to the point that you stop doing what you wish to do.
The thing about trying to become great at something is that often, a person’s self can stop them from pushing forward, for the simple reason that they might think that they’re not good enough (and they may not be!) to receive the world’s attention.
While it’s true that they may become better through practice, what happens is that their self-criticism drowns out any prospect that they had of becoming better by pushing them into a space where they think…
“Hey, because I’m not good enough at this, maybe I shouldn’t even try anymore… Right?”
Often times, we’re our most stringent critics, and our egoes stop us from putting out anything into the world that doesn’t meet our own exacting or demanding standards, which in turn makes it so that nothing happens, nothing changes, and we find ourselves left in the same position that we were in before.
Why did I write this in the first place?
I wrote this because I wanted to troubleshoot a part of my own personality and the way that I think about the world; I wrote it because I want to overcome this aspect of my personality that’s holding me back, and the answer isn’t clear – I wrote it because I want somehow or another to push past the most legendary difficulty that I’ve ever faced in this world and to make something that’s consistent and stands the test of the generations where what stands now is a record of repeated starts and stops that are a function of a nature that’s woefully ill-suited to that sort of consistency.
The recent scandal involving a fellow member of the Tan family in Singapore has rocked the entire of Singapore, revealing that in fact a political party made up of elites of the highest caliber can in fact be corrupt, can in fact be slave to the impulses that make up human beings at large.
I think it makes that party look all the more human though – it too is subject to flaws, as incredible an organization as it is, as well-constructed it is from the outside.
As human beings, we do have our flaws and our desires, our dreams and imperfections – all part of the oil that keeps the cogs running forward in a journey that for people at large is often long and intense; apparently millions of dollars in compensation, societal recognition, and other surface-level pleasantries that people fight for are window dressing – they are not guarantees that nothing will go awry in life.
What I’ve seen from Singapore lately has been shocking – something most unfortunate that has shown that no bastion is too high to fall, regardless of how well-constructed it is.
I am hoping for SG to come out stronger and am confident that the fundamentals are there, though.
Half of the things I did this year are things that I never imagined that I could do.
Almost all of the things I did this year were things I thought I never would do.
But I did them anyway.
If that’s not evidence that a soul can transform, I’m really not sure what is.
Have you ever watched your own soul transform, reflected on the things that you’ve done in the past year and considered how they affected your soul, your thought process, the way that you behave and think in this world?
I have.
I’ve witnessed ways in which my own personality has changed, how I’ve tried and performed many different things that I never even imagined that I’d try – musical instruments, new languages, new forms of business, writing books…
It’s been fascinating to watch, even if I don’t entirely know where all of it is going.
Still, this year, I’ve come to pay a deeper homage to nature and the gifts that it gives – the way that the soul reaches out from the confines that are beyond it to seek out things that align with it in a grand exercise by which somehow or another, it seeks its natural position and flourishes; like a flower that blooms in the midst of the radiance of sunlight, it is only natural that it should do so.
The human psyche is a complicated thing – so muddled, so chaotic, so filled with random things that a person might never be able to even appreciate in the course of a lifetime; I would certainly know – each time I close my eyes and begin to think about a space beyond, I find myself confronted with a hundred different thoughts that pass through like light trails on a highway, whizzing by as blurs that only take coherent form when you look at them to reflect upon what had come, knowing them only in retrospect.
I’m reminded now of the Steve Jobs commencement speech – about how the man could only see what had happened when he had looked back at his life and everything that had come by.
I don’t know the answer to what I’ll see when I personally look back, but what I do know is that well, it’ll probably be pretty interesting – so I’m glad for the ride to continue 🙂
It’s always been a little weird for me to talk about education and why I’m passionate about it, especially because I’m an Economics graduate – to say the very least, this isn’t the field or area that many people would’ve thought that I would specialize in.
I imagine that many people looked at me when I graduated and wondered – why would he want to go into education?
Well, the reason I do this all is simple: I’m just doing justice to my nature.
For one thing, I really enjoy learning new things and building up stores of knowledge; it’s something that I can literally do all day as I pick up new and interesting tricks, figure out things left, right, front, and center, and learn how to implement them inside my head.
That aside, I also enjoy understanding how to convey information in clear and easily comprehensible ways and leveling up my skill in doing so.
Lastly, educating people is a joy – it’s interesting to watch how people respond to my words and to teach them how to expose themselves to more advanced material while at the same time building their capabilities.
In my eyes, there is a strange beauty in knowing that every effort that you’re making to develop yourself will one day translate into developing the lives of other people around you and the way that they think and make decisions…
Yet at the same time I can’t help but feel that there’s always a bit of hubris along the way.
After all, the weird thing about talking about education is that it always involves talking about how well someone else has learned, when at the end of the day, the only thing that we can really speak about is the extent to which we have personally learned.
At the end of the day…
How can we really say how much we have learned? It’s kind of hard to do that, I think, especially since a person can go through the entire course of their lives but never really get a sense of who they are and what they’re about; even if a person spends all their time thinking and writing and reflecting, they may come no closer to the answer than they were before.
Having said that, though, I think I’m personally a little closer to the answer than I used to be many years ago – heavy on my thoughts, after all, is the constant recognition that I’m learning and growing as a person, a constant sense of appreciation and need, and the joy of knowing that the people whom I’ll see on a day to day basis are somehow glad to see me.
Do I know how they’ve changed as people, though?
In some ways, yes I guess; I can see the ways that their grades have improved and how that aspect of their lives has improved, and I can see the ways in which my thoughts have lent themselves into the reflections of my students.
Beyond that, though, how can I look inside another person’s mind and see what they see, what they feel, witness the foundation of their thoughts?
I guess I can’t – but it doesn’t stop this from being something that’s endlessly fascinating for me, as I bear witness to the work of my own hands in ways that I never imagined before, both on the battlefield of the exam world, and also in life at large 🙂
Maybe it seems strange that I not only serve as a teacher but also in this capacity, but I think that it is a natural extension of everything I’ve been doing, just with a different group of people and clients – the focus at the end of the day is the same – to entertain, to educate, and to empower people to develop skills that will serve them well in the modern age.
Thank you to everyone who came along on the journey with me, referred me, supported me, and brought me forward in an infinitude of different ways – you know who you are 🙂
When I think about my life, I think about the kind of pathways that I could’ve taken pretty often. Often times, I don’t know what I might have done otherwise apart from teaching – such is the captivation that this pathway has brought for me.
Over the time that I’ve spent teaching, I’ve taught literally hundreds of students – as a result, I’ve developed some familiarity with the way that people learn and grow over the course of time, which in turn has led me to develop a strong interest in the human mind, not just as a theoretical thing, but rather as something that I have dedicated my entire life towards growing and stimulating in lots of different ways.
Somehow or another, I feel most comfortable when I am in front of groups of people, speaking and sharing, and talking about the things that I learned throughout the course of the time I’ve been on earth.
I don’t know why that’s the case.
Perhaps it’s some sort of idle wish to pass down something to the next generation?
Maybe it is, but it’s not as if I don’t benefit from it either. It’s allowed me to live a life that’s pretty comfortable, one where I can be at peace with myself… Yet along the way, though, it’s led me into many different territories of doubt.
After all, can a teacher really claim credit for the student’s successes?
It is a fact that I have trained some of the most illustrious students of Malaysia, but that’s not to say that I am the best teacher, by any means – I think that if I were to say that, it would be an example of hubris of the highest order: who in this world can really say that the are the best teacher, especially when the act of learning in itself is so dependent upon the hearts and efforts of the students who choose to take part in one’s classes?
I am not so arrogant.
As a teacher, I’ve learned to consider how to become more articulate, better at structuring my thoughts, better at inspiring the hearts of the people around me – that’s been a long process of learning, not only how to order my words, but also to want the correct things, to be able to say the right things at the right time, to obtain the qualifications that I need in order to inspire confidence, while at the same time being able to cast them away in lieu of an independent mind that can inspire people to question.
I wonder if as a person, I could have become more wealthy, had more social status, or done any number of other things that could have put me in the grand scheme of things in a battle state than that which I experience at the moment – but when I look at my life, I’ve come to realize that there is no great suffering – no particular desire to compete, or compare – just a man who is enjoying what he’s doing, and can be said to be reasonably good at it.
Is it to say that there is no room for progress? No, certainly not – if anything, the journey is just beginning. Still, I thought it would be good to get some of these things off my chest while I’m thinking about them, and evaluating where I am to go in the future, because I know that wherever that road leads, it will require me to develop a stronger, personal conviction, a stronger set of abilities – a heart that is better able to deal with the inevitable challenges of this universe.
If you are a student of mine, know that I am still growing as a teacher, and I am doing my best to become the best person to serve you, although I will inevitably fail – but know that I know you have invested with me, your time, your minds, and your hearts – and I will do you well.
If you are one of the many parents who have and trusted me with your children, and also have decided to fund the journey that I have begun as I move forward, know that my gratitude extends across borders, and that my commitment is to bring your children value that extends far beyond whatever it is that you have agreed to give me in monetary compensation. Know that I am telling you that I am not necessarily a perfect teacher, or even a perfect human being for that matter – but I will continue to aspire to be a good role model for your child so that they can learn how to do things and live life a little bit more so that they can fulfill your wish that they may exceed you in the upcoming generation, one way or another.
Thank you for supporting me and doing what I wish to do and to help grow it for the next generation – your words, your thoughts, your support from so many different places, and countries around the world has been deeply meaningful to me and continues to serve as a source of inspiration that I take to hear with each moment, and each day of my life.
I don’t particularly know what led me to write this on a Saturday night, but it felt like the most important thing for me to share at this point, as I reflect upon the journey somehow amid a brief pause of moments before one of the busiest months I’ve ever experienced in my life.
I’m not sure exactly how things happened the way that they have happened, but it looks like I’ve gotten into the world of corporate training. It all started with a top that I did at the Asia School of Business in April, where I talked about the future of AI alongside several distinguished panelists…
And before I knew it, after having somehow captivated the audience in a ChatGPT and Midjourney demonstration, I had joined Iconic Training’s Train The Trainer program and delivered a first corporate training to 250 employees of Top Glove Corporation over the course of the week.
It was an insane opportunity to me at the time, and it still is an insane opportunity now – didn’t think that at some point, I’d start getting engaged to speak to some of the largest companies in Malaysia right at the outset, even before getting formally certified…
But that was then, and now I’ve completed the Train The Trainer certification with some of these lovely people 🙂
Not all of this was easy – much of it involved a long and winding journey the end of which is nowhere close in sight, and one that involved animal spirits, fears, an unfortunate betrayal involving the administrator of a rather large group dedicated to ChatGPT, and the realization that at the end of the day, we just have to do what we have to do to accomplish what we wish to accomplish.
Anyway, I’m not particularly concerned; things have been going well in accordance with some pattern I don’t quite understand at the moment, in ways that make me want to write and to wander a little bit more as I move forward in this journey, pondering the journey forward.
Thank you to everyone who’s supported me along the course of my journey, and everyone who shall support me forthwith 🙂
