It’s 2025, and people are finally talking about alternative pathways to success, as if government-mandated routes are the only ways forward. I now run more than four businesses spanning fitness equipment trading, sports equipment, rock climbing gyms, and fitness centers. What led me here wasn’t purely academics—it was the long, natural process of building multiple practical skills.
When you have an academically gifted child, the temptation is to fill their schedule with more knowledge to maximize potential: robotics classes, coding lessons, math olympiad preparation. However, packing their time so tightly deprives them of two critical aspects of exceptional development—the ability to be comfortable with boredom, and the capacity for self-directed learning.
Boredom allows the brain to wander, and it’s in these wanderings that completely new ideas emerge, possibilities usually suppressed by the bustle of everyday life. Self-directed learning is the autonomy to decide what you want to learn for your own interest, not because someone enrolled you in a class. Figuring out what you enjoy or want to learn is a lifelong process that isn’t straightforward even for adults, so allowing children to start this journey early is one of the most helpful things you can do for them.
Even as an academically inclined child, my mother didn’t rush to place me in classes to further my potential. Instead, she brought me to libraries and bookstores to choose my own books. I won a Math Olympiad Gold in primary school—not because I studied for it specifically, but because I’d always enjoyed doing math IQ puzzles on my own. She actively encouraged me to pick up practical skills rather than more theoretical knowledge, and that made all the difference.
This wasn’t coming from a place of privilege. When I was ten, my family went through financial difficulties. We often ate green bean soup and hash browns because they were cheap and easy to prepare from the supermarket. But even then, my mother understood something crucial: structured enrichment classes cost money we didn’t have, but time and curiosity were free.
The best way to acquire skills is to learn by doing, then refine the process through more reading and application. While I didn’t know it then, this process of picking up various skills—and the knowledge that basic skills in each industry aren’t hard to learn—contributed enormously to my success as a business owner. Here are some of the important skills I developed from a young age.
Sales
Arguably the number one skill, sales is the ability to talk to customers, understand what they need, and sell them what they want—all without making them feel cornered or, worse, conned. When I was ten, I went door-to-door selling jelly on quiet school nights or at year’s end. My mother had seen a newspaper ad from a wholesaler and bought a few cartons for my brother and me to try selling. As I finished the blocks near me, I ventured further and further away with a backpack full of jelly. For a ten-year-old boy, this was scary but also exhilarating.
We learned about cost, selling price, margins, and the absolute lowest price we could accept if customers bought multiple packets. Later, at sixteen, I worked at IT shows selling laptops. I also helped my mother’s bosses source parts from Sim Lim Square—building or repairing computers, or buying components for them to export overseas. We could build twenty CPUs with CRT monitors and keyboards, earning a tidy profit just shipping them to Papua New Guinea! I earned $50 per computer simply by collating requirements and budgets, then going to Fuwell to have them built and delivered to the customer’s shipping container.
These experiences were pivotal to my sales knowledge and gave me confidence in talking to strangers, knowing we could always establish common ground and work toward mutually beneficial outcomes.
Programming / Coding
If my memory serves me right, I was already using a computer in primary school—first to play games like Golden Axe from a diskette in the A-drive, then learning from my bookkeeper mother how formulas worked in Lotus 123. The first time typing “=sum” felt like magic. When I told my mother I wanted to learn more about computers, she enrolled me in a beginner’s course on Java. Typing “System.out.println(“Hello World”);” into the console and seeing “Hello World” in the output was amazing. That sparked my confidence that programming wasn’t hard to learn.
Web Design
By Primary 6 or Secondary 1—around 2000-01 during the start of the dot-com boom—SMEs were looking to build websites. My mother’s boss, knowing I was into programming, asked if I could build one for him. At that point, I was still self-learning Java and didn’t know how websites were built. I asked my mother how much to charge, and she said other companies were quoting $1,000, so I should charge $500.
Motivated by that sum as a young boy, I headed to the library, borrowed several books, and learned in a week how to build a basic website. In those days, it was just five HTML pages coded painstakingly in Notepad, line by line, and saved as “.html” files. I only learned about Dreamweaver and other programming software later. Once I understood HTML, hosting, FTP uploads, and website launches, I completed the project in about five hours once I had all the content. For a thirteen-year-old boy, earning $500 for five hours of work wasn’t just good money—it was a meaningful contribution to our household budget.
From that one project, I started receiving referrals—I was 50% cheaper than market price, after all—and built a steady client pool. Eventually, websites became easier to build with WordPress, and clients became more demanding, requiring teams, so I stopped offering web design as a service. Years later, when launching my first e-commerce stores with WooCommerce, Magento, or PrestaShop, modifying templates, core files, and PHP scripts became much easier due to these early skills.
Photography
When I was fifteen in secondary school, I had the fortunate chance to sit next to YF, who had a keen interest in photography, probably inherited from his father. He brought a Canon G5 to school—a prosumer camera with manual controls for shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. At about $1,000, it wasn’t something I could afford, but he taught me the basics and let me use his camera. After that, I bought my first camera, a Canon A70.
I joined walk-along photography tours in Singapore and learned how to adjust settings and framing for better outcomes. While helping a professional photographer part-time, I discovered you could get bulk prices from printing shops: a 4R cost 20 cents versus the retail 30 cents, a 5R was 50 cents versus $1, and an 8R was $2 versus $8. So I started taking photos at school events like Racial Harmony Day or Sports Day, passing an order list to the class monitor who helped me collate orders. I charged $1 for 4R, $2 for 5R, and $5 for 8R prints. For every event, I earned about $500 while also supporting the school as a CCA activity. It was win-win—I looked like the helpful student but was using the opportunity to earn money and help my family.
With those earnings, I bought a second-hand DSLR, a Fujifilm S2 Pro with some basic Nikon lenses. I was then able to work on external projects, charging for basic event photography with extra charges for printing. As a sixteen-year-old, this was excellent income compared to friends working in F&B as waiters or distributing flyers. By 2008, the photography market became much more competitive, so I stopped offering this service. Still, years later, knowing how to take photos, set up studio lights, and edit images proved invaluable in my first business and continues to be useful today.
Design
Being a photographer for external events naturally led to clients asking, “Since you’ve taken photos of my food, can you help me design a banner or flyer?” My default answer was always, “Yes, I can!” Again I started designing for clients, first using Photoshop, then learning Illustrator along the way. You can imagine how useful these skills became in my businesses for quick designs—product labels, flyers, website banners—long before Canva was even usable. Even today, I rarely use Canva because I’m too accustomed to Adobe Suite.
At NTU, I learned InDesign, which became invaluable when we designed our own catalogs for Movement First and Javy Sports. We modeled them after IKEA’s catalogs, knowing our clients enjoyed flipping through pages more than browsing websites.
Reading
It might feel odd to list this as a skill, but it’s crucial. Even though I earned money as a teenager that helped my family, I didn’t splurge it on frivolous purchases like Billabong wallets or Nalgene bottles—the status symbols of my time. Instead, I had learned from books I’d read earlier that the best way to compound wealth was to reinvest, either in yourself or in your business. The only place I didn’t set a budget limit was at the library and occasionally Kinokuniya.
I often went there after school, reading voraciously and buying books when I could—some of which would be considered entrepreneurship trash today, but at the time seemed enlightening. I list this as a skill because being able to sit down with a book and absorb new information quickly is far more valuable than attending workshops where so much gets lost in translation. Even when my friends attended workshops on investment or dropshipping, I’d ask them why waste thousands on a weekend course when you could find the same information, probably more extensively, for free at a library. The ability to digest large amounts of information quickly and understand its essence is essential for leaders, and this skill can only be built from a young age. Once you hate reading, it’s almost impossible to develop a love for it.
The Polytechnic Choice and Handyman Skills
When I finished O-Levels, I naturally went to polytechnic even though 99% of my cohort went to JC. I didn’t see the purpose of A-Levels when I could pick up more practical skills at polytechnic, plus have the freedom to pursue other interests.
Eventually, when I started my businesses, I needed to become handier. Critical skills included drilling holes, understanding which wall anchors to use, welding, electrical work, plumbing, and setting up our own sound and CCTV systems. Were these hard to learn? Definitely not. Did they save the business money? Absolutely. Each time a plumber or electrician came down, it cost $100 minimum before they even started fixing the problem. Now, the back of my car is filled with tools I need for my businesses’ day-to-day operations.
Where University Fit In
And where did my university degree fit into all this? I really can’t be sure. University was a place to broaden my horizons and learn more abstract, higher-level knowledge, but it also served as a safety net in case my businesses didn’t work out. My university was good to me—I won scholarships and received cash awards to support my studies. I also started my first business in Year 2, so I didn’t waste my time there as it took time for the business to scale up. I met my business partner at NTU too, which was fortunate. Thankfully, everything worked out and I didn’t need to use my degree to find a job.
The Ongoing Journey
While I’m financially comfortable today, I still love learning new things. I read as often as I can and allow myself periods of boredom where I can think of new ideas. I never imagined my years of building diverse skills would be so helpful to who I am today. I cannot emphasize enough the benefit of having a wide body of knowledge and first-principles thinking to identify root causes—whether physical problems due to inappropriate material interaction or human-related issues stemming from different emotional states.
Today, our government facilitates many of the activities I had to learn on my own back then. SkillsFuture provides an easier pathway to explore interests outside your core competency and may offer alternative career options. My wife recently attended an aromatherapy course and learned a lot from it.
Regardless of whether you learn through self-study or government-subsidized courses, the architect of your future remains squarely your responsibility.
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