A lot has been said about entrepreneurship, and most of it tends to fall into one of two camps. Either people warn you away from it — because it is uncertain, difficult, and the odds are low — or they romanticise it too much, as though it is some glamorous act of self-invention, full of freedom and inspiration and very little friction. I have always felt that both versions are incomplete.
The truth, at least to me, lies somewhere in between, and perhaps slightly outside both.
Because the real joy of entrepreneurship is not that it is easy, and it is also not that it is heroic. It is that it allows certain kinds of people to live in a way that feels profoundly natural to them, even when that life looks difficult from the outside. It allows you to create something from nothing. To take a gap, an intuition, a problem that other people have overlooked or dismissed, and slowly — through repeated effort, trial, and correction — turn it into something real. A business. A product. A place. A system. A piece of reality that would not have existed in quite that form if you had not decided to build it.
There is something deeply satisfying about that.
And beyond the building itself, there is a quieter joy in knowing that strangers are better off because of something you made. A customer finds what they need. A school uses your equipment. Someone walks into a gym that feels less intimidating than the others and finally begins. An older person who might otherwise have felt that fitness was not “for people like them” now has a place where they feel welcome. These are not grand, cinematic moments. They are small proofs that what you built has entered other people’s lives and changed them in some real way. I think that matters more than people admit.
There is also the joy of being able to explain what you do to your children, and to watch them slowly realise that what you have built is not ordinary. Not in the sense of status or prestige alone, but in the sense that most people do not spend their lives turning ideas into systems and systems into businesses. My son goes to school and sees the sports equipment we supply being used by his classmates. He knows we put it there. He can point to something in his environment and say, my father made that available. That is a small thing. But it is not a small feeling.
And perhaps even more than pride, there is the joy of giving your children a different starting point from the one you had. To let them encounter ideas earlier, read books that open up the world before the world has had a chance to narrow them, grow up in an environment where curiosity is a strength rather than a distraction. I grew up without that kind of scaffolding. I found Rich Dad Poor Dad on my own, read The Fifth Discipline at sixteen with a barely-formed prefrontal cortex and understood maybe thirty percent of it, and still it planted something that never left: that outcomes are rarely caused by one thing alone, that systems shape behaviour, that success and failure are often designed into the structure long before they become visible in the result. My children will have those ideas much earlier. At eight, my son already knows more than I did at eight. That, to me, is one of the deepest gifts entrepreneurship has made possible.
And then there is another joy which is harder to explain to people who have never built anything — the joy of operating in uncertainty.
Entrepreneurship, in my experience, is always a kind of fog of war. You do not know for certain if your reading of the market is right. You do not know if the site will perform, if the tender will be awarded, if the gap you have spotted is truly there or only visible to you. You move forward with incomplete information, guided by instinct, pattern recognition, logic, and whatever fragments of experience you have gathered from before. And then reality reveals itself.
Sometimes you are right, and there is a deep pleasure in that — not simply because you make money, but because something in your mind has correctly grasped the shape of the world before the world fully showed its hand. And sometimes you are wrong, but even then, if your temperament suits this life, failure does not feel purely like failure. It feels like correction. Like truth arriving. Like a model being refined.
What makes this sustainable across many businesses is asymmetry. One site failing barely registers. But one site growing — the upside is uncapped, while the downside is bounded by what you put in. It is the structure of a portfolio, except you built the assets yourself and you own them entirely. Your downside is $10. Your potential upside is $100. And because you built it rather than merely bought it, the satisfaction when it compounds is in a different category entirely. Most professional lives are structured to minimise variance. Entrepreneurship, done right, is structured to seek asymmetry. That distinction matters more than almost anything else I could tell you.
I have always been this sort of person — curious, outspoken, slightly troublesome, always looking for the gap in the system almost before the system had finished explaining itself. Even as a child, I was instinctively noticing loopholes, weak points, things that did not quite add up. I would hear a new school attendance system announced over the PA and within three seconds ask the teacher whether the first person in could punch the card for everyone. She told me to use my brain for better things. I felt mildly embarrassed then. I shouldn’t have.
Later, when I walked into any business, I was not only seeing what was in front of me. I was seeing pricing, customer flow, staff count, foot traffic, renovation cost, likely rental, margins — whether the whole thing made structural sense. These patterns spun in my head almost automatically, from fifteen or sixteen years old. They still do.
That is also why the sacrifices of entrepreneurship have never felt to me as great as people imagine they should.
Of course there were sacrifices. I could have taken a more conventional path, drawn a steadier salary earlier, given my family more comfort from the beginning. Instead, I paid myself $500 a month for two years, then slowly — $2,000, then $3,000, then $5,000, then gradually up to where I am now, which is above the Singapore median but still the deliberately deferred version. If I wanted to, I could pay myself far more without any difficulty. I still don’t, because I would rather keep building.
But none of this felt especially unnatural to me. Living frugally felt natural. Learning new skills felt natural. Sleeping less because I was building something — teaching myself programming, fixing website bugs, designing, taking photos, sourcing products — all of it felt less like hardship and more like a continuous game. A serious one, but still a game. A game in which I was constantly acquiring new abilities, constantly improving my own range. What others might have experienced as deprivation, I experienced as momentum.
The cost was real. It only sat lightly on a temperament that was already suited for it.
I have often thought that entrepreneurship is not necessarily for everyone, but entrepreneurial thinking should be. Not everyone should start a business — markets are brutal, timing is unforgiving, and one must be genuinely resourceful and observant enough to find a real gap and exploit it properly. But the way an entrepreneur thinks — seeing inefficiencies, improving processes, solving problems once and properly instead of repeatedly and badly — that is valuable everywhere. In our own businesses, we try to cultivate it in everyone around us. Think like a process owner. If a tool can save three hours, we will buy the tool. The real scarcity is not money. It is wasted effort, rework, friction, and problems that recur because no one wanted to solve them properly the first time.
This thinking also shaped which businesses we built and which we walked away from. Service businesses can be good businesses, but they are fragile in a specific way: they depend too much on talented individuals who may leave, take others with them, and force you to rebuild what you thought was stable. I wanted businesses built around strong systems, where ordinary people could do very good work inside a well-designed structure. That eventually led us to our various businesses, which does not rely on a strong leader or a superstar employee, but on the system working the magic.
We were very clear that we could not serve everyone, so the more important question was: who do we want to serve? The strongest? The already-converted? Or the beginners? The aunties and uncles in their sixties who need movement more than they need another place to perform intensity? We chose the bottom of the pyramid, because it is larger, more neglected, and in some ways more important. We wanted something affordable, beginner-friendly, Singaporean — a brand that did not merely import an overseas model but met ordinary people where they were. The equipment choices — 30kg max dumbbells, bumper plates — were not trivial operational details. They reflected a point of view about who the gym is for, and equally, who it is not primarily for.
That gave the business meaning beyond the economics. Though the economics still mattered.
And yes, if I am honest, there is also joy in exceeding expectations.
Many people pretend not to care about this. Most human beings do, at least a little. My teachers did not expect much from me. I was the kind of student they were hesitant to invite back to speak — not because I had failed, but because they suspected I would tell their students that the conventional path was not the only one, and they were probably right to be cautious. There is something satisfying, years later, about being able to say simply and matter-of-factly that you own a wide range of businesses, including twenty-five gyms and to know that this is already beyond what most people can imagine, and yet still feel that this is only the middle of the story.
That builds confidence. Of course it does. Confidence compounds the same way capital does.
But even that is not the deepest joy.
The deepest joy is that entrepreneurship has allowed me to live in a way that feels aligned with my mind, my temperament, and my instincts. It has allowed me to keep learning, keep noticing, keep building, keep moving between industries when I found them interesting, keep solving problems that felt real to me — without having to become narrower with age.
Many lives become smaller over time. More specialised, more cautious, more defined by what one has already become. Entrepreneurship, for me, did the opposite. It made life larger. It widened the number of things I could meaningfully care about, and allowed curiosity to remain useful rather than ornamental.
So when people ask whether entrepreneurship is worth it, I do not think the answer is universal. For some, the uncertainty would be too corrosive, the cost too high, the fog too disorienting.
But for a certain kind of person — one who is naturally curious, naturally restless, naturally inclined to see the gap, test the model, improve the process, and build where others hesitate — the fog is not the cost.
The fog is the point.
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