Category: Education
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Why So Many High Achievers Feel Lost After School
TL;DR: Awards are not evil, and most teachers mean well, but when recognition becomes a scarce, ranked, public currency, children learn to chase approval first and purpose later, and that trade-off shows up years down the road as anxiety, passivity, and an inability to self-direct once the system stops handing out rubrics. Every year,…
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Four Hours of Sleep and a Van: My Early Founder Years
TL;DR for founders:The early years of my business looked like four hours of sleep, a beat-up van, and doing school, internship and startup all at once — with zero guarantee it would work.If you want to be a founder, don’t just romanticise “freedom”; be ready for years of hard, lonely, uncertain work powered only by…
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Run Toward the Hardest Problem: Why Purposeful Internships Beat Collecting Them
The job market is brutal. Graduates are collecting internships like Pokémon cards, hoping volume turns into a full-time offer. But without purpose, those stints blur together—and rarely convert. The lever that moves careers isn’t the number of internships you rack up; it’s whether you create unmistakable value where you land. A Project That Opened a…
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Alternative Skills Pathways Beyond Academics
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…
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Making Sense of Car Ownership in Singapore: A Personal Experience
Why Share This Now? As we appear to be moving past the peak of COE prices in 2025, I wanted to share my experience of buying during the previous price trough and how it has worked out financially. My Approach to Car Ownership I’ve always opted for COE cars (Certificate of Entitlement renewed vehicles) rather…
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The Privilege of Entrepreneurship
At fourteen, I had it all figured out – or so I thought. My teenage mind was laser-focused on one goal: becoming a business owner. Nothing else seemed to matter. I dreamed of financial freedom and imagined a life where I live life on my own terms. I was only half-right. Fast forward more than…
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Teaching kids the value of money (as an entrepreneur)
When I teach my kids, ages 4 and 6, about money, I break it down into four main steps: Getting used to being told “No” (but ask anyway) I encourage my kids to ask me for anything they want to buy, but I also remind them to expect that I will likely say “No.” Asking…
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Ask for Help
Most people do not know the transformative power of asking for help. No one has ever rejected me especially when I was younger when I asked for advice, or concrete help to move on with my next learning journey. If I were to posit a reason, it might be due to our academic system, where…
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Going from Special Stream to Polytechnic (2004)
I first encountered “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” at the age of 14. Back then, I was impressionable and took its advice to heart, particularly its concepts on cash flow, assets versus liabilities, and the mindset of business owners. Luckily, I didn’t have the cash to dive into leverage at that time, which in hindsight, was…