Category: Education
-
The Ironies of Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur
I was at the Läderach counter with my son recently, buying chocolate at S$22 for 100 grams. He watched me pay, and I found myself explaining — half to him, half to myself — that this is what work is for. Not to hoard money endlessly, but to be able to enjoy something indulgent once…
-
Compounding Does Not Only Belong to Finance
When people speak about compounding, they almost always mean money. They mean savings, investments, interest, and the quiet arithmetic of letting capital sit still long enough to multiply itself. That is one form of compounding, and an important one. But it is not the only form, and I suspect it is not even the most…
-
9 Books That Shaped How I Think
I have always been a bookworm. Not because anyone made me, but because I was curious and restless and looking for answers that school was not designed to give. By the time I entered university, I had already started and failed my first business. By the time I graduated, I had started my third. Today,…
-
The Asymmetry of Starting Young
The best time to start a business is while you are still a student, because the opportunity cost is lower than it will ever be again. You have more room to explore, more room to think, and more room to fail before the consequences become truly expensive. Business ideas rarely arrive polished. More often, they…
-
The Condo Question Is Not Really About Property
There comes a phase in adult life, somewhere in one’s thirties and doing well in their career, when property ceases to be merely shelter and begins to masquerade as judgment. It becomes a referendum on whether one is progressing at the correct pace, whether one is becoming the sort of person Singapore expects him to…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…