Ian On The Red Dot

It is coming to the end of the year, a time when I start getting more pensive, more reflective.

What have I done this year? What do I plan to do next year?

Why am I doing what I’m doing?

A good friend of mine once told me over Tiger beer that when three things align, there success is found:

1. Person
2. Place
3. Time

For those with more Western proclivities, a quote from Plato’s “The Republic“:

I listened in admiration, and wanting to draw him out, that he might go on –Yes, Cephalus, I said: but I rather suspect that people in general are not convinced by you when you speak thus; they think that old age sits lightly upon you, not because of your happy disposition, but because you are rich, and wealth is well known to be a great comforter.

You are right, he replied; they are not convinced: and there is something in what they say; not, however, so much as they imagine. I might answer them as Themistocles answered the Seriphian who was abusing him and saying that he was famous, not for his own merits but because he was an Athenian: ‘If you had been a native of my country or I of yours, neither of us would have been famous.‘ And to those who are not rich and are impatient of old age, the same reply may be made; for to the good poor man old age cannot be a light burden, nor can a bad rich man ever have peace with himself.

And so, as we step into the new year, do remember that success will come as an extension of the self, of the self that’s being doing what it has always been doing, maybe especially from what the self has always enjoyed doing.

And so for my own reminder:
1. I enjoy telling stories
2. I enjoy creating imaginary worlds
3. I enjoy gaming
4. I enjoy solving puzzles
5. Much as I loathe to admit this (and my sister will probably understand why), I enjoy selling.

Programming, software – these are just enablers.

Enjoy != Passionate about something.
But, it is a start.

Truth is where you spend your time will reveal what you are passionate about, more than anything. You might be ‘passionate’ about the wrong thing(s). It isn’t too late to change it.

Sidenote: Just for my own remembrance

The worse thing that happened to me occurred in Secondary 3. It was the start of what might be described as an addiction. That habit, that part of my obsessive compulsiveness, has been a great thief. Stealing time is one thing. Stealing the ability to enjoy anything else, that’s the greater crime. It’s been 15 years and I’ve got to deal with it.

Over Singapore’s 40-odd years of independence, our bureaucracy has gone from a small team of bold visionaries with amazing execution abilities that never says die – true entrepreneurs who founded a nation – to a 110,000-odd strong Civil Service that has gotten so used to status quo and top-down leadership that it has deemed fit to leave most of the heavy brain lifting and risk taking to our Cabinet.

James Chan suggests a solution – an Agency of the Future.

Why do we need bonds? What are we scared of?

Meng says:

The assumption is that Singapore is inferior, that nobody who’s had a nice foreign education would live and work here if they didn’t have to.

Young Upstarts Daniel Goh writes:

“Space… the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

This is possibly one of the greatest vision and mission statements you’d ever hear, and also makes one helluva elevator pitch! So let’s see how this famous line can apply to entrepreneurship: