Above all else

Happy birthday to me!  Growing up in a family which made a big deal of celebrating all our birthdays, and with a lot of doting aunts and uncles, meant birthdays were often accompanied by toys! Stars Wars, He-man, then Mask, Centurions, then Transformers...  I remember that I once hurt my knee falling down at school, and the bandage got all stuck in the wound, and I dramatically screamed my lungs out as my aunts pulled the bandage off the scab one painful thread at a time.  The side benefit was that my aunt turned up that evening with a gigantic Castle Grayskull set to cheer me up :D I think it's fair to say most of us were not wealthy, but what my parents and extended family were, was incredibly generous. Those birthdays were really full of "YAAAYYY!!!!" joy. Today, birthdays are quite a bit more mellow, except when my younger cell members occasionally get a bit excited and throw a party :D But there are definitely still a lot of YAAAYYY! moments.  When we see our fr...

The other day, a friend asked me if I would like to join him to do something, and my immediate response was what I have heard many of my friends say: "ah ha ha I need to ask my wife first!"  How many times have you heard guys joke that they have to check with their wives before they do something? Quite often, if your experience is anything like mine! But even as the words came out of my mouth, I realised, hey I actually do need to ask my wife first. Not because she'll scold me if I don't, but because I actually genuinely value her view. I have a wise wife. She is sensible. She remembers things that I forget. She thinks about things in a way that gives me a different perspective.  This latter point is especially important for me. My whole family knows this: Daddy (me) is good at thinking fast and visualising clear paths to the objective. I'm not necessarily fixated on a step by step path, and I like to think I'm pretty good at connecting the dots of incomplete ...

In my usual furiously organised way, I have a recurring weekend schedule that includes various chores spread across the weekends in any given month.  This morning, it was: clean out all the toilet floortraps; mop all the toilets, the stairwell and laundry area; silicon spray the blinds and doors; empty all the robot vacuums of dust (and hair!) and wash the mop pads; and deep water the grass. As you can imagine, this takes up a fair amount of time, though I always feel a perverse sense of achievement when I'm done XD Then I sat down with my wife to work through some family issues, logistical and others, before sending off correspondence and instructions to various service providers. Felt a lot like work. Then my wife went off with my son to look after her parents, run errands for them, spend time bringing them out and making them happy. In the meantime, I sat down to read through all the financial and audit reports, and the annual reports for church and our associated charities, bec...

I'm reading Give and Take by Adam Grant. I'm about a quarter of the way through, and have been intrigued by his characterisation of people as "givers", "takers" and "matchers".  The default mindset and actions of a "giver" are to add more value into the eco-system than they take out. "Takers" aim to take more value out than they put in. "Matchers" (which apparently is most people) seek reciprocity - you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Most people think that "good guys finish last". Grant's research suggests that this is partly true. As an example, medical students who are "givers" tend to gravitate toward the bottom of the pile. They spend time and effort helping others, and end up with less time for themselves. So who's at the top of the pile?  Interestingly, also the givers ! Why? In the beginning, when results are strongly correlated with individual effort, givers lose out. But as the c...

A group of friends and I started a bread distribution initiative for rental block residents in our neighbourhood about 12-15 years ago.  We started simply because we wanted our group to be more outward than inward looking, and one of us had connections to procure bread at good prices, and another one among us lived next to one of those blocks. We decided that this wouldn't be a one-off feel-good initiative. It wasn't about distributing the bread. It was about caring for people. So we committed to doing this once a month, and to get to know the residents as people, and not beneficiaries. Over the years, the work evolved. Some more people joined in, others dropped off, but we never ran out of people to keep going. When the haze was terrible, we distributed masks. When Covid broke out, we also distributed masks! Then when we couldn't visit at all during the circuit breaker, we sent care packages via FoodPanda.  Over time, we also started to spend more time with selected househ...