Above all else

As I get older, one of the common things I hear from friends and colleagues is "when I retire, I'll spend time doing charity work", and it's great to see so many people planning to put their time to helping the under-privileged.  In fact, many friends don't even wait for retirement - they already get themselves regularly involved in social work. When my wife and I were young parents, we decided we would try to let our kids, and indeed ourselves, see that age and timing were not reasons to delay helping others.  We went on our first family mission trip when our kids were just 1 and 3, still in diapers and a pram!  I remember our teammates were mostly younger than we were, not yet married and with no kids, and one of them told us, I never thought it would be possible to go on a mission trip with infants, but you guys showed me it could be done.  Thanks! Those encouraging words inspired me to continue bringing the kids with us on subsequent mission trips, kno...

In a world of buzzwords and memes, one of the buzziest words in recent months has been “pivot”.   We’re pivoting to the blockchain (another buzzword!).   The company’s marketing programme has pivoted away from traditional media.   We’re leveraging on our focus in integrating bolt-on acquisitions to pivot to a new growth trajectory.   With all the levers, bolts, pivots and trajectories, it’s a wonder that the next pronouncement isn’t “Autobots, roll out”! So I’m jumping on the bandwagon.   In the last 12 months, my life has experienced a gradual yet profound pivot.   To what, you ask?   To the world of er ren shi jie :D As the kids progress through the mid to late stages of teenage life, we find ourselves less and less occupied with feeding, chauffeuring and tutoring.   The kids go out to the library instead of studying at home.   They hang out with friends after school instead of coming straight back home.   They acquire the ...

Let's suppose my boss asks me to advise on investing in a palm oil plantation.  And let's suppose I have a personal objection to the palm oil industry, because of environmental concerns.  What should I do?  Well, there are two basic options (a) do it; (b) decline to do it. On what grounds could I explain that I should do it?  Well first of all, I am just an employee - I can't go around refusing to do work based on whether it accords with my personal beliefs.  It's not like I'm the boss where I can walk away from the deal you know.  In the end, the final decision is not mine - whether I participate or withdraw, the decision to invest is being made by others.  I am just a good soldier, acting under instructions, so I will do my best.  Maybe I can even influence the plantation to adopt environmentally sound practices.  So far, so reasonable? Let's suppose it later turns out that the plantation is really indiscriminately slash-and-burn...

Early intervention often makes a difference in treating illness.  I was reminded of this as I made my rounds at last Friday's bread distribution.  The uncle who has one foot amputated on one leg and several toes on the other, because of diabetes.  It didn't have to be that way, had it been detected earlier.  A change in lifestyle, diet and medication would have made a difference. On the other hand, the grandmother lovingly looking after two grandkids, both with autism - but the good thing is that both have recently received access to Pathlight school, and hopefully all the intervention and help needed to cope. Intervention matters even for relatively minor maladies, like my friend who has bunions.  I popped by to see how she was doing, and it turns out that her bunions are so bad that her toes are permanently crossed, and it hurts too much to insert the bunion gel pad.  I remember that more than a year ago, she had suffered a bad cut on her foot, an...

So I was chatting with my 14-year-old son on the way back from church yesterday, and I don't know how it happened, but for some reason I decided to ask, "do you have any idea what kind of girl you want to marry one day?" To which he casually replied in the usual teenager's laconic manner, "just somebody nice I guess". Never knowing when to stop, I pressed on "yes, but what do you mean by nice?" And realising his Daddy is never going to let this go until he gets a good answer, the boy sighs briefly, and thinks for a bit.  D: Well, you know every guy wants to to be with someone who's hot, yet doesn't care very much about how she looks. Me: uh...ok, so like, somebody who's effortlessly hot. D: Yeah, exactly!  But also nice. Me (really never knowing when to stop): OK, but what about other stuff, like, does she have to like what you like, like computer games? D: Sigh.  Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.  * Of course * I want her to like ...

Last weekend, I went to visit one of my friends at her home to pass her a bunion gel-pad.  It's a small thing, but we'd noticed at our last monthly bread distribution that she had really bad bunions and we figured, worth a try, otherwise the bunions would just get worse.  But when I got there, neither she nor her kids were at home - only her husband.  I tried to explain to him how to use the bunion gel-pad, but he suggested that I explain it to my friend directly - he thought she would probably be at a nearby coffeeshop.  So off I went to the coffeeshop. At the first coffeeshop I bumped into K, a young ITE student who also lived in the same block.  He was buying a late dinner for himself, and we exchanged quick greetings and a pat on the back.  People sometimes think that students who don't study hard, or don't care enough, end up in ITE.  That's not really true, because K is not like that at all - he really cares about doing well, even a...

Someone told me recently about a "life exercise" in which one compiles all the stuff that makes up your life, and puts it in a pie chart.  So let's say for me, something like this. The idea is to visually demonstrate to myself that, in the event I lose one of these things, then I can see that, hey life is not so bad, that wasn't such a big deal.  Say for example, if I suffered a blown ACL, and couldn't run or play basketball any more, like this: At first blush - I'd say, hey, I still have my wife, children, parents, career, church life - so, chin up, things are not so bad.  Pretty good life visualisation tool to bring some optimism back into play! ... But what if, a month later, something happens at work, and boom, career gets sidetracked, I lose my job, or get put in cold storage somewhere, like this: Oops, now only half my life is left!  With only half of life's meaning left to me, what do I do? And what if something happens to...

Last week, we talked about stubbornness, and how it is reinforced by the false maxim of being "true to yourself".  To be clear - overcoming stubbornness means that if you can do something better, or be someone better, change!  It doesn't mean, make yourself like everyone else.  It's great to be unique.  It's great to be different.  As the saying goes, if you do what everyone else does, you'll get what everyone else gets. I've been reading Youngme Moon's excellent book "Different - Escaping the Competitive Herd". Having had the privilege of being in some of her classes in the past, I can almost hear her voice reading out the text as I flip the pages!  In one particular section, she points out that, just when the likes of Yahoo, AOL and AltaVista were increasingly one-upping each other by bulking up their search pages with news, email, weather, stock prices, entertainment and advertisements, Google turned up and decided that they would be ...