Try everything!

Everyone in my family loves Disney stuff - songs, movies, theme parks... one year, we even bought annual passes to HK Disneyland! The advent of budget airline travel made these adventures affordable, and the HK theme park has the shortest queues, so we squeezed in 3 trips in 12 months! 

We love Disney movies as well, though there are definitely some misses. Despite its popularity, we don't like Frozen at all. Of the movies from the 2010s/20s, we like Moana (only the first one), Encanto, Zootopia, Wreck-it-Ralph, Big Hero 6 and Tangled. A super soundtrack helps a lot: Lin-Manuel Miranda's work on the Moana and Encanto setlists is absolutely amazing, and as for Alan Menken's "I See the Light" from Tangled, well, golly. 

Anyway, Zootopia 2 is now out, and it's on the family list to watch sometime this end of year season! So of course we had to rewatch the original Zootopia first. The big song from Zootopia is of course Shakira's very pop "Try Everything", in which she sings:

I won't give up, no I won't give in

Til I reach the end, then I'll start again

No I won't leave, I wanna try everything

I wanna try even though I could fail

... I'll keep on making those new mistakes

I'll keep on making them every day... those new mistakes!

As I head into the end of 2025, and especially as I slide firmly into middle-age territory, I'm reminded to check myself to see if I'm still prepared to try everything, and to make new mistakes.

One definite recent mistake was to volunteer on the board of the local alumni association of one of my alma maters. I had reached out to the then-president to ask if there was anything I could do to help the alumni community. He said, for sure - join the board, we need a new Secretary!

To be absolutely clear - I found that the alumni association board was a bunch of fantastic people, doing amazing work. But the most important work involved event organisation and mingling (unsurprisingly, as an alumni association!). And I quickly discovered that it just wasn't my thing. I mean, I could do it, but definitely without the same enthusiasm as someone else might have had. Someone else could do a much better job than me. 

So after serving a two-year term, I asked the president to let me step down this year, and he kindly agreed. I don't regret stepping up in the first place, because as Secretary, I did get to re-write the club constitution and re-organise our AGM governance and processes... things that will hopefully have a positive long-term impact. I also got to experience organising events and meeting people I wouldn't have ordinarily met. 

But most importantly, I don't regret it precisely because I learned that university alumni networking wasn't something that was suitable for me. It was a mistake - but a mistake well worth making.

I have made plenty of new mistakes elsewhere too. As I mentioned in my earlier blog here, mistakes are especially aplenty when we try new stuff in an unfamiliar context. We brought stacks of English books to our friends in the village school. That was a mistake - the books were too far beyond their ability to reasonably use - we needed to start at a lower rung. 

We set up a computer lab with more than a dozen donated used laptops. That was a mistake - the heat and dust caused the laptops to break down all the time. So we installed air-conditioning. That was an even more fundamental mistake - we then realised we didn't have enough power to turn on all the laptops at once with the air-conditioning on.

There were other mistakes! But all mistakes worth making. Because we were trying, failing and learning. Better than waiting and thinking and... waiting and thinking and... waiting and thinking some more.

What did work this year? We thought our group was large enough to expand our catchment area to visit and care for residents in villages further out. So we tried that. We immediately realised we were right - people were delighted for us to see them. 

We thought we should try to gather all the residents of a particular village in one place to strengthen the sense of community, rather than visit one home at a time, but we were concerned that no one would want to open their home. We tried anyway - and it totally worked because they love to gather! 

So now I'm convinced that there are lots of new things to try, and new mistakes to make in our work with our friends over there.

Then there are some things that I try, that really work out. Several years ago, I tried out volunteering as a mentor for a couple of programmes. One programme gets us paired with a young working adult looking for guidance, and the other pairs us with a complementary co-mentor, and we then work with a group of 5-6 students from polytechnic or university. 

I had no idea if I'd be any use to these young people, and no idea if I'd like it. But it's fair to say, after several iterations of both programmes, that I really like this work. It gives me the opportunity to learn from younger people, and the opportunity to give back by sharing my own experience. 

I share what we look out for in a CV, what works or doesn't work in an interview or assessment centre, what gets you ahead in the workplace, and very importantly, how to manage life outside of work, so that we don't miss out on some really important stuff that necessarily exists outside of our working lives. I'm so glad to have become friends with some of these young people, and to have made it more than about just work.

So what new mistakes lie ahead in 2026? I really enjoy working with younger people, so I've been thinking that I'd like to try some teaching in some useful context. I've reached out to a couple of people to learn more about what's involved, and hopefully, I'll move beyond merely waiting and thinking. 

Maybe I'll learn that I'm a terrible teacher. Maybe I'll find that it's a fantastic extension to my mentoring volunteer work. Who knows? But it'd be a mistake not to find out!

Happy New Year in advance to everyone. May we all have the joy and privilege to try everything and make new mistakes in 2026, and may I dare to become all things (even unfamiliar things) to all people, so that by all possible means, some might be saved (1 Corinthians 9:22)!