- K
- May 21, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 21
1992 - PSLE.
It was the year I took the PSLE (Primary School Leaving Examinations). Some might say I was in one of the top notch primary schools in today's terms. The school had come from humble beginnings, being located in a neighborhood whereby most of my friends stayed in HDB flats and everyone knew their neighbors.
I had been fortunate enough to almost always be in the top one or two classes with the best performing students.
Back then, my childhood dream had been to be a doctor. So for my PSLE, I had aimed for a score of over 260 (300 was the maximum) as that would surely propel me into the best secondary schools.
But when the results came back, my score was an astounding 237 - a decent grade no doubt for many, but it fell incredibly short of what I had hoped for.
I could not qualify for any of the schools that I had initially shortlisted and I remembered walking along the road to the bus stop just outside the school after collecting the result slip as mum and I re-evaluated my secondary school options.
I eventually went to a secondary school that I had never heard of (which later also turned out to be quite a good school).
Despite the turn of events, those four years were one of the most transformational periods of my life. Excellent teachers and numerous outdoors expeditions would shape me into a highly athletic, all-rounded and balanced person that good grades alone could not achieve.
1996 - Food poisoning.
On the morning of my English 'O' levels, I came down with an extremely bad case of food poisoning. So bad that on that fateful morning, I had to be sent to the hospital.
I vaguely remembered the nurse putting me on a drip as I gradually passed out on the wheelchair.
Back then, I had enrolled in a triple science route as part of the pre-requisites to study medicine. I had nine subjects under my belt and English was just one of them. Failing or skipping the English papers meant that you had to re-take the entire year of school again, regardless of the other eight subjects.
Everything was on the line here.
By the time I had woken up, I remembered distinctively that it was 8:25 in the morning and a man was seated just across the bed where I was. The school had been informed of my circumstances and sent an invigilator to the ward.
I ended up taking my English papers nearly an hour behind every one else, in a slightly woozy state and with a thick hypodermic needle stuck in my right arm.
Although the doctors put the diagnosis as a simple bout of food poisoning, I was placed under further observation for a week.
Ironic as it seemed, I scored an 'A' for all the papers that I sat for during my stay in the hospital. But I still fell short of the overall grade requirements to break into the top five junior colleges.
1999 - Career choices.
I did well enough for my 'A's to do nearly any course I wanted in university except for medicine, which I eventually gave up when I traded biology for athletics, which I later obtained school colors for.
As I left junior college and served my mandatory national service in the army, I had been offered a prestigious government teaching scholarship to study at some of the most reputable universities in the US.
The catch was that I had to commit six years of my life to the public education sector upon graduation. So I passed.
A year later when I graduated from OCS, they had once again offered to send me overseas to a military college in Japan and engineering school in exchange for serving six years in the army.
I declined again, mostly because I didn't like the idea of working under a covenant. I figured there were much more job opportunities beyond civil service after four years of studying in a university.
I wanted to be an engineer. Back then I remembered one of my teachers in junior college saying, "Go study engineering, it will always be in demand".
So I went and enrolled in Computer Engineering, believing that it would lead me to the holy grail of all professions.
2006 - China and the world of finance.
Studying engineering in university proved to be much more difficult than I had thought. I was toeing the red line and nearly got booted out.
But my life changed forever when I decided to spend a year living and working overseas in China. It was at a time when the country was undergoing market reforms and opening up to the world.
I was introduced to the glittery world of business, finance and private equity. Everything that I initially looked forward to in an engineering career had basically been undone during those twelve months in Shanghai and I eventually convinced myself that after graduation I wanted to be in banking, more specifically investment banking.
My entry into the corporate finance team at KPMG marked the day that I would renounce my engineering career forever.
Based in Raffles Place, the heart of Singapore's financial center, I was excited to be in the league of like-minded aspiring fresh graduates, constantly on the lookout to make that transition into a bulge bracket bank with a five-figure monthly paycheck. But I missed that boat when the 2008 financial crisis struck, crippling the hiring plans of the large investment banks across the globe.
In the twist of fate, I managed to join a mid-market Korean securities house that was looking to expand in Southeast Asia. I clocked my mileage, put in the hours and late nights, adhering to the rites of passage, before subsequently moving on to BNP Paribas and Standard Chartered Bank to get more exposure as part of a larger and more institutionalized corporate finance set up.
2010 - Rinse and repeat.
Investment banking turned out to be a jealous and selfish bitch five years into the job, demanding one's personal and social time more than anything else.
I had worked up to sixteen-hour work days, eighty-hour work weeks, pulling all-nighters, even on weekends and holidays. One of my co-workers summarized it aptly then: We were simply trading time for money.
For many years, the routine had been: Wake up, drink coffee, generate pitch books, run financial models, update trading comps, get yelled at by seniors. Rinse and repeat.
I had received several offers to jump ship, some of those include buy-side and corporate development roles that promised a more balanced lifestyle and decent pay check.
But all this time inside my head was a voice that kept saying, "just stick to the plan, put up with this for a few years and then leave."
2016 - Been there done that.
Leaving banking to build a business from scratch was probably one of the best and worst things that happened to me.
On hindsight (as with most of everything), it had been one of the most liberating initiatives I had done with my career. But nothing would prepare me for what was to come:
Waking up every day without having to report to a boss at the office, learning the ropes of HR, operations, finance, legal and sales all at the same time. Not to mention the disappointment of getting repeatedly rejected by prospective clients.
But most trying of all was the nagging anxiety of watching your bank account being depleted month after month.
No one understands how difficult this process was without having ever gone through this first-hand. Entrepreneurship would basically test your limits and push you to the breaking point, again and again.
It had been good mental training and personal development: Under any situation, no matter how hopeless and impossible it seemed, your mind would always force you to find a solution.
Looking back, I recalled reading in some random article and people telling me that: Money shouldn't be the reason why you start a business. It should always revolve around purpose, it should involve solving a pain point in the industry, or making a better product, or offering a better service to the world.
I never explicitly admitted it, but what mostly drove me to start a business was the naive illusion that I could make lots of money, and in a relatively short time.
It was much later that I realized employees are in fact the richest people in the world. They will all be slaves but they are still rich [1].
2021 - Moving to Hong Kong.
It felt surreal the day I left Singapore. It had been an indefinite job posting and I had initially planned to return possibly after two years.
I am into my fourth year now and residing in Hong Kong today feels so much different from it was three years ago. A part of it feels like a home and a sanctuary.
Sometimes I think about how life would be like had I not accepted that offer to be based overseas.
Epilogue
At the time of writing this, I was watching a documentary on CNA about a young man who had graduated from university and decided to make a living out of being a hawker as compared to the rest of his peers who went into white-collared jobs.
He described how he started off, grew, and transformed his business along the way. Some of words relating to the twists and turns in his life stuck with me:
[1] Entrepreneurs of course have the potential to be much more wealthy, but no one considers the tail event. Only a miniscule percentage of entrepreneurs make it really rich. For every mind-blowing successful start-up seen on social media, there are at least a thousand others that have failed and don't even show up in the headlines.