The Necessary Exposition

Quite interestingly, 

I find myself engaging in the verbal wankerage (or wankery, can’t be too sure about the grammatical accuracy of a contrived verb) that is bloggerism (again…) – as with all inaugural entries on a content platform I feel obligated to share the rigmarole that is my present, personal ‘state of the nation’. I used to have a blog in eons past on livejournal, but that was another time with a different brain-chemical mix (read: puberty). I’m just a bilingual, unmarried, 30-something ethnic Chinese Singaporean [For the uninformed- this is in Southeast Asia, take a microscope to the southern end of the Malayan peninsula and here you may find winged men.]

Given my recent sojourn into full time entrepreneurship [靠！Note that the very term is French for ‘he who undertakes’], I am finding myself listless in that leaving behind my full time job of 7 years in NTUC Club has created a rather fascinating shift in my modus operandi; I can now sleep till 11am (or whenever my neighbour’s renovation crew decide to start using their jackhammers at 8.30am) and practically travel at whim; all with a firm sniperesque line-of-sight  to the cashflow situation that has beset me since my last paycheck disintegrated into bills and inefficient hedonism. I have embarked on not one but three separate channels of business: 

• Cheeseshaker – a printing company with infrastructure principally based in Johor, Malaysia.
• VX Global – A valiant attempt at Alcohol import and trading turned lifestyle and marketing 
• Simple Solutions – a representative role of a Vietnamese Web-based POS that I saw great promise in their proliferation into the rural retail sphere

My days are now spent in a systematic process of problem solving until I reach a reactive state and then pro-actively trying to scale up my operations to a certain end… and what end might that be?

My long term objectives, for lack of a crystal ball, are plainly to create a mechanism that would allow me to pursue greater levels of connectivity. Why would this be a long time goal? I always thought that the accumulation of knowledge as a child was tantamount to lasting success, then later this objective swiftly became time in my adolescence and adulthood. We are seemingly in a perpetual marathon, chasing after a finish line that seems nailed to the horizon; embodied in the whole sham ‘you can do XXX after your exams’ – what Tim Ferriss‘ would refer to as the behaviour of  a ‘deferer’.  It is also ironic that in the quest to find more time as a full-time employee, we struggle to find more activity while in the throes of teething a sustainable business. I thoroughly regret that in my secondary and tertiary years I was an experimenter, dabbling in various esoteric pursuits such as the mystic art of Disc jockeying – now rendered meaningless and hollow by the almighty ‘sync button’ on interfaces everywhere alongside similarly redundant bikini clad effigies. I also tried, like every hormonal undergraduate to turn my love of parties into a paltry career: I studied Multimedia in Perth’s Murdoch university and attempted to rally a posse (now called ‘database management’) into a farm-able community: That I could generate leisure events that could satisfy my then lurid lifestyle and financial needs in one fell swoop. But it was for naught. Had I bothered to financially educate myself and learn some serious HARD life skills I would not have spent the best of my 20s, which I now dub ‘the lost decade’ in such lamentable circumstances.

So discarding knowledge (which is ubiquitous now at a mouseclick) and time (which is finite anyway) – I have now decided to focus my faculties on maximizing my health (increasing effective time by lengthening my lifespan) and learning to learn (internalizing a lifelong, open-minded approach to learning as opposed to the meagre accumulation of mere data) – but most of all, the epiphany I had is that a focused lifelong goal is social in nature. I want to know as many people in the context of doing business as humanly possible before my eventual senility. It is statistically improbable that I could become a billionaire, hell, there’s about ten thousand Olympic gold medallists versus 400 billionaires on Forbes – its easier to be the world champion at, say, shot-put, than it is to accumulate a billion USD. And to what end? Creation of a dynastic wealth does sound superficially appealing in that my bloodline would be ‘set for life’ but would I be able to change the world? In fact based on the rates of fixed deposit account in ANZ bank western Australia, I only really need 1.3M to kickstart the unproductive lifestyle of unearned income to the tune of say 50k annually, eliminating the need to contribute work…. ever. I will speak of the toxicity and evil of passive income in a forthcoming entry. Onward.

Just to re-emphasize how unlikely it is to be a Billionaire (aside from reading aloud the entirety of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers) – your net worth has to multiply not by lineal progression but by exponential growth – meaning that at some stage an aspiring billionaire has to delegate (the prerequisite of any given complex system) via hiring, replicating (franchising perhaps?) and accelerate each year. I recently had the joy of reading Blueprint to a billion by David Thompson – heads up, its available in your local library – that purports that billion dollar mark companies and their respective IPOs follow a Darwinistic set of common principals, and yet I sometimes always believed in cults of personality ala Steve Jobs that are the necessary radical force that drives such engines of success. Gladwell’s argument is the success of billionaires as statistical outliers is largely environmental as well as a conspiracy of savants with 10,000 hours of practise in their relevant field. So looking at the latter I’ve taken a page from his book in that I will get 10,000 hours of training in NETWORKING and hence mastery of the art of social connection in business.

So that is my purpose, my destiny, my grail and my Golgotha – I cannot be the MOST connected entrepreneur in the world, it is nigh improbable. But I can be the most connected SOUTH-EAST ASIAN Entrepreneur. And I’m going to get there step by step by sharing segments of my life via this grotesque window into my brain.