Just how fun work can be when you do it right.

When I talk to my friends about my entrepreneurial aspirations, sometimes they tell me that they want to start their own businesses too. However, most of the time, I hear that response with one short caveat – that they’ll only do so after a few years of working experience in some large multinational company, supposedly to gain experience and to be more financially stable.

I never quite agreed with that line of thought and by beliefs were further confirmed when my supervising professor for my professional attachment paid me a visit at the Jipaban office. My supervising professor had been involved in dot coms since way back before the turn of the millennium, before the dot-com crash, and was extremely eager to hear all about the Jipaban.com.

Somewhere in our conversation, he mentioned this – that he had many students who also similarly told him that they wanted start their own businesses. When he asked them how they were working towards their aspirations, they told him that they’ll go start out working for a large, stable firm, gain experience and finally come out, 10 years later and start out a business of their own.

His reply was simple. It was – why do you think that the experience you gain at working for a large firm would be the most relevant to your future entrepreneurial exploits in the future? Really, would experience in spending your day focused on solving someone else’s problems and working on making that person rich be the best teacher at teaching how to make yourself rich? I really don’t think so.

Why I don’t believe that this is the way to go.

When you work for someone, it’s your job to make your boss rich, not the other way around. Always remember that.

When you spend the majority of your time thinking about how to maximize someone else’s profit and not your own, I believe that it’s easy to get caught up constantly focusing on that issue and not on what’s efficient – increasing your personal wealth and working towards financial freedom. Working to make others rich is vastly different from working for yourself.

When you work for yourself, you make all the decisions, but you reap all the benefits (and losses) incurred by your actions; when you work for others, an artificial safety net is put under you. When you work for yourself, it’s so much easier to be motivated to understand every aspect of your business – you try to understand it from a macroeconomic point of view, you analyze customer feedback, you check the data religiously; when you work for others, that kind of intense motivation to master the business just isn’t there.

I believe that the only way to really teach yourself business is to immerse yourself inside a business that you really care about, and experience the pure joy of working hard to make it all come together. That’s just something I don’t see happening much if you decide to work at a large firm where the red tape just ties you down.

The red tape, politics, and artificial safety net does more than limits your potential to shine, but I also believe that it is one more additional barrier that stands in the way of you learning good business habits. Getting used to the wrong level of thinking, a totally different level of decision making, would not only hold you back but may go on further to negatively affect the business decisions you make! You may have been better off starting with a blank slate as you might have incorrect perceptions and habits you may have acquired about business by immersing yourself inside an employee culture!

Money ties you down.

Another reason I don’t want to apply for a job in a big multinational the moment I graduate is because money just ties you down. Holding a high paying, “stable” job is quite a bit like giving in to the urge to just lie down in an extremely comfortable sofa – it’s really comfortable to get into it, and very hard to get out.

I have always believed that the worst thing that can happen to someone is to get too comfortable. When you’re too comfortable, there’s nothing forcing you to get faster, smarter and better – you just take it easy. As a result, you just end up sloppy, lazy and inefficient.

Life’s short – you gotta be efficient.

All in all, I strongly feel that working for someone else just happens to be the roundabout way of doing things should you want to start your own business in the future. I believe that it’s not only inefficient, but also that being trained to be a good employee might not make you a good boss. I guess that’s exactly why I’m so happy during my internship over the past 10 weeks at Jipaban – I’m right on track to getting to where I want to be.

Now I’ve just got to apply those lessons I’ve learnt with diligence and focus!

Nobody likes to be bored, and everybody can benefit from having just a little bit more fun and excitement in their lives! The exciting thing is that injecting fun and excitement into the mundane does not have to be difficult and hard. Having fun isn’t exactly rocket science. All it takes is some creativity and thinking out of that damn box.

Just watch how Volkswagen started this initiative to make mundane things that we take for granted in life just a little bit more fun and exciting!

Don’t you just feel inspired to just go out there and to do something really awesome and fun right now? I sure do! Come to think of it, great ideas like Foursquare were also probably born out of a question like “how can I make visiting places more fun and engaging”. An answer was then born out of making a social networking game out of just going about your business in life!

What’s the next innovation that’s going to make the mundane exciting again? Who knows what will come next!

Sometimes, a rock is just a rock.

I was really thinking about the choices that I’ve made in life, and then I serendipitously chanced upon this quote by Confucius on the Positivity Blog:

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”

And that is so true.

I don’t know why – it could be our human arrogance at having mastered the environment around us, or our capacity for higher thinking functions – but the fact is that we people like to overthink things.

You could be perfectly happy going out with someone you have wonderful chemistry with, but no, you have to carefully evaluate if you guys happen to be that million-in-one, perfect match for each other.

You could be perfectly happy buying a dress you like, but no, you just have to spend the entire day, searching the mall, just to make sure that you’re getting a good deal.

The fact of the matter is this: sometimes life’s just that simple and going on and on and thinking about things just gives you additional frustration in your life that you don’t have to put up with.

I feel that the general rule of thumb is that it’s a matter of weighing the benefits and the costs of thinking something through. If excessive thinking and worrying about something isn’t going to bring you any closer to understanding a situation, like when you’re constantly wondering if he’s the perfect one or not, it’s so much simpler to just enjoy the moment and see where life takes you.

If more thinking’s not going to take you anywhere, why let it bog you down and frustrate you? You might as well just take time to smell the roses.

Sometimes life’s just that simple.

It’s okay to let it out to a close friend, but it’s important to remember that your experience of life is a function of what you focus on in life – if you focus on what’s happy and good about your life, you will feel happy; but if you focus on the things in life that get you down, that’s just exactly how you’re going to feel.

Even though things do occasionally go wrong, it’s never an excuse to harp on the bad things in life. Life’s just too awesome for that.

According to the Boston Consulting Group, the two countries with the highest growth of millionaires over the last year are the two countries that I’m based in - Singapore with a 35% increase in millionaires from 2009 to 2010 and Malaysia with a 33% increase! Read the full article here.

This is amazing!

That millionaire dream is possible. Just gotta work at it one step at a time, building the necessary competencies to achieve my objective.

That’s all there is to it.

Do what makes you happy!

I’ve realized that the days that I feel the most down are the days that I don’t really have anything to do or anyone to meet. Days like that can feel pretty darn depressing.

When I really thought about it, it occurred to me that most of what we call modern entertainment doesn’t really make you happy, but are just temporary distractions to life.

Really, just take a moment to think about it.

A movie in the cinema, partying the night away in a club, escaping the country for a holiday – yes these things can be fun, but it sometimes seems that we do these things as a form of escape from reality, and escape from our sometimes less than satisfying lives.

What really makes you happy? What are the keys to happiness then?

Victor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning that:

“Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

And I think that’s a very big hint to that big secret. Happiness usually requires action of some kind. I’ve realised that I’m the most happy when I am working on something that is important to me, and close to my heart.

I’m happy when I feel that I’m going somewhere with my work and achieving my purpose in life.

I’m happy when I feel that what I’m doing is positively impacting others.

I’m happy when I’m achieving goals that are important to me.

I’m happy when I’m cultivating a successful relationship with someone dear to me.

But I’m definitely not happy sitting around and doing nothing. Some people may say that it’s the best thing ever to not have anything to do, but sloth is a very real sin. Possibly the worst sin that you can commit against yourself.

Finding true joy and happiness in your life will never be about inaction. Hopefully, you’ll find your calling in life – that something that makes you wake up early in the morning just because you can’t wait to continue working on it, that one project that you can’t stop thinking about.

Don’t settle and spend your life doing anything less than that.

But during the wee hours of the nights, that nagging five percent of the time, I just find myself unable to answer that fundamental question – who am I?

Who is Kevin Chan?

Why after countless hours of journaling, self-reflection and meditation, can you still not be sure of who you are?

Who am I?

The new chapter.

Every time I enter a new phase of my life, things have turned out way more differently than I had expected them to.

When I just finished secondary school, I always thought that I would attend college in KL, and I somehow ended up in Singapore.

When college was through, I always thought that I would have ended up somewhere overseas doing something like Law, but I ended up doing a double major in Marketing and Business Law in NTU instead.

Things never really turned out the way I expected them to, but they always turned out for the best. And so, here I plan to stick to my modus operandi – to venture headfirst into the exciting, uncharted depths of the future.

I can’t wait to see where this exciting, exciting road takes me!

A naïve mind is
More guilty than the fraud that
It surrenders to.

- Mika Yoshimoto

How true. Ignorance, turning a blind eye to truth, can indeed lead to disastrous outcomes.

Ignorance and not having the courage to put your “truth” up for examination is not bliss, it’s just cowardice.

That’s all it is.

It was horrible, but as I already got out of bed early to take a run round school, I persisted.

It happened again and again – the cars sped by with drivers wearing glazed expressions on their sullen faces, heedlessly ignorant of the damage they’re causing.

Then it occurred to me.

The reason that my generation doesn’t care about our environment as much as we should is because we’ve always been in the car, and not the one jogging behind it.

I hate to admit it, but we’re a sheltered lot. We grew up in the safe confines of our air-conditioned homes, told to keep away from muddy playgrounds, told not to get grass stains on our white shirts and encouraged to run in comfortable indoor gyms.

We’re happily sitting inside the cabin of the car, inside the safety of our artificial environments, that we close our eyes to the threat we pose to our very own way of life.

Our Earth is of a finite size, a fixed volume, and there is only so much poisons, so much damage that she can take, so get to know her. Get to know what it feels like jogging on a beautiful morning and have the tranquility destroyed by yet another big, noisy bus. Get to know what it feels like swimming in a clear sea when an oil spill turns the waters sticky, smelly and black.

Our home.

Only my getting to appreciate our environment will be grow to become more environmentally conscious human beings. If we don’t see the beauty of what we are unwittingly destroying, all the Earth hours that we are going to have won’t change a thing.