Clarification part 2: dealing with the mistakes we have made

Hi guys. Let's pick up where we left off from my previous post: I was talking about the some of the hate mail I have been getting of late. Now, I have a policy not to respond to hate mail - I'm not talking about people who simply disagree with me, I am talking about the people who write things like 'shut the fuck up, eat shit and die'. The fact is I really don't mind if you choose to hate me, you can't participate in social media and expect everyone to love you unanimously. But if you are going to do that, then please at least get your facts right because in my clarification part 1, I had to deal with some of the wrong assumptions that my haters have made about what I do for a living. And as promised in this part, I will be dealing with some of the darker things they have said and I will explain why I find it so disturbing as I do believe that a lot of these hate mail is actually coming from teenagers rather than older adults but also what that tells us about our culture.

We have all made mistakes - how do we deal with them?

Yes I have made many mistakes in my life. So? 

One of the haters tried to make me feel bad about not having made it to Oxford and I'm like, really? Another tried to belittle me for having accepted a lousy sales job as my first job - that I didn't waltz into a good job with a big bank upon my graduation despite having had a scholarship. I think he wanted me to become highly defensive of the choices I made, but instead I merely said, yeah I messed up so many times in life before, it happens. Ironically, it does seem like a highly elitist approach - to condemn those mere mortals who failed to gain admission to Oxford. I wonder which university that hater went to, I somehow doubt it was Oxford or Cambridge. We're all human and we make mistakes; life is not like a computer game whereby it is 'game over' the moment you make a big mistake like fail an exam, get divorced or fail get a place in the university of your choice. You don't get to start a new game, you just have to make the best of whatever situation you find yourself in. I think it is important to have role models in life when it comes to this aspect, otherwise you end up like that poor kid in Singapore who killed herself just because she didn't get the perfect grades for her exam - like she got two Bs and not straight As, so she killed herself. How messed up is that? I think it is hideous that some people do have that mentality - that if you fail to achieve what you set out to do, you should kill yourself. Well that's quite extreme, I certainly don't believe that should be the case and I think a lot of my sane readers actually agree with me.

You want a list of my mistakes? There are too many. 

I am not proud of the mistakes I've made, but I am however, happy to tell you that I have learnt many valuable lessons, that I am humble enough to have embraced the mistakes I have made in my life. The worst mistake someone can make in this aspect is that they go into denial mode: they made a stupid mistake, they wish that never happened and they don't even allow themselves to think about it - they pretend it had never ever happened but within a few weeks or months, they make the exact same mistake because they have not even tried to figure out why they made that big mistake the first time round. I didn't do the right degree, I didn't go to the right university, I didn't get the right scholarship for the right reasons, I didn't apply for the right jobs after I graduated - oh let me be the first to tell you that I made more dumb mistakes than your average person. So indeed, I made many mistakes along the way but still managed to carve out a career in sales within the world of corporate finance. So what do you want to count: my successes or my mistakes? What do you think utlimately matters at the end of the day? Please allow me to now refer you to one of my role models in life.

Svetlana Khorkina: the Queen of gymnastics

Khorkina was one of the world's most successful gymnasts, her international competitive career span the period from 1992 to 2004. She has won two Olympic gold medals and was world champion nine times - she is a legend in the world of gymnastics and few other gymnasts have won as many times nor have they had a competitive career as long and successful as her. Yet if we go onto Youtube, we can easily find quite a number of clips of Khorkina crashing and falling during various competitions. In fact, there was a clip from her at the 2004 Athens Olympics when she attempted a difficult double twisting Yurchenko vault and crashed really badly, it was a pretty epic face plant. I have found the video below. Now I can imagine some of her haters using that video to try to prove that she was a terrible gymnast. But guess what? I'm sure Khorkina would shrug that video off and say that yeah, she tried something difficult, that was a double twisting Yurchenko vault and unfortunately it didn't go to plan - so what? The fact is Khorkina was never always perfect, she has crashed and fallen quite a number of times over the years in competition but she did win enough world and Olympic titles and that's what people will remember her for. As long as you have had enough success along the way, the world is usually happy enough to forgive the odd disaster you have had along the way. Like Khorkina, sure I've had my share of terrible mistakes, but I've also done a number of things right to make me look back at what I have achieved with a smile.

Is it 'game over' when you make a big mistake?

So you see, I have seen my role models like Khorkina shake off her mistakes and go on to achieve great success. Can you imagine if Khorkina just gave up on gymnastics after she had just one bad competition?  If she didn't forgive herself for that mistake and found a way to move on, get over that mistake, then she would have never gone on to win so many Olympic and world titles. Can you imagine a world where people simply gave up the moment they made a terrible mistake? Gosh, how horrible would that be? Where do those people go once they have given up on themselves? Do they sink into a deep depression? Do they commit suicide? What a terrible, grim world that would be - no, I believe in a vision as laid out by my idol Khorkina whereby we simply treat each mistake as a learning exercise to become stronger and wiser.  Coming to terms with those mistakes is something I have done on my own terms: I do not need the approval or permission from anyone to do so. So if someone ever tries to make you feel bad about your mistakes, just be aware that they come from a pretty dark place where they expect you to think it is all 'game over' rather than treat the mistake as a learning experience. No, how you deal with your mistakes in your life is none of their business and don't let them even think they have a say. Yikes, with that in mind, I even feel quite sorry for the person who wrote me that hate mail.

Is the glass half full or half empty then? 

Nobody is perfect, when you put even the life of the most successful people under the microscope, you're bound to find stupid mistakes that they've made. The fact is if you want to find fault with someone like Khorkina to denounce her as a failure, it would involve an exercise whereby you focus on all her bad competitions and obliviously ignoring all her world championships and Olympics gold medals. The only kind person who would indulge in an exercise like that would be someone who has been brought up without ever having any failure tolerated, where they were expected always to be perfect within a certain context like delivering straight As at every exam in school. Now this even defies any kind of logic governed by the rules of statistics: I blog regularly on the reality TV programme The Amazing Race where I find the average ranking of each team after each episode, to ascertain just how strong a team they are and base their chances of winning on those averages. A team can have a bad episode where they have a very poor ranking, that would merely drag down their average somewhat, but I would never focus on that one mistake which resulted in that poor ranking (such as in TAR S30 E2 when team Yale struggled to stay in the race in Antwerp), but rather I would look at their average ranking and see if that mistake is actually representative of their true strength. Is this a team who regularly makes silly mistakes, or is this mistake an exception? That's why I like statistics for they take human emotion out of the equation.

Why do people go down this dark, grim route then? 

The fact is, we do live in a society where some people commit suicide when things go wrong in their lives - they feel they cannot go on, they cannot live with themselves and try to fix the problem, they feel that they have no option but to declare that it is game over and kill themselves over something like a bad exam result. Ultimately it boils down to the family environment and the kind of people you surround yourself with in life: I remember if I had ever performed badly in a test or exam in primary school, my parents would beat the crap out of me and they believed that it was the fear of physical pain that would motivate me to study harder next time rather than trying to encourage me, build up my self-esteem or help me believe in my ability to perform better. That kind of encouragement or nurturing was seen as a mistake that white people made, my Asian parents didn't believe in encouraging their children because they believe that it would 'spoil' their children, it would lead to complacency and laziness. They were all too ready to label white kids as lazy 'spoilt brats' who didn't have any boundaries, who were not motivated enough to study hard at school and they poured so much scorn on white parents who gave their kids hugs and told them words like 'I love you'. Culturally, my parents were conditioned to believe their method was correct and that white parents were idiots who got it totally wrong.

Of course, having spent half my life in Europe now, I can tell you that this Chinese-white, Asian-Angmoh dichotomy doesn't exist: there are European parents who can get it desperately wrong too and some Asian parents who do get it right when it comes to dealing with this issue. It goes beyond parenting: I also see it in terms of the way white bosses manage their staff compared to Asian bosses. What do you do when an employee makes a big mistake - do you sack them, ie. 'game over' or do you work with them to overcome the problems, so they learn from the mistake? This is also reflected in the attitudes of the individuals when they make a mistake - do they wait for someone to forgive them and give them permission to move on, do they condemn themselves and declare it it game over or do they simply find a way to move on after having dealt with the mistake made? You see, like my parents, most people are culturally conditioned to respond a certain way: my parents genuinely believed that you must give children boundaries, that there must be consequences and punishments if you do something wrong, so children will be deterred from doing the wrong thing and will always choose the right options in life. You don't encourage mistakes by rewarding children with love - such rewards are only reserved for when children do well, so by that token you need to punish children when they make mistakes. If you present it like that, then my parents' approach actually makes sense and thus that became the norm in Singapore.

Shouldn't we discourage mistakes then?

Is it just a lack of empathy or dare I say it, autism?

In reality, we're all individuals and how we choose to respond to mistakes in life really boil down to our individual characters, though cultural influences can be a major factor of course. I recognize this and am acutely aware of how culturally different we can be when it comes to dealing with this issue - but that comes with having spent half my life in Europe and half my life in Asia. The problem with some people is that they simply lack the basic empathy to try to appreciate that others have a different point of view to the issue - or even if they recognize that others have a different approach, their response to the difference is, "you're wrong, I'm right, how dare you have a different opinion - are you stupid or what?" My autistic parents responded exactly like that when they witnessed American people taking a very different approach to parenting. I get the feeling my haters are left baffled thinking, "how can you live with yourself after you got rejected from Oxford? Why didn't you just kill yourself on the spot?" They are disappointed that I didn't react the way they would have reacted - how dare I simply move on with my life without punishing myself after such a terrible failure? The irony is that the people who attacked me probably didn't go to Oxford themselves: they probably went to NUS or even SIM - they simply have a problem with me taking a completely different approach to dealing with the matter of dealing with one's mistakes and moving on. Are you willing to accept that different people have different ways to deal with problems in life, or are you going to condemn everyone who doesn't react in exactly the same way as you do?

Or is it a Singaporean problem?

When you look at the kind of pressure that Singaporean kids are subjected to in the education system, they are expected to deliver so much and failure is not tolerated. Oh Singaporean parents would beat their children and punish them should they dare to deliver a C for maths after their parents have paid so much money for the best tuition teacher in Ang Mo Kio! The kid who scores a C is made to feel as if he had let his parents down and brought shame to his family - that it was a moral failure, that the kid was too lazy, he was busy surfing the internet or sleeping instead of studying hard for his maths exam, that's why he did so badly. Even if you can bludgeon kids through such an unforgiving system to come up with brilliant results, you cannot replicate the same kind of perfection in your career - it just doesn't work like that. If you were to look at some of the most successful and rich businessmen in the world today, even they have made some terrible mistakes and have lost loads of money. But guess what? It doesn't matter - as long as their profits exceed their losses sufficiently, they are still going to be extremely rich! By the same token, there are plenty of very cautious people who have never ever made a mistake because they are so risk averse, but they have never really found great success either by that very same token because they never ever take any chances. What would you rather have at the end of the day?

What happens when students fail to deliver those As?

Let's talk about Donald Trump.

Let's take the example of president Donald Trump, a controversial figure but one we all know very well - he has suffered so many catastrophes in his businesses over the years, declaring bankruptcy no less than six times. Most of us would assume that even one bankruptcy would be enough to wreck your career, nonetheless Trump has the most important job in the world today, is the leader of the most powerful nation of the world and is worth no less than US$2.86 billion. You may not like Donald Trump (I certainly don't), but you can't deny the fact that even though he has made countless mistakes in the past, ran an awful presidential campaign and keeps on making terrible gaffes practically everyday in the White House now - somehow his mistakes have not held him back from being president, wielding an enormous amount of both power and wealth. If you were to mark his performance like a teacher, you'll probably fail him in every aspect - but somehow, in real life, none of that matters and Trump still manages to be one of the most powerful men alive today in the world, his mistakes notwithstanding. His mistakes should have made it clear to America that he is definitely not president material - but here we are, after a year of him in the Oval Office, he is still the president of the USA. That is why I say there is a huge disconnect between what we subject students to in the education system and how things actually work.

By that token, the education system in Singapore is failing Singaporean students: they may be brilliant students who are scoring straight As, but how prepared are they to make that transition into the working world, where they have to deal with problematic situations? Where they simply cannot find perfection: what if you have to work on projects with no easy, perfect solutions? What if you have to work with people who are difficult or flawed, who will not agree with your opinion on how to deal with the challenges ahead? Oh this kind of messy realities of life would frustrate the hell out of your typical Singaporean student who aspires to get nothing but straight As, because they would no longer be able to deliver perfection in the workplace. With this in mind, I believe that some of my haters are actually pretty young - that they are these good students who have totally unrealistic expectations about what kind of career they are going to have once they step out into the big bad working world. If that is the case, then oh dear, I'm not sure I feel sorry for them per se, they're in for a rude shock when reality bites. Either they learn to adapt quickly or they will plunge into very deep depression.

Why is the blind leading the blind?

Do you wanna know my PSLE results? 

Here's the irony: my haters are in fact talking about things that have all happened an awfully long time ago (don't forget, I'm going to be 42 this year). I got rejected from Oxford when I was 18 and then got my first job upon graduation at 24. You see, most people would take a look at what I am doing today and judge me on that basis, on what I have achieved - so I didn't make it to Oxford, but are they actually interested in what I did in my working life? No. This is strikingly similar to what happened a few years ago when my nephew got his PSLE results and he asked me what I scored back then - when I told him what I scored, he said something like, "oh then you're cleverer than my friend (insert name) but only by just a little bit because you only scored 2 points more than him in the PSLE." I didn't quite know how to react, it was hardly the kind of comparison I would make given that I took my PSLE back in 1988 - but my nephew was just a kid then, he doesn't understand what I do for a living: the world of corporate finance is just way too complex for him to understand so he is using a frame of reference that he does understand very well to judge whether uncle Alex is clever or not.

This is why I realize that some of my hate mail would be coming from teenagers who are actually quite young, rather than adults because all these references they are talking about are important issues for young people of course, but they become increasingly irrelevant for older folks in their 40s like myself. Of course, all of these hate mail are totally anonymous - I don't even know the gender of the people leaving all these nasty comments on my blog, but what I find disturbing is that they are probably quite young and if they fail to make it into like the top 1% of their cohort by getting perfect grades and prestigious scholarships, what then? Are they going to condemn themselves the same way they were so ready to condemn me? Are they going to be convinced it is 'game over' and kill themselves just because things didn't quite go to plan for them? Of course, this does sound somewhat extreme to most of us, but try to see it from your point of view: if you were brought up by very strict Asian parents who demanded that you became a doctor or lawyer, that you had to do whatever it took to get the grades to get into law or medical school - then failing at the very last step does feel like the end of the world for you, if you have failed to achieve everything you have spent most of your life trying to achieve. Normal people would say, "it's okay, you didn't make it to medical or law school, but there are plenty of other career options open to you, let's talk about those and explore some of those options." But some of these kids were never taught to tolerate failure and will literally kill themselves because they don't know how to cope with such a situation.

Asian parenting is deeply flawed.

The football score analogy 

Allow me to use a football analogy given the simplicity of it: the official score that determines whether you have won or lost the football match is the score when the referee blows the final whistle to declare the end of the match. Football fans may fuss about the details like which team scored first or what the score was at half time, but none of that actually matters as much as the final score. So you can be the team that scores the first goal, you may be up 2 - 0 at half time, but unless you can manage to defend and stop the other team scoring, there's really nothing to stop them from staging a huge come back and score a few goals in the second half to eventually win the match. Now if I were to judge an older person's achievements, I would look at his current job and wealth status rather than what he was like as a student; after all, I have met Oxford graduates who have struggled with finding a job they can excel in their adult life - I have also met people who have no degrees but have set up extremely successful businesses. My point is simple: it really doesn't matter how well you start off, it is where you eventually get to that matters. What is your personal net worth - how much money are you earning? After all, a degree from Oxford may get you off to a good start, but it doesn't guarantee that you will make a fortune and become rich. Likewise, not having a good degree may be a bad start to your career, but if you're a hustler who's willing to work hard, then you can create your own luck and become incredibly successful. Like yeah, I had a few rough patches, but the fact is, it doesn't matter how many setbacks you've had - what really matters is how you're doing today and I'm a multi-millionaire, I'm probably far richer than all my haters put together. I'm interested in the score when the referee blows the final whistle, not the half time score because that's the only score that really matters.

How do you judge what I have presented then?

Quite frankly, I don't see why my education or my current job has any bearing on whether I should be allowed to speak up and make a point. But no, my haters have been bitching about everything from the fact that I went to UCL and not Oxford, or that I work for a small company today rather than a big investment bank. Like what does my life have to do with the point I am making? And quite frankly, just because I write a blog, it doesn't mean that I am seeking your approval about how well I am doing in my life. What if someone from Oxford who worked for a big investment bank made a totally sexist or racist statement - would that make it any more acceptable or palatable? Obviously not. Yet in Singapore, the mindset is such that your opinion is more valid if you went to Oxford than say if you went to NUS - you guys seriously put that ahead of the actual content of the opinion voiced? Seriously? Are you for real? Geez. That's not how we function in the West and for that, I'm glad I'm in London and not Singapore. Disagree with me if you don't agree with what the point of view I presented, but present your point of view and show me what your opinion is - let's have a rational conversation.

So that's it from me today. What do you think? Personally, I think it is highly ironic: rather than attacking me for being elitist per se, my haters are telling me that I am not elite enough to be elitist since I am not an Oxford graduate - but good grief, isn't that simply setting the bar so high that the vast majority of ordinary folks are such 'failures' that we have all wasted our lives? What is behind this kind of mentality? Leave a comment below please and many thanks for reading.