What is wrong with nice auntie Mary?

Hi guys, you know, I love it when one of my old posts still gets loads of hits even after two years but sometimes it comes at a price: I've been known as the gatekeeper who is gladly condemning those with degrees from private universities like SIM and make no mistake, SIM degrees are indeed worthless. But I can't help but feel that a lot of people have been shooting the messenger for the message: I am merely laying out the facts for you based on my position as someone who has played the role of the gatekeeper over the years. Like seriously, what do these young people expect - someone to tell them, "hey it doesn't matter if you have fucked up your studies and failed your exams, just get this degree from a university that doesn't give a shit if you failed everything so far and you can still do as well as an Oxford graduate. Everything is going to be just fine and you're going to be incredibly successful regardless of everything that may have gone wrong in your life so far!" Yeah right, even dumb kids would think that there was something very wrong with a message like that because it just doesn't add up? Why would an employer ever pick you over an Oxford graduate then?

Don't we love listening to an encouraging message?

Let's try to reach a sensible compromise here: I don't believe in kicking someone who is already down - someone who has already messed up their studies to the point where they end up in SIM are already in a pretty terrible place. Telling them that gatekeeper out there think that they are totally shit and will never be hired - well, that's not going to help them. However, giving them encouragement that isn't based in reality - like telling them that they will be treated like Oxford graduates out there in the job market - I just don't see the value in that kind of encouragement. I have seen this only too much in people who feel the need to say something nice and they say something uplifting and encouraging without any concrete evidence: it's like when my friend Sarah was given the diagnosis of terminal cancer, I passed that news to an older friend called auntie Mary - like this woman isn't a doctor, she knows nothing about cancer. Mary didn't know how to react to the news of Sarah dying, so she said something like, "oh I am sure the chemotherapy will clear it up - my friend Conrad knows a really good specialist, I'll put you guys in touch". Auntie Mary said all that without even knowing the details of Sarah's diagnosis; perhaps saying something so positive and optimistic was her way of not dealing with the fact that Sarah was dying - because if your friend isn't dying, then you don't have to deal with the pain of reality, right? I don't think Mary is a bad person per se, she just took the coward's way out - nobody wants to have to deal with the reality.

Look, I monitor the sources of traffic that send readers to my blog and I have been reading a lot of the discussions on websites like Reddit and HWZ - I must say, there are a lot of nice people like Auntie Mary out there who are saying loads of very encouraging, positive, uplifting things with no real concrete evidence to back up what they are saying. And unfortunately, people like Mary may be always there with a smile to give you the encouragement you would like to hear, but would she be able to give you any helpful advice when you're really in trouble? I wouldn't turn to someone like Mary who isn't emotionally committed to deal with the reality of your situation. Gosh, if you want that kind of uplifting experience to be surrounded by people who are always conditioned to be nice to you no matter how dire your situation is, I suggest going to church on a Sunday where you can praise God and sing happy songs, that will definitely make you feel much better about your fate than reading those forums. Like seriously, at least you are interacting with real human beings there in church rather than anonymously online with strangers hiding behind a pseudonym - you might actually make some very good friends at church: that's coming from an atheist. Just don't go to City Harvest Church though.

Are you after advice or do you just want to hear a nice message?

Instead let me tell you about how I overcame the odds to get to where I am today: in my previous post, I did talk about the issue of social class. I came from an extremely working class family and today, I've benefited greatly from social mobility and have achieved a lot without any help at all from my parents. In fact, a lot of the problems stemmed from the fact that my parents firmly believed that it was important to spare yourself disappointment, so you should never take part in a competition or apply for something like a scholarship. If you never even try, then you will never fail and life will be peaceful, without disappointment. I was a former national champion gymnast who represented Singapore in many competitions in the 1990s and picked up three scholarships along the way - excelling in both sports and studies. Now that would have made most Singaporean parents very happy to say the least but nope, not my parents. I remember once my mother being really nasty to me when I had just won yet another award at school - she screamed at me, "you think you will keep winning forever? One day you will lose and you will come crying to me and don't expect me to comfort you because I warned you that you can never keep winning. Stop this stupid nonsense now, you really want to drive me to an early grave." Yeah, talk about a messed up childhood - that's the kind of reaction I got when things went well. I grew up hiding most things from my parents knowing that I simply couldn't trust them with anything, even normal stuff.

Look, you guys wanna talk about having the odds stacked against you by having a degree from SIM, you wanna compare it to me when I had my parents do everything they possibly could to hold me back as a child? It's not like I can even blame them - they're both severely autistic and uneducated, the modern world scares them and confuses them. I can see why they seek a life of predictable routine as that gives them comfort. It got to the point in my teenage years when I told them nothing because I figured, the less they knew the better. Like them, I was autistic too but unlike them, I had somehow won the lottery with my genes and thus was a lot more intelligent than they are. Now the problem was that they genuinely believed that the true path to happiness was having a set routine in your life, devoid of surprises or new challenges - that way you will always feel very safe and secure and that was exactly what they had created for themselves in becoming not just primary school teachers, but picking a school within walking distance from our home. The level of their OCD and strict routines drove me nuts as a child and all I wanted to do was to get away from their world. So if you do wanna talk about battling the challenges in life with the odds stacked against you, well that's me.

What kind of social interaction are you after online?

Okay I know what you're going to say, how here goes Alex again feeling sorry for himself, ranting on and on about how messed up his childhood was. But I do have a point: I do know exactly how it feels to feel that everything is difficult, what it feels like when all the odds are set against you, when you know what you're capable of but people are trying to put you down and tell you what you cannot do. You think SIM graduates face discrimination out there - well, I suffered much worse at the very hands of my own parents. Even after I got my scholarship to UCL, my mother kept repeating this story of someone from her church whose son got a scholarship to Oxford only to commit suicide when he couldn't cope with the stress there. Like my mother couldn't even be happy for me when I got what I wanted, how many normal Singaporean mothers out there would be thrilled if their children won an award, never mind three scholarships? So yeah, you wanna talk about being put down, being discriminated against - guess what? I have had my face rubbed in the dirt by my own parents for the first 18 years of my life, that's probably far more discrimination than any of you SIM graduates will ever have to face out there. So guys, you wanna talk to me about feeling the pain of discrimination? Bring it on.

 Do you people wanna talk about feeling despair, that life is not worth living for because you didn't get into NUS? Look, I was in a very dark place when I enlisted but somehow, a few months into NS something in my head clicked. I could feel sorry for myself for having been born into the wrong family and kill myself - or I could pick myself up and get on with life. I chose the latter because killing myself would not have achieved anything - it would almost have proven my parents right and I didn't wanna give them that satisfaction. In hindsight, I did a lot of growing up in NS, I learnt to develop my social skills to get along with the difficult people I had to live and work with. I opened my eyes to others in society when I was thrust in that situation, rather than being so focused on my own family, I learnt to see how others were messed up too and I think a turning point was when I encountered another guy - his name was Alex too. He too had another really messy family situation, it is a really long story which I shall save for another day but Alex had plain given up on life and decided that killing himself was the best way to spite his parents. He failed but had hurt himself real bad and that kinda scared me into taking control of my life - knowing that I definitely didn't want to give in to self-pity and end up like him.

The NS experience opened my eyes to the rest of society.

At some stage, you have to accept that you're never going to get what you want and you have to stop punishing yourself for the mistakes of others. Even just today, I read this horrible story on the BBC about a woman who was rejected by her biological father because he decided to become a Catholic priest and thus turned his back on her, didn't want to know her at all, didn't want to be his father and the feeling of rejection sent her into years of self-abuse and despair. In the end, she couldn't even make him feel bad for the rejection - all that self-punishment she inflicted on herself seemed pointless because really, the person she wanted to hurt and punish was her father but he didn't give a shit about her or the pain she was going through. You know, it is easy to read a story like that about someone else and scream at them for being irrational, but having gone through years of punishing myself for having severely autistic parents - well, I can tell you that even the most intelligent people can be irrational and I had to move beyond my hurt. There was really no real alternative when you eventualy realize that self-pity achieves nothing and your search for sympathy may lead you to nice people like that auntie Mary I told you about, but at the end of the day, these nice people like her have little to offer that is of value.

But allow me to clarify something: yes I did go to a good British university on a scholarship. My university didn't come with a bond as it was offered by the university, not a company or government. But what happened next? Did everything simply fall into place and I had it easy from then on? No, quite the opposite - you see, there is an important event in the university calendar called the "graduate milk round", that is when big companies go to the top universities and offer jobs to their best graduates. Well, because I was on exchange in Paris at the time it happened, I missed the entire milk round that year and that was a mistake. I then desperately tried to apply for jobs the moment I got back from France and managed to get one, but it wasn't my first choice, it certainly wasn't what I wanted but I needed a job to stay on in the UK and I didn't have the luxury of choice. And so that's how I fell into sales - oh boy. I had a geography degree that didn't point me in any specific direction but at least I spoke several languages fluently, they always need sales people who speak languages so that's how I ended up in sales as I needed a job quickly. Now I have talked a lot about working in sales in my blog - it is a double edged sword: on one hand, yes it is potentially lucrative but hugely unpredictable as your salary is pretty much dependent on your sales figures. You are only a hero as long as your sales figures are healthy.

Sales is potentially lucrative but it is a ruthless environment.

Regardless of my scholarship, I started at the bottom like all sales people selling advertising space on the internet. It was a very pushy sales environment whereby you were expected to sell a lot quickly, they had no patience for beginners who were shy or slow. It was a very male dominated environment - nobody cared how educated you were or how posh your background was, all that mattered was your ability to sell. I moved on from that to events when I sold tickets to conferences, before moving up the food chain to selling packages for big banks to sponsor the entire event. I then got scouted by a hedge fund manager I was trying to persuade to do one of my events and he said, okay you are a natural salesman, come sell hedge funds for me and I've been working for him ever since and he is still my boss today, as I work for him in the world of corporate finance. So it wasn't like I waltzed out of UCL into the world of corporate finance: well that kinda thing might happen if your dad was someone influential who could get you a good job upon graduation. I had to prove myself every step of the way: I remember my first sale was for something pathetic like £200 for a small ad on a website, then I moved on to getting like £500 for ticket to a conference, then selling an exhibition stand for £4,000 and eventually sponsorship packages in the region of £50,000. When I moved on to hedge funds, my sales figures went up into six figures easily and today I am brokering deals of at least eight figures. That only took 17 years of bloody hard work - I may be making good money now but it wasn't always the case. Nothing came easily, there was a lot of hard work.

So guess what? I may have had a pretty good track record as a student with all my scholarships but I eventually went into sales because of my languages and I was working alongside salesmen with either degrees from universities I had never even heard of and there were a lot of them who didn't even have a degree. Yeah, my degree did absolutely nothing for me in the working world because nobody was going to give me a job based on my degree - the first question they asked was, "what were your sales figures like in your old job? Can you sell?" You see, the answer to those questions had absolutely nothing to do with whether I have a degree or not. I guess I was blessed with the power of learning quickly through mimicry - let me give you an example. I worked alongside this guy Alan from Liverpool with a ghastly Scouse accent. For those of you not from the UK, allow me to explain that this is considered a particularly low-class, unattractive, nasty accent - when he was selling though, he used a fake name and completely changed his accent to sound extremely posh, so he would come across someone important inviting you to an event, rather than just some bloke trying to flog you a ticket to an event for £500. I swear it worked, he was extremely persuasive and people did buy tickets to those conferences because he convinced them to go - last I heard, he went on to sell expensive cars. No, Alan didn't have a degree at all, he was just a brilliant salesman but no university in the world could possibly teach him to do what he did.

My degree was completely useless and irrelevant to my job.

So if there was an alternative universe where I didn't get my scholarship - let's say I totally flunked my A levels because my head was not in the right place, guess what? I probably would not have gotten a degree at all, I would have just focused on the things I was good at, that made me happy like learning languages and still end up doing something like sales which I could have easily done without a degree. For the people who do know me well, they would realize that I came from nothing, I had no help at all from my parents and I worked hard all my life to overcome all the odds that were stacked against me to achieve everything I had. I'm not one of those kids from rich families who had everything handled to them on a silver platter, I'm really quite the opposite. So if someone who is facing the prospect of getting a degree from SIM (or having no degree at all) were to come to me for help, no I'm not going to be auntie Mary and say loads of sweet, nice, encouraging thing. But would she know how to point you in the right direction when it comes to your career prospects? No, clearly not. She is in no position to help - but ironically, I am and I hope that is clear after you've read my story. You may not like what I have to say, you may not even like me but at least I hope that sharing my story so candidly here will at least clear the air up about how hard I had to work to get to where I am today - the fact is, many graduates from the top universities probably struggled as hard as I did, especially if they wanted to start their own business.

The moral of the story? Don't envy those with good degrees, nothing is handed out to them for free I can assure you that. They may have had some advantage in getting their first job, but after that, they still have to prove themselves in whatever career they choose. In fact, the only people you should be truly jealous of are those who have had everything handed over to them on a silver platter - I'm talking about kids who are born into families with rich parents: even if they truly mess up their studies, their parents can still support them as adults and have a huge inheritance for them regardless. And if they need a job, no worries - daddy or mummy probably knows someone who owes them a favour, all they need to do is to make a phone call or two and you will be able to start next Monday. People like that don't need to worry about looking for a job or going for job interviews like the rest of us - yeah, those are the people who truly have an advantage over the rest of us ordinary folks. So if you want to hate someone, don't hate me - hate those who got so much from their parents when they did nothing to deserve it. Oh boy, I actually know quite a few people like that - nasty people who inherited so much wealth. So that's it from me, what do you think? Have you met people like nice auntie Mary in your life? Why do people like listening to her though? Leave a comment below please, many thanks for reading.