"But you even don't want to work as a gymnastics coach?"

Hi guys, I got into a conversation with one of my readers - let's call her Shannon and this is what she said to me, "You complained a lot about your parents not being supportive of your gymnastics when you were younger, but today you're working in finance rather than in sports. The reason is obvious - you've said this yourself on your blog many times - you can earn a lot of money working in finance whereas the amount of money a coach can earn is very limited. So perhaps you need to give your parents some credit - after all, they were right in steering you away from something that clearly brought you a lot of joy and fun, but would ultimately only lead to a rather poorly paid job. Competing as a gymnast was probably extremely fun and I know you enjoyed that a lot, but after your last competition, what happens next? Most people leave competitive sports and then pursue a career that has little to do with sports: Mark Spitz (the American swimmer) became a stock broker and Li Ning (the Chinese gymnast) is the CEO of one of China's biggest sportswear brands today - certainly, they could have gone into coaching but they wanted to make a lot of money. It would be fair to say that your parents wanted you to have the option to do something else apart from coaching once your competitive career was over - so, how would you respond to that? Don't you think your parents deserve at least some credit then?"

Thanks for that question Shannon. I will begin by talking more generally about coaching gymnastics - you are right, it is a fairly low paid job because you earn by the hour. You are paid for the number of hours you spend in the gym giving lessons and there's no incentive say, if your students win the gold medal. Perhaps they can get some kind of reward from the government if they do win a medal at a major international competition like the Olympics but as the coach you get nothing. Now I have to state that there is a tiny percentage (probably less than 0.001%) of gymnastics coaches who do earn a lot of money and these are a small handful of American coaches who have successfully coached famous world and Olympic champions - given the popularity of gymnastics in America, many parents will pay a lot of money for their kids to be coached by one of these superstar coaches like Valeri Liukin, Liang Chow and Yin Alvarez. Now I actually know someone who is in the gymnastics club run by one of these superstar coaches in America - the coach does oversee the training programme and schedule, but all the hard work in the gym is done by other coaches whilst the boss (ie. the superstar coach) focuses his energies on just a tiny handful of the top gymnasts in the club, you know, those who actually do have some chances of actually making it to the Olympics. My friend sees the boss in the gym all the time but the only time the boss has ever said anything to him was, "keep your legs together" after he walked past my friend whilst he was training on the vault. My friend is actually trained by someone called Nicky and coaches like Nicky actually get paid very little despite the fact that my friend is paying a lot to train at one of America's most prestigious gymnastics club.

An analogy I would give you is celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay who has a few restaurants in London (see the video below) - a meal in one of those restaurants would be very expensive but do you think the waiters or kitchen staff there earn a lot of money? Hardly. It would be the boss Gordon Ramsay himself who sees the lion share of the profits whilst the staff who slog is out in the kitchen get paid peanuts. It's the same miserable situation with gymnastics coaches, even those who do work in a prestigious, popular gymnastics club with famous coaches. When you go into one of Jamie Oliver's or Gordon Ramsay's restaurants in London, do you think the celebrity chef himself is actually cooking your meal in the kitchen? Hell no, he's probably not even in the same building. So in fact, these superstar coaches are not coaches at all, but businessmen who are running the gymnastics club as a business - they are charging for a service, but they're actually employing a large team of staff to provide a service which they are guaranteeing to be of a very high standard. This is why such rich gymnastics coaches are in the minority - the vast majority of gymnastics coaches have a schedule that resemble my friend Warren (not his real name), a gymnastics coach I have known for quite a while. Warren is working full time but is effectively living from paycheck to paycheck and much of his earnings go on rent and necessities.

Given that Warren is paid by the hour, he has to chalk up many hours every week in order to make a decent amount of money. The gymnastics clubs run classes from 3 pm to 8 pm for children, that's because the children are in school in the morning and show up after lunch but you can't keep the kids in the gym beyond dinner time. There are some private lessons and adult classes from 8 pm to 10 pm, so Warren works between 5 hours a day during the week, but he makes up for it during the weekends, when he works about 8 hours on both Saturday and Sunday. So on average, Warren works about 41 hours a week (that doesn't include the 2-hour round trip he has to make from home to the gym, which brings that figure up to 55 hours a week) - sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less during term time. That is spread out throughout the week and he doesn't get a day off unless it is a public holiday - however, if he doesn't work, he doesn't get paid. Now how much he earns depends on his hourly rate and he gets £13.50 an hour for a standard class, around £50 an hour if it is a private lesson. Now I have to add this disclaimer: I know £50 an hour sounds a lot, so why doesn't he just do private lessons only? Well, you need a hell of a lot of extremely expensive equipment to run a gymnastics class. The just equipment in a gymnastics club is worth several million dollars and Warren needs to coach for £13.50 an hour at the gym just to gain 'staff status' which enables him to access the facilities when it is not being used; if he isn't staff, the gym would expect him to hire the gym for £85 an hour to run a £50 an hour private class. So he only does two private lessons a week because it is subject to the availability of the gym and he may get a text that says, "Hi Warren, this is Vanessa's mother - her aunt and cousins from Italy are visiting next week so we will have to cancel the private lesson next week. We shall see you the following week." So when that happens then obviously Warren doesn't get paid.

So on average, Warren earns about £550 to £625 a week during term time but that has to cover all his bills and he has a daughter. Needless to say, money is very tight - he simply can't afford to take a break and he has no savings because he is spending practically every penny he is earning on necessities. He hasn't had a holiday in years and there's just no way he can ever get on the housing ladder - no bank would give him a mortgage given how little he earns. Here's another problem that Warren faces: he is underemployed due to the nature of gymnastics clubs. There is a huge demand for after school sports activities during term time but once the school children are on holiday, the demand drops. This is because the system is structured to keep the children occupied after school whilst their parents are busy at work. However, during the school holidays, the demand for gymnastics classes actually drops - allow me to explain: firstly, the schools may organize all kinds of activities like field trips to camps to special courses for the children to attend, such special activities take advantage of the fact that the children don't have to be in the classrooms attending lessons for most of the day but that also makes them unavailable for attending a gymnastics lesson as well. Furthermore, some parents tend to take their children abroad on holidays during the school holidays or even if they're not going on holiday, they're doing other activities like visiting their grandparents  or participating in religious activities at the church/mosque/synagogue. The gymnastics club will run some kind of school holiday programme during the school holidays, but the demand is usually a lot lower than during term time. That means that Warren actually gets a lot less work during the school holidays - in the UK, children get about 13 or 14 weeks of holiday a year (and that doesn't even include the 8 public holidays a year, when both the gym and the schools are all shut) - that's means Warren's earnings fall significantly during that period. Sure, he would love to do more coaching during the school holidays but the demand simply isn't there for his services: such is the nature of underemployment. So when he doesn't work, he doesn't get paid.

All in all, Warren makes about £25,000 a year before tax which isn't bad - it isn't going to make him rich but he is by no means poor. His take home pay after tax and national insurance contributions is about £20,000. Considering that the starting salary for a teacher (outside London) is £22,917, Warren is not doing too badly but the situation is far from perfect. But here's the challenges he faces: there's no career progression at all. None whatsoever. Warren's job hasn't changed at all since he started and he's not learning anything new, there's a totally different team of managers running the sports center so he can't even progress into that role (not that they're earning more anyway - I suspect they're actually earning less than Warren.) His pay will never increase. Warren's job will be exactly the same until the day he is too old to work as a gymnastics coach - it is quite a physically demanding task as you have to be on your feet all day, you have to take the body weight of the gymnasts you are teaching when you support them and Warren is already in his mid-50s. Frankly, I don't know how much longer he can keep going; he is healthy enough for now but what will happen when he can no longer do this kind of very physically demanding work? Besides, remember the names of those superstar coaches in America I talked about? Well, Liukin is from Russia, Liang is from China and Alvarez is from Cuba - there are loads of highly qualified, highly experienced gymnastics from these countries who would love to do Warren's job and for them, £20,000 a year is a lot of money. Now with all due respect to Warren, he doesn't quite have that level of expertise and experience compared to say someone who has worked with the national team in somewhere like Bulgaria, Ukraine or Kazakhstan. Thus Warren's wages are unlikely to increase in light of the competition he is up against - hence the only way Warren can earn more money is by working even more hours, but even if he wanted to, he couldn't find more work.

Does Warren love gymnastics? Of course he does, that's why he is coaching it in the first place but is he happy coaching gymnastics? That depends. Like all teachers, he gets a mix of good students and bad students. Now I'm not even talking about skill level here, quite frankly he doesn't care whether or not his students are any good at gymnastics, as long as they are well-mannered, polite, co-operative and behave sensibly in his class. Sometimes you will get the kid with parents from hell who has all kinds of behavioural issues and Warren doesn't have the right to march up to the head coach and say, "I refuse to teach that boy - you want to take his parents' money, you teach him yourself." No, I'm afraid Warren has no choice but to deal with the situation himself and if that kids makes his life hell, well that's part of what Warren has to suffer just to earn that £20,000 a year. So sometimes Warren has good days and on the bad days, I know he would stop by supermarket outside the gym for a cheap bottle of vodka or gin. He would then wake up the next morning with a terrible hangover and stumble to the gym in time for the 3 pm class after having had a lot of coffee and painkillers. Of course, not all days are that bad but that's his life 7 days a week. Quite frankly, when I look at Warren, I am grateful that I am not a gymnastics coach - it's not that I don't like gymnastics, I can see how hard things are for Warren and often he is not happy. I do like training gymnastics but I'm not sure I would enjoy coaching gymnastics like Warren. 

Allow me to play devil's advocate and ask a question - so why doesn't Warren try to become one of those celebrity coaches in America who can make millions from coaching gymnastics then? Why is he simply satisfied with making £13.50 an hour giving lessons at his local gymnastics club? Allow me to share the story of coach Liang Chow (his surname is actually Qiao but he spells it as Chow these days as Americans can't pronunce Qiao) in America: after an illustrious gymnastics career, he retired from the sport following a serious injury. He then moved to America to work as a gymnastics coach in Iowa in 1991 - what he did wasn't that unusual in the 1990s when thousands of skilled migrants left China to seek work abroad, including gymnastics coaches. In fact, we saw the arrival of many gymnastics coaches from China in Singapore in that same period. Chow had no idea he was going to become one of the most famous coaches in America at that time and for many years, his life was fairly low key as a gymnastics coach until he became the coach of Shawn Johnson in 1998 who went on to win a gold medal at the 2008 Olympics. After Johnson gained fame as a junior in the period around 2005-6, people in the gymnastics community noticed this future champion and asked, "who's her coach?" So it was until that moment that Chow went from just one of many gymnastics coach in America to a superstar and when Johnson clinched her gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Chow became a legend in the world of gymnastics coaches - being one of the very few coaches who has managed to deliver that elusive Olympics gold medal.

Sure Chow has coached many other elite gymnasts since, but his rise to fame is inextricably linked with Shawn Johnson's Olympic success. Now this is the problem that gymnastics coaches face: Chow may be a brilliant gymnastics coach but let's not take any credit away from Johnson - she is incredibly talented and worked super hard in order to earn her Olympic gold medal. So much of Chow's reputation and career had been tied up in Johnson's success in the sport. With no disrespect to Chow, there are many gymnastics coaches out there who are brilliant at what they do, but if they do not have a gymnast like Shawn Johnson joining their class and showing promise to be a future champion, then they just go on teaching gymnastics day after day - it is a job that they have to do to earn a living and put food on the table. Whilst Johnson has always humbly paid tribute to her coach Chow for her success in the sport, one has to note that without her success, he might be just another gymnastics coach in America today working hard and doing his job, rather than earning huge amounts of money as one of the legends in the world of gymnastics coaches. Wouldn't ever gymnastics coach like to become just like him? Of course - but without having a gymnast like Shawn Johnson to train and send to the Olympics, they will never get their moment of glory to say, "hey, you see that Olympic champion there? Well, I'm her coach - here's my business card." There are actually loads of gymnastics coaches out there like Warren are unfortunately pretty much just stuck where they are because they've not had the good fortune of having coached a gymnast who is talented enough to become the best in the world - I'm afraid luck and fate has kept Warren where he is.

So did my parents save me from turning into Warren by making sure that I didn't neglect my studies? Well it would be unfair of me to deny that - so let's deal with what my parents did. They weren't against me doing gymnastics in the first instance because they thought it was just some sports to keep me healthy, burn up excess energy to avoid obesity and that it might go some way in preparing me for NS. What upset them was when I began to spend more and more time training because I was actually pretty darn good at it and that was when they thought I was spending too much time training gymnastics and not enough time studying. This then became a problem from when I was 13 years old and it never really resolved itself till today - my parents didn't have the parenting skills to try to deal with the situation in a rational manner, so they went for a very simple solution: they wanted me to quit gymnastics and pick a different activity, one that wouldn't take as much time so I could focus on my studies but I was not the kind of person who would listen to my parents and do as I was told. I knew better, I didn't trust them and I knew they were incredible stupid. So I wasn't about to let them ruin my life the way they had ruined my eldest sister's life (that's another long story for another day) with their awful parenting skills. Anyway, things go so antagonistic between me and my parents by the time I was 14 that I was deliberately staying late at the gym just to irk them - ironically, I was even studying at the gym but I wanted to make them angry by giving them the impression that I was not studying at all. We had a bad passive-aggressive relationship.

But leaving all that aside, there's a point that I think my parents have missed - a person is either clever or stupid, that's pretty much determined by your IQ at birth. If you have a stupid child with exceptionally low IQ, you can buy him the best education in the world and he still wouldn't do well in school - likewise, if you have a talented kid who is blessed with business acumen, then school is pretty much redundant as he would go out there and start teaching himself everything he needs to know to run a business successfully. So either way, whether the child is stupid or intelligent, what he does in school becomes irrelevant either way. Here's the purpose of education - students perform well in their exams to get the grades they need to gain entry into a top university, so they can say, "I'm smart enough to earn myself a place in this super prestigious university, that means I am really intelligent, you want to employ someone like me." That plan would work if you are indeed smart enough to get the top grades to make it to Harvard or Oxford but it is a pretty lousy plan if your child is simply average and has no chance of making it to a top university. So if I was really stupid, then allowing me to explore coaching gymnastics as a career option wouldn't have been a bad idea at all since it was at least something I was good at. By the same token, if I was really intelligent (which I am, modesty aside), then I still managed to get through my education with no less than three scholarships despite barely studying and doing gymnastics all the time. So either way, whether I was stupid or intelligent, the right choice would have been to allow me to do loads of gymnastics regardless. I simply can't think of a situation where stopping me from doing gymnastics would have been the right option.

There was one other very compelling reason why my parents should have let me do gymnastics - I was actually good at it. it was not like I was ever going to win an Olympic medal but for what it was worth, I was talented and if your child is actually good at something - whether it is to do with sports, music or anything else in the arts, you should let them pursue it to see just how much potential they actually have. The fact is my parents had no idea whether I was truly talented in gymnastics or not - I should have been given the chance to find out, I should have been sent to China for training stints during my school holidays and if after all that I still didn't win a gold medal at a major international competition then fair enough, but I wasn't even given the chance to try. When I was 17, I was invited to compete in a competition in Los Angeles and the organizers were happy to pay for everything the moment I got there - all I needed was the plane ticket and my parents were adamant that it was a waste of money. If my parents had spoken at length with my coaches and had ascertained the level of my talent in gymnastics then came to that conclusion, then fair enough - but no, they just decided that sports couldn't possibly be as important as my studies so they jumped to their conclusions without even finding out just how talented I was in gymnastics. With any decision concerning your child's future, shouldn't any responsible parent make the effort to get all the necessary facts and information before making any serious decisions?

Let me compare this to my friend Vincent who has a teenage son: the boy is struggling in his studies at school. He is socially awkward and doesn't have any friends; he speaks with a stutter, is somewhat chubby and sucks at sports. Vincent is desperately pulling his hair out trying to find just one thing that his son is actually good at so he can actually praise his son over something, anything. Yeah some parents out there are like Vincent, wishing that their kids are actually good at something, when his son seemed to suck at everything. The fact is we can't expect to be good at everything, but we usually have that one thing we know we are good at - no, in fact that we're brilliant at. Now some people are able to monetize that talent and they can become professionals who can charge a lot of money for their services - whilst for others, it can be something that brings them a great sense of joy. So in the case of Vincent, a family friend suggested getting his son a dog to teach the boy a sense of responsibility and thankfully, that went incredibly well. The fact is the boy doesn't have any friends in school at all, so his best friend becomes the dog and he really enjoys playing with his dog. They could spend hours playing together and one day, as Vincent was watching his son play with the dog, he realized, he's really good with that dog - that's one thing he's great at. The dog loves him and he has successfully become an excellent pet owner. Will Vincent's son be able to turn this into a job - by working say in a pet store or at a vet clinic? Well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, but for now, we have finally found something that has made the boy truly happy and for crying out aloud - which normal parent wouldn't want their children to be happy?

Soon after they got the dog, Vincent began to see a change in his son - his confidence grew, his grades at school improved and he actually started making some friends at school. There was definitely a clear correlation between finding a fun activity that brought his son joy and building his self-confidence. We are at our best when we are happy and we will find that joy if we're doing an activity that we excel at - for Vincent's son, that's playing with his dog and for me, it was doing gymnastics. Every good parent ought to seek out activities that will bring their children that kind of joy and use it as a confidence building exercise - now I know my parents may look at Vincent's son and think, "why is that boy playing with his dog when he should be studying? Get rid of the dog at once, it is a distraction for the boy." But then, they would be totally wrong because Vincent's son's results at school actually improved a lot after they got the dog. Unfortunately, this is where Asian parents are totally wrong when it comes to parenting: they probably had such a joyless, wretched childhood they don't know the value of seeking joy for the purpose of having joy in one's life and believing that simply being happy will have such great benefits. No, instead most Asian parents don't care how miserable they make their children - forcing them to study for many hours everyday, making them forgo their favourite activities and even forbidding them to see their friends. That's because Asian parents value good results above happiness when simply allowing the child to be happy can naturally improve the child's overall performance in all aspects of the child's life. After all, we will work at our best and achieve the most when we are happy, not utterly miserable. Now that may seem obvious to some people but not others.

Here's the thing: I don't think my parents even understand that concept of happiness because they have never been happy. It is a really harsh thing to say but hear me out: my father was born just before the Japanese invasion of British Malaya and my mother was born during the Japanese occupation of Singapore. They saw so much hardship and suffering during their childhood and they lived in fear of the Japanese, barely clinging on to survival. But it wasn't just the Japanese they feared, there was so much poverty and starvation in my father's town in Johor that his family were targeted in a brutal armed robbery when he was a child and to this day, I knew horrible things happened when they were attacked but he still can't bring himself to give the full details of what he witnessed. My mother lost a sister to malnutrition and illness when she was about 7 years old - shortly after the war ended, my mother's father died of tuberculosis but that was just the last straw that broke the camel's back. He was an uneducated, illiterate manual labourer who had literally worked himself to death - he had a family to feed and if he didn't get out of bed in the morning to go to work, his family would starve. So he kept on working through his illness till he literally just dropped dead one day. Such is the context of my parents' childhood: there was no joy, only brutality, hardship, suffering, pain and fear. Now not everyone who has gone through a difficult childhood like that would inflict the same thing on their children - they may say, "okay I suffered a lot, but I don't want my children to go through the same thing and I'm going to make sure they have a good upbringing."

However, my parents reacted in a different way: even though life for them had become a lot more stable and comfortable by the time they had settled down to have children, that sense of peril never left them but it merely translated into a lack of confidence in the future. So if their children were not scoring full marks in the tests and exams at school, they would worry that it was a sign that we were lazy or stupid and they had to leap into action to punish us for our mistakes (often with a severe beating), to make sure that we never ever made the same mistakes again. If this sounds harsh, then well, yes it is. But allow me to share a story from my mother's childhood - the kids in her school were mostly malnourished and very thin, so one day a teacher took pity on my mother because she wasn't just extremely thin, she looked sick. The teacher had a bun for her lunch but gave the bun to my mother: my mother was very grateful of course as she wasn't expecting that gift of food but her hands looked dirty and the teacher did the sensible thing any teacher would have done. She told my mother to wash her hands before eating the bun. So my mother put the bun done on the desk whilst she ran to the toilet to wash her hands - she must have been in the toilet for little less than 30 seconds, but when she got back to the desk, the bun was gone. Someone had taken it and eaten it, which was hardly surprising given how most of the kids in that school were starving. My mother was afraid that the teacher would scold her for leaving the bun on the table, so she pretended that she ate the bun and didn't dare to tell the teacher what had happened. In such a harsh environment, mistakes like that did have grave consequences - it was the difference between filling your stomach and going hungry.

So from a young age, bad experiences like that have left my mother always looking over her shoulder, worried about the future and unable to trust people around her - the cumulative effect of this was to leave her with very little self-confidence and low self-esteem. Her survival instincts took over and there was no room for fun and certainly no concept of doing things just because they bring you joy. From tender age, my mother spent every waking moment doing something useful - be it helping to take care of her younger siblings, helping her mother cook or doing other kinds of housework. She barely had the concept of playing as a child as there was simply no time for it - being playful was seen as bad behaviour because you're wasting all that energy doing something seemingly unproductive when all that energy could be spent on doing something productive like studying or pragmatic like housework. That's why my parents never saw the point of me doing something like sports because it was not part of my exams at school - the only joy they thought that children had the right to experience was the joy they would earn when they perform very well in their exams, apart from that, any other kind of joy derived from play time was hedonistic and unproductive; that kind of joy was forbidden. For my parents, the concept of happiness is so tightly locked into knowing you have enough to eat, that you will be able to get a job to earn enough money so you will never go hungry the way my mother did when someone stole the bun she was given in school.

When I give you the background of the kind of horrific hardships that my parents had to endure when they were children, it does help us to understand their mindset - we would only see that level of hardship and suffering in the refugee camps of war zones today but back then, it was pretty common to be so poor you had one meal a day. The problem is that my parents applied that kind of war-zone survival mentality to my upbringing, even though it was the 1990s and we were living in one of the world's richest countries - never mind not having enough to eat, Singapore had the opposite problem: an obesity epidemic. In fact, I have described this in detail in my analysis of the working class with money, for people like my parents, even if they do become financially comfortable enough, even if they do live in a nice house, even if they have plenty of money in the bank, they will still behave as if they don't know where their next meal is coming from and that motivation influenced a lot of the decisions they make when it came to parenting. To put it mildly, it was inappropriate - we were not in a refugee camp or living in a war zone, they didn't need to behave that way as there was no real benefit and it did do a lot of harm by depriving me of doing something that genuinely brought me joy. Even if you were to leave aside any of the other benefits that excelling in sports may bring to a young person, at a very basic level, it just made me happy doing gymnastics but my parents just couldn't understand why it was so important for me to be happy as it was a luxury they never had in their own very difficult childhoods. This is reflected in the fact that neither of my parents have any hobbies - they don't understand the concept of doing something for fun (even if they now have the time and money).

It isn't hard to see where they got this mindset from - after all, I did mention that my grandfather was a manual labourer who literally worked himself to death trying to feed his family. He was paid a pittance doing backbreaking hard labour and even when he was in ill health, he had little choice but to keep working in those days or his family would starve to death. That was why the moment my grandfather came home from work, everyone in the family fell silent - he was given food and water, then he would quickly go to sleep as he was exhausted from the hard work. Nobody would dare to disturb his rest as it was vital that he got enough sleep in order to get up the next day to go to work, or they would starve. So by that token, my grandfather never ever took time out to play with my mother or did fun things with her for no other reason than to bring her joy - he (barely) kept her alive by working himself to death. Even though the conditions in Singapore in the 1980s and 1990s were vastly different compared to the 1940s and 1950s, my parents still couldn't change the mindset that they had grown up with. So when my parents didn't want me to do gymnastics, it was not that they even considered what it was like to work as a gymnastics coach, if I would be happy if I led a life like Warren's - it was far more about excluding the unnecessary activities in our lives that we did for fun and simply focusing on the work we had to do; for me as a student back then, my parents expected me to basically study, eat and sleep but not waste time playing or trying to find happiness. I could tell you all this in hindsight, but back then it was extremely frustrating trying to reason with them.

So there you go, that's it from me on this topic. Do most Asian parents have a point when it comes to steering their children towards careers that will be more lucrative? Or are too many of them tainted by the mindset of the working class with money? How much of a role should parents play when it comes to their children choosing a career path then? If you are a parent, would you stop your child going down a career path that is not very well paid? What about the function of happiness in your life then - what role does it play for you? Do leave a comment below please, many thanks for reading.