Hi friends,
As of 29 January, I am now voluntarily unemployed for the first time in the last 6 years!
The strangeness of the occasion has not fully hit yet, but I’m sure it will sink in once it hits Monday and I don’t need to go to the office or log in for our daily sync up call.
But why quit a stable job in the middle of a pandemic and recession?
When you’re one of the first few hires at a high growth startup, you start off doing everything. It’s scrappy, fast-paced and energetic. You get lots of opportunities to expand on your skillset when you establish structures and build things that didn’t exist before with a team that’s fully committed to the cause.
But fast-forward three years later, my day-to-day became less creating and building, more processes, administration and stakeholder management. Besides the joy of nurturing my junior team members and direct reports, work became a slog.
Plus, 2020 was a year like no other. It was a year that compressed 12 months into 48. I was drained, depleted and exhausted, horrible to be around.
Come 2021, I had a decision to make. It was either choosing to continue on a path well-travelled while maintaining status quo and incremental growth at this blistering-fast pace striving for even-higher revenue targets, or step off this rocket ship for a change in direction and break. To follow that instinctive feeling and desire to create, or stick with stability?
There’s this quote I’m thinking about:
“Near the end of your days, when you’re 80, will your life be measured in the regrets you didn’t have the courage to act upon, or of the mistakes you had the courage to make? Will your life be driven by the fears of potential regrets or the fear of potential mistakes?”
For years my happy place was envisioning myself on top of a snow-capped mountain, vast and full of empty space.
Artist: Ryo Takemasa
I had all these projects and essays that sat untouched in the dusty corners of my brain - all because of the lack of brain space or physical time to properly commit to them. I wanted empty space. To try out new cooking recipes or finally organise my digital brain. To take trains from one end to the other end of the country with book in hand and Hammock playing in my earbuds.
What comes next, we’ll see. But I am at peace. It feels like a huge weight lifted from my shoulders. And that’s how I knew it was the right decision to make.
🆕 What’s new:
Continuing on the #Ship30for30 writing challenge: I’ve been mostly consistent except missing one day since life happened. But I’m pleased with the output. The rapid flurry of idea generation has laid a fantastic foundation for me to explore further in longer-form essays.
Decolonise your mind with Raffles Renounced:A critical examination of essays published by Ethos Books centred around Singapore’s perplexing relationship with our colonial past. Why do we celebrate an obvious act of imperialism clearly setting us as second-class citizens? Be ready with notebook and pen, this is a dense read.
💡 Awesome things I learned this week:
A beautiful ode to online newsletters and publishing by Robin Rendel. Robin reflects on the personal, quirky nature of email newsletters, while lamenting the Internet’s lack of accessibility for creatives. I especially love the slide, visual nature of this essay.
How much should hawker food cost in Singapore? This well-researched articles with numbers and statistics poke at one thing I’ve never really grasped about Singapore hawker culture. How do we claim Singapore hawker food as heritage yet balk at paying more than $4 a plate? How long will our hawker heritage continue if they can’t survive with Singapore’s high cost of living?
Also related: A history of Singapore’s hawker culture
Measure what matters: This essay spoke to my conflict as a marketing professional and a creator. Should you optimise for your analytics or not? But optimising for analytics goes into “growth-hacking” territory. A great way to think about reconciling the two disparate schools of thought.
📚 Resources for you to think and create better
Salt Sear Savour: A newsletter dedicated to the fundamentals of good cooking. Curated by Luciano. I love this as Luciano’s love for cooking shines through in his issues. He strikes a balance between scientific rigour and keeping issues accessible, There’s science-based explanations to why you should rest your meat after cooking to the best ways to cook an egg. Home cooks will find this useful.
Wordtune: A free Chrome extension helping you edit your sentences and polish your words.
Five Ideas A Day: Awesome Twitter account dispensing ideas. How this guy comes up with so many ideas for such a long time is a mystery. Reading this puts me in the “anything is possible” mentality
🧠 Brain breaks
Window swap: Ever wondered how neighbourhoods around the world look and sound like? Travel without moving with this little warm corner of the Internet
Fascinating and untranslatable words: I thought of Singlish; our unique colloquial language that peppers conversations here in Singapore. As universal as English is, there’s sentiments and feelings that cannot be explained in English
Seed: A community dedicated to celebrating storytelling. Three people are selected to interpret a story in a single image in less than 100 words. Think of this as creative escapism.
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