I paused for a long time. My short answer: don’t have.

I have 4.

Singapore’s TFR is now 0.87. I am, statistically, a freak. Not enough of us to move the needle, clearly.

The reason I have 4 is genuinely stupid. I have an older sister I’m not on talking terms with. When we only had 2 kids, I was scared they’d turn out like that. So the solution, obviously, was to have more. We stopped at 4.

Very sound logic.

And it was great when they were young, oblivious, and fun. But they grow up. They go to school. Some struggle academically. And I’m already getting ahead of myself because I’m one of the lucky ones since my kids came out healthy. I have friends whose kids didn’t, and that threw a spanner into their lives that never fully comes out.

Then there’s the kiasuism. I have a friend, hipster at heart, the kind of guy who goes diving in South Africa and cooks his own food on weekends. I always thought he’d be chill about his kid’s academics. His P6 boy now has tuition for every subject, and he’s already mapped out every possible DSA pathway just in case.

He went through a lousy school and turned out fine. I went to a not-bad school and wrecked it academically. I turned out fine. And yet when my eldest was in P6, I did the exact same tuition-for-everything thing.

Plot twist: it did nothing. He ended up in a neighbourhood school, which made him better.

Teo You Yenn said on The Financial Coconut that autonomy is a myth. You think you’re making free choices until you don’t get paid for 3 months. Then see what your choices look like.

So we overcompensate. We keep inching forward, chasing goalposts we can’t see clearly, or that might not exist. On this small, claustrophobic island where you can’t not compare, social media makes it worse. Every new Swatch, every travel vlog, every minimalist HDB reno that is 100% not kid-friendly. It’s easy to look at what children cost and feel the pull backwards.

And they do cost. StanChart estimates raising a child from 0 to 18 runs between S$280,000 and S$560,000 for a middle-income household. That’s your CPF Retirement Account minimum sum, evaporated. And if you still harbour thoughts that your kids will take care of you in old age out of filial piety, here is a slap to wake you up.

So I’m not optimistic about whatever the new government family workgroup will be producing. These things tend to land somewhere around “4.5 months maternity leave instead of 4.” Tactical tweaks. It’s like putting up corner mirrors and widening the footpath to stop PMD accidents when the real answer is just to ban them.

Having 4 kids and having chased the 5Cs that my government used to actively sell me until they quietly stopped, my finances are a mess. Being self-employed makes it worse, especially now with my client base heavy in tech. On the hard days, I think about how much simpler my life would be without them. Logically, financially, pragmatically. I can do that math easily.

My youngest saved my number as Best Daddy Ever. She’s since updated it to Farter Father, which is honestly more accurate.

I ferry them to their outings and watch them having fun. When my eldest made it through secondary school and came out with real options, I felt something I didn’t have a word for. My favourite thing right now is watching all 4 of them in a room together, just playing.

Warm. Full.

I didn’t put those words in the first half of this piece. They don’t show up in a spreadsheet. I don’t know how you buy them any other way.

That content creator is probably still waiting for a proper answer.

The honest one is: don’t have.

The other honest one is: I’d do it again. All 4.

I’ve been sitting with both of those for a while now. Still can’t pick one.

Not 4 close friends. 4 friends, full stop. And I’m being generous with one of them.

My definition is strict. A friend is someone who can hear the ugly, unedited version of your life and not flinch. Someone who doesn’t immediately try to fix you, reframe you, or pivot to their own story. Someone you can sit with and do absolutely nothing (no agenda, no occasion, no reason) and that’s enough.

And when they need the same from you, you show up without being asked. No questions, no conditions. You just show up.

A psychiatrist, but cheaper and with better drinks. Except this one you’d take a bullet for, too.

By that definition: 4. Maybe 3.5.

I also have 48,000 followers on LinkedIn.

Make of that what you will.

I learned what friendship actually is by losing it completely.

This was back in secondary school. A good friend decided, after a misunderstanding involving his ex-girlfriend, that I needed to be cancelled. He was thorough. One by one, the entire cohort stopped talking to me. For the better part of a year, I ate lunch alone every single day.

I told myself it recalibrated me. Made me tougher, more unfiltered, less dependent on approval. And maybe some of that is true. But the more honest version is that I built walls and called it character.

I only figured out how much it had actually cost me years later. I was at my kids’ art class, waiting at the holding area the way parents do, killing time by writing. I’ve been working on a book for them — something to leave behind, in case. My father died early. I don’t want them to have nothing if the same happens to me.

I got to the part about secondary school. And I just started crying. Not a quiet tear. The kind you feel in your chest before it reaches your face. I was sitting there trying to hide it from the other parents, pretending it was a running nose. I think even the blind could tell.

Thirty years. That’s how long it took for that lunch table to catch up with me.

Think of friendship as a long game of tennis. Two players. The ball goes back and forth at varying pace, varying intensity, but it always goes back and forth. That’s the whole point.

Most people, I’ve discovered, don’t want to play tennis. They want an audience.

And we’re apparently terrible at admitting it. An IPS poll found that young Singaporeans aged 21 to 34 reported the highest levels of social isolation and loneliness, and more than half felt anxious about talking to people in person, finding it easier to communicate online. We live in one of the most densely packed cities on earth. And we are lonely.

Turns out, 6 million people on a tiny island doesn’t actually solve anything.

Importantly, many people don’t really know how to be friends. Here’s what they actually are when some cosplay to be my friend.

The Ego Caddy. Every conversation circles back to their latest win. The new car, the promotion, the deal they just closed. Did you hear about the deal? I’ve sat across from people and felt genuinely relieved when they finally asked me something. Then the moment I paused to breathe, they were off again.

The Emotional ATM. Available whenever they need to withdraw. Gone the moment you show up at the counter. You’ve listened to their 2am spiral about their boss, their relationship, their existential dread - multiple times, no complaints. Then one day you need to unload something. Read receipt. Three days of silence. Then a meme.

The “Content” Creator. They come close fast. Ask the right questions, remember details, and make you feel genuinely seen. Then your darkest Tuesday ends up as their next “here’s what I learned about resilience” post. You weren’t a friend. You were a case study.

The Timed Reach-Out. You haven’t heard from someone in two years. Suddenly, they’re in your DMs asking how you’ve been. Between “how are you” and “actually, I wanted to share this incredible opportunity” is a very short distance. Either they’ve joined an MLM, started selling insurance, or found God. Sometimes all three simultaneously.

The 3.5 I’ve kept shares one quality. They don’t perform. They show up messy, let me do the same, and nobody keeps score.

That’s it. That’s the whole criterion.

48,000 followers. 3.5 friends. What do I know?

But I’ll tell you what I do know. I know exactly who shouldn’t be on that list.

He wants out and to do something on his own. The usual story.

Except I’ve been hearing this a lot lately. Another guy, also 40s, says he wants to quit because of elder care responsibilities. The ideas he’s pitching, though, are all service businesses that’ll eat his time whole. I didn’t say anything. But the math doesn’t add up.

And then there’s someone I spoke with recently, a CFO at a large company (she’d kill me if I named it). By any measure, she made it. Corner office, the title, the pay. And she’s phoning it in. Has been for a while. All the restructuring, the constant changes, the new priorities that replace last quarter’s new priorities. She stopped going above and beyond sometime last year. Maybe the year before. She can’t quite remember when.

Three people. Different industries, different levels, same quiet misery.

I know that misery. I spent years in it.

I’ve been independent for a while now. Fractional work, writing, building things on my own terms. And when I sat across from these people, I did feel relief. Genuine relief.

But I’d be lying if I stopped there.

Because when a client calls timeout. When a retainer doesn’t renew. When the months where the stars just don’t align stretch longer than you planned for, I would look at the corporate cage and think: at least the aircon is good.

That is truly the part nobody puts in the “I quit my job and never looked back” posts.

Now, here’s what I think is actually happening with my 3 friends.

They’re not burned out, exactly. Burnout implies you ran hard and hit a wall. These people stopped running. They’re still showing up, still collecting the salary, still attending the meetings. But something quietly switched off. The CFO isn’t lazy. The furniture guy isn’t unambitious. They’ve just outgrown the story they told themselves about what the job was supposed to mean. And they haven’t found a replacement story yet.

So they dress it up. Elder care. Company changes. Wanting something different. All true, probably. But also covers for something harder to say out loud: I don’t know what I’m doing this for anymore.

The cage doesn’t feel like a cage when you first get in. It feels like stability. Structure. A reason to show up that someone else hands you every morning, already formatted, with clear KPIs.

That part is genuinely comfortable and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

What independence actually costs is the removal of that comfort. Every month is a negotiation with uncertainty. Some months the stars align. Some months you’re refreshing your inbox and wondering if you made a catastrophic mistake around 47 years old.

The people still inside aren’t stupid for staying. They’re paying a price. So am I. Just different prices.

Predictable misery versus unpredictable uncertainty. If you’re honest about it, most people will take the predictable version every single time. At least you know what’s coming.

I think about this whenever the temptation gets loud. Which it does and more than I’d like to admit.

The furniture guy will probably stay another 2 years. The elder care guy will probably not quit. The CFO will probably ride it out until a package comes along.

And me? I’ll probably stay independent.

Because on the days when the stars do align, no pay cheque has ever felt like that.

AGMs. Boomers in collared shirts, arriving early, loading plates from the buffet before the meeting starts. Fully focused. Extremely motivated. Zero ambivalence about what they came for.

That is hunger.

So when Shulin Lee, a recruiter and founder of Aslant Legal, appeared on a CNA podcast to say that Singaporeans are being replaced because foreigners are hungrier - I had some thoughts.

I ran a recruitment agency once. The people who walked through my door fell into two buckets.

Bucket one: people I had to hunt down, woo, and convince to even consider a coffee meeting. These were the ones my clients actually wanted. The best ones don’t come to you. You go to them. And if they don’t return your calls, you’ll never know they exist.

Bucket two: everyone else.

If you spend long enough talking to bucket two, you start to think the whole sea is full of the same fish. It’s a sampling problem. The recruiter’s view of the talent market is, almost by design, skewed toward people who need help. So when a recruiter tells you what Singaporeans are like, please take it with a grain of salt. They are describing the subset they actually see.

But let’s say we accept the hunger framing. Let’s go there.

Hunger is not a personality trait. It’s a function of whether effort maps to outcome.

My first HDB in Tampines: $275k before grants. My first car: $68k all in. Was I hungry? Sibei hungry. Because the finish line was visible. I could see it, calculate it, sprint toward it.

Today’s fresh grad starts at maybe $3,500 to $4,000 - call it double what my cohort made. That same HDB is $500k to $700k on the resale market. Not double. Triple, minimum. Salary grew arithmetically. Housing grew geometrically. The ratio has completely flipped.

If I run as fast as I can and the finish line keeps moving, I don’t become less hungry. I become less stupid. I stop running a race designed for me to lose.

Former PM Lee called it “divine discontent”. The idea that restless, driven people will always push harder. Lovely concept. Works better when the condo at the end of the sprint doesn’t cost $1.8 million.

I hosted Gen Z on the Work It podcast. The episode was called “Generation Z Claps Back: We Are Not Strawberries.”

What struck me: they will work hard for you. They will give you a full shift. But they will not die for you because they have watched, with their own eyes, what dying for the company gets you.

Companies are now laying people off even while posting record profits. All in anticipation of AI adoption. Optimising for a future headcount before the future has even arrived. And then someone goes on a podcast to tell the people being optimised away that they need to be hungrier.

There’s a word for this. I’ll let you pick one.

What bothers me more than the claim itself is the timing. The moment someone gets far enough from the bottom, the instinct kicks in: close the door, face the room, deliver the hard truth.

I was on a panel once. A fellow panellist looked out at a room full of people who had just been retrenched (people anxiously updating CVs, attending free talks, genuinely trying) and delivered, with great conviction: “Nobody owes you a living.”

This same person had struggled to find a job after his own retrenchment. Someone had given him a hand. He remembered none of it, apparently.

Same genius: the MP’s daughter who wrote: “Get out of my elitist, uncaring face.” Different era, identical move. The further some people get from the bottom, the faster they want to close the door behind them.

Chris Kuan noted on Facebook that Shulin seemed surprised that the reaction was brutal. You waved a red flag in front of a bull, then acted shocked when it charged. Haha.

I may be biased, of course.

I need young people to be okay, financially, emotionally, and physically, because someone has to finance my diaper change when I’m old. So I am, structurally, always on their side.

If you’re young and reading this: stay hungry. Just maybe not for the AGM buffet. That’s already taken.

Two rejections that, in the moment, probably felt like the full stop on a career that hadn’t really started.

Kevin Hart talked about this on his new reality show, Funny AF. He’s looking for the next big comedian — and somewhere between auditions, he gets into the things that didn’t happen to him.

Except they quietly did something else. Missing SNL meant he never got locked into that orbit. Soul Plane flopping meant he had to find other rooms, other producers, other writers. He ended up somewhere he wouldn’t have looked for if things had gone to plan.

He’s now one of the highest-paid entertainers alive.

There’s a Princeton professor named Johannes Haushofer who made a list of everything that didn’t happen to him. Every rejection letter. Every application that went nowhere. Every program that said no.

He put it on the internet.

It went viral. Which is maybe the most Princeton thing that could happen — your failure CV outperforms your actual CV.

His explanation was simple: most of what he tried failed, but the failures were invisible while the successes were visible. So everyone looking from the outside assumed things just worked out for him. They’d compare his highlight reel to their own blooper reel and wonder what was wrong with them.

Nothing was wrong with them. The blooper reel is just the part nobody posts.

I have my own list.

Didn’t get promoted to Sec 4. Repeated Sec 3. Didn’t get into polytechnic. First business — built it, ran it, didn’t cash out when I should have. Then the GM role at Hired.com. Went through the whole interview process, thought I was the obvious fit, didn’t get it.

Each one stung the way only rejection can sting. The kind where you replay the what-ifs for longer than you’d like to admit.

But the Sec 3 repeat put me in a different cohort, which rewired how I thought about timelines. Not getting into poly forced a path I wouldn’t have taken voluntarily. The business that didn’t pay out taught me things no clean exit would have. And the Hired.com role I didn’t get? I eventually stopped trying to climb someone else’s ladder entirely.

I can’t tell you I knew any of this at the time. I didn’t.

The problem is we’re all keeping 2 CVs. One we show people. One we bury. The visible one has the wins, the promotions, the things that worked out. The hidden one has everything that actually got us here.

Haushofer made his hidden one public. Hart turned his into material.

In Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos told Loki that failure isn’t experience. Loki disagreed. “I consider experience, experience.”

Hard to argue with a god of mischief.

The things that didn’t happen weren’t detours. They were the route.

If you prefer, here is the written summary:

So a couple of weeks back, I published an article on Channel News Asia about fractional work, and it opened a floodgate of inquiries. I’ve received numerous questions via LinkedIn and even had face-to-face meetings about it. This prompted me to think: why keep repeating myself when I can just create a comprehensive resource? And that’s how this blog post came about.

Introduction to Fractional Work

Fractional work might sound new to some, so let’s first clarify what it entails. Think of it as part-time work within an organization, but at a more senior level. It’s different from being a consultant because a fractional professional isn’t just advising; they’re rolling up their sleeves and doing the work. This approach often includes reduced hours, making it distinct from typical full-time roles.

Financial Viability of Fractional Work

One of the biggest questions I’ve received is about the financial sustainability of fractional work. Can it work financially? The answer is yes, but with caveats. My earnings in this field have fluctuated, sometimes dramatically. It’s crucial to be prepared for periods of instability, where assignments might end sooner than expected. Retainer agreements help provide some stability, but the market dictates that you remain ever-vigilant and hunt for new opportunities.

Handling Dry Spells

Dry spells are a reality in fractional work. Personally, I diversify my income sources. Besides fractional assignments, I engage in project work, content creation, co-hosting podcasts, and even enjoy some royalties from my book. Leveraging personal branding has been pivotal in my success, helping me build pipelines of assignments and opportunities rapidly.

Networking and Setting Up Shop

Is a big network a prerequisite for success in fractional work? A substantial network helps, but isn’t mandatory. Various directories and communities, such as Portfolio Career Asia, support executives in finding opportunities and learning more about this career path.

Whether you need to set up a company or can operate as an individual depends on client preferences. I chose to incorporate a private limited company, which I found to be a cleaner arrangement. However, there’s flexibility here based on individual circumstances.

Landing Your First Client

My first client found me after I put out a call for opportunities online. The strength of a niche focus and a strong professional reputation brought further business my way. When well-established in your area of expertise, word-of-mouth can be a powerful tool.

Choosing Independence Over Full-Time Offers

What if a client wants to convert you to a full-time role? It’s a personal choice. For me, the independence and flexibility offered by fractional work outweigh the security of a full-time position. It allows me to explore different opportunities freely, maintaining a diverse and dynamic career.

Industry Suitability and Retirement

Not all industries are receptive to fractional work. Founder-led businesses or those setting up shop in new locations, like Singapore, tend to be more open. It’s essential to find industries where your expertise gives you a competitive edge.

As for retirement, fractional work is less about planning an exit and more about lifestyle. It prioritises time and personal growth over relentless career ambition, a choice that aligns with my middle-aged priorities.

Pricing Yourself

Pricing in fractional work isn’t straightforward due to the lack of standard benchmarks. Initially, I based my rates on market rates for full-time roles and adjusted based on demand. It’s about finding a balance between supply, demand, and your unique expertise.

I hope this blog post answers some of the burning questions about fractional work. If there’s more you’d like to know, feel free to ask in the comments. Thank you!

One week, a new engagement initiative. The next, a community survey. The week after, a cross-functional taskforce. Each one landed with its own KPI attached, like a gift nobody asked for but everyone had to sign for.

By month three, my logical brain started asking the question nobody wanted to answer: where do you find the space to add new things if there are none to minus?

Silence. Next slide. Moving on.

This is the corporate default setting. And if you’ve ever watched a kiasu Singaporean approach a buffet line, you already understand the physics. One plate. Infinite ambition. Chye sim at the base. Curry chicken on top. Sushi balanced against the salmon. A prawn somewhere in the middle doing structural work. The plate is now an engineering marvel. Nobel-prize-worthy, really.

Two things tend to happen next.

One, you cannot finish. You pay the penalty and pretend the extra rice was for your friend.

Two, one small sneeze and you are witnessing food avalanche in real time.

The corporate version of this is your Google Calendar. Knowledge workers today take pride in showing you how tight their week is. Back-to-back meetings. Double-booked slots. The occasional triple booking that they mention with a sigh, as if it is a burden, when really it is a flex. Busyness equals productivity, right? At least that’s the theatrical version.

Contrast this with what Warren Buffett once told Bill Gates. Buffett pulled out his diary. It was mostly empty. He said his best days are the ones where nothing is scheduled. Somehow the wisdom of the Oracle of Omaha escapes the rest of us, who keep treating a blank Tuesday like a personal failing.

Closer to home, look at parliament. Every year, a fresh round of schemes, grants, and initiatives. Bold names. Optimistic acronyms. What happened to the old ones? Did we take them away? Did they work? Did they not work? We don’t really know. They’re just under the rug. And the rug now needs new stuff on top of it, to keep the old stuff from showing.

Which brings me to the part that genuinely surprised me.

There is actual science on this. In 2021, researchers at the University of Virginia ran a series of experiments, published in Nature, on how people try to improve things. They gave participants a Lego structure that needed to hold a brick above a stormtrooper figurine’s head. Each Lego piece added costs ten cents. The cleanest fix was to remove one block. Most people added instead.

The researchers concluded that people “rarely look at a situation, object or idea that needs improving and think to remove something as a solution. Instead, we almost always add some element, whether it helps or not.” They went further, linking this bias directly to overwhelming schedules and institutions bogged down in proliferating red tape.

In other words: it is not just your CEO. It is your brain. Additive ideas come to mind quickly. Subtractive ones require cognitive effort. We default to stacking the plate because stacking the plate is easier than thinking.

And once you see the pattern, it’s everywhere.

The gym-goer who keeps adding supplements but refuses to cut the late-night supper. The company that launches a wellness programme while the same leaders send emails at 11pm. The condo that adds a new facility — a pickleball court, a co-working lounge, a wine cellar — every time the MCST meets, and somehow the monthly fees go up but the lifts still break down. The parent who signs the child up for another enrichment class while the homework from the last one sits untouched.

The honest fix in all of these is a subtraction. The instinct is always an addition. Because the addition feels like action. The subtraction feels like admitting the last addition didn’t work.

So here is what I’ve been trying lately. Before adding anything new — a project, a subscription, a meeting, a WhatsApp group, a fourth streaming service I forgot I was paying for — I ask what comes off the plate to make room. Not in a Marie Kondo way. Just a small accounting question. If nothing comes off, the new thing probably isn’t as essential as it felt thirty seconds ago.

Most weeks, the honest answer is that nothing needs to go on. The plate was fine. I just wanted to feel like I was doing something.

My old CEO probably wanted the same thing. Somewhere on his calendar, in a recurring Monday slot, was a meeting called Management Sync. I wonder, sometimes, what would have happened if one week he just cancelled it.

No replacement. No rescheduling. Just an empty hour returned to every person in that room.

Probably would have been the best KPI he ever set.

It was instinct, really. One Tampines Hub, need a spot, Starbucks is right there. Shao Chun replied that the hawker centre would do fine.

That $6 latte I didn’t buy tells you everything you need to know about Shao Chun — and embarrassingly, everything you need to know about me.

Shao is hard to miss. Put him in the right robe, and you could genuinely mistake him for a Shaolin monk who got lost on the way to the temple. The bald head is real. The demeanour — unhurried, bright, like someone who has stopped checking his phone for notifications that don’t matter — is also real.

His CV reads like a millennial highlight reel. NTU banking degree, 2010. Equity analyst at Merrill Lynch. Then JPMorgan. Then the pivot to tech — LinkedIn, and eventually Google, where he stayed for nearly eight years before a round of layoffs made the decision for him.

Most people in that situation would have panicked. Shao moved to Chiang Mai.

His wife is Thai. (I told him that a foreign spouse is a Singaporean’s best retirement plan. He agreed without hesitation.) The cost of living is a fraction of Singapore’s. He makes YouTube videos for his channel, 9to5millionairemindset, at a pace of about one a month. He has around 20,000 subscribers — which, if you know how YouTube economics work, is a long way from stable income.

But here’s the thing about income. It’s not just what comes in. It’s what comes in minus what goes out.

And Shao has engineered the “what goes out” side of that equation with the kind of precision he probably once applied to equity research.

His friends tell him he doesn’t need to be so frugal. He could make more videos, build the channel faster, ramp up income to match his old lifestyle.

He told me this and I waited for him to say he was considering it.

He wasn’t.

We ended up on the businessman and the fisherman — you’ve probably heard some version of it. Businessman meets a fisherman on the beach, catches enough fish each day to feed his family, spends the rest of his time napping and playing with his kids. Businessman tells him he should scale up, build a fleet, IPO the operation, and then — only then — he’d be able to relax on the beach.

Fisherman asks: what do you think I’m doing right now?

Shao is already the fisherman. The beach is Chiang Mai. The fish is sufficient. Why would he go one big round just to end up exactly where he already is?

I had no answer for him. I still don’t.

A few days after we met, a friend messaged me on Instagram. How’s family, how’s work?

Family is great, I replied. Work… is work.

And that’s the honest version. No matter how you frame it — fractional, gig, part-time, portfolio career, whatever language makes it sound like a choice — work has a way of being annoying. It follows you. It has opinions about your calendar. It exists, with needs, on days when you’d rather it didn’t.

I want to retire by 55. I don’t know exactly what that looks like — some version of enough, I think, where work becomes optional rather than load-bearing.

But I also have four kids. Shao’s equation works because he built it to work — fewer obligations, lower overheads, deliberate choices about what he actually needs versus what he’d been conditioned to want.

I haven’t made those choices yet. I still suggested Starbucks.

Frugality, I think, is not really about money. It’s about figuring out the smallest number of things you actually need to be fine — and then protecting that number from everything that wants to inflate it.

Shao looks like a monk because he’s done the accounting. Not of his bank balance. Of his actual life.

The hawker coffee was $1.20. It was fine. It was, genuinely, fine.

I think about that more than I expected to.

No longer workplace jargon, the rise of fractional work reflects an evolution in how white-collar workers earn a living.

In Singapore, the number of LinkedIn profiles containing “fractional” in their job description has surged past 1,000. Specialised directories like The Fractional Directory have popped up to connect these high-level talents with a hungry market.

Even the government has signalled that this isn’t a passing fad. In 2025, Workforce Singapore launched pilot programmes specifically designed to match start-ups with seasoned experts in HR, finance, and operations. But is fractional work just a corporate fad, or is it something deeper?

DIFFERENT FROM FREELANCE OR PART-TIME

It took me two years of living the fractional life before I even knew the term existed. When I started in early 2022, I called myself a “Part-Time CMO.” It sounded practical, but it didn’t quite capture the weight of my responsibilities.

It took a client to point out that what I was doing was fractional work. I swiftly updated my LinkedIn headline while we were still on the Zoom call.

While “fractional” certainly sounds sexier than “part-time” or “freelance”, there is a structural difference. Fractional work isn’t just about the hours; it’s about the nature of the relationship.

If you hire a freelance graphic designer on Fiverr, you are buying a specific output, such as a logo, banner or deck. In a fractional arrangement, you aren’t an extra pair of hands for a one-off project. You are a supplier of high-level strategy, embedded in the senior management team. Beyond doing the work, you own the outcome.

There are several reasons for the rise of fractional work. The COVID-19 pandemic was the catalyst, breaking the psychological barrier that workers must be seen in an office from 9 to 6.

Once companies realised their people could work effectively via Zoom and Slack, the geographical and temporal chains were broken. And let’s be honest: C-Suites do not “strategise” for eight hours straight. Most of their time is swallowed by board meetings and office theatrics, so less time does not mean fewer outcomes.

Then there is the economic pressure. Payroll is typically the heaviest burden on any ledger. Amid the economic uncertainty of 2026, companies are prioritising short-term agility. They need a heavy-hitting chief financial officer to guide them through a Series B or a merger, but they may not have the US$300,000 annual budget for a full-time hire.

But for me and many others, the driver is personal. As I age, my inability to tolerate corporate politics has grown. I’ve spoken to peers, such as a CFO at a major Southeast Asian media company, who are similarly jaded. They are tired of the constant reorganisations and the fear that their job is a line item waiting to be deleted. Under a fractional model, we can contribute our best work without the emotional tax of office politics.

PRICE AND ACCESS

For businesses, the value proposition of fractional workers comes down to price and access. Asking a start-up to hire a 20-year veteran on a full-time basis is usually impossible. But they can “buy” 20 per cent of that person’s brain. They will also be able to tap into the fractional worker’s network, which can be more valuable than their actual hours.

One question I get is how fractional workers can be C-suite executives for three different companies at once. In 2022, the answer was “very little sleep.” In 2026, the answer is artificial intelligence.

AI is the silent engine behind the fractional boom. It can handle the heavy lifting of data processing and drafting, which are the time-consuming parts of any executive role.

For instance, when I’m acting as a fractional CMO, I use AI to synthesise months of customer interview transcripts, or to build complex market simulations that used to take a week of manual spreadsheet grinding. This leaves me more time to do what the client actually pays for: high-level judgment, cultural navigation and relationship building.

Fractional work is going mainstream – it is now a searchable job type on platforms like Indeed and LinkedIn. Barring a global financial collapse, the costs of rental and full-time payroll will only continue to rise. Fractional work is simply the professionalisation of the gig economy for the C-suite.

My take? It’s not a fad. It’s the future of how expertise is traded.

This article is originally published on CNA. You can find other articles I’d written for them here.

On collection day, he was still going. Still singing the car’s praises as he drove me over to pick it up. At some point, I turned and asked, almost as an afterthought: so what do you drive?

A Subaru.

The world didn’t end, exactly. But something shifted. Not because he’d lied since he hadn’t. He was probably a perfectly good salesperson doing his job with genuine enthusiasm. But there’s something about that moment that lodges in you. If the car is this good, why isn’t it good enough for you?

The Verna, as it turned out, was not great. The fuel efficiency was poor — I was at the petrol station embarrassingly often. The pickup was weak, especially going uphill. It spent more time at the workshop than I’d like to admit. Eventually, the car and I parted ways. I don’t miss it.

But I’ve thought about that moment many times since. Because I keep seeing the same thing play out, just at a much larger scale.

The pattern has a name.

Researchers call it the “say-do gap”: the well-documented disconnect between what people and organisations claim they believe and what they actually do. Studies suggest that stated preferences predict real behaviour with only about 34% accuracy. In other words, what someone tells you they’ll do is wrong two-thirds of the time.

Companies are not immune to this. In fact, they might be the worst offenders, because the stakes of the gap are higher and the audience is larger.

Take the AI industry right now.

You’re scrolling LinkedIn. The usual parade - someone just automated their entire sales pipeline with Claude, someone else dissolved their BDR team and replaced it with an AI agent, someone’s closing deals while they sleep. You’ve seen this post seventeen times this week, different avatar, same energy.

Then you check Anthropic’s careers page.

At the time of writing, Anthropic - the company whose product everyone on LinkedIn is using to replace their sales teams - has 133 open roles in their sales department. One hundred and thirty-three. Salaries ranging from $116K to $290K. Business Development Representatives, Account Executives, Growth roles. A full-scale human sales operation, being built in parallel with a product marketed as making human sales teams obsolete.

And Anthropic isn’t alone. A few months ago, Salesforce made headlines for aggressively hiring salespeople - this while actively marketing agentic AI to customers as a tool for reducing headcount in, you guessed it, sales.

We’ve seen this movie before.

There’s a concept in the tech industry called “dogfooding” — the idea that a company should use its own product internally before asking customers to rely on it. Microsoft popularised the term back in 1988. The logic is simple: if it’s good enough to sell, it should be good enough to use yourself. When companies do this, it builds credibility. When they don’t, it should raise questions.

A high school friend once tried to convince me to quit smoking. He made a pretty compelling case. He was smoking while he said it.

The crypto era is instructive here too. I know this one personally.

A friend got me into crypto around 2021. He was genuinely pumped — the kind of conviction that feels like insider knowledge when you’re on the outside of it. I trusted him. Put in $30,000. By the time the music stopped, I had $200 left. I later connected the dots: he had every incentive to bring people in. His reputation took a significant hit afterwards, and I wasn’t the only one who got burned.

I don’t think he set out to con anyone. But he was selling a story he personally stood to gain from, and I took the excitement at face value instead of asking harder questions. The loudest voices in the crypto conversation were often the ones most financially exposed to your belief in it.

Then there’s the online course industrial complex. Someone builds a modest income teaching people how to build a modest income. If the method worked as advertised, why would they bother teaching it to you? The question answers itself.

In a noisy, TLDR world, the loudest claim wins by default. Most people don’t have the time, or the incentive, to check whether the person selling the vision is actually living it. That ease is exactly what gets exploited.

So how do you tell the bluff from the real thing?

Get a little more cynical. Not paranoid butcynical. Paranoid is assuming everything is a lie. Cynical is asking, quietly, who benefits from you believing this.

A few things worth keeping in mind:

Watch what they hire, not what they announce. Press releases are marketing. Job postings are operational reality. When a company posts aggressively for roles they claim their product eliminates, that tells you where the technology actually stands. The hiring budget doesn’t lie the way the keynote does.

Are they eating their own dog food? If the AI company isn’t using AI to run its own sales pipeline, that’s worth noting. If the salesperson drives a Subaru, that’s worth noting too. Behaviour leaks out if you look closely enough. Even if there are legitimate reasons for the gap, the optics take a hit — and optics are often the point.

Who’s getting rich from the idea - and how? The crypto evangelist made money from your belief in crypto, not necessarily from crypto itself. The course seller made money from selling courses about making money. When the messenger profits more from the message than the method, slow down.

Give it time. NFTs had a very loud two years. Then the music stopped. Most hype cycles have a shelf life. The question isn’t whether something is exciting now — it’s whether the people selling it are still around in five years, building on it quietly rather than loudly.

None of this means AI isn’t genuinely transformative. It probably is, in ways we’re still figuring out. The honest version of the story - AI handles the volume, humans handle the stakes - might turn out to be exactly right.

But “might turn out to be right” is very different from the confident, frictionless certainty that fills your feed every morning. The LinkedIn version has already closed the deal, collected the commission, and is posting about it.

My Verna salesperson wasn’t dishonest. He was enthusiastic about something he had good reasons to be enthusiastic about. But he drove a Subaru home every night.

Ask people what they drive. It tells you more than the brochure ever will.

Battle of Fates is a Korean survival show where 49 fate readers — shamans, tarot readers, saju masters, face readers — compete to prove they can actually read destiny. On paper it sounds like glorified entertainment. Forty-nine mystical figures in a room, one winner. I went in half-sceptical, half-curious, the way you approach anything that sits just outside what you’re willing to believe.

What I didn’t anticipate was how human they all were. And I mean that in the heaviest sense of the word.

Every single one of them had a story. Not a fun origin story — the kind with a montage and a triumphant score. The kind you carry quietly. Grief, loss, illness, years of being misunderstood. The kind that doesn’t resolve, it just becomes part of how you move through the world.

The one that stopped me was Young Master Byeon. He started his journey at five years old. Five. We’ve all seen this archetype in other forms — the piano prodigy who was practising Chopin while other kids were watching cartoons, the chess grandmaster who never really had a childhood to speak of. We tend to celebrate these stories. But watching Byeon, the feeling I got wasn’t admiration. It was something closer to grief. Whatever opened in him at that age, he never really got to be a child after that. No clean stretch of ordinary life before the weight arrived. It just arrived early and stayed.

I sat with that for a while.

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We romanticise people like him. The gifted one, the seer, the person who can perceive what the rest of us can’t. There’s a kind of glamour to it — in movies, in folklore, even in the way we half-jokingly consult fortune tellers at Waterloo Street and then think about what they said for three days after. The gift feels powerful from the outside.

But watching these 49 people, I kept wondering: what if it’s less gift, more weight? What if the sensitivity that lets you read someone else’s fate also means you can’t quite switch off? What if the same thing that makes you perceptive also makes ordinary life feel a little harder to inhabit?

I don’t know if fate reading is real. I genuinely don’t. But I think that question might be less interesting than this one: what does it cost the person doing it?

Byeon wasn’t an exception. The more episodes I watched, the more I noticed the pattern.

There was Seolhwa, who was told she would have a short life. She knows this. She continues anyway — reading other people’s fates, showing up, doing the work — with that knowledge sitting somewhere in her. I don’t know what to do with that kind of person. I’m not sure I have the vocabulary for it. “Brave” feels too clean.

Then there were the shamans who are parents. What struck me about them wasn’t the rituals or the intensity, though there was plenty of both. It was something smaller: the fear that their children might inherit this path. They didn’t choose to become shamans — in Korean shamanic tradition, the calling chooses you, often through illness or crisis. You resist it, you suffer more. You accept it, and your life becomes something most people wouldn’t recognise as ordinary.

And these people, who have built their entire identity around this path, quietly hope their kids are spared.

If that’s not a review of the life, I don’t know what is. Nobody lies awake worrying their child will inherit something good.

Here’s what makes it complicated though.

People still seek them out. In droves. The show’s guests — celebrities, ordinary people — sit across from these fate readers and open up in ways they probably don’t with their therapists. They cry. They nod. They say how did you know that.

So there’s something being exchanged in that room, regardless of what you believe about the metaphysics of it. These wounded people, with their heavy histories, are giving something real to the people who come to them. Maybe the suffering is precisely what makes them good at it. Maybe you can only see certain things clearly if you’ve had to look at hard truths your whole life.

None of them chose this. Not Byeon at five. Not Seolhwa with her shortened timeline. Not the shamans who resisted the calling until resistance became its own kind of suffering.

But here they all are. Showing up. Reading strangers. Carrying their weight and somehow still making it useful.

And they’re not alone in that. Most people carrying a hard hand never end up on a show. They’re just out there — the single mother holding three jobs together with sheer will, the kid who grew up too fast because someone had to, the person who rebuilt quietly after losing everything. No cameras. No audience. Just the daily decision to keep going anyway.

We don’t get to choose the hand we’re dealt. Some people get a harder one than most, and no amount of positive thinking changes that. But what stays with me, watching all 49 of them, is that the hand isn’t the whole game.

You still get to decide how you play it.

If that scene made you wince a little, good. Because that instinct to immediately locate the gap instead of celebrating the ground is exactly the problem Tim Ferriss was circling in his recent piece on the self-help trap. His line hit me cold: to continually improve yourself, you must continually locate the ways you are broken. We’ve built an entire culture around doing exactly that, and we’ve gotten very good at it.

Singapore is a spectacular case study. Back in 2016, PM Lee told us to have Divine Discontent — never to be fully satisfied, to always be reaching. Noble idea. Except somewhere along the way, Divine Discontent stopped being a personal philosophy and became a national anxiety. Ministers remind us to reskill and upskill or risk irrelevance. Every other LinkedIn post screams that 90% of people are using AI completely wrong. Oh, and if you want the cheat code, just comment WOOHOO and they’ll DM you a PDF (that nobody reads past page 3).

I should know. I have a Notion page stuffed with AI prompts I’ve collected like a man preparing for an apocalypse that requires very specific text inputs. You know what that Notion page taught me? That I am an excellent collector of prompts. That’s it. That’s the whole lesson.

And here’s the phrase we’ve collectively forgotten how to say: good enough.

Not in a defeatist, give-up-and-rot sense. But in the honest, clear-eyed sense of: I am doing well. The goalpost keeps moving, and maybe I should stop chasing it. You score 100? Now you need to score 100 consistently. You graduate from a local university? Last generation, that was a golden ticket. Now you need seven internships, a specialisation, an online certification, a side hustle, and probably to make offerings at Tua Pek Kong for 49 days straight. And still, maybe, possibly, a job.

This screenshot I’ll drop here says it all. Nobody — nobody — needs anything that sophisticated. We’re solving problems we don’t have with tools we’ve barely started using.

Ferriss puts his finger on something deeper, though: the optimisation obsession starts with a foundational belief that you are broken. That the glass is perpetually half-empty when it comes to yourself. Keep seeing yourself that way long enough, and it stops being motivation — it becomes a kind of low-grade misery you’ve learned to call productivity.

Think of it this way. You finally add a car perfume to your car after years of meaning to. Does the car suddenly feel new again? For about four minutes, maybe. That 0.00001% improvement you chased didn’t change anything fundamental. But somehow we keep believing the next upgrade will be the one that finally makes us feel complete.

Most of us are, in fact, doing remarkably well given everything we’re dealing with. That deserves more than a footnote.

So what instead? Not nothing. Not abandoning growth entirely. But maybe redirecting the energy toward what actually matters — friends, family, a hobby you do just because you like it, meals you cook for someone else, conversations that don’t have a productivity angle. Anything, really, except trying the new technique that meshes Pomodoro with time-blocking while listening to a binaural beats playlist your LinkedIn connection swears by.

Life is already here. Already happening. Already, in most of the ways that count, pretty good.

The 98 marks are right in front of you.

My first thought — embarrassingly honest — was: must be nice to live in Australia.

Work-life balance. Shops that close at a reasonable hour. A culture that doesn’t celebrate staying at the office until 9 pm as a personality trait. I told myself that’s why he has time for all this, and I don’t.

Then I caught myself.

He has 24 hours a day. I also have 24 hours a day. The math is the same. The question isn’t time. It’s what fills it.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Specifically about how I spend the hours that aren’t work. The honest answer, for a long time, was: social media rabbit holes. Netflix until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. The particular exhaustion of consuming a lot while doing nothing.

Recently, I built a book nook. If you haven’t seen one: it’s a miniature diorama — in my case, a tiny Shakespeare bookshop, complete with shelves, a staircase, and a sign that reads “Welcome to My Book Store” — that sits between books on a shelf. It does nothing. It solves no problem. It cannot be monetised. I bought a kit on a whim and spent many afternoons assembling it, and somewhere around the third tiny shelf I realised I hadn’t looked at my phone once, hadn’t thought about work, hadn’t thought about much at all except whether this miniature plant was going in the right corner.

I felt better afterwards than I had in weeks.

There’s a name for this. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying what he called “flow” — the state of being fully absorbed in a task, where self-consciousness drops away and time stops registering normally. The activity has to be the right level of challenging: too easy and your mind wanders, too hard and you freeze. Building flat-pack furniture, apparently, sits right in that sweet spot for me.

The research on hobbies is more robust than you’d expect. A 2023 study published in Nature Medicine tracked over 93,000 people aged 65 and above across 16 countries for up to eight years. People with hobbies consistently reported better health, greater happiness, and fewer symptoms of depression than those without. That’s not a small convenience sample. That’s a serious longitudinal study across diverse cultures pointing in the same direction.

At the neurological level, engaging in an enjoyable hobby triggers the brain’s reward system, releasing dopamine — the chemical tied to pleasure and motivation, which then reinforces the desire to do it again. It’s one of the few legal, free ways to reliably hack your own reward circuitry.

There’s also a stress angle. One study found that roughly 75% of participants saw their cortisol levels drop after making art — even those who didn’t identify as artistic. The act of making something with your hands, it turns out, has a physiological effect that passive consumption simply doesn’t replicate.

But here’s what I find most interesting, and what I think is most relevant for people like me who have spent years optimising everything: the identity buffer argument.

When your professional identity is the only one you have, any failure at work becomes a failure of self. A bad performance review, a project that doesn’t land or a period of unemployment all start feeling like existential threats. You’ve put all your eggs in one basket.

I felt that after exiting from my recruitment business after 11 years. Without any other identity, I was thrown straight into an identity crisis which took months to get out of.

A hobby cracks that open. If you’re also someone who grows aquatic plants, or builds speaker systems, or does weekend barbecue with genuine investment, a bad week at work is still a bad week at work, but it doesn’t touch the part of you that knows how to keep a planted tank alive. Your self-concept has more surface area. It distributes the load.

One scientific review catalogued more than 600 distinct ways hobbies can benefit people — from reduced stress and improved mood to the development of creativity, resilience, and self-confidence. Six hundred!

There’s a particular trap worth naming here, especially for people with an entrepreneurial reflex: the temptation to monetise.

The moment a hobby becomes a side hustle, something changes. The thing you did because it absorbed you completely is now subject to performance metrics. Are people buying? Is the audience growing? Could this scale? The frivolousness and the uselessness were precisely what made it work. Turning it into a revenue stream strips the very quality that gave it its restorative power. And the exhaustion from managing a side hustle has a way of bleeding into everything else.

Some things are allowed to just be for you.

I know the objection. I’ve made it myself. Time is the real constraint. Between work and family and the ten thousand administrative tasks that constitute modern adult life, where exactly do the hobbies go?

But I keep coming back to my friend’s husband and his aquatic plants. He’s no less busy than me in any meaningful structural sense. He’s made a different set of choices about what the non-work hours are for. Something more like an investment in a version of himself that isn’t legible on a CV.

If you spend three hours a day on your phone — which, per most screen time reports, is a conservative estimate for a lot of us — and redirected even 15 or 20 minutes of that toward something that required your hands and your full attention, the research suggests it would matter. Not in a productivity-hack way. Not in a way that optimises your output or builds your personal brand. More quietly and durably, being good at something for no reason tends to matter.

The frivolousness is the point. That’s what makes it work.

First, you don’t retire with money—you retire with memories, and some experiences have real physical expiry dates, so postponing them can mean missing them forever.

Second, I reframe retirement planning by treating net worth peak as a date, not a number, and explain how dying with unspent money can represent thousands of hours worked for nothing, while the fear of running out is often bigger than the math.

Third, I walk through Perkins’ “time bucketing” exercise—mapping life in five-year blocks and assigning goals to realistic windows—plus my own buckets for travel, family, and work changes, to stop drifting and start choosing intentionally.

00:00 Munger’s Wish for Time
00:27 Book That Changed Me
01:05 Retire With Memories
02:06 Experiences Expire
03:19 Peak Net Worth Date
04:11 Fear of Running Out
05:09 Time Bucketing Method
06:16 My Time Buckets
07:07 Bucket List vs Buckets
07:54 Closing Takeaways

Charlie Munger, at one of his final birthdays, was asked what he wished for. His answer: to be 83 again.

Here was one of the wealthiest, sharpest minds alive — a man who could literally buy almost anything — and his greatest wish was simply more time. Not more money. Not more status. Time.

That’s the cruellest joke of life. You can compound your wealth. You cannot compound your years.

Sit with that for a moment. I’ll wait. (Unlike time, which will not.)

We All Live Like We’re Immortal

For the longest time, I was firmly in this camp.

Save more. Spend less. Delay gratification. Retire comfortably. Die... having done what, exactly?

Confronting your mortality is deeply uncomfortable. Almost as uncomfortable as discussing finances with your spouse — and if you’ve attempted that conversation, you know exactly the specific silence I’m describing. But Die with Zero by Bill Perkins forced me to do both, and I’m genuinely glad it did.

(My wife is also glad. Mostly because it means I’ve stopped judging her Grab Food orders as “unnecessary spending.”)

Three chapters left a deep impression on me. I’ll save my favourite for last, so stay with me.

CHAPTER 1: We Don’t Retire with Money. We Retire with Memories.

When we’re on our deathbed, the account balance is meaningless. The memories are all that remain.

One of my most vivid memories is a trip to Hong Kong with colleagues from my first job. We were earning $1,500 a month — and this trip cost a significant chunk of that. Worth every single cent, and I remember it far more clearly than whatever I spent the other months’ salary on. (Probably nothing exciting. Probably chicken rice.)

Here’s something Perkins made me realise: there are experiences you can only have when you’re young. A backpacking trip. Staying in hostels. Sleeping on a cold wooden bench at the firing range during NS — I did this, effortlessly, at 18. I couldn’t now if you paid me and provided a chiropractor on standby.

By your mid-40s, travel looks different. You’re constantly yawning. Your body needs two days to recover from one day of fun. You’ve developed an eight-step bedtime routine and you will tell people about it unprompted. How do you build great memories when you need a risk assessment before staying up past 11pm?

The book also makes a reassuring point for younger readers: your income almost certainly grows over time. You can make up the savings shortfall later. You cannot un-miss experiences.

CHAPTER 2: Think of Your Net Worth Peak as a Date, Not a Number

I know people in their 80s who still manage five properties, obsess over yield optimisation, and calculate rental returns at the dinner table. The time they spend playing landlord logistics could be spent living — but more pressingly, it could be spent not making everyone at dinner very uncomfortable.

Perkins cites a striking example: if you die with $130,000 unspent and you spend $32,000 per year, that’s 6,600 hours of your life worked for nothing. Over two and a half years of 50-hour weeks. Gone. For money sitting in an account, quietly judging your heirs.

I was reminded of a conversation with Ashok Samuel, who was head of private equity at GIC. He told me simply: “55 is my retirement. No buts, no ifs.” Decisive. No hedging. Meanwhile, I’m over here negotiating with myself about whether I can afford an extra side dish.

A note on the numbers (because I know you’re quietly panicking):

Many people overestimate how much they need to retire. And I say this as someone who has definitely Googled “how much do I need to retire” at 2am and immediately felt worse about my life choices.

Here’s why the fear is overstated: your remaining money doesn’t sit still while you draw it down.

Say you have $500,000 saved and spend $30,000/year:

• Your balance earns 1.5% interest → $7,500 in year one

• Inflation at 3% adds only ~$900 to your annual expenses

• Net: you’re still $6,600 ahead from interest alone in year one

Even as you withdraw $30k, your remaining $470k earns $7,050 the following year. The math is genuinely kinder than the fear. (And yes, this is precisely why financial advisors have every incentive to keep you saving longer than necessary — looking at you, and your very confident PowerPoint projections.)

CHAPTER 5 (My Favourite): Time-Bucket Your Life

I have this on my wall now. My family thinks it’s morbid. I think it’s the most useful thing on the wall, which previously just had a motivational print I stopped reading in 2019.

The concept: draw a timeline from today to your expected death. Divide it into five or ten year buckets. Then list everything you want to experience — travel, giving, gardening, visiting every park in Singapore, learning something, building something — and assign each to the bucket where it realistically belongs.

What this exercise reveals is quietly devastating: you have far less time than you think.

I haven’t filled in my 70s and 80s yet. Partly because it’s a bit confronting. Partly because I’m hoping my 70s are still far enough away that Future Me can deal with it. But even seeing my 40s, 50s, and 60s laid out — with physically demanding travel needing to happen sooner, giving requiring financial readiness, and some experiences having hard expiry dates I never consciously acknowledged — it changes everything about how you prioritise.

A bucket list made at 70 is reactive. Time-bucketing is proactive. You stop drifting through life on autopilot and start making actual decisions — which, as it turns out, is both terrifying and oddly liberating.

The Business of Life is the Acquisition of Memories

Charlie Munger wished he could be 83 again.

You cannot buy time back. But you can choose, starting today, to stop treating your future self as the only one who deserves to actually live.

Save, yes. Be responsible, yes. But ask yourself honestly: where is your life energy going — and is it building the memories that will matter when the balance sheet is completely irrelevant?

I asked myself that question, and the answer was uncomfortable enough that I changed a few things. I’m a work in progress. But at least now I have a wall chart.

What’s in your time bucket?

Yes, and we all die eventually, but that's not the point today.

I get flustered when I hear such high-level, obvious statements. As Hongkongers like to say—who doesn't know your mother is a woman? It's bordering on Captain Obvious territory. Telling us many more times will not move the needle.

The Paralysis of Too Many Options

We don't need someone to tell us for the 400th time that we need to upskill. We just need to know what step one is and which step one we should take. I always like to contrast it to walking into a Hong Kong cafe with 200 items on the menu—you freeze and walk out. Or spending 30 minutes scrolling through the million options on Netflix and falling asleep before starting any show.

I do agree that creativity and critical thinking would be a competitive edge for anyone, more so in Singapore, where our best natural resource is our people. Creativity can flow into many aspects of our society to solve deep problems and even create new opportunities.

So how does one begin to acquire them? Let me share my health story first.

My Health Story: Learning to Walk (and Lift) Again

Two years ago, I had my first slipped disc surgery. I had to literally relearn how to walk. I thought all was good, and I was on track to normalcy when another one hit me, this time near my neck. The second surgery hit me when I was already on track to recovery from my first. I was distraught.

So another surgery, and I was back to square one. My doctor told me to never stand near a gym, but I can't. Day by day, I put in the reps and worked myself back to fitness. Fast forward to today, my PB deadlift is 120kg.

Creativity and Critical Thinking Are Muscles

Creativity and critical thinking skills are the same. We're all at baseline, and we need to start somewhere. In the advertising world, people hand-copy Ogilvy ads to train themselves on how he thinks and writes. Similarly, many painters—think Picasso, Van Gogh—would copy the greats before developing their own style over time.

For many of us, we may not endeavour to become pro artists, just like I have zero intention to even sign up for Hyrox (I just want to keep fit), but we need outlets where we can put those into practice.

Finding Your Starting Point

For me, this has been in the form of my video content, which I've been posting on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Facebook. Except for one, none of them is an original idea. You've likely seen similar skits floating around. I'm doing my equivalent of copying from Ogilvy as my first step to work on my creativity. Over time, I may be able to reach the equivalent of my 120kg deadlift and do original content, but that isn't really the point. Working on my creative muscles has allowed me to expand my viewpoint on other areas and see (most of the time) funny angles that I never caught, which is why comedians are funny. They're really observant, and it's a skill to sharpen.

Similarly, on the critical front, you've probably seen many of my rants on LinkedIn. I may be right and mostly wrong, but it again allows me to build that particular muscle. Granted, some people flame me, but you don't need to go public like me. Feel free to write for yourself and not the world. I don't share my workout videos, but that doesn't mean I'm not working out.

Your Turn

These are what work for me and may not be for you. You need to find your equivalent of what can help you put those into practice. Because as competition heats up not just among humans but also from AI, these skills are more important than ever to help you stand out in the market. Or who knows—maybe help you create your own market in the future.

Adrian Tan
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That phrase really stuck with me. I found myself rewatching a recent reel by Dr Jason Leong, a Malaysian comedian who recently moved to Australia with his family. I'd heard about his plans earlier in a podcast where a comedian friend mentioned Jason was debating between Singapore and Australia. Australia won out. Better culture, less pressure-cooker environment for his daughter, and lower cost of living overall.

All of it came together for one reason: so his daughter could have a fair shot at life.

Granted, he is speaking from a Malaysian POV where the Malay-first policy may disadvantage the Chinese. But what he said still lingers deeply in me.

I don't need to belabour the point, but the Singapore Dream narrative hasn't aged well. The 5Cs (Cash, Car, Condo, Credit Card, Country Club) seemed entirely achievable when I was growing up. The formula was simple: study hard, get a degree, land a job at an MNC, and you'd make it to the middle class. It wasn't just propaganda. It actually worked.

The costs were within reach, too. Check what an ICON condo in Tanjong Pagar sold for in 2000. Sure, you could argue that money worked differently back then, but I've also heard stories from ex-colleagues in the stockbroking industry about 12-month bonuses being the norm. That could easily cover half an HDB flat. One bonus. Half a flat. Try telling that to a millennial today and watch them weep into their avocado toast.

There was an implicit social contract: work hard, play by the rules, and you'll get your piece of the pie. For a generation of Singaporeans, that promise was kept.

The Cracks Are Showing

Right now, you see friction everywhere. Left, right, centre.

Let's start with education. Loiter outside any tuition centre and you'll notice many parents aren't local. They brought their families here hoping for a better future, and they're investing heavily in their kids. Learning Lab can costs $1,000 per month per subject, and some kids do multiple subjects to prep for PSLE.

Let me repeat that. One thousand dollars. Per month. Per subject. That's more than some people's car instalments. For a 12-year-old's math tuition.

For parents who can't afford those supplements, their kids naturally fall behind. And those spots, whether in schools or later in life, naturally go to those who performed better. It's an arms race where the entry fee is your child's childhood and your retirement savings.

And here's the kicker: I hear about Asian migrants doing the same thing in Australia, and it's genuinely facepalm-inducing. Like, guys, you literally moved countries to escape this. Why are you recreating it? If you want a pressure-cooker environment, Singapore will gladly welcome you back. We've got the infrastructure down to a science.

Then there's housing. My first HDB flat in Tampines, a 5-room, cost me $250,000. That same flat now? Easily $800,000. Even getting a BTO takes half a lifetime. By the time you finish paying it off, you barely have anything left to retire on unless you cash out and downgrade. Which, if you think about it, means you spent your entire working life paying for a house you'll eventually have to leave anyway. Fantastic investment strategy.

The math just doesn't work anymore. A fresh graduate today, even from a decent university with a decent job, is looking at decades of debt for a home that's smaller than what their parents had. We're not even talking about condos anymore. Just basic HDB flats.

And speaking of smaller: houses are shrinking. Despite official claims that newer flats are "bigger," anyone who's actually viewed them knows the truth. I've seen shoe boxes with better proportions. What bought you genuine space and breathing room in 2000 gets you a layout where you can touch three walls simultaneously today. Add in longer work hours, longer commutes, and the constant grind just to maintain the same standard of living our parents had.

It's the treadmill effect: running faster just to stay in place. Except the treadmill is also getting more expensive, and the gym keeps shrinking.

What Does "Fair" Even Mean?

So what does Jason mean when he talks about giving his daughter "a fair shot at life"?

I think it's about the gap between effort and outcome. It's not that Singaporeans don't work hard. We're famous for it. We're so good at working hard that we've turned burnout into a competitive sport. It's that the effort required to achieve what used to be a normal middle-class life has become borderline superhuman.

You're paying more for less space while your kids are competing in a high-stakes academic Olympics (that somehow starts at age 7), and you're left wondering: what exactly are we working so hard for? The privilege of doing it all over again?

Fair doesn't mean everyone gets the same outcome. But it should mean that hard work and playing by the rules get you somewhere reasonable. That the game isn't rigged from the start. That your kids can have a childhood instead of a resume-building exercise complete with enrichment activities, leadership camps, and a LinkedIn profile before they hit puberty.

Australia isn't perfect. No place is. But I imagine for Jason, it represents something fundamental: the possibility of a life where success doesn't require sacrificing everything else. Where his daughter can be a kid. Where a decent job means a decent life, not just survival with aspirations.

The Question I Can't Shake

Singapore has given me opportunities I'm grateful for. The efficiency, the safety, the infrastructure. These aren't small things. But when I look at the trajectory we're on, I wonder if the next generation will say the same thing. Or if they'll look back and ask: why did you stay when the writing was on the wall? And also, why is this wall so expensive?

Jason made his choice. He looked at the options, weighed what mattered to him, and decided that Australia offered his daughter something Malaysia couldn't, or wouldn't, provide anymore.

I don't know what my choice will be. But his words keep echoing: "a fair shot at life."

That's not asking for much. It's asking for what we were promised. What our parents had. A life where hard work pays off in ways that matter, where your kids can thrive without being crushed by the system, where the dream isn't just survival.

Maybe that's still possible here. Maybe it's not. But the fact that so many people (smart, successful, integrated people) are asking the question at all tells you something has shifted.

The Singapore Dream isn't dead. But it's certainly on life support.

And more people than ever are wondering if it's worth waiting around to see if it recovers.

Adrian Tan
Say hi 👋 on LinkedIn

WHENEVER YOU'RE READY, HERE ARE 3 WAYS I CAN HELP YOU:

1. No More Bosses - My book on the journey to sustainable self-employment
   

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I reflect on the evolution of content creation from blogging to contemporary practices involving AI, and emphasise the importance of maintaining authenticity in one's tone of voice.

Also, a shout-out to ⁨Typeless:⁩ to help you align spoken and written content, and announces plans for more monologue episodes. Stay tuned for a candid look into the world of content creation and personal growth.

00:00 Welcome Back: Where Have I Been?

00:11 The Journey of My Podcast and Book

01:16 Current Work and Future Plans

02:14 The Evolution of Content Creation

03:09 The Importance of Authenticity in Writing

06:03 Tools and Tips for Content Creation

07:20 Conclusion and Future Episodes

The PropertyLimBrothers saga isn't just a scandal; it's a masterclass in what NOT to do, wrapped in a case study of brand destruction.

For those who somehow missed it, let me recap: Melvin Lim, CEO and co-founder of PropertyLimBrothers, and Grayce Tan, VP of Strategy with 190K Instagram followers, allegedly had an office affair that went viral thanks to a leaked video. The cherry on top? Their neighbouring PropNex office could hear everything through the thin walls. Both have since resigned "with immediate effect," but not before Reddit detectives uncovered every detail of their lives, from Grayce's $230K salary (despite only two years of experience) to the company's now-ironic motto: #RealEstateWithIntegrity.

This week’s recommendation: WayShot

Finally, photos my wife actually wants to post

I used to get endless complaints about my photography skills - wrong angles, bad lighting, random people in the background. Then I found Wayshot.

Now I just point and shoot, and the AI does everything else: perfect framing, pro-level edits, ideal lighting adjustments, and it even removes photobombers automatically.

My wife's Instagram has never looked better, and I've never heard "can you retake that?" fewer times. If you're tired of being the designated photographer who can't seem to get it right, Wayshot is honestly a relationship saver.

The Soundproofing Industry's Biggest Win

Let's start with the most obvious business opportunity here: soundproofing. If there was ever an advertisement for investing in acoustic barriers, this is it. Imagine being so confident in your discretion that you forget your competitor's office shares a wall with yours. The PropNex agents didn't even need to try - The surveillance practically delivered itself.

I'm envisioning a whole new product line: the OpacityMax™ series, specifically designed for modern offices where boundaries (both physical and professional) tend to blur. Key features would include:

• PropNex-proof acoustic barriers (tested against thin walls)

• Moan suppression technology (patent pending)

• Lock-sound dampeners (because apparently that matters)

• "Working late again honey" voice modulator

The marketing practically writes itself: "Never again let your neighbouring competitor's office become unwitting witnesses to your poor decision-making."

The Reddit Detective Prevention System

Speaking of prevention, let's talk about the Reddit Detective Survival Kit. When r/SingaporeInfluencers starts their investigation, you need more than just prayers and deleted Instagram stories. These digital sleuths found everything - wedding photos, vacation pictures together, salary discrepancies, Glassdoor reviews, and probably their favourite bubble tea orders.

The kit would need to include:

• Wayback Machine blocker (spoiler: doesn't exist)

• Screenshot detector (also fictional)

• Stress ball shaped like upvote/downvote arrows (this one's real)

• "Don't Read The Comments" motivational poster

The harsh truth? Once Reddit gets involved, you're already cooked. The screenshots are forever, the memes are eternal, and your Google search results are permanently compromised. But at least you can protect yourself from what you CAN'T protect yourself from... the awareness!

The Salary Justification Generator

Now here's where things get really interesting. How do you explain paying your affair partner $230K after two years of experience (starting as an $800/month intern, no less) while your co-founder with 18 years of experience makes $60K? This is where the Salary Justification Generator comes in handy.

This revolutionary AI would auto-generate "merit-based" explanations, create retroactive "special project" documentation, and produce talking points about strategic vision and influencer marketing value. It would even include a comparison tool that searches the entire industry until it finds someone, somewhere, making comparable money with similar experience. The premium feature would make the co-founder's salary look intentional, perhaps suggesting he preferred equity over cash, or that he simply handles "operations" (read: the actual work).

The Brand Integrity Scrubber

PropertyLimBrothers built their entire brand on integrity. Their website proudly proclaimed #RealEstateWithIntegrity. Melvin was a Christian blogger who wrote about family values. The cognitive dissonance is almost impressive in its completeness.

Enter the Brand Integrity Scrubber™. It’s a service that removes all evidence of your formerly wholesome branding. It would erase website mottos, hide Christian blog posts, archive "family values" content, and rewrite Instagram captions to remove all mentions of God, integrity, and family. One satisfied customer testimonial would read: "Changed our motto from 'Integrity' to 'Results' in under three hours!" Another might add: "Successfully pivoted from 'faith-based real estate' to 'real estate' in record time!"

The Spouse Damage Control Package

Let's address the elephant in the room: both parties were married. Melvin has four children.

Enter the Spouse Damage Control Package:

The "I Can Explain" Starter Kit:

• Pre-written apology scripts (tested on focus groups)

• Couples therapy referral list (extensive)

• "It meant nothing" phrase variations

• Tissue boxes (industrial quantity)

The "My Wife Saw It On Reddit" Emergency Kit:

• Crisis PR consultant on speed dial

• "How do I explain this to my 4 kids?" guide

• Asset protection attorney hotline

• Children's therapist database

The "Both Our Spouses Know" Nuclear Option:

• Dual family crisis management

• Divorce lawyer coordination service

• "Starting fresh" rebranding package

• New country relocation guide (non-extradition countries highlighted)

The truth is, no product can fix this level of damage. Those four kids will eventually Google their father's name. Both spouses discovered their marriages were a lie via internet sleuthing. No amount of crisis PR can rewrite that reality.

The Christian Influencer Crisis Kit

For when your faith-based brand collides with your faith-based scandal, you need specialised tools. The Christian Influencer Crisis Kit would include "We're all sinners" theological defences, "God forgives" redemption timelines, church statement templates, and Matthew 7:1 ("Judge not") auto-responders for the comment section.

The bonus feature? A "Testing my faith" persecution narrative builder that helps you reframe public accountability as spiritual warfare. One success story: "Turned my scandal into a testimony! Book deal pending!" The reality check: your church small group is very awkward now, and probably will be forever.

The Resignation Letter Templates

When stepping down becomes non-optional, you need the right words. Here are your options:

The Graceful Exit:

• "Personal reasons" (vague but effective)

• "Family priorities" (true but deeply ironic)

• "Time to reflect" (on mistakes)

• "Full responsibility" (but no details)

The Deflection:

• "Misunderstanding" edition

• "Media speculation" blame version

• "For the good of the company" noble sacrifice

• "Let the team move forward" martyr script

The "At Least I'm Honest" Version:

• "I messed up" admission

• "Crossed boundaries" confession

• "Personal mistake" acknowledgement

• "Privacy for families" plea

All templates include "immediate effect" phrasing because there's no transition period when PropNex has audio evidence.

The Actual Lesson

Behind all this satire lies a genuine tragedy. Two families are shattered. Four children are dealing with their father's very public infidelity. A brand built over years collapsed in days. Careers are destroyed. And for what? A moment of poor judgment that neighbouring offices could literally hear through the walls?

The real opportunity in this crisis isn't about selling products. It's about learning what not to do:

• Don't have affairs (obviously)

• Don't have office affairs (especially obvious)

• Don't have affairs when you're married with four kids (morally bankrupt)

• Don't build your brand on "Integrity" if you're having affairs (cosmically ironic)

• Don't forget PropNex is next door with smartphones (practically stupid)

• Don't pay your affair partner $230K while your co-founder makes $60K (forensically obvious)

Singapore is a small country. Everyone knows everyone. The internet never forgets. And thin walls make terrible co-conspirators.

The Bottom Line

If you're reading this and thinking, "this could never happen to me," you're probably right because you have the common sense not to have an affair in an office that shares walls with your competitor. But just in case, maybe invest in soundproofing anyway. Prevention is always cheaper than crisis management.

And if you find yourself becoming the next viral scandal? Well, at least you'll know there's a whole suite of satirical products waiting for you. They won't save your marriage, career, or reputation, but they might help you organise your crisis efficiently.

Remember: in Singapore's tight-knit business community, today's scandal becomes tomorrow's cautionary tale at every industry networking event. Choose your actions wisely, because Reddit never forgets, and neither does PropNex.

Adrian Tan
Say hi 👋 on LinkedIn

WHENEVER YOU'RE READY, HERE ARE 3 WAYS I CAN HELP YOU:

1. No More Bosses - My book on the journey to sustainable self-employment
   

2. Fractional Marketing Lead for Tech Companies - Looking to scale? Leverage my expertise in driving marketing strategies and business growth.
   

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Two years ago, I had my first slipped disc surgery due to compression on the discs around my lower back. Early last year, I went for another one, this time nearer to my neck. Somewhere in there now sits a titanium clip that will remain long after my body goes up in the furnace.

But the health issue I'm still grappling with? GERD. And if you've never heard of it, stick around – because it might be what's been quietly wrecking your voice too.

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When Your Voice Just... Stops Working

Here's the thing: I was in choir throughout high school and could sing pretty well. I auditioned for competitions. Even though singing never became my career, I always walked into a KTV session knowing I'd impress someone. That confidence carried me through my entire 20s and 30s.

But when I hit my 40s, something was off.

I could no longer hit the high notes I used to nail, let alone falsettos. Initially, I chalked it up to being rusty – I wasn't singing as much as before. So I'd practice occasionally when driving alone in my car, belting out old favourites.

No matter how much I practised, things didn't improve. In fact, they got worse. Some days my throat felt so stuffy I could barely speak without clearing my voice incessantly.

The Expensive Detour

Could it be a technique thing? I can't believe I fell for that myself, but I signed up for a voice projection course thinking it would fix everything. Eight lessons and several hundred dollars later, I was exactly where I started. Turns out you can't technique your way out of a medical problem – though apparently I needed to learn that the expensive way.

The Dentist Who Solved the Mystery

It took a routine dental checkup to crack the case.

My dentist pointed at my teeth and said, "The surface is highly eroded. This is probably from excessive acid production in your stomach flowing upward – especially when you're sleeping – into your mouth." He paused. "And if this isn't taken care of, it'll burn your throat too."

EUREKA.

My throat issue wasn't from underusing my vocal cords or using them wrong. It was a health condition that had taken me more than five years to identify.

This is exactly why I'm sharing this. A year ago, when I posted about my second slipped disc surgery, it reached someone who'd been experiencing the same pain for years. My story motivated her to see the neurosurgeon who operated on me, and she finally resolved the pain that had plagued her for half a decade. If this post does the same for even one person with mysterious throat issues, it's worth writing.

What Actually Is GERD?

I went to see a GP who referred me to an ENT specialist. After scoping my throat, he confirmed it: GERD.

GERD – Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease – is basically chronic acid reflux on steroids. Your stomach acid regularly backs up into your esophagus and throat, causing damage over time. For a month, I was on medication to suppress the acid overproduction and bring me back to baseline. And oh my god, my throat hadn't felt that liberated in years.

The Diet That Made Me Question Everything

But medication is only half the equation. The tougher part? The diet restrictions. GERD is triggered by food, and I was told to avoid:

The Annoying Stuff: citrus, tomatoes, mint

The Painful Losses: fatty and fried foods, chocolate, coffee and tea

The Soul-Crushing Eliminations: garlic and onion (which are in everything)

When I saw this list, I was stunned. So many items were my daily staples. This sounded worse than keto.

But GERD doesn't give a shit about your feelings. I know because I tested it. Sneaking in a coffee? Instant regret. One piece of KFC? Nearly turned into a sore throat. Even this morning, I tried having coffee again. Didn't go well.

The Medication Maze

I'm already supplementing with Nexium, which my dentist recommended after discovering the erosion. Getting that drug was surprisingly difficult – until I miraculously found it in a vending machine while stuck at San Francisco airport. (Yes, apparently American airports sell prescription-strength antacids in vending machines. What a country.)

Now I get my supply from JB pharmacies, where prescriptions aren't needed, because cross-border healthcare arbitrage is apparently part of my life now.

My current regimen: Nexium 30 minutes before breakfast and dinner, plus Weisen-U after dinner (I switched from Gaviscon because it tastes like liquid chalk). The situation has improved significantly, though there are days when I ask for trouble by eating things I shouldn't.

The Depression That Wasn't

Here's something else: because excess acid causes heartburn, I'd been waking up with a heavy chest. For a long time, I genuinely thought I was developing depression. Nope. Just heartburn masquerading as existential dread.

If This Sounds Familiar

If you're suffering from similar symptoms – mysterious voice loss, chronic throat stuffiness, unexplained chest heaviness – please do yourself a favour and get checked. Especially if, like me, your job requires you to talk.

I spent five years losing my voice to something I didn't even know I had. You don't have to.

Don't lose your voice to GERD. Or at least, don't lose it for five years before figuring out what's actually wrong.

Adrian Tan
Say hi 👋 on LinkedIn

WHENEVER YOU'RE READY, HERE ARE 3 WAYS I CAN HELP YOU:

1. No More Bosses - My book on the journey to sustainable self-employment
   

2. Fractional Marketing Lead for Tech Companies - Looking to scale? Leverage my expertise in driving marketing strategies and business growth.
   

3. Promote to my 16,000+ subscribers by sponsoring my newsletter.

Want to ruin my day? No problem! Unsubscribe below.

Do you want to share your journey or have feedback? Just hit reply - I'd love to hear from you!