贵人

Arnold Schwarzenegger gave a commencement speech a few years back where he called out the self-made man myth directly. Nobody built anything alone, he said. The roads you drove on, the teachers who stayed after class, the people who picked up the phone when they didn’t have to. We inherit more than we admit.

In Chinese, there’s a word for these people: 贵人 (guiren). Literally, “noble person.” In practice, the person who showed up at the right time which made the next chapter possible.

I’ve been thinking about mine.

It started with a conversation with Manu Khetan. We were in the middle of an assignment when he asked how I was doing. I told him the truth: work had thinned out, budgets tightened, and a few things had been cancelled. He listened, then shared what he thought I could consider.

Somewhere in that exchange, it hit me. His faith in me 4 years ago is what made this journey possible in the first place. And when I looked back further, every win I could point to had someone like him in it.

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RecruitPlus, 2004.

4 of us decided that starting a business sounded more exciting than our dead-end jobs. We were right about the excitement. We were wrong about almost everything else.

What we didn’t account for was that none of us actually knew how to run a recruitment business. My girlfriend (now wife) did. She came on board as an associate — full commission, no safety net — because that’s all we could offer. Her billings kept the lights on while the rest of us figured out, slowly and expensively, what we were doing.

That company ran for 11 years. The original partners exited along the way. I stayed.

None of it happens without her saying yes to a very uncertain proposition in 2004.

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CareerLadder, 2014

My attempt to become an independent career coach didn’t start with a business idea. It started with a book.

Steven Pang suggested we compile all the blog posts we’d both been writing and publish them. Everything You Wish to Ask a Headhunter. He pushed it through when it could easily have stayed as a folder of drafts nobody printed.

The book came out, and suddenly, career coaching wasn’t a stretch. People had a reason to take me seriously before I’d done a single session. The business followed the credibility, not the other way around.

Without Steven insisting that the book happen, there’s no CareerLadder. And without CareerLadder, I would not have managed to get a job at Ingeus to be their first Singapore Ops Director, since they needed someone with a mix of recruitment and career coaching experience.

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HackerTrail, 2016

This one’s harder to write about because it requires admitting something uncomfortable.

I exited RecruitPlus thinking opportunities would follow. 3 months of silence later taught me otherwise. My career coaching idea isn’t panning out, and I was desperately in need of something to make ends meet. I still remember taking the call from Tushar Tejuja at Kallang Wave Mall with my kids at the free swimming pool. He needed someone for sales. Part-time. That’s what he could afford.

I took it.

I had 11 years of running a business behind me. I also had 11 years of overspending whatever I made, a mortgage, kids, and a confidence level that was at an all-time low. Tushar didn’t offer me a lifeline because the optics were great. He offered it because he needed someone, and he thought I could help.

That part-time gig compounded. It planted me in the HR tech space. Everything that followed grew from that.

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PeopleStrong, 2019

Nikhil Bhardwaj reached out about TechHR 2017 in India. Invited me to check it out. I didn’t, but did so during the 2018 version, as our conversation led me (and my business partner at our HR consultancy then) to help bring Singapore-based HR Tech to participate as exhibitors.

At the event, the then marketing manager of PeopleStrong recognised me from my HR tech content. She walked me over to a booth. We set up a meeting. The company was looking to expand into Singapore and needed an advisor. It eventually became a full role as we wound down the consultancy.

My official entry into HR tech traces back to one message from someone who didn’t have to send it.

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Marketing Sumo, 2021

Manu first engaged me 4 years ago when I put out a LinkedIn SOS at the start of this independent journey. Content retainer back then. These days, I co-host his corporate podcast. The engagement changed. The through-line didn’t: he showed up early, when it mattered most.

I likely wouldn’t be writing any of this if he hadn’t.

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Looking back, none of my 贵人 announced themselves as 贵人.

A girlfriend joining a shaky startup on full commission. A co-author pushing a book that could have stayed as a folder of drafts. A part-time offer when I was almost drowning. A conference invite I could have filed away.

Every single one had an easy “no” attached to it. Or at least a “not yet.”

The self-made myth is seductive partly because it lets you avoid those moments. If everything depends on you, you don’t have to say yes to things that don’t look like wins yet. You can wait for the opportunity that looks the part.

Mine never did.