Yesterday I was driving. My wife and a couple of friends in the back started talking about work.
The new boss sucks. The restructure makes no sense. The boss is a dick. Standard stuff. The kind of talk that fills a car ride and a thousand kopitiam tables every evening in Singapore.
I kept my eyes on the road and mostly listened.
I’ve heard this too many times. The label changes but it’s the same bottle of wine.
The pragmatist solution is to seek greener pasture. But urgh, that means giving up the flexibility, the comfort, the people, the [fill-in-the-blank].
So they stroll on, hoping things somehow improve. Or maybe do a Bryan Johnson and just try to outlive everyone else at the office.
Let me tell you about Amin.
Amin was the QA manager at my third job, an aviation spare parts distributor, around the time SARS emptied the airports and very nearly emptied my desk too. Grumpy old man. One of the genuinely nice ones. He had an answer for everything, either in his head or somewhere in a notebook only he could read.
He’d been there longest, so he knew where everything was, why every odd decision had been made, which supplier to never trust and which one would save you on a Friday night. The company couldn’t get rid of Amin. Amin was the documentation. His value wasn’t the QA work. It was that the institutional memory lived inside his skull and nobody had a copy.
That’s how he stayed till retirement. The iron rice bowl was never a government thing. It was an Amin thing. You made yourself the only backup drive, and they couldn’t unplug you.
Now every company can pay Anthropic $20 a month and spin up a digital Amin for the whole office to use.
That, on top of globalisation, layoffs becoming normal, Singapore’s climbing cost of operations, and of course AI, is driving a relentless wave I keep watching on layoffsg.com, the tracker I’ve been keeping since the announcements started getting frequent.
Everyone expects the big distressed cuts, the Lazadas of the world. What surprised me were the small ones. Companies that look perfectly healthy, trimming three here, four there. Not dying. Restructuring. Quietly shipping the expensive Singapore function offshore, or replacing the Amins with something that doesn’t take leave or ask for a confirmation letter.
I was fired or laid off six times. The universe is sending me clear signs that I’m unemployable and please stop trying. I ignored it five times. The sixth was the one that hurt, a role I’d coveted, my comeback after closing my recruitment business, dead at 10 months. That’s the one where I finally accepted my fate.
It’s not a bed of roses, and anyone who sells you that should be executed. Doing your own thing is tough. You’re your own worst boss with zero regard for work-life balance. As the saying goes, you didn’t want to work 40 hours a week for someone else, so now you work 100 for yourself.
Still, I’m glad that conversation in the car happened. The struggle is painful, but I’m glad I don’t sit in those conversations anymore. I have clients now, not bosses. I build my own rice bowl instead of depending on someone else’s fictitious iron version.
What made it slightly easier was a combination of moves I worked on, mostly by accident, along the way. Each one nudges the needle on its own. Put together, they compound.
It’s how I landed three retainers the week I announced on LinkedIn, five years ago, that I was going independent. When your reputation precedes you, everything gets easier.
There are 8 of these moves. The book, the bylines, the speaking, the podcast, and a few more. None of them work in 30 days. They’re slow, unglamorous, and they pay out years after you start. Which is exactly why almost nobody starts. They wait until the layoff lands, until the deal finally breaks, and by then it’s the worst possible time to begin building the thing that takes years.
The best time to start was before you needed it. The second best time is the afternoon you realise the rice bowl was never yours to hold.
I broke down all 8 moves in a video. If you’re staring at your own back seat right now, wondering how long the deal holds, start here:
