About 2 and a half months since my last post, then I thought I hit rock bottom, I was wrong.

Shortly after that post I had a full-blown breakdown.

I somehow just felt the overwhelming crushing weight of defeat.

I ended up driving around for an entire day just crying at my steering wheel and for a couple of days I was just lost.

Crying at what exactly, I’m not entirely sure.

It’s a combination of mourning a past relationship lost, feeling the pains of regret and the failures I had.

I guess for the longest time I’ve been sucking it up and pushing things aside to keep pressing on, and slowly these things just added up until the straw that broke the camel’s back.

And then the realization came to me, that I was stuck in a rut.

Since 2012 I’ve had no clear goals, not doing what I really wanted to do, the business that I started isn’t really going anywhere and I’m just not spending my days in a fulfilling manner.

I’ve spent a large part of my twenties chasing my dreams but at the end of it, I had pretty much nothing to show for except the scars of my failures and the pains of my defeat.

I needed results.

I realized that if I don’t do anything about it, if I remained the same and kept doing the same things, saying the same things, I’m going to crash and burn, heading nowhere real quick.

I had to get myself out.

The breakdown gave me a chance to have an honest evaluation of my life.

What I have got going and what I did not.

Most of all, it made me realize, I wasn’t happy.

So I had to change.

I took some hard decisions, broke up another relationship with a great girl (hurting others is always the worst, but I knew I wasn’t in the right place and time and that the hard thing to do was the right thing to do).

And then I took some time off.

Bought tickets to Krabi at 1 in the morning, flew off to Thailand with no expectations just a couple of hours later. One backpack on me, I left everything unnecessary behind.

Sometimes, removing yourself from the familiar and putting yourself in an environment that you got to start all over again makes you realize what you truly need.

Got on the bus and started chatting with another young fella from Brazil. He was traveling for a month whilst taking a break from his studies in Australia.

Straight away, I realized something that I’ve forgotten for a long time.

One of the reasons why I set off on this journey all those years ago was to be free. I watched Jason Mraz’s video and just felt a very deep connection to the message back then.

Along the way I’ve just forgotten what it was like to let go of expectations and enjoy the moments, embracing the uncertainties and just going with it.

Got checked in to a random hotel I booked online called the Happiness Resort (hey, I guess I was looking for happiness), and immediately rented a scooter.

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Water, food, shelter and transport.

Somehow those few things have always stuck on in my head since my army days.

In essence, those are perhaps the only things you truly need. Everything else just weighs you down and slows you.

So I spent the next few days just riding around Krabi on my scooter, exploring the area, hanging around the beaches, went water taxi-ing around to other beaches nearby.

The week went by with me just roaming around, but there wasn’t any sudden realization or enlightenment I was hoping for.

I think perhaps that itself was the enlightenment.

I’ve been travelling quite a lot by myself and roaming around hoping to find myself whatever that means, then I realize that it actually doesn’t quite matter which part of the world you are in.

Happiness is a state of mind.

You’re not going to find it by suddenly being in a different environment and suddenly become a different person.

You’ll just be the same person in a different environment.

Nothing changes.

And being in Krabi made me realize that all along, the state of mind I was looking for was freedom.

Freedom from inhibition.

I realized that there was just so many things I do holding myself back, and that if I don’t let go of those things now, I’ll never be happy and I’ll never be the person I could be.

And it’s all about just taking the actions you need.

I wasn’t happy about my weight, my fitness, my career, my personal and social life.

It was time to stop giving myself excuses and work at it.

So I got back to Singapore and actually made the decision to work at it.

No excuses if good enough this time.

I decided to work on what makes me happy.

Being fit and riding a motorbike around came to my head as the obvious ones to start working on.

So I decided to sort my body out, my Achilles tendon was giving me big issues still when I ran, so I sought out a physiotherapist and went for intensive 2-3 times a week rehab/therapy sessions, completely stopping any training for a month to focus on healing.

Every single night I worked on the rehab exercises, no exceptions, no excuses.

If I missed one day, I know that I’ll miss everyday.

After I got that sorted, then I went to cut down my weight.

Over the year I’ve gotten fat.

Was weighing in at about 86kg, up from 83kg back when I was competing in decathlon.

So I put my sports science knowledge to use, cut out carbs completely from my diet to get into a net negative caloric state and after 4 weeks, this is my current weight.

 

Next phase is to get myself cardiovascular-ly fit. I will be using my 1500m timing as a gauge of my fitness (my best time was back in 2012, 5 min 26s during a decathlon).

Time to take some of my own medicine that I have prescribed.

After 3 weeks I took a time trial and it turned out to be like this:

Yup, definitely a lot more work needed.

But this time, I found myself a lot more determined.

I boiled down the essence of my life to this:

At 530am when the alarm rings, either I get up or I give up, it’s that simple.

I always struggled in the past to put in these before work training session, but now, it’s gotten a lot easier.

I guess it’s because the alternative, which is a life wasted, is a lot more painful than the feeling of waking up early.

I’m running with my heart rate monitor and paying attention to the time spent in the heart rate zones to maximize the effectiveness of my trainings.

I found out that I tended to be overly harsh on myself at times, cause I kick myself for not going hard enough to hit the times or reps, but when I look at the data from my HR monitor, it clearly shows the improvements and that session after session I was pushing into new times spent in the max zones.

My next test will be in 2 weeks time, will post out the results then.

Next, motorbike license.

Well this is what classic procrastination looks like.

Each day you delay is a day longer you will take to succeed.

I’ve enrolled in motorbike riding school since late 2012, could have gotten my license by mid 2013 if I focused and took consistent lessons back tend. Which would mean by now I can take my 2A license (Singapore’s riding license format requires you to wait a year after you get your 2B license (200cc and below) till you take your 2A (400cc and below) and another year to class 2(unlimited)).

Instead, I’m still without a license and it would mean it would be at least another 2 years before I can get my class 2 license and get my dream bike, a BMW GS1200.

So I set a schedule, 2 lessons a week, no excuses.

After two months, finally.

I passed all the school lessons and internal evaluations, allowing me to book a test date (28^th May).

In fact, I failed the lesson 8 evaluation once because I was a little too nervous, then I realized, heck, I’m prepared to keep going until I passed everything.

And being in that frame of mind, failure really doesn’t faze you anymore.

Fail forwards until you reach your goals.

That was the idea behind the company I started last year, but I guess along the way we’ve kinda gotten sloppy due to the lack of results.

So I got together with whoever was left in the group committed to the process, and decided there was no substitute to being competent and getting skilled.

To build a modern business empire, we realized that a big skill set that was missing was the ability to code.

Which incidentally once again was something I started learning 4 years ago but just procrastinated over.

So I bit the bullet and threw myself into it.

No excuses this time.

You can follow our process at this other blog where we are building a super awesome to do list (a web app built on Ruby on Rails) as a technical exercise to learn coding.

So two and a half months later, here I am and I’m seeing small results.

Am I happy?

Happier I must say, but I know there is still a lot of work to be done.

How do you build a life worth living?

I’m not sure, but I’m doing my best to find out.

Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five. – Benjamin Franklin.

Today is my birthday.

I turn 26 today.

I guess it’s not until you reach above 25 that you start to understand what Benjamin Franklin meant.

Here are the 6 things I need to do this year, when I’m 26.

1. Keep Dreaming

Look forward, but please, hold on to your dreams.

It’s so easy to let go and start dying a little bit inside each day.

It’s so easy to let today’s reality overwhelm you and beat you into submission.

It’s so easy to let the pains of failure from yesterday rob you of your confidence to keep dreaming for tomorrow.

At 20, it’s so easy to look at your life ahead and dream big dreams for it.

And 26, things change a little, dut don’t stop dreaming.

The past 8 years of my life, the journey to become a decathlete, if nothing else, has taught me the powers of having and pursuing a dream.

It’ll drive you to see and experience great things in life that you will never otherwise have a chance to.

Things may not always go your way, but it will still make life better.

Now at 26, I have to summon up the courage to take the pains of failure from my past and transmute them into lessons for success in the future.

I have to dream bigger, plan better and execute the hell out of my plans to make it happen.

I have to be thankful too for my past, despite it’s shortcomings, for it is said best by the following great:

I treasure the memory of the past misfortunes. It has added more to my bank of fortitude. – Bruce Lee

I also have to be thankful for my family, mentors, coaches, training partners and friends.

Sometimes I find myself blaming the people around me (including my family) for the lack of success today, but I realised its just a cowardly avoidance of the real problem, which is myself.

So thank you all, for everything.

Time to man up and point the finger back at myself.

 

2. Follow Through

Lessons from my previous sport, shooting.

Steady the aim, pull the trigger and follow through.

Thinking back on the past 5-8 years of my life, one very big reason why I failed to achieve the success I wanted was that I failed many a times to follow through on the little things.

The small daily rehab routine for my injuries.

The daily diet and food preparation that I should have made.

The weekly financial planning and decisions I should have taken.

All the small little things that I should have been doing on a day to day basis to learn the skills I wanted or to complete the goals I’ve set.

I’m pretty good at making big decisions with my life and taking big chances, but its the little mundane stuff that gets to me.

So no more of this nonsense.

Put out the to-do list everyday, attacking each small task to make it happen.

No excuse is good enough anymore.

 

3. Choose

There is no more time to stay uncommitted, to ‘keep my options open’ and just wander around hoping that something great will happen.

Time to make a choice on what kind of person I want to be, the path ahead I wish to take, the family I want to have and the city I want to live in.

As how Dr Meg Jay puts it brilliantly in the video below, the course you set out for yourself in your 20s is going to have a huge impact on how your life turns out to be in the future.

At 26, you realise you’re starting to run out of time.

I have to force myself to make the hard decisions to close some doors and to start walking through the ones I left open.

 

4. Be Brutally Honest

No more time for bullshit.

Time to be completely honest with myself, see the harsh reflection of myself and pinpoint what I’m doing that’s holding myself back.

Equally important is to be completely honest with myself about what I want or do not want with my life.

Life’s too short to be living out somebody else’s desire or dreams.

And only with this honesty can I make those difficult decisions I need to make above.

 

5. Network

We’ve heard it all before, no man is an island.

In fact one of the first few steps in Napoleon Hill’s success instructions was to form a mastermind group (another term for a great crew).

So enter The Company.

A group I am part of that aims to fulfil our own potentials and engage in start ups and small businesses to make the world a slightly better place.

One of our start ups, 9squares.sg an e-commerce platform in Singapore will aim to make e-commerce easier and better with a fulfilment service for retailers (third party logistics) to make selling online easier as well.

As I grow older, I learn the importance of making connections and in my travels I realise that the world is just one big tribe.

Be part of it.

Aim to make it better.

 

6. Simplify

Buy less, buy better.

Time to de-clutter my life.

Not just with the things I own but the activities that I do.

And it’s mainly just about overcoming procrastination.

To make the time to empty out the junk in my life and make space for more awesomeness to come in.

And that’s it.

6 things on my to-do list.

Another year ahead.

Time to do it and fly.

😉