A Singaporean Decathlete

The People’s Champion

We look a successful people and think: Why am I not luckier or more talented?

Well, behind a successful man there usually is a story of failure and defeat. Because if you haven’t hit rock bottom, you wouldn’t know how to come up and fight your way to the top.

The transition happens just like that ‘click’.

Random shirt I got from a long time ago.

Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true. – Leon-Joseph Cardinal Suenens 

Choose to be happy.

I know, it’s a lot harder than it seems sometimes.

After being back here in Singapore for almost 6 months, I must say a large part of it was spend in the dark, moody and depressed states.

Coming to terms with reality is always a harsh experience.

But through that experience, there’s always a silver lining.

The moment where you become fully honest with yourself and your surroundings, and the subsequent decision to then act to turn things around to where you want your life to be.

It’s not easy by any means, but it’s possible and that’s all we need.

Doing decathlon back here in Singapore has been a huge struggle with work commitments and limitations to training facilities (and the weather). But I realised that I’ve always tried to get the work aspects of my life right, and indeed I have actually made big progress towards that in the last 6 months.

Yes it came at an expense of other areas in my life, but such is the price you must be prepared to pay to get to where you want to be.

So stay the course, have faith and most of all, enjoy the ride.

You become what you do everyday.

What are you waiting for?

Bruce Lee. Picture from runningonmylastleg.wordpress.com

To be honest with yourself, that is something really difficult to do. – Bruce Lee.

I just got reminded of his words watching the very inspirational interview by Nicholas Tse on leadership.

Somehow the interview really struck me, maybe it’s because I am also in a unique position of trying to lead my father’s company.

Then I realise, I’m not being completely honest with myself.

I keep using that as an excuse to skip a training session, to miss another workout.

It’s not what I truly love the most.

And as a result at work I’m not exactly being the best that I can be as well.

I already know what I want.

I still want to run.

I still want to be a great decathlete.

I know I’m still very far away, but at the same time my potential is yet to be fulfilled.

Time to be honest with myself.

7am at the track tomorrow, training with James Wong who’s making a come back for this year’s SEA games.

The lie stops here.

The life starts now.

The stopwatch doesn’t lie.

Being realistic is the most commonly travelled road to mediocrity. – Will Smith

Or is it?

Well I have been fairly unrealistic with my expectations of life thus far, sometimes I’ve been proven right by reality, other times wrong.

But what I realised is that I overestimate my capabilities for today, end up over-reaching and not making the best out of the day constantly.

For example I would go to the track thinking I will run my 8x200m session with a pace that I should have been targeting at for this time of the year if I had trained according to schedule.

But I have not.

And by the 4th rep I’m horribly off pace, demoralised and utterly exhausted, wasting the session instead.

So I tried a different tactic last week, this time I under-estimated myself and deliberately set a very slow time, gradually running faster when my body allows me to.

I completed the session and felt that I’ve gotten the best out of the session.

I then came to a conclusion, the whole concept of being realistic, is relative to time.

You have to be realistic with what is going on right now, and accept that what you see today are the very real circumstances and limitations that you have to deal with right now.

But that does not have to be the reality of tomorrow.

In fact, you can be completely unrealistic about tomorrow, because the truth is: anything is possible.

You work with what you have to the best of your abilities today, then yourself up to achieve the amazing in the future.

Gotta get to work.

From http://bettermess.com/the-passive-aggressive-manifesto/

A common thread that often comes up with conversations with friends my age is, well what we would like to call the ‘Quarter-Life Crisis’.

I’ve blogged about it before a few years back now and I guess it’s a lot more common that I thought, I’m not the only one that feels this way.

I guess when you hit the later half of your twenties, it suddenly dawns upon you that you’re really not that young anymore, and more scarily, some of your youthful dreams are starting to fade before you have any chance of living them.

You come to the realisation that after all these years of education and preparation for this great and wonderful life, kinda never came.

You end up at somewhere you don’t really want to be, doing something you don’t really want to do, week after week.

Sounds scary doesn’t it?

The scarier part that for a lot us, it’s true.

I came back from the UK 4 months ago and found myself after having such a wonderful adventure, to be exactly where I don’t want to be.

Coming down from a high, I struggled with who I was and what I am going to be doing for the rest of my life.

And then the societal pressures start to come in, looking around, you start to get affected by everyone else’s thinking.

A need to get a job that pays, need to conform to my parent’s thinking, need to settle down, need to save up enough money to buy a ridiculously priced house.

It starts to get a little confusing, a little depressing, and then the thoughts of perhaps giving in.

But no.

Don’t.

Because it’s your life, and there’s always a choice.

I’ve always loved the line from a Curious Case of Benjamin Button, it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. 

But form personal experience, I know it can be a lot harder than it seems.

So, where do we go from here? How do we make sure the last few years of 20s be many times more awesome than the first few?

It’s time to take a bit of self-responsibility.

Saw this brilliant old school video the other day, I guess being self-respobsible is not that different than being self-reliant.

As seen from this article http://artofmanliness.com/2013/01/28/12-vintage-instructional-films-worth-watching/ 

Assume Responsibility – This is your life. Be responsible for it.

You are likely to be a free man, with free will to make decisions about your everyday life. If you’re not at a place you want to be, realise it’s your own fault for not being there or making an attempt to get there.

If you’ve failed in the past, realise that it was largely your own responsibility for your failure. Pick yourself up, learn from your mistakes, don’t make the same mistakes again.

You and only you are responsible for yourself, stop blaming your parents, your circumstances or your surroundings.

Take charge of your own life and make exactly what you want out of it.

Be Informed – Knowledge is power.

In the age of the Internet, there really isn’t much of an excuse not to be informed.

If you need to know something or find out how something is done, go and Google it.

If you can’t find it or need more knowledge, find someone who has already done it and go out there and ask.

Don’t expect the world to come to you (even though with the internet it already largely has).

Leverage on information to create your destiny.

Know Where You’re Going – Without a goal, you can’t score. 

What’s the point of finding out which road to go if you yourself do not have a good idea of where you are going?

Take some time out to really think about what you want to do with your life.

This is probably going to be one of the most important thing to do, because if you don’t, you’ll just spend your entire life looking for something that you don’t know what is (highly unlikely you’ll be able to find what you don’t know what you’re looking for).

Make Your Own Decisions – Decide.

It’s not that hard.

Take responsibilities to make your own decision.

Small exercise, when someone asks you, what you want to eat? Make a decision and go for it, rather than answering ‘I’ll have whatever you’re ok with.’

——

So, time to actually f*cking do something before I get too old to do it.