Singapore has the highest childhood myopia rate in the world. By Primary 6, roughly 65% of Singaporean children wear glasses. By university, it’s closer to 80%. A Singaporean child today is more likely to have damaged eyesight by adulthood than not.

This is not a mystery. It is not a tragedy or bad luck. It is the predictable, well-documented, scientifically-understood output of the operating system we have chosen to run.

What we know

The science is settled. The eye elongates in response to two inputs: too much sustained close-distance focus, and too little bright outdoor light during childhood. Outdoor time of two or more hours daily, especially during midday, materially reduces risk. Sustained near work — reading, screens, homework, assessment books — increases it. Genetics sets the slope; environment sets where on the slope a child lands.

We have known this for decades. The Health Promotion Board has known it since at least 2001. MOE knows it. Every paediatric ophthalmologist in Singapore knows it. Most parents who have read a newspaper in the last ten years know it.

And yet.

What we do

We extend school days. We pile on homework. We sell assessment books at the checkout counter of FairPrice. We move PE indoors because of heat stress. We remove outdoor ball and field privileges as collective punishment for a few jostling incidents, hurting the children who just wanted to kick a ball around. We air-condition every classroom and connect them with covered walkways so children never need to encounter the sun.

We do not redesign primary school start times. We do not cap homework hours. We do not mandate outdoor instruction time. We do not abolish the PSLE. We do not subsidise after-school sport at the rate we subsidise enrichment tuition.

What we do instead is screen children’s eyes once a year, prescribe atropine after they’re already myopic, sell them spectacle lenses that slow the damage, and run public campaigns urging “more outdoor time” — to parents whose children leave home at 6:30am and return after dark.

Read the previous paragraph again. That is not a system trying to prevent myopia. That is a system treating its own externality.

The tacit choice

Nobody at MOE wants children to need glasses. Nobody at HPB designs programmes to elongate retinas. Yet, what EDB and MTI needs is an elite workforce, relative to our neighbours and the global workforce, who historically score high in PISA and university rankings. There is no single villain.

There is just a system that has, over decades, made a thousand small choices, each one defensible in isolation, each one optimising for something other than children’s eyes. The cumulative effect is that 65% of our children are now physiologically reshaped by the environment we built for them.

The system doesn’t have to want the outcome. It just has to act as if it does.

The principal who bans ball games on the field isn’t anti-eyesight. She’s protecting against the next parent complaint. The teacher who runs silent reading from 7:10am till assembly isn’t anti-eyesight. She’s responding to a career structure that rewards her for academic results, not for the eyes she sends home each evening. The MOE planner scheduling 6-hour school days and 2 hours indoors CCA isn’t anti-eyesight. She’s responding to parental demand for more contact time. The parent booking three enrichment classes a week isn’t anti-eyesight. She’s responding to the PSLE arms race. Each actor optimises for their local incentive. The aggregate output is a generation with elongated eyeballs.

This is what tacit means. Not declared. Not endorsed. Just produced.

The uncomfortable mirror

The kids in Singapore who don’t wear glasses are increasingly the kids who fell off the academic track early. The ones whose parents didn’t push. The ones who didn’t make it into the gifted programme, the elite secondary, the JC stream. Glasses, in our society, have become a faint marker of having tried. In fact, the sadder outcome is those who turn myopic but did not excel in their studies, which given our myopia rates, are more common than outlier.

We have built a system in which damaged eyesight is the visible signal of academic effort. Where myopia rates correlate roughly with PSLE scores. Where the child whose father bought him assessment books at age six is more likely to need glasses at twelve than the child whose father didn’t.

If you want to know what a society values, look at what it physically does to its children’s bodies. Singapore’s answer, written into 80% adult prevalence rates, is unmistakable.

The campaign theatre

Singapore is not pretending the problem doesn’t exist. The National Myopia Prevention Programme has run since 2001. Vision screening is universal. Atropine is widely prescribed. Myopia-control lenses sit on the shelf at every optical chain.

But notice where every intervention sits: downstream. Detection. Treatment. Slowing the damage that the upstream system creates.

The upstream interventions — shorter school days, less homework, mandatory outdoor instruction, lower-stakes exams — are politically untouchable. They would collide with the meritocratic compact, which is the operating system’s actual core. So we run the campaigns. We hold the press conferences. We tell parents to “encourage outdoor play” — to parents whose children spend Saturday at tuition and Sunday at enrichment.

The campaigns are not lies. They are theatre. They let us feel that something is being done while preserving the upstream conditions that make the something necessary.

The planner’s bind

The people running the system are not fools. They have the same myopia data we do. They also have data we don’t read as often — the numbers that say Singapore’s economy was built on academic intensity. Our PISA scores are the envy of OECD ministries. Our universities feed a workforce that has powered four decades of growth. The educational compact — long days, hard exams, parental investment, meritocratic sorting — is the engine that turned a port without resources into a high-income economy.

A planner staring at this is not asking the question a parent asks. The parent asks: should we relax academic intensity to save children’s eyes? The planner asks: if we relax it and the next generation underperforms, what happens to the economy that funds the healthcare system that treats myopia in the first place?

And the asymmetry is the killer. It is easy to remove academic focus from a system. It is brutally hard to put it back. Cultural norms around homework, parental investment, exam stakes — these took two generations to build. Loosen them for five or ten years to run an experiment, and you may not recover them. The downside of relaxation is permanent. The downside of holding the line — somewhat more myopic children — is at least addressable through downstream interventions.

So the planner does the calculation. Atropine works. Control lenses work. Outdoor campaigns work, partially. None of these threaten the economic engine. All of them treat the symptom while preserving the cause. From the planner’s seat this is not theatre. It is a calculated trade — absorb the physiological externality rather than risk the academic one.

Myopia is one of the uncomfortable truths the city’s planners almost certainly understand and have decided not to touch. It is not a failure of analysis. It is the analysis. The 80% prevalence rate is the planner’s reluctant equilibrium — the price they have judged worth paying to keep the engine running.

That makes the story sadder, not less culpable. Ignorance would be excusable. This is informed consent given on behalf of children who cannot give it.

The personal hook

I am writing this as the father of an eight-year-old who was just diagnosed with myopia.

I did everything a “good” parent is supposed to do. Outdoor playground every evening. Weekend swims. Reading capped at twenty minutes a session. No smartphones or tablets. And it still wasn’t enough — because “enough” in Singapore means something the system makes structurally impossible for most working parents to deliver.

I am not new to systems thinking. I should have seen this earlier and louder. I didn’t, because the system is good at making its own outputs feel like personal outcomes. My son’s myopia felt, for a moment, like something I had failed at. It is not. It is something the city did. I happened to be holding him while it happened.

You cannot single-handedly out-parent the operating system. You can mitigate. You can intervene. You can spend on atropine and special lenses and morning playground rituals. I will be doing all of that. So should every parent who has the means. But stop pretending your child’s myopia is a personal failure or a genetic curse. It is the predictable output of an environment we collectively chose. Your child’s elongated eyeball is a product of policy.

What I refuse to be

I have decided not to be powerless about this.

The system is what it is. The planner’s bind is real. I cannot single-handedly rewrite the educational compact, and I am not going to pretend that watching documentaries about myopia or writing blog posts is a substitute for action inside my own household. So my wife and I have made a set of small decisions, and we will hold them.

We will arrive at the school gate at 7:25am, not 7am. The 15 – 25 minutes of silent reading the school encourages before assembly is, for our son, fifteen minutes of low-light near focus during the worst possible window of the day. We are skipping it. From now on, we will be at the playground from 6:50am — monkey bars, frisbee, ball-catching, pull-ups, whatever it takes — and we will walk into school at the last legal minute. The school recommends earlier arrival because it is administratively convenient. It is not biologically appropriate for our child. We will politely decline.

We will redouble outdoor weekend mornings. Not the sixty-minute evening playground block we used to consider sufficient, but two to three hours of genuine outdoor time between 9am and 11am — before the equatorial sun gets unsafe and after it has cleared the buildings. Hikes, swimming, cycling, beach trips, anything not under a roof.

We will start the appropriate medical stack — atropine drops, myopia-control spectacle lenses, axial length monitoring every six months — without delay and without negotiation. The cycloplegic refraction, the Hoya MiyoSmart or Essilor Stellest lenses, the 0.05% atropine. Whatever the paediatric ophthalmologist recommends, we will say yes to immediately.

We will rearrange our son’s near-work schedule. No reading at the breakfast table. No reading during the school commute. No reading in dim ambient light. His reading time, of which he loves a great deal, will move to bright weekend daylight or to a properly lit desk in the evening, with breaks. We will not punish him for loving books. We will protect his eyes while he goes on loving them.

None of this guarantees an outcome. The system pushes the other way for seven hours a day. Our son will likely still progress. But he will progress less than he would have, and the difference between -3D and -6D as an adult is the difference between mild inconvenience and lifetime medical risk. That margin is worth fighting for.

I am writing this section as much for myself as for any reader. Powerlessness is a comfortable place to sit when the system is bigger than you. It is also a moral abdication. The planners cannot fix this. The schools will not fix this. Many parents in our position will read articles like this one, nod, feel briefly aggrieved, and change nothing on Monday morning. We are not going to be those parents.

The hardest sentence in this piece

Nobody will fix it because nobody — including me, including you — actually wants the trade reversed.

If MOE announced tomorrow that primary school would end at 1pm, that no homework would be given before P5, and that the PSLE would be abolished, the parental outrage would be louder than any anti-myopia campaign that has ever run. We say we want healthy children. What we actually vote for, with our enrichment fees and our gifted-programme aspirations and our SAP school applications, is academic differentiation at any physiological cost.

Glasses are the cost. We have decided, collectively if not consciously, that we will pay it for individual and country economic potential.

People sometimes look at our group of businesses and assume that we just keep executing based on instinct, and somehow most of the things we touch work.

Movement First. Javy Sports. Fit Bloc. Arkkies. Apex. The gyms. The sports supplies. The metal fabrication. The different pieces somehow look quite neat after the fact, as if there was always a grand plan and we just followed it.

But that is not really true.

A lot of things died before they became visible.

Some ideas never made it to a public launch. Some made it to samples, supplier meetings, trade fairs, websites, packaging materials, and early stock — but did not make it to a real business. Some were not killed in one dramatic meeting. They just died slowly because the more we studied them, the less they deserved our time.

I think this is the part people do not see enough. Entrepreneurship is not just about taking action. It is not just about being brave, moving fast, and executing harder than everyone else. Sometimes the more important skill is knowing when not to execute. Or more accurately, knowing when an idea does not deserve the next five years of your life.

The toy business we almost started

Around 2018, after we moved into a much bigger warehouse, we started thinking about how to optimise the space better.

When you suddenly have more warehouse space, your mind naturally starts wandering. What else can we store? What else can we sell? What other categories are adjacent enough to what we already do? Could we build another e-commerce business? Could we use our existing fulfilment, sourcing, and operational setup to attack another market?

Toys became one of the categories we looked at seriously.

It was not completely random. In 2018, Ian and I both became first-time parents. Our firstborns arrived that year, and naturally we started paying attention to children’s products differently.

Before becoming a parent, a toy is just a toy. After becoming a parent, you suddenly start asking different questions. What kind of toy helps a child think better? What builds spatial reasoning? What encourages curiosity? What is just plastic junk? What is actually useful? What is beautiful enough that you do not mind having it around the house?

We looked at wooden toys, technology toys, educational toys, flashcards, construction toys, problem-solving toys, and all kinds of products that promised to build a more curious child. So there was a personal angle to it. We were new parents. We were interested in the category. We were already in product sourcing and e-commerce. We had warehouse space. We had distribution ability. We had enough operational capability to think, maybe this could work.

And like many of our ideas, we did not just sit around talking about it.

We spent money.

We flew to Shanghai for the China Toy Expo. That trip probably cost around $5,000. We collected supplier contacts, looked at the China side of the market, spoke to factories, and tried to understand what was available. Then we went to Nuremberg for the Spielwarenmesse, probably another $10,000. Germany showed us a different side of the industry — not just cheap factory toys, but brands, design, positioning, European wooden toys, and all the more premium things parents like to imagine buying for their children.

We brought in batches of products from Chinese factories and from brands. That was probably another $20,000. We developed a subsection on the Javy Sports website — the plan was to sell under that brand first before spinning it out — and did early e-commerce work, maybe another $5,000. Marketing, packaging, miscellaneous costs, maybe another $5,000. Storage cost was there too, even if it is harder to quantify because we were already running the warehouse.

So this was not a random idea we entertained over coffee. Easily in the $40,000 to $50,000 range if we count everything properly.

But the more we studied the market, the less attractive it became.

The toy market was already very well served. Retailers were there. Online sellers were there. Manufacturers from China, Thailand, Europe, and the US were all fighting for the same parents’ wallets. And the barriers to entry were low. Anyone with a credit card and an Alibaba account could source toys and start selling them. There was no structural advantage we could build that someone else could not replicate quickly.

Then there was the bigger problem. Singapore’s total fertility rate was already low in 2018 — about 1.14 — and there was no obvious reason to believe it would recover. If anything, all the signs pointed the other way. And if the number of children is not growing, then the natural customer base for toys is not growing either.

Of course, a low birth rate does not mean nobody buys toys. Parents may spend more per child. Grandparents may spend more. Premium categories may still exist. But from a business point of view, we had to ask a more brutal question: why would we win?

Not, why are we interested? Not, can we source some nice products? Not, do we personally care as new parents?

Why would we win?

And the answer was not strong enough.

So the toy business died. There was no dramatic shutdown. No emotional meeting. No big internal disagreement. We just let it die a natural death. The old stock was sold through existing websites. The idea quietly stopped receiving attention.

In hindsight, I think the decision was largely correct. Over the years since, we have watched toy businesses and children-focused retail businesses in Singapore struggle, shrink, or close — some mass-market, some premium, some started by parents who genuinely cared about making better products for children. The operators were not stupid or lazy. The market was structurally difficult. Singapore’s TFR has since fallen below 1.0, and it keeps going lower.

The lesson from this one was not complicated, but it was important: just because you personally care about a market does not mean the market is structurally attractive. Personal interest and business viability are two different things, and a lot of founders confuse them. We nearly did too.

Javy Learn

The second idea was different.

Around 2021, we looked seriously at school supplies, especially art and learning supplies.

This was not toys anymore. This was more closely related to our existing customer base. Through Javy Sports, we were already serving schools. We understood some part of school procurement. We had relationships. We had warehousing. We had delivery capability. We knew how to supply physical goods to institutions.

At that time, we also had a new hire who was a native Chinese speaker and understood the sourcing side well. Because of her background, we thought we could explore categories closer to the China sourcing market with more confidence.

So we started looking at things like paint, paint markers, crayons, colour pencils, exercise books, art and craft materials, and other learning-related supplies for schools.

On paper, this looked quite logical. Schools were already buying PE-related supplies from us — why not art supplies? We already had the customer base — why not sell more things to the same customers? We already had the warehouse — why not increase product categories? We already had sourcing capability — why not use it?

This is the kind of business idea that looks very sensible in a meeting. And to be fair, it was not stupid.

We called it Javy Learn. We started javylearn.com and built the initial website. We sourced samples. We brought in products. We worked on collateral and packaging materials. We spoke to teachers and customers. We did sales outreach. Because of Covid, trade shows were not available in the same way, so the exploration was more through sourcing, samples, suppliers, and customer conversations.

Again, this was not free. Sourcing and bringing in samples probably cost around $10,000. Initial goods, collateral, and packaging material maybe another $20,000. Developing the e-commerce site maybe another $10,000. Sales outreach and customer development probably another $10,000 if we count time and cost properly. Another $40,000 to $50,000 experiment. We didn’t visit tradeshows this time due to Covid, so we saved some money here.

The difference was that Javy Learn was not necessarily a bad business. In fact, I think it could have worked. We could probably have built it to one or two million dollars in annual revenue if we executed decently.

But that was exactly the problem.

At an earlier stage of the group, a one to two million dollar revenue line would have been meaningful. In the early days, almost any profitable revenue matters. You are just trying to survive, build capability, hire people, and compound.

But by 2021, we were no longer asking the same question. The question was not just: can this make money? It had become: will this change the shape of the group?

And for Javy Learn, the answer was probably no. It would have meant more SKUs, more suppliers, more inventory, more packaging, more small orders, more school-specific servicing, more customer support, more working capital, and more management attention. But it would still hit the same kind of ceiling we had already experienced with Javy Sports. Singapore is a small domestic market. In certain categories, no matter how well you execute, the ceiling appears quite quickly.

The danger was not that Javy Learn would fail. The danger was that it would succeed just enough to trap us.

If it completely failed, the decision would be easy. Shut it down, move on. But if it worked a bit, then suddenly you have a small team, inventory, customers, obligations, slow-moving stock, and a revenue line that is too alive to kill but not big enough to matter. Everybody becomes busier, but the group does not become meaningfully stronger.

There was no big fight internally. Nobody had to be dragged away from it. The gym business started taking more attention. Other parts of the group needed more energy. Javy Learn slowly became something we did not push.

Some ideas do not die because they fail. Some ideas die because a better use of time appears.

The gym business was not obviously right

This is the part where it would be easy to rewrite history into something cleaner than it really was.

It would be tempting to say: we killed toys because it was a bad market, we killed Javy Learn because it was too small, then we entered the gym market because it was scalable, and then everything worked.

But that is not true.

The gym business had the characteristics we wanted — recurring revenue, a larger addressable market, the ability to open multiple outlets, a stronger brand moat, and a chance to make a meaningful contribution to the community. But having a bigger ceiling does not mean the business is easier. Actually, it is usually the opposite.

We struggled for a long time. The gym business only started to become clearly right from late 2024 onwards. Before that, we were grinding through it, and there were long stretches where the outcome was far from certain. Even now, I would not say it is easy. We have more breathing room, but that is not the same as saying the business is simple or solved.

So Javy Learn did not die because the gym business was already booming. It died partly because the gym business was consuming all our attention — and partly because, even if the gym bet had not existed, Javy Learn was still too small to justify group-level effort.

I wish I could say that the lessons from killing toys and Javy Learn immediately led us to the right bet. They did not. The path from killing a bad idea to building a good business is not a clean line. It is messy, slow, and full of doubt.

But the filters sharpened over time. Is the market structurally attractive? Is the ceiling high enough? Does this deserve our attention or just our interest? Is the upside worthy of the pain? Those were built from projects that cost money and went nowhere.

Spending money to not start

I know it sounds strange to say that spending $40,000 to $50,000 on an idea you eventually kill can be a good outcome.

But the alternative is worse. The alternative is to save that money, stay ignorant, convince yourself the idea is brilliant, hire people, import more stock, build a bigger website, spend more on marketing, sign leases, commit warehouse space, and then spend the next few years trying to make a structurally weak business work.

That is much more expensive. Sometimes the small loss is the thing that prevents the big loss.

The money we spent on toys and Javy Learn was not exactly fun to lose. Nobody enjoys spending money on things that do not become full businesses. But it bought us information. It forced us to see the market properly. It exposed the weak assumptions. It showed us where we did not have an unfair advantage. It clarified what kind of business was no longer worth our attention.

The best return on that money was not a new revenue stream. The best return was the decision not to continue.

Between these two ideas alone, we spent close to $100,000 and two to three years of intermittent effort. From the outside, that looks like waste. Internally, it was tuition. And I think it was cheap tuition, considering what we avoided.

The part people do not see

This is probably what bothers me most when people talk about entrepreneurship from the outside. They see the businesses that survived, and then they assume the founder has some kind of instinct. They do not see the dead ideas. They do not see the samples sitting in the warehouse, the trade fair trips, the packaging materials that never became a brand, the website that was built but not pushed, the slow internal loss of conviction.

From the inside, it is much messier. You are constantly testing, guessing, spending, learning. Getting excited and then getting disappointed. Trying to separate your ego from the facts. Trying to decide whether you are being too cautious or finally being disciplined.

And sometimes, the most disciplined thing is to stop. Not because you are scared. Not because you lack execution ability. Not because you cannot make the business work. But because making it work is not the same as making it worth it.

Toys taught us not to confuse personal interest with market attractiveness. Javy Learn taught us not to confuse viability with worthiness. These are different lessons, and both were expensive enough to remember.

Good entrepreneurs do not just execute well. They also kill well. They spend a little to learn a lot, and then they have the discipline to walk away from a business that is merely viable, in favour of one that might actually be worth the years it will take.

I bought an office workstation in July last year and only set it up recently, which is slightly ridiculous but also quite typical of how business purchases sometimes happen. You buy something because it is needed, or will be needed soon, or because a window opens where you can settle the problem before it becomes urgent. Then the business moves on to the next problem, the box sits somewhere, and months later you finally get around to using the thing you already paid for.

There was nothing especially strategic about the purchase. We needed a machine for accounting, Excel, admin work, and the boring operational layer that nobody really talks about but every business quietly depends on. The kind of work where the computer does not need to be exciting, but it cannot be slow, unstable, under-specced, or annoying. It needs to open large spreadsheets without drama. It needs to run accounting software, browser tabs, email, PDFs, WhatsApp Web, maybe some Power Query, maybe a few messy consolidated P&L files from different entities. It is not glamorous work, but it is the work that keeps the numbers visible enough for decisions to be made.

What I had not properly considered before clicking buy is that I had not properly considered anything at all. The old machine had been misbehaving for a while in a specific way — slowdowns, blue screens, the system reporting much less RAM than I knew it had — and we were busy enough with gym buildouts and the usual operational firefighting that I did the thing busy founders default to. I bought a new computer. The old one was already several years old, the new one was needed eventually anyway, and the easy decision was to skip the diagnostic step and replace the whole thing.

It was only after I had clicked buy that I sat down and actually looked at what was happening. The old PC was reporting 8GB of installed memory, which struck me as wrong. I would not have bought a machine with 8GB of RAM even eight years ago, let alone for accounting work. So I checked the original invoice. The machine had shipped with 16GB. Which meant one of the two sticks had likely failed, and the system was running on a single 8GB stick — limping along on half its memory, intermittently dropping in and out of dual channel, occasionally throwing blue screens when something demanded what it thought it had.

The fix was straightforward once I saw it. The motherboard could take four sticks up to a maximum of 32GB, and four 8GB sticks worked out cheaper per gigabyte than two 16GB sticks. So I bought $140 of Transcend RAM, replaced all of the existing memory, and the old PC came back to life. It kept running for another nine months. The new workstation sat in the box. We migrated this week not because the old machine had failed again, but because even with 32GB of working RAM, the processor had finally become the bottleneck. Slow opens, slow saves, slow everything. Time to move.

Recently, after finally setting it up, I went back to check what the same configuration would cost today from the same vendor. Not roughly the same class of machine. Not a cheaper headline build with different compromises hidden inside. As close as possible to the same configuration: same general platform, same RAM, same SSD, same graphics card, same power supply class, same cooler, same Windows and Office inclusion, same three-year warranty structure.

The answer was about 25% more.

I paid around $1,850. The equivalent build today is around $2,470. That is not a rounding error. It is not the kind of difference you explain away with one slightly better part or one small promotion. It is several hundred dollars more for something that is, for practical purposes, the same office workstation.

The mechanism is not especially mysterious. AI datacentre buildouts have put enormous pressure on memory and storage supply. The world suddenly needs a lot more RAM, a lot more SSDs, a lot more high-performance memory, and the supply chain does what supply chains do when a large buyer with urgent demand enters the room. Consumer pricing starts moving. Components that felt ordinary last year become expensive this year. Depending on the exact SKU, RAM and SSD prices have not just gone up slightly; they have moved enough that an old purchase can suddenly look unusually smart.

But that is exactly the problem with the story.

I bought before the curve bent.

I did not know the curve was about to bend.

That is the important part.

This was luck. Not strategy, not foresight, not the proprietary pattern recognition of someone who has been operating businesses for long enough to see around corners. I needed a machine, I bought one, and then the world moved in a way that made my purchase look better than it was. If I had needed that machine nine months later instead of nine months earlier, I would have paid hundreds more and there would be no essay. I would simply have absorbed the higher cost, complained a bit, and moved on.

There is also a smaller layer to this that I find quietly interesting. The new machine sat in the box for nine months not because of strategic patience but because, after I had already clicked buy, I went back and actually diagnosed the old machine. The RAM upgrade kept it alive. If I had not bothered with the second look, or if the upgrade had not worked, I would have migrated to the new workstation in August, and there would be no gap. The price move would still have happened in the world, but it would not have appeared in my story, because my reference point would still have been the price I had just paid. The window for noticing the luck opened only because a careless decision happened to be rescued by a more careful one. Two purchases, made on the same day, one impulsive and one considered, stacked into something that in retrospect looks like timing.

I find this kind of thing interesting because founders, including me, are very bad at telling stories where good luck is allowed to remain good luck. We are quite comfortable telling stories about bad luck. In fact, bad luck often improves the story. The shipment was delayed. The landlord changed the terms. The contractor disappeared. The regulation shifted. The platform changed its algorithm. The customer pulled out. The bank took too long. Bad luck flatters perseverance because the implied ending is that we suffered, adapted, pushed through, and survived.

Bad luck makes us look durable.

Good luck does something less convenient. Good luck makes the outcome feel less fully owned.

So we usually round it into something else. Timing becomes instinct. A favourable market move becomes strategic positioning. Being early without knowing we were early becomes conviction. A supplier relationship that happened to save us becomes our ability to build networks. A customer who appeared at the right time becomes proof of product-market fit. A macro tailwind becomes evidence that we understood the market better than others.

Some of these things may be partly true. That is what makes the self-deception so easy. Most business outcomes are not pure luck or pure skill. They are mixed. You had to be in the game. You had to have cash available. You had to be willing to act. You had to have built enough structure to benefit from the event when it happened. But the fact that you were positioned to receive luck does not mean you created the luck. It only means you were standing in a place where the wind could hit you.

That distinction matters.

Entrepreneurship is usually written with too clean an arc. Saw the problem, made the bet, took the heat, stayed the course, got proven right. It is a satisfying structure because it gives meaning to pain and narrative shape to chaos. It also allows the founder to remain the central causal force in the story. Every setback becomes character development. Every win becomes validation. Every coincidence gets absorbed into the myth of judgment.

But the real texture of business is much messier. Some of it is skill. Some of it is timing. Some of it is accumulated judgment from years of being punched in the face by reality. Some of it is having the right person introduce you at the right moment. Some of it is being in an industry before it becomes obvious. Some of it is having cash available when others do not. Some of it is buying a computer before RAM and SSD prices move sharply because AI datacentres start swallowing supply.

And some of it is simply randomness rewarding people who happened to be positioned to receive it.

This is not false humility. I am not saying work does not matter, or that founders should pretend they did not make difficult decisions. That would be equally dishonest. There is real work. There is real risk. There is real judgment. There are years of small decisions that create the surface area for lucky things to attach themselves to. But the presence of work does not remove the presence of luck. In fact, the more I operate, the more I think the serious work is not to deny luck, but to understand where the work ends and the luck begins.

The danger is not just moral. It is practical.

When you misread luck as skill, you become worse at decision-making. You start copying the wrong parts of your own success. You repeat the visible action without understanding the invisible conditions that allowed the action to work. You tell yourself you made a brilliant call, when what actually happened was that the market saved you, or timing saved you, or a supplier absorbed pain for you, or a competitor made a worse mistake at the exact moment you needed them to.

That kind of misattribution is expensive.

It makes you overconfident in the next bet, but not in the useful way. There is a kind of confidence that helps you move, and there is a kind of confidence that prevents you from seeing what is actually carrying you. The second kind is dangerous because it feels like leadership from the inside. You think you are being decisive. You think you are trusting your instincts. But sometimes what you are really doing is mistaking a previous tailwind for a repeatable internal capability.

That is why I think saying “I was lucky” is not just a humility exercise. It is a diagnostic tool.

It forces you to separate the parts of the outcome you controlled from the parts you did not. In the PC example, I controlled the decision to buy a competent workstation instead of underbuying. I controlled not being penny wise and pound foolish on RAM, storage, power supply, cooling, warranty, and Office. I controlled buying a machine suitable for the work rather than chasing the cheapest headline price. Those were sensible decisions.

But I did not control the AI datacentre cycle. I did not control global memory allocation. I did not control SSD pricing. I did not see the supply curve bending and move early because of some clever thesis. I bought the machine when I needed it, and the market later made that timing look clever.

That is luck.

There is another layer to this which I find harder to express without sounding mystical, so I will say it carefully. I suspect people who see themselves as lucky often become luckier over time, but not because the universe rewards positive thinking. I do not believe luck works that way. I think it is more behavioural than that.

People who think they are lucky tend to take more small risks. They show up to more rooms. They are more willing to have conversations with no immediate return. They are less quick to dismiss strange openings. They scan the world as if something useful might be hiding inside ordinary events, and because of that, they sometimes notice what others do not. They are also easier to be around because they are not constantly carrying grievance into the room. That part is underrated. People help people they do not mind helping. They share information with people who receive it well. They make introductions to people who will not embarrass them. They bring opportunities to people who seem alive to possibility rather than permanently convinced that the world has shortchanged them.

Over time, that compounds.

The inverse is also true. People who see themselves as unlucky often become harder for luck to reach. They take fewer small risks. They attend fewer conversations. They reject more opportunities before they have properly understood them. They become suspicious when help arrives and resentful when it does not. Eventually, the world gives them something close to what they expected, because their behaviour shaped what the world had a chance to deliver.

This is why gratitude for luck has a practical case even outside any spiritual framing. Gratitude keeps you accurate about how much of your outcome was given rather than earned. It prevents you from becoming the kind of founder who believes every win was deserved, every break was engineered, every favourable move in the market was just evidence of superior judgment. That kind of founder becomes hard to help, and often does not realise it until the invitations stop coming.

The grateful founder is different. Not softer. Not less ambitious. Not pretending the work was easy. Just more accurate. He can say, without embarrassment, that the timing was lucky, the conditions were lucky, the people around him were lucky, the market moved in a way that helped him, and he happened to be positioned to receive something he did not create.

That does not erase the work.

It puts the work in its proper place.

I do not know how to honestly tell the PC story without saying I was lucky. I bought a machine I needed, on a normal week, from a normal vendor, for normal business reasons. Months later, the world rearranged itself in a way that made the purchase look smarter than it was. The right response is not to pretend I saw it coming. The right response is to notice the luck, be grateful for it, and stay the kind of operator who remains available for the next round of luck without depending on it.

That last part matters. You cannot build a business by depending on luck. But you also cannot understand business properly if you remove luck from the story after it has helped you. The work is to keep building, keep deciding, keep positioning, keep reducing the downside where you can, and then, when the wind happens to be at your back, resist the very human temptation to rewrite the story as if you built the wind.

Sometimes you were smart.

Sometimes you were early.

Sometimes you worked harder than others.

And sometimes you were just lucky.

It is useful to know which is which.

When I started climbing in Singapore around 2005, I was sixteen or seventeen, and the gym looked nothing like it does today. The wall was just covered in holds. Hundreds of them. No tape, no colour coding, no grades. You walked in, looked up, and had to invent your own route — or watch someone else climb theirs and try to remember the sequence. If you forgot where the next hold was as it usually happens when you are anxious or tired, you came down and started again.

That was the spray wall era. Or more accurately: every climbing gym was essentially a spray wall.

Looking back now, with a few climbing outlets of my own and an investment in a few more, I can see how much has changed — and how much of that change has been the quiet migration of cognitive load from the climber to the gym.

Three stages

The cleanest way to frame what happened is this: indoor climbing went from self-authored to setter-authored to software-assisted.

In the self-authored era, the climber did almost all the work. You read the wall. You invented the line. You memorised the sequence. You estimated your own difficulty. The gym was a training facility that provided surfaces; you were expected to provide everything else.

Setter-authored climbing arrived with tape. A coloured strip next to a hold meant this is the route, and the chaos of the dense wall resolved into legible problems. Tape later gave way to chromatic setting — the holds themselves carried the information. Red holds form the red route. The grade is on a placard at the start. No memorisation required, no interpretation, just follow the colour.

Software-assisted climbing is where we are now on the training side. MoonBoard, Kilter, Tension — standardised hold layouts, app-based problem libraries, LEDs that light the sequence for you. The app tells you what to climb, the wall tells you where to go, and the community tells you how hard it is.

Each stage took something off the climber’s plate and put it onto the operator’s.

Why it happened

The common explanation is that this was market response — beginners need cleaner walls, tired climbers need easier reading. That’s true but incomplete. A few less-obvious drivers:

Turnover. Setter-authored climbing creates a refreshable product. A reset every two to four weeks pulls members back to try new problems. A static spray wall doesn’t. This is probably the single biggest commercial reason mainstream gyms moved away from dense walls, and why the spray wall got displaced from the main floor to a dedicated training corner — if it survives at all.

Communal legibility. Graded routes create shared vocabulary. “Did you try the new V4 on the overhang?” is a sentence that works in a chromatic gym. It doesn’t work on a spray wall, because my V4 and your V4 aren’t the same problem. Setter-authored climbing is easier to talk about, easier to film, easier to share. This matters more in the Instagram era than it did in 2005.

Beginner onboarding. V0 to V1 to V2 is a visible progression ladder. Spray walls can’t onboard beginners because they presume the climber already knows how to read movement. For a commercial gym, losing the beginner pipeline is fatal.

Liability and consistency. Setter-authored routes let the operator control the movement, test the holds, present known difficulty. Spray walls distribute authorship — and with it, dispute and injury risk — back to the climber. That’s not incidental.

Coordination as a genre

Hold design changed alongside the setting style. Older spray walls were dense and rock-mimicking — small to medium holds packed tightly, the shapes suggesting granite or limestone. You couldn’t do coordination moves on that kind of wall because there is no single hold to aim for; the wall is just textured surface area.

Macros and volumes changed that. Big three-dimensional shapes, spaced far apart, create the geometry for dynamic coordination movement — the all-points-off paddle, the running dyno, the comp-style jump-to-a-volume. This movement genre didn’t exist as a category twenty years ago. It exists now because hold design made it possible, and because competition climbing made it aspirational.

What this also means: modern indoor climbing is drifting further from outdoor rock. Granite doesn’t have volumes. Limestone doesn’t have paddle holds. A climber who has only trained on modern setting is strong on plastic but often plateaus at outdoor grade transitions, because the skill of reading dense, ungenerous rock has never been rehearsed. Indoor climbing is no longer training for rock. It has become its own sport, with its own movement vocabulary, and its own athletes who may never climb outside at all.

Revealed preference

You can see how deep this shift goes by looking at modern gyms that still provide spray walls. Many do. A spray wall tucked into a corner or a side room is a common feature — a nod to the old training tradition, or a concession to the strong climbers who might want one. But watch the floor on any given evening. The coloured routes are crowded. The training boards have a queue. The spray wall sits mostly empty, used briefly for warm-ups or by one or two regulars who know how to work it.

Operators didn’t stop building spray walls because nobody would use them. They built them, watched them sit idle, and drew the obvious conclusion. Even the climbers who theoretically benefit most from open-ended training gravitate toward the legible product when it’s available. The spray wall didn’t die because gyms killed it. It became niche because climbers voted with their feet.

The board compromise

Training boards sit in an interesting middle position. A MoonBoard, Kilter or Tension is functionally a spray wall — dense, standardised, no grade markings on the wall itself. But the app layer restores everything that makes chromatic setting satisfying: grades, community voting, shared problems, lit sequences.

Boards give you the producer-density of the old era underneath a consumer-interface layer. That’s why serious athletes use them and most casual climbers don’t or can’t. The density is still there; the demand for patience and improvisation is not.

I was at the Läderach counter with my son recently, buying chocolate at S$22 for 100 grams. He watched me pay, and I found myself explaining — half to him, half to myself — that this is what work is for. Not to hoard money endlessly, but to be able to enjoy something indulgent once in a while without flinching, and without guilt.

The entrepreneur, as far as I can tell, has to hold contradictions that don’t naturally sit well together to be successful. Each one sounds like a virtue on its own. Held together, they look more like paradoxes. That’s probably why so few people manage it.

Short-sighted enough to care about immediate profitability. Far-sighted enough not to spend it.

You cannot start a business if you are completely detached from money. At some level, you have to be driven by it. You have to notice a gap and feel enough urgency to do something about it.

For me, that was noticing that a specific niche of fitness equipment was hard to buy in Singapore. By around 2010, CrossFit was already taking root here, but the ecosystem around that kind of equipment still felt fragmented. There was demand, but the supply side hadn’t matured.

That’s the short-sighted part. You have to care about the first dollar in — whether people will actually pay.

The harder part comes after. You have to be far-sighted enough not to enrich yourself too early. You watch the bank account climb and resist the urge to consume the result. You keep putting money back into the machine — inventory, supplier depth, the subsequent business via horizontal or vertical expansion, then some. The process took me more than fifteen years, and at many points I could have taken money out. At many points I could have rewarded myself earlier.

That’s where most people break. They have one good business, one good year, maybe two, and they assume the trajectory is now permanent. They buy the luxury car. They upgrade the lifestyle. They stop compounding at exactly the point compounding would have started to matter. They confuse early validation for arrival.

The irony is that to start, you need to care enough about money to chase it. But to build something lasting, you need to become detached enough from it not to spend it.

Smart enough to qualify for the top track. Street-smart enough to walk away from it.

In Singapore, the path for strong students is very clearly marked. If you were in a special stream, the expected move after O-levels was JC, then a local university with a scholarship from a ministry or an MNC, then a bonded career that is fast-tracked.

I went to polytechnic in 2004 instead.

At the time, this looked like some combination of stupidity and bravery, mostly the former. The tilt toward the JC route wasn’t imagined. In 2008, of every 100 students in a cohort, 25 entered the three subsidised local universities — 19 through the JC route and only 6 through polytechnic. The university route then was structurally more oriented toward JC.

What I only realised later was that polytechnic suited me far better than the conventional path would have. The curriculum was directly aligned with what I actually wanted to learn, which was business. It was also, frankly, easier academically than JC. That gave me more room to explore, more time to pursue other interests, and less of the exhaustion that comes from grinding through a prestigious path by default.

Then came the second-order effect. Many of my JC peers arrived at university already burnt out. They had told themselves JC was the sacrifice and university would be the reward, so by the time they got there they wanted to play. They treated university as the last checkpoint before adulthood, and some of them took their studies too lightly. I arrived fresher, with a better relationship with studying, and could push hard when it actually mattered.

The same logic showed up later whenever scholarships were dangled as the obvious next move. In OCS, the army tried to sell me one — local or overseas, bonded to the organisation afterwards. On paper the pitch is always attractive: prestige, security, a defined path, a sense that you’ve been chosen. But street-smartness begins where the official pitch ends. You count the years. You see the cost of bonds, of lost optionality, of a life that looks good on paper but is already spoken for. The pitch always skips the cost side, and that’s exactly where the asymmetry lives.

Sometimes the smartest move is not to take the path designed for smart people.

Brave enough to leap. Discerning enough not to be stupid.

The line between bravery and stupidity is thin, and it is only visible in retrospect. Choosing polytechnic over JC could have turned out stupid. Starting Movement First could have turned out stupid. Many of the expansion decisions I’ve made along the way looked unnecessary, reckless, or overconfident until enough time had passed for people to relabel them as bold. That is one of the cruellest things about entrepreneurship: the judgement is always retrospective.

Ark Bloc was one of those bets. We took on a 15,000 sqft space that was effectively a sheltered shed — no walls, no fit-out — and spent a significant sum retrofitting it. The math only worked if the lease played out a very specific way: signed in Feb/March 2022 with two months rent-free, opened in May, with an initial term of less then 3 years running till December 2025. For the economics to hold, we needed SLA to renew the master lease for another two or three years and not five, so that the landlord would not be able to find a replacement tenant easily and we would have leverage to negotiate a modest rent increase at renewal. If revenue growth disappointed, or if SLA declined to renew the master lease, or if the lease got extended too long at the wrong rent, the capital we had sunk in would be gone. Objectively, for the win probability we were underwriting, it was probably stupid.

The thesis played out. We had designed Ark Bloc around bouldering, strongman and functional fitness, but by luck more than foresight, the layout and stations mapped almost perfectly onto Hyrox, which boomed from 2022 onwards. The lease got renewed in 2023. We’re still waiting to see whether it gets renewed again at the end of this year. The bet hasn’t fully resolved.

That’s the honest shape of these decisions. At the time of the leap, I could not have told you with confidence which side of the line we were on. I could only tell you that the downside was survivable and the thesis rested on something real — actual demand for bouldering and functional fitness space, an actual scarcity of 15,000 sqft shells in the right catchments. Those two conditions are what separate a brave bet from a stupid one, at least in my experience. The people who stay on the brave side usually insist on both. The people who end up on the stupid side usually skip one or the other.

Where it breaks

I’ve seen two failure modes more often than any others, and they are the same paradox running in opposite directions.

One group is too far-sighted. They chase a grand vision without doing the unglamorous work of figuring out who their first twenty paying customers are. They build a beautiful product for a market they haven’t properly spoken to. They confuse ambition with traction.

The other group is too short-sighted. They do get traction. They do make money. But they mistake the first upward slope for the whole curve. They cash out too early, upgrade their lives quickly, and stop reinvesting at exactly the moment they should be doubling down.

One dreams without grounding. The other earns without discipline. Both fail on the same axis, just from opposite ends.

When my son is older, I’ll probably tell him some version of this. Work hard enough that you can buy the chocolate without flinching. But don’t get so attached to the chocolate that you stop compounding the thing that bought it.

The friend whose first order started my trading business also introduced me to the client who would one day threaten to burn my warehouse down. I’m still grateful to him.

I was in my early twenties when a friend — a coach I’d met through mutual circles — placed a small order with me. Equipment for a corporate facility he was setting up. Nothing dramatic. A few hundred dollars. But it was the first real order my trading company ever received, and it set the whole thing in motion: supplier relationships, logistics, invoicing, the entire operational muscle that would eventually become the backbone of three companies.

Over the next year, this friend co-founded a brand with an older, more established entrepreneur — a foreigner with a corporate background, a loud personality, and the kind of confidence that fills a room even when the numbers don’t. I’ll call the friend L, and the founder B.

Because of L, I became their go-to equipment supplier. We gave them preferential pricing — 20% off our standard rates, free delivery, credit terms. We treated the relationship as a long-term investment. They were growing, opening new locations, and we were growing with them.

The problems started quietly.

The Pattern

Their first unpaid invoice was $84. It sat for three months. I chased B directly. “Sure.” Then silence. I chased again. “Will do.” Then silence. I chased a third time. “Oh yeah, forgot.” It eventually got paid, but the pattern was set.

The amounts grew. A custom steel frame for a corporate client’s office. Equipment for their flagship location. Deliveries for satellite orders. Every time, the same cycle: we’d deliver on credit, then spend weeks chasing. Their ops manager — a good guy, always caught in the middle — would say “sure sure,” “I’m on it,” “I’ll nudge him.” But the cheque never came on time.

By mid-2016, the outstanding amounts had been dragging since February. I’d send polite messages. Blue ticked. Follow up. “Sorry, we’re swarmed.” Follow up again. “B’s been overseas.” Follow up again. Silence.

No one ever said they wouldn’t pay. But no one was making it happen either.

The Deposit

When their next big order came — a major equipment package for a new outlet, roughly $11,000 after a generous discount — I required a 50% deposit.

Their ops manager pushed back. “We’ve been your customers for so long already. Still need to drop 50%?”

I explained. The recent orders had been painful to collect. I’d also been burned before — L once asked me to produce 25 custom units, I didn’t take a deposit, they pulled out, and I was stuck selling those units for more than two years.

“A 50% deposit is market practice,” I wrote. “Whether you are buying products or services, your construction contractor probably has something arranged too. The bigger the potential purchase, the more we have to take this deposit in case the deal falls through.”

B himself had messaged me weeks earlier, unprompted, to say they’d just closed a major investment round. New locations in the pipeline. So I didn’t understand why a deposit on an order they had already committed to was generating this much friction.

They agreed. The deposit came in. We reserved the stock, placed top-up orders with our suppliers, and prepared for delivery six weeks later.

Delivery Day

August 2016. Two vans loaded. Picked, packed, and ready.

That morning, I messaged their ops manager: “Can I confirm the cheques are ready?”

Silence.

I followed up at 1pm. Silence.

By early afternoon, I learned the cheque hadn’t been prepared. B had been overseas and just returned. No one had arranged the balance payment despite two weeks of confirmations.

We told them we’d hold the delivery until the payment was ready. This was the agreement from the start: 50% deposit, 50% on delivery.

The Explosion

B called my business partner first. Then the messages came.

“Push me or my guys again, say one more sarcastic comment about us, do anything short of deliver my stuff immediately or you will never get another order from me.”

I responded calmly. I showed him the agreement. I walked him through the timeline — the follow-ups with his ops manager, the two weeks of “sure, sure,” the cheque that wasn’t ready on the actual day.

He told me to shove the equipment. He said he’d sue me to pieces. He said I had no idea the trouble he would go to, to bury my business. He said his lawyers would be in touch and told me to sleep well.

Then, over the phone — not in text, which is perhaps why he felt brave enough to say it — he threatened to come to my warehouse and set it on fire.

We called the police. They took it seriously. They advised us: if he shows up, stay inside the unit and call us immediately.

He didn’t show up. The lawyers never came either.

What We Did Next

We delivered the equipment that same evening.

Two vans. Up the cargo lift. Into the space. His staff — the ops manager, the trainers, the people preparing for their grand opening — didn’t deserve to be caught in the middle of their boss’s tantrum.

A few days later, we discovered a defective medicine ball in the shipment. We air-freighted a replacement from our supplier at our own cost — not by sea, which would take four weeks, but by air — so it would arrive before their opening.

Their ops manager thanked us. “Thanks for being professional. Appreciate that.”

B never apologized. Not that week, not that year, not ever.

The Friend in the Middle

What made this harder wasn’t B. People like B exist in every industry. They’re loud, they run hot, and they confuse aggression with leadership. You learn to deal with them.

What made it harder was L.

L was the co-founder. He was also my friend — someone I’d known since before the company existed, someone whose first order had literally started my business. When the threats came, I reached out to him directly. I laid everything out. I told him we had contacted the police. I told him my business partner had needed reassurance before sending our delivery crew, in case B followed through on his threats.

I told L, honestly, that the only reason I hadn’t posted the entire exchange online was because of him.

He replied that he was deep in construction for their new outlet. He said he’d call me that night.

He never did.

I don’t hold it against him. He was caught between a business partner and a friend, in the middle of an expansion that probably felt like the most important thing in the world. He chose not to step in. I understand why. But understanding doesn’t make the silence land any softer when you’re the one who just got threatened.

Ten Years Later

I’m writing this nearly a decade on.

There’s a coda to this story that I find hard not to smile at.

Even before the blowup, B’s company had started selling our products through their online store — a consignment arrangement where we supplied the goods, they took a commission, and we handled fulfilment. After the fallout, they began sourcing directly from the same factories in China, branding the equipment themselves. They were building toward something bigger.

Five years after the threats, their ops manager reached out again. The company wanted to partner with — or buy — an equipment supplier in Singapore. Scale things locally and internationally. A “much bigger play,” he called it.

They approached us first.

I declined. Politely, but without hesitation. Too much bad blood. B had never apologized. You don’t go into business with someone who threatened to burn your warehouse, no matter how much time has passed.

Their ops manager understood. He said he’d reach out to someone else. That was the last real conversation we had.

Less than three years later, the brand shut down all its outlets. Key investor pulled out. Liquidators appointed. Members scrambling for refunds.

The company that once wanted to acquire what we’d built couldn’t keep its own doors open.

I don’t say this to gloat. I say it because there’s something worth examining in the contrast.

We were twenty-something when this happened. Our trading company was small, bootstrapped, running on margins thin enough to see through. We had no investors, no PR, no media profile. We had a warehouse, a van, and a set of payment terms we believed were fair.

Enforcing those terms against a bigger, louder, better-funded client felt terrifying. When someone threatens to destroy your livelihood — when they threaten to physically burn your inventory — the instinct is to fold. To tell yourself it’s not worth the fight over a few thousand dollars. To deliver the goods, eat the delay, preserve the relationship.

We did deliver. But we didn’t fold on the principle. And that distinction matters more than I understood at the time.

What I Learned

The companies that shout the loudest about their growth are often the most fragile underneath. A business that can’t write a cheque for $5,600 on delivery day — after agreeing to the terms, after confirming twice, after closing a funding round — doesn’t have a cash management problem. It has a discipline problem. And discipline problems compound.

A 50% deposit is not an insult. It’s a basic commercial safeguard that every serious buyer understands. The ones who take it personally are telling you something about how they run their operation. Listen.

The people who threaten to bury you rarely have the follow-through. The lawyers never called. The warehouse didn’t burn. The business wasn’t destroyed. What actually happened is much quieter: we kept operating, kept our terms, kept building. And the person who made the threats eventually ran out of runway.

And gratitude and boundaries can coexist. I owe L something real — his first order set everything in motion for me. I can hold that gratitude while also recognising that he went silent when it mattered, and that the friendship was never quite the same after. Both things are true. Neither cancels the other out.

If you’re a young founder reading this and you’ve just been shouted at by a bigger client for enforcing your own payment terms — for doing the thing your business needs you to do to survive — I want you to know something.

You’re not being unprofessional. You’re being a business.

The discomfort you feel right now, standing your ground when every instinct tells you to apologise and comply — that’s the price of building something that lasts.

When people speak about compounding, they almost always mean money.

They mean savings, investments, interest, and the quiet arithmetic of letting capital sit still long enough to multiply itself. That is one form of compounding, and an important one. But it is not the only form, and I suspect it is not even the most powerful one in an individual life.

The more consequential forms of compounding are harder to see, precisely because they do not present themselves in neat numbers. Skills compound. Knowledge compounds. Relationships compound. Reputation compounds. Health compounds. So does the absence of those things.

The problem is that most people only learn to recognise compounding when it appears on a spreadsheet.

What they miss is that life itself is full of non-financial compounding effects — except they are usually invisible while they are being built and only become obvious in hindsight.

That, I think, is why so many people underestimate the value of curiosity, of learning broadly, and of pursuing hard knowledge before there is any clear use case for it. They want to know what something is for before they are willing to invest in it. They want immediate application, immediate payoff, immediate relevance. But a large part of life does not reveal its uses that early.

A lot of useful knowledge enters your life long before it becomes usable.

When I was twelve or thirteen, I taught myself website design. At fifteen, photography. At sixteen, design. Around the same period, I was building PCs from parts to sell to my mother’s bosses — not because I had a plan, but because I found the work interesting and it made a bit of money. Later, climbing gave me familiarity with tools, hardware, and the practical side of how equipment behaves under load. When I started my business, installation work forced all of that into a more serious and commercial form.

At the time, none of these felt like part of one coherent strategy. They looked separate. Even random. Website design did not obviously point to gym equipment. Photography did not obviously point to operations. Building computers as a teenager did not obviously point to troubleshooting fitness machines a decade later.

But that is precisely how compounding often works in real life. It does not always stay within one lane. Sometimes it happens across domains, and the connections only become legible in reverse.

A person learns design and becomes better at presentation. He learns photography and becomes better at marketing. He learns hardware and becomes less intimidated by repairs. He learns installation and becomes better at operations. He learns how systems fit together and becomes better at solving practical problems under commercial constraints.

No single skill explains the result. But together, over time, they create a form of capability that looks obvious only after the fact.

This is why I have become increasingly convinced that the pursuit of hard skills and hard knowledge is rarely wasted. Not because every skill will produce a direct and immediate return — often it will not — but because the relationship between learning and usefulness is usually delayed, uneven, and nonlinear. A thing can sit dormant in your life for years before the right context arrives and suddenly gives it value.

Reading works in a similar way.

People often think of reading too transactionally. They read one book and try to extract one lesson from it, as though the point of reading is to find an immediately deployable tactic. But I do not think the deepest benefits of reading work like that.

It is not one book that changes your life. More often, it is hundreds of books over ten or fifteen years. It is seeing the same truths reappear in different language, in different settings, across different traditions and disciplines, until those truths stop being mere information and start becoming part of your judgment. Reading changes you less by isolated insight than by accumulated pattern recognition.

That, to me, is where reading begins to compound properly.

For me, some of those patterns came from Buddhist influence at home, then reading more about Buddhism from a layperson’s perspective, and later encountering Stoic ideas. On the surface, these may not look like things that should shape the building of a business. It sounds almost contradictory — why would someone who understands impermanence start a company?

But in practice, it is the same thing.

When you think seriously about impermanence, you become less attached to any single product, strategy, idea, or business model. When you think seriously about interdependence, you stop imagining that outcomes are caused by one factor alone. When you understand that conditions are always shifting, you become less shocked when plans fail and less arrogant when they succeed. You do not fall apart when things go sideways, because you already know that everything changes, nothing is permanent, and everything depends on everything else.

These are not merely spiritual ideas in some abstract sense. They are useful operating principles. They make you less rigid, more adaptive. They make it easier to let go of what no longer works. They make it easier to revise your position without feeling that your identity is under attack. In business, that matters a great deal.

This is also why cross-disciplinary reading is so powerful. The person with the edge is not always the person who knows one field most deeply. Sometimes it is the person who has read across several fields and can recognise analogies earlier than others can. What applies in one industry may become a useful lens in another. A case study from manufacturing may suddenly illuminate maintenance. An idea about human nature may explain a problem in hiring or marketing.

But none of this can be forced too early. You cannot read The Toyota Way and demand that it justify itself to you immediately. Sometimes you have to read first, work first, struggle first — and only later does experience provide the missing bridge. That delayed usefulness is not a bug. It is part of how compounding works.

Practical skill compounds in the same way, and it nearly always feels linear before it feels exponential.

When we first started, the work was simple. Dumbbell racks. Benches. Basic assemblies. Then over time it moved into more complicated machines — power racks, Smith machines, cable stations, rowers, ski ergs. Then eventually into the electronic side of things, where you begin to understand burnt boards, faulty buttons, worn switches, loose wiring, simple soldering, and the difference between something being genuinely dead and merely repairable.

In the early stage, the progress feels almost disappointingly flat. One small task. Then another. Then another. Nothing about it feels dramatic.

That is one reason people quit too early. They misread the phase they are in. They think nothing is happening because the visible gains are still modest. What they do not yet realise is that repetition is building familiarity, and familiarity is reducing fear, and reduced fear is increasing willingness to attempt harder things. Once that threshold is crossed, capability expands faster than it did before.

At some point, you are no longer merely assembling what someone else told you to assemble. You are diagnosing. You are improvising. You are understanding systems. And once that happens, the range of things you can do expands well beyond the specific tasks you were first trained for.

Each layer of competence opens the next. The confidence compounds alongside the skill.

Relationships compound too, though in a less discussed way.

A business does not only grow through products, pricing, and execution. It also grows through trust, and trust is itself a compounding asset.

When customers know that you do what you say you will do, that compounds. When landlords know that you are reliable, that compounds. When suppliers know that your word means something, that compounds. When staff know that you are fair, that compounds.

Reputation is built in increments.

If you promise something and deliver it, people remember. If there is a delay and you are upfront about it, people remember. If something is clearly your fault and you refund quickly or compensate fairly, people remember. If an employee makes a small mistake and you respond with proportion instead of ego, people remember.

None of these moments looks life-changing in isolation. But over time they become a stockpile of trust. Then one day, that trust returns — as referrals, as loyalty, as patience, as extra effort at exactly the moment you need it most. By then, the return looks sudden. But the reality is that it was built much earlier through repeated small acts of reliability.

Even within a company, this matters more than people admit. A hundred-dollar loss to a business can be absorbed without much consequence. The same hundred dollars to a junior employee may be two or three percent of his monthly pay. The company writes it off as an expense. The worker cannot. So part of leadership is knowing when to enforce, when to teach, and when to absorb. If you are fair when you can be, you are not merely being kind. You are making deposits into the relationship.

That compounds too. When you need people to step up for a critical task, the ones who feel respected get there faster than the ones who feel taken advantage of.

Of course, not all compounding is positive.

Negative patterns compound with just as much force. In some areas, perhaps more.

I saw that most clearly in my own health. As the business was growing and my children were young, stress rose and daily rhythms broke down. I was undereating during the day — not obviously, because I was consuming enough overall to feel as though I had eaten. The problem was timing, regularity, and quality.

Then came the night cravings. Then the snacking. Then poorer sleep. Then worse recovery. Then more weight gain. Then the whole thing began feeding itself. My weight crept from 65 to 75 to 80 kilograms — not because of one bad decision, but because of a cycle that reinforced itself quietly over years.

From the outside, people often talk about weight gain or poor health as though it came from one moral failure. But much of the time it is simply bad compounding. One destabilised habit pulls on another, which pulls on another, until the system as a whole starts working against you.

It took a long time to understand properly. I tried the fad diets. I considered the shortcuts. Eventually I figured out something embarrassingly simple: I was not eating enough at regular intervals. Once I fixed that, the night cravings subsided. Better eating led to better sleep. Better sleep led to better recovery. Better recovery led to better training and energy regulation. The pattern did not reverse overnight, but it did reverse.

That is the encouraging part: the reversal also compounds once the fundamentals are corrected. The negative spiral and the positive spiral follow the same mechanics. The question is which one you are feeding.

What, then, should one do with all of this?

My own view is that people should invest more seriously in curiosity than they currently do. Not shallow dabbling for the sake of stimulation, but genuine curiosity that leads into competence. Learn hard things. Read serious books. Acquire practical skills. Follow interests far enough that they become part of your mental furniture. Do not dismiss a field too quickly simply because its usefulness is not yet obvious.

A great deal of what later becomes decisive in life begins as something that did not look especially important at the time.

A hobby becomes an operational advantage. A philosophical idea becomes a management principle. A technical skill becomes a commercial edge. A habit of reading becomes judgment. A habit of fairness becomes a network of trust. A small discipline in health becomes a different body five years later.

The compounding was real all along. It simply did not announce itself early.

You may not know when you will use what you have learned. You may not know how it will connect. You may not even know what problem it is preparing you to solve. But life has a way of returning serious effort in forms that are difficult to predict in advance.

If that is true — and I believe it is — then the rational response is not to wait until every learning journey comes with a clear spreadsheet. It is to build depth anyway, to follow real curiosity seriously, and to trust that what compounds quietly today may become unexpectedly useful tomorrow.

One day, you look back, and the line has gone vertical.

A lot has been said about entrepreneurship, and most of it tends to fall into one of two camps. Either people warn you away from it — because it is uncertain, difficult, and the odds are low — or they romanticise it too much, as though it is some glamorous act of self-invention, full of freedom and inspiration and very little friction. I have always felt that both versions are incomplete.

The truth, at least to me, lies somewhere in between, and perhaps slightly outside both.

Because the real joy of entrepreneurship is not that it is easy, and it is also not that it is heroic. It is that it allows certain kinds of people to live in a way that feels profoundly natural to them, even when that life looks difficult from the outside. It allows you to create something from nothing. To take a gap, an intuition, a problem that other people have overlooked or dismissed, and slowly — through repeated effort, trial, and correction — turn it into something real. A business. A product. A place. A system. A piece of reality that would not have existed in quite that form if you had not decided to build it.

There is something deeply satisfying about that.

And beyond the building itself, there is a quieter joy in knowing that strangers are better off because of something you made. A customer finds what they need. A school uses your equipment. Someone walks into a gym that feels less intimidating than the others and finally begins. An older person who might otherwise have felt that fitness was not “for people like them” now has a place where they feel welcome. These are not grand, cinematic moments. They are small proofs that what you built has entered other people’s lives and changed them in some real way. I think that matters more than people admit.

There is also the joy of being able to explain what you do to your children, and to watch them slowly realise that what you have built is not ordinary. Not in the sense of status or prestige alone, but in the sense that most people do not spend their lives turning ideas into systems and systems into businesses. My son goes to school and sees the sports equipment we supply being used by his classmates. He knows we put it there. He can point to something in his environment and say, my father made that available. That is a small thing. But it is not a small feeling.

And perhaps even more than pride, there is the joy of giving your children a different starting point from the one you had. To let them encounter ideas earlier, read books that open up the world before the world has had a chance to narrow them, grow up in an environment where curiosity is a strength rather than a distraction. I grew up without that kind of scaffolding. I found Rich Dad Poor Dad on my own, read The Fifth Discipline at sixteen with a barely-formed prefrontal cortex and understood maybe thirty percent of it, and still it planted something that never left: that outcomes are rarely caused by one thing alone, that systems shape behaviour, that success and failure are often designed into the structure long before they become visible in the result. My children will have those ideas much earlier. At eight, my son already knows more than I did at eight. That, to me, is one of the deepest gifts entrepreneurship has made possible.

And then there is another joy which is harder to explain to people who have never built anything — the joy of operating in uncertainty.

Entrepreneurship, in my experience, is always a kind of fog of war. You do not know for certain if your reading of the market is right. You do not know if the site will perform, if the tender will be awarded, if the gap you have spotted is truly there or only visible to you. You move forward with incomplete information, guided by instinct, pattern recognition, logic, and whatever fragments of experience you have gathered from before. And then reality reveals itself.

Sometimes you are right, and there is a deep pleasure in that — not simply because you make money, but because something in your mind has correctly grasped the shape of the world before the world fully showed its hand. And sometimes you are wrong, but even then, if your temperament suits this life, failure does not feel purely like failure. It feels like correction. Like truth arriving. Like a model being refined.

What makes this sustainable across many businesses is asymmetry. One site failing barely registers. But one site growing — the upside is uncapped, while the downside is bounded by what you put in. It is the structure of a portfolio, except you built the assets yourself and you own them entirely. Your downside is $10. Your potential upside is $100. And because you built it rather than merely bought it, the satisfaction when it compounds is in a different category entirely. Most professional lives are structured to minimise variance. Entrepreneurship, done right, is structured to seek asymmetry. That distinction matters more than almost anything else I could tell you.

I have always been this sort of person — curious, outspoken, slightly troublesome, always looking for the gap in the system almost before the system had finished explaining itself. Even as a child, I was instinctively noticing loopholes, weak points, things that did not quite add up. I would hear a new school attendance system announced over the PA and within three seconds ask the teacher whether the first person in could punch the card for everyone. She told me to use my brain for better things. I felt mildly embarrassed then. I shouldn’t have. 

Later, when I walked into any business, I was not only seeing what was in front of me. I was seeing pricing, customer flow, staff count, foot traffic, renovation cost, likely rental, margins — whether the whole thing made structural sense. These patterns spun in my head almost automatically, from fifteen or sixteen years old. They still do.

That is also why the sacrifices of entrepreneurship have never felt to me as great as people imagine they should.

Of course there were sacrifices. I could have taken a more conventional path, drawn a steadier salary earlier, given my family more comfort from the beginning. Instead, I paid myself $500 a month for two years, then slowly — $2,000, then $3,000, then $5,000, then gradually up to where I am now, which is above the Singapore median but still the deliberately deferred version. If I wanted to, I could pay myself far more without any difficulty. I still don’t, because I would rather keep building.

But none of this felt especially unnatural to me. Living frugally felt natural. Learning new skills felt natural. Sleeping less because I was building something — teaching myself programming, fixing website bugs, designing, taking photos, sourcing products — all of it felt less like hardship and more like a continuous game. A serious one, but still a game. A game in which I was constantly acquiring new abilities, constantly improving my own range. What others might have experienced as deprivation, I experienced as momentum.

The cost was real. It only sat lightly on a temperament that was already suited for it.

I have often thought that entrepreneurship is not necessarily for everyone, but entrepreneurial thinking should be. Not everyone should start a business — markets are brutal, timing is unforgiving, and one must be genuinely resourceful and observant enough to find a real gap and exploit it properly. But the way an entrepreneur thinks — seeing inefficiencies, improving processes, solving problems once and properly instead of repeatedly and badly — that is valuable everywhere. In our own businesses, we try to cultivate it in everyone around us. Think like a process owner. If a tool can save three hours, we will buy the tool. The real scarcity is not money. It is wasted effort, rework, friction, and problems that recur because no one wanted to solve them properly the first time.

This thinking also shaped which businesses we built and which we walked away from. Service businesses can be good businesses, but they are fragile in a specific way: they depend too much on talented individuals who may leave, take others with them, and force you to rebuild what you thought was stable. I wanted businesses built around strong systems, where ordinary people could do very good work inside a well-designed structure. That eventually led us to our various businesses, which does not rely on a strong leader or a superstar employee, but on the system working the magic.

We were very clear that we could not serve everyone, so the more important question was: who do we want to serve? The strongest? The already-converted? Or the beginners? The aunties and uncles in their sixties who need movement more than they need another place to perform intensity? We chose the bottom of the pyramid, because it is larger, more neglected, and in some ways more important. We wanted something affordable, beginner-friendly, Singaporean — a brand that did not merely import an overseas model but met ordinary people where they were. The equipment choices — 30kg max dumbbells, bumper plates — were not trivial operational details. They reflected a point of view about who the gym is for, and equally, who it is not primarily for.

That gave the business meaning beyond the economics. Though the economics still mattered.

And yes, if I am honest, there is also joy in exceeding expectations.

Many people pretend not to care about this. Most human beings do, at least a little. My teachers did not expect much from me. I was the kind of student they were hesitant to invite back to speak — not because I had failed, but because they suspected I would tell their students that the conventional path was not the only one, and they were probably right to be cautious. There is something satisfying, years later, about being able to say simply and matter-of-factly that you own a wide range of businesses, including twenty-five gyms and to know that this is already beyond what most people can imagine, and yet still feel that this is only the middle of the story.

That builds confidence. Of course it does. Confidence compounds the same way capital does.

But even that is not the deepest joy.

The deepest joy is that entrepreneurship has allowed me to live in a way that feels aligned with my mind, my temperament, and my instincts. It has allowed me to keep learning, keep noticing, keep building, keep moving between industries when I found them interesting, keep solving problems that felt real to me — without having to become narrower with age.

Many lives become smaller over time. More specialised, more cautious, more defined by what one has already become. Entrepreneurship, for me, did the opposite. It made life larger. It widened the number of things I could meaningfully care about, and allowed curiosity to remain useful rather than ornamental.

So when people ask whether entrepreneurship is worth it, I do not think the answer is universal. For some, the uncertainty would be too corrosive, the cost too high, the fog too disorienting.

But for a certain kind of person — one who is naturally curious, naturally restless, naturally inclined to see the gap, test the model, improve the process, and build where others hesitate — the fog is not the cost.

The fog is the point.

One of the less discussed parts of building a business is that society and business often speak in entirely different languages when it comes to success, and because of that, a founder can spend years doing what is rational in one domain while appearing irrational, unimpressive, or even suspect in the other.

Society, understandably, relies on visible shorthand. It wants some immediate, legible proof that one is doing well. The car one drives, the clothes one wears, the watch on the wrist, the wallet in the pocket, the handbag one’s wife carries, the house one lives in — these things are not merely objects, but signals, and people read them with astonishing confidence. From these surfaces, they infer scale, competence, credibility, and truthfulness. If the outward presentation is modest, then many quietly conclude that the inner reality must be modest too. If one claims otherwise, it can sound like exaggeration.

But business, especially in its earlier growth years, often demands a very different posture. It asks not what can be displayed, but what can still be retained. It asks whether the next dollar is better spent on comfort or on capacity. It asks whether the founder is willing to delay the performance of success in order to increase the substance of it.

That, in very plain terms, is why I have come to see deferred salary or deferred salary increments not as some grand act of self-denial, but as a form of capital allocation. Sometimes the business is not paying the founder more not because the business is weak, but because it is strong enough, and the opportunities ahead are compelling enough, that spare cash has a higher return inside the machine than outside it.

This is easy enough to say once the logic has become obvious in hindsight. It is much harder when one is living through it.

—

Because in real life, this decision does not feel noble. It often feels confusing. There is a period, sometimes a long one, where you are not entirely sure whether you are being disciplined or simply making life harder for yourself than necessary. You watch peers around you move along more socially recognisable tracks of progress. They buy the continental car while sitting in a fifteen-year-old car on the way to check on a stanky civil defence basement outlet.

And meanwhile, if you are in that founder phase where the business keeps presenting openings for expansion, you find yourself doing the opposite. You keep your own pay below market rates. You defer increments. You keep driving the old car. You continue dressing simply. You keep cash inside the business, because you know — or at least you hope, with a conviction that is never fully free of anxiety — that the retained dollar will do more work there than it will in your personal lifestyle.

I knew the theory. I had read the book. I understood compounding. I understood that a dollar retained in a business earning high returns is worth more than a dollar spent. But knowing that and feeling okay about it while your peers are visibly enjoying the rewards of normal career trajectories — those are two completely different things.

And when you have young kids, the internal narrative gets harder still. It is no longer just your own consumption you are deferring. The question shifts from “can I handle this?” to “am I depriving my family?” That is a different kind of stress entirely. The founder chooses the pain. The family inherits it.

—

This is where the emotional burden begins. The challenge is not merely delayed gratification, though that phrase is directionally correct. It is delayed social proof. It is not just that you are postponing comfort. It is that you are postponing the external evidence by which other people are willing to believe you.

I saw this most clearly in the earlier years when we were building out gyms. My co-founders and I would meet property agents or landlords dressed very casually — T-shirt, bermudas, sandals or slippers — sometimes driving a van or a very old car. If they did not know us beforehand, there would often be that subtle but recognisable first impression, that initial categorisation that people do almost unconsciously. You can read a person’s face in the first ten seconds. And what their face said was: these guys are not serious.

And then the conversation would continue.

We would talk about how many outlets we had already opened, our next few outlets, what we knew about lease structures and fire safety compliance and equipment procurement. We would reference our fabrication arm, our trading businesses, our supply chain. We would explain our cluster model and expansion roadmap. At no point did we reveal any trade secrets — but we demonstrated enough depth that the posture in the room would shift.

One could almost feel the perception changing shape in real time. It would dawn on them that we were not hobbyists wandering in hopefully, nor dreamers intoxicated by our own pitch, but operators who had done this repeatedly and who understood locations, operations, cost structures, and execution at a level that could not be faked for very long. And then, sometimes only then, the old car and the simple presentation began to look different. They were no longer interpreted as evidence of weakness, but as evidence of restraint — that this deferred consumption was a lifestyle choice made so that the businesses could grow even faster.

Today it is different. We do not walk into every room as strangers anymore. Landlords request us. Agents refer us. Fellow operators recommend us. The credibility is attached before we arrive. But that took years of showing up underdressed and over-prepared, earning trust one conversation at a time.

Looking back, I think the slippers were accidentally a filter. The agents who could see past the appearance and recognise the substance — those became our long-term partners. The ones who could not filtered themselves out. We did not plan it that way, but it worked that way.

—

Let me make this concrete, because the numbers are what make the logic undeniable rather than merely persuasive.

My co-founders and I have drawn minimal personal salary across all our businesses for over a decade. Before we started fit bloc and Arkkies in 2021, we had Movement First (fitness equipment, founded 2013), Javy Sports & First Aid (school PE equipment, 2016), and KC Metal & Trading (metal fabrication, 2019). Each entity was funded by retained earnings from the ones before it. No investors. No external capital. Just profits reinvested instead of extracted.

Here is what that reinvestment enabled.

When HDB-managed civil defence shelters came up for bid, we could move aggressively. We could stomach rapid site buildouts and sometimes elevated bid prices because the capital was in the business, ready to deploy — not locked in a condo mortgage.

We had 15 of such outlets by the time HDB started excluding gyms in late 2025 as an approved trade entirely — too many other operators had caused disamenities like noise, vibrations, and heat from aircon compressors, on top of internal issues like illegal modifications and misuse of void spaces. Rent across these outlets is affordable, will never be increased drastically, and will stay for the long term as long as we do not move out or cause trouble. That base is now permanently protected. Nobody can replicate it. That window existed briefly, and we were in a position to capture it, because retained earnings meant we could move on each opportunity without hesitation.

Our fabrication business, KC Metal, gives us a customisation advantage over every competitor. We understand how to fabricate and modify metal structures for effectiveness. That business exists because profits from Movement First were deployed to start Javy Sports, which were then redeployed into building KC Metal — rather than paying ourselves more.

Each business funded the conditions for the next business. That is not diversification — it is compounding across entities. And the compounding only works because the founders are not extracting.

—

This captures one of the stranger ironies of entrepreneurship. The very behaviours that strengthen the business can weaken how the founder is perceived. One conserves cash because growth opportunities are real, because money left in the business can compound harder than money extracted too early for consumption. But from the outside, prudence can be mistaken for scarcity. Simplicity can be mistaken for underperformance. Deferred consumption can be mistaken for failure.

The paradox that took me years to articulate clearly: the better your businesses are doing, the more capital you need to retain for expansion — and the less successful you appear. Meanwhile, someone whose business has plateaued can afford to extract freely. They have nowhere to deploy the cash. So they buy the continental car and the condo, and they look more successful than the person who is compounding at twice their rate but putting every dollar back into the machine.

The market may eventually reward prudence. Society, much of the time, rewards display.

—

And that is why I think the question of founder salary is not merely a financial question, though it is certainly that. It is also a psychological question, and perhaps even a moral one. What exactly are you optimising for in this season of life? Are you trying to look successful, or are you trying to become structurally stronger? Are you extracting proof, or are you preserving optionality? Are you decorating the outer layer of life, or are you still feeding the engine?

I do not say this to romanticise needless suffering. There is no virtue in paying oneself absurdly little forever, nor is there wisdom in confusing prudence with permanent deprivation. A founder should, in time, be paid properly. But there are phases in business where the disciplined decision is to leave more inside the company than one’s ego might prefer, because the business is still in that fertile stage where retained capital meaningfully enlarges what can be built next.

The end result, in our case, is full control of all our businesses — without external funding, without giving up equity, without answering to short-term investors whose timelines do not match our own.

But there is one more dimension to this that I only recently found the words for, and it may be the one that matters most. A typical commercial gym membership in Singapore costs $100 to $110 a month, often with a long-term contract, an initiation fee, and a cancellation penalty. Our gyms charge roughly $55 a month. No contract. No lock-in. Low initiation fee. No penalty for leaving. If you want to try getting into fitness, you can walk in and start without risk.

For every dollar I do not pay myself, I can work towards opening another gym. And for every gym I open, roughly 400 members save about $40 a month compared to what they would pay elsewhere. That is $16,000 a month in savings returned to the community — per outlet. Multiply that across fifteen, twenty, twenty-five outlets, and the number becomes difficult to ignore.

This reframes the entire question of deferred salary. It is not only a capital allocation decision for the founder. It is, in a small but real way, a resource allocation decision for the community. Every dollar retained inside the business does not simply compound for me. It funds another outlet that makes fitness more accessible to people who could not or would not pay commercial gym prices. The sacrifice could be just on me, but the benefit is for the entire community.

And sometimes it is simply the discipline to accept that real compounding often becomes visible much later than the sacrifice that made it possible.

Early founder life, at least for many of us, is not just delayed gratification.

It is delayed social proof.

I have always been a bookworm. Not because anyone made me, but because I was curious and restless and looking for answers that school was not designed to give. By the time I entered university, I had already started and failed my first business. By the time I graduated, I had started my third. Today, across our group of companies, we employ about 100 people and operate more than 25 locations in Singapore.

People sometimes ask me what business books I would recommend. I find this question difficult to answer honestly, because the books that mattered most to me did not matter because of what they said in isolation. They mattered because of when I read them, what I was going through at the time, and how they interacted with each other over years.

A book read at 14 lands differently than the same book read at 36. And a book read in combination with many others builds something none of them could build alone.

What follows is not a ranked list of recommendations. It is an honest account of nine books that, looking back at my shelf, shaped how I think, how I build businesses, and how I try to lead.

———

Starting the Engine

Rich Dad, Poor Dad — Robert Kiyosaki

I first encountered this book at 14. I was impressionable, and I took its advice to heart — particularly its concepts on cash flow, assets versus liabilities, and the mindset of business owners versus employees.

Looking back, the book is imperfect. Its financial advice is often oversimplified, and some of its claims do not hold up under scrutiny. But that is not why it mattered. It mattered because it gave a 14-year-old in Singapore permission to think about money, work, and independence in a way that nobody around me was thinking about them. It planted a seed: that there was an alternative to the prescribed path of study, get a job, climb the ladder, retire.

That seed led me into a string of part-time jobs in laptop sales, then into service work like web design and photography, and eventually to starting my first gym at 20, fresh out of National Service and just before entering NTU. It failed in 2011 due to cashflow issues — which, ironically, is the very thing Kiyosaki warned about. But the attempt itself was a product of the mental shift this book triggered.

I would not recommend this book uncritically to anyone today. But I remain grateful for what it did for me at that age: it made entrepreneurship feel possible, not just for the privileged or the lucky, but for anyone willing to think differently about how money works.

———

Finding Your Own Path

The Element — Ken Robinson

Ken Robinson’s argument is that people do their best work at the intersection of natural aptitude and personal passion — what he calls the element. The conventional education system, he argues, systematically narrows children toward conformity rather than helping them discover where they naturally thrive.

I bought his book after discovering his TED Talk around 2008, and wanted to read more about what he thought.

I read books and pursued interests because I was curious, not because they improved my odds of getting into a school or scoring better grades. None of it sat on any career-planning worksheet. It came from following compounding interests rather than the prescribed path many Singaporeans, especially those from backgrounds like mine, are expected to take.

Robinson also shaped how I think about my own children. I have two, both below twelve. I have made a deliberate choice not to optimise their environment for comfort. I want them to experience some friction in daily life. Comfort breeds complacency, and a perfectly curated environment does not prepare them for the world they will actually have to navigate.

The deeper lesson from Robinson is that the most valuable thing you can do for a young person is not to hand them a map. It is to help them develop the confidence to explore without one.

———

Learning to Navigate Institutions

The Rules of Work — Richard Templar

In 2008, when I was 18, I worked at Alexandra Hospital with an introduction to the organization by the then CEO, Mr Liak Teng Lit. He was one of the most consequential healthcare leaders Singapore has produced. Under his leadership, Alexandra Hospital topped the Ministry of Health’s Patient Satisfaction Survey for six consecutive years. He was also deeply committed to Toyota Production System thinking — the hospital was a pioneer in applying lean management principles to healthcare in Singapore.

I was young, surrounded by senior professionals, and trying to be useful without getting in the way. I was given the opportunity to spearhead the website development, and had to speak to management, doctors, nurses and their call centre agents for their perspectives. Templar’s book was a practical survival manual for exactly that situation. It taught me to read the room, to build credibility through competence rather than visibility, and to understand how organisations actually function beneath the formal structure.

For a young person trying to operate effectively inside institutions, it is quietly one of the most practical things you can read.

———

Understanding How People Decide

Influence — Robert Cialdini

Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion — reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity — are well known. What is less discussed is how powerful they become when they are designed into a system rather than applied as sales tactics.

Across our businesses, we do not run a marketing-heavy business. Movement First and Javy Sports create value through being reliable and dependable, not being the cheapest. We do not do hard sales. There is no lock-in contract at Arkkies. No large upfront payment. No penalty for leaving. On paper, this looks like we are giving away all our leverage. In practice, it creates something more durable than any contract: genuine reciprocity.

Members who pay $55 a month for a gym (or various prices across our brands) that competitors charge $100 or more for feel they are getting disproportionate value. That feeling drives word-of-mouth without us asking for it. The no-contract model, paradoxically, increases real retention — because people stay by choice, not by obligation. And every new outlet we open in a new neighbourhood is social proof at scale: it signals to the next neighbourhood that this is something real and growing.

Cialdini taught me that the most effective persuasion is structural, not verbal. You do not convince people to stay by arguing with them. You design the experience so that staying is the obvious choice. The best marketing is a product so good that your customers do the marketing for you.

———

Leadership as Stewardship

The Leader, the Teacher, and You — Lim Siong Guan

Lim Siong Guan was Head of Civil Service in Singapore, Permanent Secretary across multiple ministries, and later Group President of GIC. He is arguably the most influential public sector leader Singapore has produced in terms of institutional thinking.

His argument is that a leader’s purpose is not personal achievement. It is building the people and institutions that outlast them. Leadership is stewardship. The measure of a leader is not what they accomplish personally, but what the organisation can accomplish without them.

When I read this book after it was published in 2013, it gave me the language for something I had already witnessed but could not yet articulate. Five years earlier, at Alexandra Hospital, I had watched Liak Teng Lit lead in exactly the way Lim describes. He was not just running a hospital efficiently. He was building an institution that could sustain its own culture of excellence. He was developing people, not just directing them. I saw it at 18 but did not fully understand what I was seeing. Lim Siong Guan’s book, arriving years later, retroactively made sense of that experience. Sometimes the theory comes after the observation. I enjoyed the book so much, I emailed the publisher to buy in bulk, and gave it to close friends.

———

The Discipline of Continuous Improvement

The Toyota Way — Jeffrey Liker

I came to this book through Alexandra Hospital. In 2008, Singapore’s healthcare system was actively adopting lean methodology, and hospitals were sending managers to Japan and America to study the Toyota Production System. I was sitting next to someone who was operationalising those ideas in real time. So when I bought the book, it was not abstract. I could see the principles playing out in the institution around me.

The concepts that stayed with me most are kaizen (continuous improvement), genchi genbutsu (go and see for yourself), and poka-yoke (mistake-proofing through design). They sound like management jargon until you see what they look like in practice.

Here is one example from our business. We noticed that cables on our gym equipment were wearing out faster than expected. The normal response would be to replace them and move on. Instead, we took cable samples from mainstream brands — the industry benchmarks made in USA or Europe. We sent those samples to our factory as a reference standard. Then we sourced candidate cables from manufacturers in Canada, the United States, Japan, and Europe. We ran comparative strength tests. We settled on a Japanese-made cable that significantly outperformed the default Chinese-produced alternative. We now buy it in bulk and pre-stock it across our network.

That process — treating a recurring problem as a defect in the system rather than an event to manage, going upstream to understand root causes, testing alternatives rigorously, and permanently fixing the input — is the Toyota Way applied to gym maintenance. We do the same with bearings, pulleys, and every other high-wear component. We accept that the factory ships with Chinese bearings because insisting they use Japanese bearings is not in our control given our relatively small order size. But the moment a bearing fails, we make sure it gets replaced with a Japanese one that lasts significantly longer. Over time, every machine in our network quietly improves through its maintenance cycle.

Nobody gives you an award for upgrading bearings. But across more than 20 outlets over several years, the cumulative effect is a member experience that is imperceptibly but consistently better than every competitor — built not through grand strategy but through the relentless discipline of making each small thing a little better, every time.

Be careful not to apply ideas like TPS too early, or in areas you do not yet control. At the beginning, we were small, budget-constrained, and still trying to get factories to take our orders seriously. In that position, lecturing them about defects or process discipline would have been pointless. The only leverage I had was to leave and find a better factory.

———

Seeing the Whole System

The Fifth Discipline — Peter Senge

A mentor introduced me to this book when I was about 15. I understood maybe a third of it at the time. I understood the rest only after spending a decade building businesses.

Senge’s central argument is that most chronic problems in organisations are produced by system structure, not by individual failure. If you only react to symptoms, you keep the deeper structure intact and therefore recreate the same results. The alternative is to learn to see patterns, feedback loops, time delays, and shared assumptions before they harden into costly outcomes.

This way of thinking is now so deeply embedded in how I operate that I sometimes forget it is not how most people see things.

When we decided to open Arkkies, it was not because we woke up one day and decided to run gyms. It was because we could see, through a systems lens, that our equipment supply business was structurally vulnerable to disintermediation. Our gym customers could eventually go to the same factories we were sourcing from. Or the factories we sell to could try to reach our customers directly. Instead of fighting that trend with lower prices or more discounts, which would only have treated the symptom, we moved downstream and became our own customer. That created a reinforcing loop. We also understood the consumer problem firsthand: as parents with less time than before, we could see that many gym options were either too expensive or unfairly structured around lock-in contracts.

I have returned to The Fifth Discipline recently, and it reads completely differently now. The same words carry meaning they could not carry when I was 15, because now I have lived the systems Senge describes. The book did not change. I changed.

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Building the Flywheel

Good to Great — Jim Collins

Collins’s flywheel concept is the one that gave me language for something I was already doing instinctively. A flywheel is a self-reinforcing cycle where each turn makes the next turn easier. The key insight is that there is no single defining action, no miracle moment. It is the cumulative effect of consistent pushes in a coherent direction.

Our flywheel looks like this: Movement First sources equipment directly from factories. That equipment goes to general customers and Arkkies outlets. Arkkies also gives Movement First staff meaningful work during lull periods. Over time, we realised that people prefer consistently busy work to cycles of slack and overload, and gym buildouts help smooth that curve.

Those outlets generate maintenance data that flows back to Movement First. Movement First uses that data to source better components for all its customers. KC Metal fabricates custom pieces. The lower buildout cost enables faster expansion. Faster expansion increases procurement volume. Higher volume strengthens factory relationships. Stronger relationships reduce per-unit costs. And the cycle continues.

None of those individual steps is dramatic. There is no single genius move. But together, turning consistently for more than a decade, they produce a cost structure and operational capability that is special and hard to replicate.

Collins also introduced me to Level 5 leadership — the idea that the most effective leaders are not the most charismatic but the most disciplined, the most willing to confront brutal facts, and the most focused on building something that endures beyond themselves. That connects directly to Lim Siong Guan. And it connects to the work I still need to do.

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Skill Before Passion

So Good They Can’t Ignore You — Cal Newport

I first came across Cal Newport through his blog and kept finding myself sharpened by his thinking before I eventually bought the book. Experiences like that probably shaped my own desire to write publicly too.

Newport’s thesis directly contradicts the popular advice to “follow your passion.” He argues that career capital — rare and valuable skills that the market cannot ignore — must come first. Passion follows mastery, not the other way around.

This matches my experience exactly. We did not start Arkkies because we were passionate about running gyms. We started it because other than spotting the market gap with unfair consumer practices, we had spent eight years building capabilities in equipment sourcing, factory relationships, logistics, maintenance, and supply chain management. Those capabilities made us structurally better at running gyms than anyone who started from the gym side. The passion for what we are building came after the competence, not before it.

Newport’s framework also explains why I am sceptical of the advice to “just start.” Starting without skill is how I failed my first gym in 2011. Starting with accumulated career capital is how we scaled Arkkies from one outlet to over 25 in five years. The difference was not courage or motivation. It was the decade of capability building in between.

For anyone young and reading this: do not chase passion prematurely. Build skills that are genuinely rare and valuable. Get so good at something specific that opportunities come to you. The passion will follow — and when it does, it will be grounded in something real.

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Is This Normal?

People sometimes ask me how I have read so many books. The implicit question is whether this is normal. I do not think it is typical, at least not in the way reading has functioned in my life.

Most adults read somewhere between zero and four books a year. Among those who do read, the majority absorb one or two ideas at a surface level and move on. The book does not change how they operate. It is consumption, not formation.

What I have done is different in three ways, and I think it is worth being honest about that rather than pretending reading is some universal habit that anyone can casually pick up.

First, I started early and sustained it. Reading seriously from 12, across disciplines, for over two decades. That is not a habit. It is a compounding investment with a 24-year runway. Most people who read business books start in their mid-twenties when they hit their first management role. By that point I had already been reading for over a decade. The gap is not just in the number of books. It is in the years of accumulated cross-pollination between ideas.

Second, I read across domains rather than within one. My shelf spans persuasion psychology, systems theory, lean manufacturing, institutional leadership, education philosophy, career strategy, and personal finance. I picked up books on biotech, engineering and religion out of pure curiosity. Most readers stay within their lane — a finance person reads finance books, a marketer reads marketing books. Reading across boundaries is where the unexpected connections happen: Senge’s systems thinking applied to Toyota’s production methods, filtered through Cialdini’s understanding of human behaviour, grounded in Lim Siong Guan’s philosophy of institutional stewardship. No single book gave me that synthesis. The combination did.

Third, and this is the part that probably matters most: I applied what I read. Many people read for information or stimulation, but fewer convert what they read into operating principles. They agree with the ideas. They may even discuss them. But the ideas stay in the book. They do not cross the gap into daily operations and actual decisions. I read Senge at 15 and eventually built a vertically integrated business group that runs on systems thinking principles. I read Liker and designed a maintenance process that is functionally kaizen. I read Cialdini and built a business model where the structure does the persuading. The reading became operational. That is where the value lives, and it is where the vast majority of readers stop.

I do not say this to boast. I say it because I think the compounding effect of reading over two decades is genuinely very difficult to replicate quickly by someone who starts at 30. That is not arrogance. That is just how compounding works. A dollar invested at 14 is worth more than a dollar invested at 34, and the same is true of ideas.

If you are young and reading this, the most important thing I can tell you is not “read more.” Everyone says that and it changes nothing. What I would say is: read above your level, read across boundaries, and do not worry about understanding everything the first time. Some books will not make sense until you have the experience to unlock them. That is fine. They will be waiting for you on the shelf when you are ready.

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The Compounding of Reading

Looking at this list, I notice that none of these books overlap much in content. Cialdini teaches how people decide. Templar teaches how to navigate institutions. Robinson teaches how talent develops. Lim Siong Guan teaches how leaders build people. Liker teaches how to improve processes. Senge teaches how to see systems. Collins teaches how to build flywheels. Newport teaches how to build career capital. Kiyosaki, for all his flaws, teaches a teenager that there is an alternative.

Taken together, they produce a way of operating: think in systems, improve through disciplined iteration, design structures that work without enforcement, build skill before claiming passion, and lead by developing others rather than directing them.

None of this happened by design. I did not sit down at 12 and plan a reading curriculum. I simply followed curiosity, often far above my comprehension level, and trusted that the ideas would eventually find their way into practice.

The honest truth is that reading is the earliest investment I ever made, and it is still generating returns. The books did not change. I changed. And every time I return to one of them, I find something I was not ready to see before.

That is the compounding of reading. It is slow, it is invisible, and it is the most undervalued asset on any entrepreneur’s balance sheet.