Second Bookout

Being marginally less sleep deprived and more comfortable with the routine, I think this week I have more time to reflect and reach small “a-ha” moments (rejoice I thought my brain rotted).

Few mantras that I think were important to me as the week progressed and I will keep in mind for the rest of my time:

1) Aristotle once said: he who has not learned to obey cannot be a good commander.
This time I want to learn what it means to be a good follower. If I had a choice, I would like to spend more time learning that. It’s a bit of a struggle sometimes because I’m so accustomed to stepping up instead of watching and learning from others. I see this attitude as something that would be really healthy once the majority of people start to desire to be the leader or are super alpha.

2) Ralph Nadar: The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not followers.
From observing people around me, I’ve come to realise that no matter where we go there will always be people who treat everything as a competition. Perhaps as time goes on, I will inevitably be sucked into that culture, but I want to learn to stop being possessive over power/position and to share it, hell even give it, to others. It is very straightforward now – my throat can only last so long – but even in future it is even more important because I might get tempted to cling onto the claim of being solely responsible.

Another interesting thing that happened to me was the internal turmoil that I was experiencing for one of the first times. It is the initial instinct to feel inferior whenever someone amazing was brought up. It was one of those days that we had to wait around and talk shit, so I sat with my legs curled and listened in on a conversation about people I knew. They were amazing people, and listening to someone gush (or close to gushing) made me feel so far and so insignificant from who I want to be. How am I supposed to deal with that? This feeling kicked in without my control. I struggled to not compare myself, but also, I really cannot achieve such feats of people-skills nor do I think I have made such an immediate impact.

This short episode forced me to be conscientious of the way I deal with pressure. I had to rationalise the emotions and learn how to cope in an environment where I am surrounded by crazy competent people. I tell myself: everyone catches the eye for different reasons, so I do not have to model myself after the known successes. I tell myself: I am someone who takes time to warm up, and I am confident that as time goes on more of myself will show. I tell myself: I may not be the most amazing person right now, but I am firmly convinced in my capacity for growth. And perhaps this is also a reminder that in the future that I want to step towards, I will have to revaluate the metrics of how I view my own strengths and to reduce my reliance on validation.

The last issue is something that I have been chewing on for a long while: do I believe in the grand motivation of defending my nation? And if I do, what does that really mean? After a sharing by a chaperone, I realised that there are some bits of that in me that I could latch onto and grow.

I think I do want to defend Singapore because of how much I have received despite my less than privileged background. I’m pretty proud of where I am now despite circumstances. The core reason is because of my mother and her incredible strength and foresight, that is why I love her and want the best of her; the environment and opportunities for me to be as self-reliant as a teenager in a first world country could be is because of the systems in Singapore, and for that reason I want to defend this country. It’s not perfect but it’s a lot, and I want this place to exist 50 years down the road and within those years for more people like me to benefit.

Clearly gotten really rusty, but I’ll just end my reflections here and in the next few weeks build upon these realisations.