Jack of All Trades, Master of None
Growing up, I wanted to be a lawyer, marine biologist, golf course designer, lawyer, pro-athlete (preferably in the NBA), and a long line of other professions that caught my eye at any given time. I had dreams of following my heart, my passions and one day hitting the last second Game 7 winner over an outstretched hand to win my third NBA championship.
On the other hand, my father would frustratingly ask me to focus, pick a thing, anything, and stick to it. Ever the pragmatic and practical one, he would constantly preach, “love what you do, not do what you love”. He understood that hard work, perseverance and sheer focus would eventually lead to greatness, measured in monetary values, will eventually follow.
This was his way, and his way has been proven to work.
He was a child born to first generation Chinese migrants in Malaysia, who moved to Southeast Asia in search of a better life. In those days, I don’t think my dad’s side of the family had much to their name. My gong going was a policeman (and later security guard), while my ma ma was a seamstress (along with many other jobs) - working hard to provide for their four kids, where my dad was the oldest.
Details were scarce to come by growing up, nor did I bother to find out more. Stories of going hungry, scraping and saving for special meals with chicken legs were foreign to me. Perhaps this is why my father grew up to be a pragmatic man, a man single-mindedly focused on hard work regardless of the subject or field.
He would go on to be the first one in his family to study at university, relying on student and family loans to become an engineer, later turning his profession to purchasing, and eventually overseeing the entire regional supply chain for one of the largest aerospace companies in the world. He retired at 50.
My mother, equally as pragmatic, stayed at home with us after my little sister was born, giving up her career in education to raise us across the continents - making sure we were always taken care of, regardless of where we were in the world. While my dad at least had work to cling to, my mum always had to find new friends, establish a support network and navigate day-to-day life in places strange to her that would eventually become homes. I now see how tough that must’ve been for her, having to start from scratch every time we moved.
Unlike the previous generations, my siblings and I are children born of privilege, the opposite to my father’s upbringing. We are products of globalism, growing up across three continents and access to more opportunity in our lifetime than most. Thanks to my parents, we had less boundaries and limitations placed on us, which led to us having limitless dreams and passions, endless rabbit holes to go down. Both my sisters have found their way, one pursued the creative field, with design as her field; the other, a soon-to-be lawyer.
I’m still in my thirties, still searching for that thing to stick to. I’ve never had a plan and have continuously stumbled from one thing to another for as long as I remember. I stumbled into university in Singapore, where I studied Communications because I believed that I was a good communicator. After graduation, I logically ended up at a Communications agency, which felt like pointless amounts of work for what ultimately amounted to press releases and endless bylines about fraud prevention to be picked up in obscure trade publications in Romania.
Digital agencies were my next thing, where digital was the cool thing and still continues to be what I work in. However, even that sometimes can feel like an obscenely large amount of work for something as trivial and pointless as a corporate website for a B2B telecommunications company that provided networking middleware to consumer telecommunications and media companies. Other times, I stumble across work that will genuinely make a difference to the lives of people, which makes all of the pointless bullshit worth it in the end.
And so maybe I am in the right field, my interests too broad and too wide to ever be contained. Like many others born of privilege and opportunity, I have yet to find the thing that I would be willing to bet it all on, fully commit until I’m a success or dead. For those of you that know me, maybe it will be food, maybe it won’t.
Even with my never-ending fascination with food, I would struggle to give a straight answer if you pressed me on what I wanted to do with this passion. Is it to start a food business? To write about it? To work with people that work in it
Funnily enough, my dad, in his retirement, has already done more in the food business as I sit here pontificating and philosophising. There was no hesitation, no moment of indecisiveness, and no should-I-or-shouldn’t I. He saw an opportunity and just went ahead and did it. He’s now exporting and importing food stuffs as a retirement hustle.
Perhaps one day, I will learn about the stories behind the decisions that both my mum and dad made, how they actually came to be and see if I can pick up any lessons from their story to find my way. Until then, I’ll just keep on stumbling.
