This event was held at BASH@Blk79, a quick 5 minute walk away from One-North mrt station. I must admit that initially, I was not expecting anything extraordinary from this short session. Though I do my best to constantly keep myself open to new ideas and knowledge, I found myself drifting into the “this is going to be another of those…” mood as I read the email that I received regarding the event. Main reason was that the background of the speaker seemed to be very heavily based on corporate and government linked work, which does not seem very entrepreneurial or startup related.
However, as I am sitting down typing out these words on a flight to Yangon, Myanmar, I am extremely glad that I did not allow that “mood” to overtake me and send that particular email into the abyss of my archives section. I chose to believe that there is something I can always learn from others. And indeed, I have learnt from this event.
My key learning point from this event was not really an entirely new idea, or some ground-breaking concept. Rather, I first came upon it 3 years ago, in a book the many of you guys should have come across it before, title “Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill”. The concept of visualising and writing out your desires as one of the key factors of success was covered in this book, where Napoleon Hill wrote about crafting your ‘definite chief aim’. If you want a rough idea of how a definite chief aim looks like, do a search on Google for ‘Bruce Lee definite chief aim’.
The speaker, Dr. Alex Lin, actually took the time to walk the participant through what I would call a ‘vision exercise’, where we were supposed to write out what we visualise what kind of business we want to run, how many customers we will be serving, the kind of partners that can help with the execution, and so on. That session was really useful for me as it served as a reminder of what I had learnt, but had not practiced for quite a while (the entire 2015, to be exact). After that session, I went home and looked for all my previous materials that I had created previously, and did an ‘inventory check’ of what I wrote previously, and basically took note of my progress. Some of the things I wrote down had been materialised, while some are no longer a part of my life. This is what Lean Methodology considers as iterating and pivoting I guess.
I also noticed that among all the participants, there were some who did not take the exercise seriously. They basically either sat through listening as a passive participant, or went to the toilet the moment they had the chance to. I’m a firm believer that to learn, you have to fully participate, and if you are not fully participating, you should spend your time elsewhere.
As Napoleon Hill mentioned briefly in his works, you should keep an open mind and be willing to put aside your past experiences and prejudice while learning. After all, you can always take them (your prejudice, limiting beliefs etc.) after you are done.