PropertyGuru owns 81% of Singapore’s property search market.

The company has a 5.7x traffic lead over the next closest competitor, which is the kind of dominance where you could put your logo on every MRT platform in the country and nobody would question why.

So when they launched a brand new show this year, they hid their own name.

They created a new TikTok account and Instagram account without any PropertyGuru branding in the bio, the captions, or the credits.

Then, they cross-posted across both, with zero paid amplification behind it and just a small cast of Singaporeans living through the very ordinary chaos of moving out of their parents’ place.

The PropertyGuru name didn’t show up until the finale.

However, by then, audiences had already followed these characters through arguments about independence, about what “home” means once you leave the one you grew up in, about the guilt of finally getting your own space.

They were watching people they had started to care about, instead of a brand campaign.

This is the part that is interesting because a company that didn’t need a single new customer to know its name chose to earn attention the hard way.

Real creators carried the cast with creators like Charlene Oh (SGTroller on TikTok) and Ryan Ang, who are names the audience already trusted before PropertyGuru ever entered the frame. The show hit one million organic views in 48 hours and by the finale, 3.3 million. All of it earned, none of it bought.

This matters beyond one show because the creator economy crossed $235 billion in 2026. In the first six months of this year alone, 70 companies bought their way into it through acquisitions, which is the strongest six-month stretch on record.

That means big, cash-rich companies are watching creators do something no ad budget can buy: getting believed.

This is a sequence, not a fluke, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it in every brand, founder, and creator winning attention right now.

I call it HALO: Human story first, Authority borrowed from people already trusted, Leverage that’s earned before it’s bought, and Offer revealed last.

PropertyGuru just proved it works with a nine-figure marketing budget behind it, while I proved it works with none.

The credential trap

Most brands and people building a personal brand get this order backwards.

They think authority has to be established before the story gets told.

For example, they feel they need to lead with the logo, market share, their title, degree, years of experience, the “as seen in” logos stacked at the bottom of the page.

The assumption is that credibility is a precondition for trust, something you prove before anyone’s allowed to like you.

PropertyGuru had every reason to make that mistake because they had the market share to brag about and the budget to buy every ad slot on every platform in Singapore.

Instead, they let creators tell a story about moving out, and allowed the audience to fall for the characters before they ever found out who was paying for it.

That is a great strategy because the aha moment buried in it is that the audience was already sold a story about growing up.

The brand only inherited the trust that story had already built, which meant that if PropertyGuru had opened with their own name, the same content would have registered as an ad the second it appeared on someone’s feed.

That is why hiding the name was the only way to let the story do its job before the brand asked for anything.

This is exactly what the sharpest minds in marketing right now are converging on, independently of each other.

Gary Vaynerchuk has been saying it on every stage he’s stood on this year: organic performance, not paid reach, is the only honest measure of whether content actually connects.

His line from a recent keynote has been stuck in my head for weeks — media shouldn’t be hiding bad creative. It should be amplifying good creative. Paid media was supposed to scale it once it already existed; it was never supposed to manufacture belief.

Alex Hormozi defines branding the same way, just from the numbers side, because to him, a brand is a deliberate pairing between your name and an outcome your audience already wants.

He built three billion organic impressions and sold $105 million in books in a single weekend, with zero paid ads behind the launch. The brand did the selling because the trust was already there before the offer showed up.

Steven Bartlett puts it perfectly, too: a brand is the sum of every experience a person has with you, and at scale, that experience becomes belief.

Belief is something you accumulate, one honest interaction at a time, until people trust you before they’ve even met you.

Look at Codie Sanchez too, who built an entire following on the same instinct. For example, she opened with a contrarian story like buying laundromats and vending machines while everyone else chased the polished Wall Street path and let the story do the convincing before she ever asked anyone to buy a course.

Even Dan Koe, who I would bet has never once thought about property listings, teaches something he calls the Trust Matrix: growth, authenticity, authority, in that order.

It is a different name, but with the same sequence I teach, which is that you prove you are real before you ask to be believed.

None of these people is saying “post more”, but they are all pointing at the same order.

I didn’t need PropertyGuru’s balance sheet to test this because I built my own business with no team behind me and no ad spend anywhere in the process.

Every client retainer and speaking invite came from a story people had already decided to trust, long before I had anything to sell them.

If the sequence holds with nothing, it holds with whatever resources you are sitting on right now.

The HALO playbook

You need the right order of HALO, not a market-leading budget.

Most people get stuck because they think this requires scale, when what it actually requires is sequence.

PropertyGuru had scale and still chose to earn attention the slow way, because they understood something most marketers skip past, which is that an audience can feel when they are being sold to before the sale ever happens.

Get the order right, and the sale becomes something people ask you for.

Here’s the sequence, broken into steps you can run with whatever you already have.

Lead with the Human Story

Before anyone knows whose story it is, they need a reason to care about it. PropertyGuru’s cast were arguing with roommates and calling their mothers about rent. That’s the entry point: a story specific enough that a stranger sees themselves in it.

Think of it like a doorway with no sign above it. People walk through because the room looks interesting, not because they know what’s inside. The pain point this solves is obvious once you’ve felt it: nobody clicks on an ad, but everybody clicks on a story that sounds like their own life.

Borrow Authority from people already trusted

PropertyGuru cast Charlene and Ryan, names their audience already believed before the brand showed up.

This is the step most founders skip because it feels like giving away credit, but it is the opposite. Trust is a currency, and the fastest way to earn it is to borrow it from someone who’s already spent years building theirs.

This is why a client testimonial does more work than a founder’s own claim and why a guest post from someone your audience already follows moves faster than 10 posts from your own account.

The metaphor here is simple, which is you are getting a loan from someone with a credit not building a bank from scratch.

Let Leverage be earned, not bought

Organic first and proof before promotion.

PropertyGuru let the show hit a million views before it ever needed a dollar of paid support behind it, and by the time the finale landed, the numbers were already doing what an ad budget never could — they were making people curious on their own.

This is the step that separates a brand people trust from a brand people tolerate. A boosted post says “we paid for your attention,” but an organically shared one says “people wanted this enough to pass it along themselves.”

One is rented, and the other is earned because rented attention disappears the moment you stop paying for it while earned attention compounds.

Reveal the Offer last

The name came in the finale, and by the time PropertyGuru revealed itself, the audience had already decided how they felt about the story, and the brand walked into a room that was already warm.

This is the step people rush the most, because waiting feels like leaving money on the table, but what they don’t realise is that the offer revealed too early gets read as a pitch.

The same offer revealed after trust is built gets read as a natural next step because timing decides whether the offer lands at all.

Audit your current order

Before you run the HALO framework, it’s worth a five-minute gut check.

Pull up your last three pieces of content and ask what came first: the story, or your name. Most brands and most personal brands run this sequence backwards without ever noticing, opening with the credential and hoping the story catches up.

If your name shows up before anyone has a reason to care, you’re already running the offer-first version of this, even if you didn’t mean to.

Forget about PropertyGuru’s market share or their production budget. You need to stop leading with your logo and start leading with the story that makes people forget there is a logo coming.

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Two sisters run a thrift store in Orchard Plaza called Fairies Aisle.

They are 19 and 21 years old; one of them has pink hair, the other green. They run the kind of store where the clothes look like they were pulled straight out of a Harajuku street shoot, because that’s exactly the point.

Someone photographed them on the MRT without asking and posted it.

The message underneath was simple and confident, the way these messages always are: that hair will stop any company from hiring you. Be decent and presentable. Fix yourself before the real world does it for you.

They had every reason to get defensive.

Instead, they filmed a tour of the store they had built exactly as themselves, and closed with one line: never judge a person for how they choose to show up.

Epictetus said it 2000 years before TikTok existed: “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.”

The sisters didn’t debate the stranger’s definition of professional, but they just kept being exactly who they already were, on camera, in daylight.

It went viral, and strangers who had never met them showed up to defend them in the comments.

Underneath all of it, a question started circulating that Singapore doesn’t ask itself nearly enough: why do we still confuse conformity with employability?

The bigger idea hiding inside a story about hair dye and a thrift store is that what used to guarantee you safety in your career and reputation is fitting the mould.

That could be looking the part and sanding yourself down until nobody had a reason to look twice.

However, that currency is losing its value fast because something else is replacing it. Most people haven’t noticed the exchange rate has already shifted underneath them.

I know that stranger’s voice on the MRT better than I would like to because I heard a version of it the same month I was put on a performance review, given a pay cut, demoted, and told my job was safer if I made myself smaller.

Three months later, I was told it was my last day.

This newsletter is about what happened after that, what actually replaced the mask, and how you build the same thing for yourself, on purpose, before life forces the question on you.

Respectability was never the asset because trust was

Most people operate off the same unspoken belief: strip out anything that could make a hiring manager, a client, or a room full of strangers uncomfortable, and safety follows.

So they stay neutral or palatable. They are told to keep their hair, politics, history, body, and identity out of the conversation, and the paycheck stays intact.

It is a reasonable theory, but it is also wrong, and I found that out the expensive way.

Marcus Aurelius wrote himself a note that still holds up better than most modern career advice: “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”

He was talking about the exact trap most people fall into, spending their energy managing how virtuous or professional or safe they appear, instead of just being the thing and letting the appearance sort itself out.

During Pride Month last year, the same month my daughter was diagnosed as neurodiverse, I came out publicly as queer and gender-fluid. I passed my performance review, but I still got a pay cut and a demotion.

Three months after that, I was called in and told it was my last day.

I had just moved into a new house with renovation bills still coming in, and therapy invoices for my daughter starting to stack on top of them.

I also had no updated resume, no plan B, and had never sold anything or marketed myself in my life. I sat in a park for an hour before I could bring myself to text my wife.

Living authentically in Singapore was never the easy road to begin with because stares and comments from strangers, particularly men and older folks, were already part of my daily reality long before I lost that job.

Using the bathroom without a gender-neutral option meant constant calculation, cleaners trying to chase me out of the men’s room, my wife and friends gently suggesting the women’s room while I stayed conscious of not wanting to make anyone else uncomfortable either.

My chosen family and close friends were the ones who kept reminding me that hiding would have meant giving up on the life I had already fought hard to live.

So even with everything stacked against it, I didn’t go quiet. Instead, I did the opposite and started writing about all of it, in public, every single day.

That decision is the whole hinge of this story because what nobody tells you when they hand you the advice to hide the parts of yourself that make people uncomfortable is that it just delays the moment you find out it was never protecting you at all.

Seneca called it centuries before anyone had a LinkedIn profile to protect: “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

The demotion I imagined coming for the honest version of me was real, but the years I spent bracing for a punishment that hadn’t landed yet cost me more than the actual firing did. Most people are still paying that imagined tax right now, for a consequence that may never even arrive.

What replaced the paycheck was trust, and I call it the trust premium, and it’s the opposite of what I’d been taught to chase.

The respectability tax is what you pay quietly, every day, to keep yourself palatable to people who were never going to be your real audience anyway.

You pay it in energy, in hesitation, in the version of your work that never quite says the true thing.

The trust premium is what you earn instead, the moment you stop paying that tax and let yourself be fully seen. It compounds, which the respectability tax doesn’t; it just keeps billing you.

By March 2025, five months after losing that job, I made my first $5,000 from writing in public, with nothing polished or perfect about how I did it and by June, my first $10,000 month.

By August, $15,000, more than I had ever made in any single month at a 9-to-5 and none of it came from hiding the queer, gender-fluid, neurodiverse-parenting, ex-convict-as-a-teenager version of my story because all of it came from refusing to.

The aha moment underneath all of it, and it applies whether you are a founder, a leader in transition, or two sisters running a thrift store: a hiring manager cannot see your talent through a mask you never take off.

Neither can a client or an audience because they can only trust what they can actually see, and a version of you optimised for nobody’s discomfort is a version nobody can trust enough to hire, refer, or remember.

How to build the trust premium (without waiting for permission)

The sisters at Fairies Aisle didn’t ask permission to be seen. They just were, on the MRT, on TikTok, in their own store. That’s the entire model, and it’s more repeatable than it looks.

If you’re currently paying the respectability tax without realising it, here’s how you stop.

1. Name your own respectability edit

Everyone is editing something like the layoff you don’t mention or the mental health season you smooth over in interviews. The identity, the accent, the age, the gap year, the arrest record, the divorce, the diagnosis. Before you can build trust, you have to know exactly what you’ve been quietly hiding to seem safer to hire, safer to work with, safer to know. So write it down with one sentence. That sentence is the edit you have been making, and it’s the first thing costing you the trust premium.

2. Tell the story once, in public, before someone else forces it out of you

I didn’t wait for a headhunter to explain my identity for me, and I didn’t wait for a journalist to ask why I left my last job. I wrote it myself, on October 18, 2024, to just over 11,000 followers, with no script and no safety net. Telling your own story on your own terms is closing the gap between the private version of you and the public one, so nobody else gets to hold that gap over you later.

3. Build proof, not polish

A polished LinkedIn banner convinces nobody of anything, while the body of real, specific, dated work convinces almost everyone. The sisters didn’t argue with the stranger about whether pink hair is professional; instead, they filmed the store and showed the proof. My own proof was daily writing, five months of $0 revenue, then $5K, then $10K, then $15K months, documented in public as they happened, not cleaned up in hindsight.

4. Let the discomfort be the marketing

The version of you that makes nobody uncomfortable also moves nobody to act. Every post I have written that actually built trust and revenue was the one I hesitated before publishing. The MRT photo was meant to shame two sisters into hiding. Instead, it became the best marketing Fairies Aisle never had to pay for, because the discomfort was the hook, not the liability.

5. Repeat until the mask becomes irrelevant

This is a practice because every time you tell the truth publicly instead of managing perception privately, the mask gets a little less relevant to the people who actually matter, and a lot less relevant to the ones who don’t.

Respectability was always a rented asset, handed out by people who could take it back the moment you stopped performing for them. Trust is the one nobody can repossess.

Marcus Aurelius left us the line this whole newsletter has been circling: “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.”

The stranger on the MRT never had power over the sisters’ hair because he only ever had power over how long they had let his opinion live rent-free in their decisions.

Same stranger, different decade, was the one who told me my career was safer with less of me in it. He didn’t have that power either, and neither does the version of him waiting for you.

What is the one thing you’ve been quietly editing out to seem more presentable? Let me know in the comments!

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“My husband is the mom, and I’m the dad.”

She says it because it’s the fastest way to make a confusing thing click for people who need everything filed under a label.

That line is why I sat Felicia (Felly) down for this week’s episode and asked her to say, on the record, what most couples never say out loud.

Because underneath the joke, that sentence describes a marriage that’s been completely rebuilt more than once and is still standing.

Most marriages aren’t built to survive reinvention. You agree on roles early, like who earns or leads, and spend the next 40 years assuming those roles are permanent.

Nobody renegotiates the contract, and nobody’s supposed to need to.

Then life does what life does.

Someone loses a job or gets a diagnosis. Someone realises the gender they’ve been performing isn’t the one they are, and the contract that was never written down has no clause for what’s happening.

It’s not the change itself that breaks couples, but the process for renegotiating who does what once the change lands.

Felly and I have gone through three resets in six years.

I came out as gender-fluid and pansexual. I lost my job the same month our daughter was diagnosed with a developmental delay. I built a business from nothing while Felly held the steady paycheck for the first time in our marriage, flipping the roles we had unconsciously assumed at the start.

Any one of those, on its own, ends a lot of marriages.

Ours got more honest instead.

In this week’s episode, Felly says things on camera she’s never said publicly — about the DMs asking if I’m “even into women anymore,” about what she actually thought the first time I told her I wasn’t only attracted to women, about the night the word “bankruptcy” stopped feeling abstract.

What held us together through all three resets is something I’m calling the Role Audit — a practice for figuring out who’s actually doing what right now, instead of who agreed to what years ago. “Mom” and “dad,” in Felly’s framing, were never about gender.

They were about function, and functions can move.

We unpack the full six moves of that audit in the episode, including the one where I told Felly something I’d been holding back for years, and the four words she said back that changed how I think about honesty in marriage entirely.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your relationship can hold the new shape of you like after a layoff, a diagnosis, a transition, anything that’s changed what you can offer the people you love, watch the full conversation with Felly.

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Max Pasakorn is an award-winning, published author of the creative nonfiction chapbook A Study in Our Selves (Neon Hemlock Press, 2023) and a Thai cultural translator with an average of 2 million monthly views on TikTok and Instagram. Max’s writing and social content explore the multiplicity of his identities as a Thai-born queer person who grew up in Singapore with English as his primary language. From a young age, he’s been writing poetry and creative nonfiction about his identity. Recently, he’s started unleashing those thoughts via video content on social media. Max has previously spoken at the Singapore Writers’ Festival and the Singapore Book Council. He’s currently the NAC-NLB Writers’ Lab Writer-in-Residence, where he’s working on his full-length debut memoir about growing up as a Thai third-culture kid in Singapore.

It is 2am on a Saturday morning. I have been partying so hard inside BEEF that the fake pieces of butchered meat hanging from the ceiling have started to look real. The club is crowded enough that, if the DJ played a Top 40 hit and I flailed my arms, I was sure to cause some kind of unwanted spill. So my body remembered what it was like to be in Singapore, courteous enough to keep myself in check so the crowd wouldn't look at me funny as a troublemaking tourist.

On the dance floor, beside me, a conversation started between two men with almost identical looks: stocky, with enough muscles to look like they ‘take care’ of themselves. I tuned out the music and into their words, certain I would recognise them, whatever language it was in. That was my superpower in the club, here in Bangkok. My trilingualism made me the perfect undercover spy. My parents didn’t name me after the titular character from the ‘80s American TV series MacGyver, best known for his resourcefulness for problem-solving, for nothing.

Sure enough, it was Mandarin Chinese, a language I had learned and dreaded throughout my early years of schooling in Singapore. All I remembered while studying the language were adults around me praising its future utility. Study Chinese and study hard, because you will need it for business with the Chinese diaspora when you grow up.

“Are you staying alone?” one guy eventually asks. Until that moment, I could not read whether he was being friendly or flirty. Mandarin always sounded a little too certain, as if expression were secondary to purpose. That was how I learned it, a utilitarian language, taught in primary school, so I could converse with others who couldn’t speak any other. But the characters I memorised from a dictionary were flat, and these were two real-life human beings attempting a kind of courtship, shoved underneath carefully chosen words. I didn’t hear hope through his words, but in his voice.

The other guy sips his drink. “With a friend.”

He puts his arm around the first man’s shoulders and leans in close to whisper into his ear. The first man blushes. They remain there, in half-embrace, for a long time.

This is Bangkok, I tell myself, as a Katseye song blasts through the speakers. “Where I want to call home.”

The trouble with being in between spaces, of being part of a diaspora, is that the world expects you to be certain and not half-hearted, binaristic rather than fluid. Planting one foot squarely in two cultures feels like your allegiance to each is constantly tested. My mother would scold me if I ever stepped on a raised threshold while entering a Thai temple. I was not supposed to exist in the in-between. Even if my identity was in flux, I learned to choose a side: cross into or stay out of a space. Then, perform that choice.

Am I Singaporean? By many definitions, yes. The hardest stamp of my Singaporeanness is the two years I reluctantly gave to National Service, the time when my income was so minuscule that I had to moonlight as an SEO copywriter to survive on weekends. I also went to school here and worked many jobs at local SMEs, where I learned how notoriously disciplined and hard-working Singaporeans are. I had Singaporean friends I played Mahjong with during Chinese New Year. Was that enough?

Am I Thai? Thailand is how I entered this world, gifted with a language so complexly beautiful I refused to give it up. While I watched dramas on Singapore’s Channel 8 (mostly so I could speak Mandarin the way my Chinese teacher wanted me to), I watched so much more Thai satellite TV. While she cooked, my mother and I watched so many sitcoms and comedy sketches. What I remembered about the Thai language was laughter. Unseriousness. Of realising how the twist of a phrase could lead to joy. Even if I could not write in it, Thai cracked me up, opened my love for creativity. Was that enough to call myself Thai?

As I navigated my adult life in Singapore, I began code-switching between Singaporean friend groups and expats. To some, I spoke perfect English. I told those people I was training to be a radio DJ at the polytechnic. To some, my English became Thai-accented. It was how I was supposed to sound. And to others, my English sounded so undeniably Singaporean, what you would hear from a 50-year-old uncle at a kopitiam. I’ve learned to live my life pulling these identities out like scarves from a magic box.

Over the years, as I navigated different stages of life, I could feel these scarves swirling from the recesses of my gut. Each time I encountered a new person who looked at me with that quizzical gaze, the one reserved for people they just didn’t intuitively understand, I’d find ways to add a new scarf so they would not. I would happily play grumpy, serious, ministerial Singaporean guy (with black-rimmed glasses) if it meant government workers would take me and my art more seriously. I could also play the globe-trotting executive with a multicultural background when I interviewed for jobs at multi-national companies. It was never an act of deception. These identities did exist. They were just folded neatly somewhere in the scarf box until I needed to pull them out.

Putting on these scarves made it easier for the world to perceive me. Because it did not raise unanswered questions, I could find allies more easily. Work, and therefore, life, would be smooth-sailing.

But, the more I wrote creative nonfiction about myself and my life, as I exposed my identity through the written word, the more I realised that the scarves I wear within these interpersonal conversations were pretty distractions from cementing my identity to the world, not as simply Thai, simply Singaporean or simply queer, but as an amalgamation of it all. On the page, I expressed what I could not in conversation. When there was no specific audience I needed to tailor my words for, I discovered my own vocabulary.

Once, I believed authenticity meant a complete understanding of myself. That was how I was taught in schools: do not put words on a page that you cannot defend. Yet, as I wrote, I became aware of shifts in my identity. Because prose has momentum, I would often note how my perspective shifts as I traverse the scenes of my life. Where I end is not where I begin.

This instability can scare many writers off the page. But acknowledging one’s constant state of flux is quite ingrained in me. I explore the concept of a constantly changing self artistically in one of my earliest creative nonfiction pieces, “Field Notes from an Investigation into the Self”, where a disembodied “self” represents how I’ve noticed myself changing over time.

Even as I write this essay, I am changing; I am acknowledging that, while I am jealous of the interaction between the two men I saw at BEEF, their story was never meant for my self-insertion. Because I am a non-fiction writer, every scene I write would be colored by what I inherently yearn for — not a romantic happy ending for what I see, but a state of emotional comfort for myself. I was not jealous that the interaction happened to someone else, but that I would likely not witness something similar again when I left BEEF, when I left Bangkok, and returned to Singapore. A state of normalcy where both queerness and a linguistic diaspora (two Chinese men in a Thai gay club) could co-exist with ease in the same space.

What I find most beginning non-fiction writers struggle with is a general unwillingness to cede their voice of authority. They feel they must enter a written work already understanding where they stand and who they are, and that the journey of the writing is a telegraphed act of revealing those aspects. Before they write, there is already an outline, and they’re just filling in the blanks. I do not blame them, for that is how they are taught to write, particularly with the five-paragraph college essay.

But I find that the most rewarding — and therefore, authentic — non-fiction is when you can tell that something clicked in the middle of the writer’s process. There is an “aha!” moment about their topic that wasn’t there before. That is the moment where readers perk up their ears (or eyes), because an unexpected energy flows into the text. They learn something about themselves as they are developing their thesis. And their selfhood evolves.

Being a diasporic and genderfluid writer means that this essayistic mode of inquiry is how my mind operates on a day-to-day basis. I wear a neat scarf when it would be dangerous not to, the way a turtle might crawl into its shell when attacked. But, away from judgmental stares, when I am let loose to wander this world as an authentic and unlabeled self, I am always finding new parameters to breach, new selves to grow into.

To be free in writing, we must treat writing as a canvas for freedom.

On every flight back to Bangkok, I make it a point to load my Spotify with Thai music, usually the latest Top 40 hits. I sometimes joke to my friends that I must study before I hit the club, the way a Singaporean student might “mug” before a big exam. But really, I treat it as a kind of emotional reset — to put myself in a stream of Thai words and of Thai artistry, and remind myself of where I was going. It was a ritual of transitioning, of recalibration. Of letting go of the version of Max I had put on while in Singapore, who felt priced out of a crowded and noisy city, and returning to an indisputably Thai version of Max. The one who was there on a holiday, not from work, but from someone whose feet became naturally muddy with Singaporean soil. It felt like a kind of cleansing.

On my most recent flight, I latched onto a song that has become Thailand’s top hit in the past few months: แก้บน by Karntong Tungngern. It was a love song, much like many Thai tracks that hit the top charts. But this one felt extra special. It was a song about wanting to be loved so bad, by the ideal person, that the singer was willing to do anything for it.

“When I land a good husband,” she sings, “I will dance to undo what I owe the deities.”

What struck me about this song was the over-the-top promise, the single-mindedness of doing anything not for one specific person, but to eventually find love.

Mouthing the words miles in the air, I wasn’t thinking of a lover. I had that already in Singapore. But I thought of how much I would give to be loved by the home I was about to land on. To be loved by Thailand, despite spending so many years away from her.

Each trip, I try to find signs of that love. With writers. In the clubs. With like-minded people, I meet. It never feels fully like a homecoming, but when you are part of the diaspora — here but away — you learn to sit squarely in that feeling of in-betweenness.

I write it out so I can show it, this beautiful braid of scarves I previously paraded for the world, only one at a time.

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After I lost my job in October 2024, I told people close to me what I was thinking. I wanted to build a one-person business and write publicly to monetise my story and expertise instead of sending out resumes.

The responses came fast.

“That’s risky.”

“You have a family to think about.”

“Wouldn’t it be safer to just find another job?”

“Personal branding is for people who are already famous.”

None of these people had ever built a business or ever tried to monetise their expertise online. None of them had ever taken the leap they were advising me against.

However, I almost listened anyway.

That is the trap because when you are scared, you reach for the nearest voice, and the nearest voices are almost never the right ones.

We are living in the most over-advised and under-qualified era in human history. Everyone has a podcast and a take. They have a framework for how you should live your life, run your business, raise your kids, and manage your money.

However, here’s the question almost nobody asks before taking advice: Have they actually done the thing they’re telling me to do?

Have they done it with real stakes and failure? Do they have real skin in the game? Watching someone else do it on YouTube or reading a book about it does not count.

According to a 2019 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, people consistently overestimate the quality of advice from confident sources, regardless of whether that confidence is backed by experience.

We mistake certainty for competence and confuse fluency with expertise.

As Bertrand Russell once observed: “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

The result is millions of people making life-altering decisions based on input from people who’ve never actually navigated the terrain.

Your uncle telling you not to start a business, has he ever started one?

Your friend saying “just be patient, love will come”, is she in a relationship she actually wants to be in?

The person online selling a course on passive income, is their income actually passive, or is it made from selling courses about passive income?

By the end of this newsletter, you will have a clear framework for filtering advice so you stop wasting time and confidence on people who are guessing, dressed up as guidance.

The advice economy is broken, and it is costing you years

Most people take advice from whoever is closest, like a parent or a sibling. It could be a friend from university or a colleague who’s been in the industry longer. It could even be someone whose LinkedIn headline sounds impressive.

Proximity is mistaken for credibility, and confidence for competence, and the louder someone speaks, the more authoritative they seem.

This is the broken model, and it keeps smart and capable people stuck for years longer than they need to be.

The real problem runs deeper than just bad advice because most advice is projection, not wisdom.

Stephen Covey wrote that “most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” Bad advisors are just processing their own fears out loud through you because when your risk-averse relative tells you not to quit your job, they are describing their own fear.

When your burned-out friend tells you that all relationships are hard work, they are rationalising their own choices.

People tell you what they wish they had done or what they fear. Or what would make them feel less alone in the decision they made?

That is the therapy they are outsourcing to you.

I have seen this pattern play out in my own life with painful clarity. When I came out publicly as queer and gender-fluid in Singapore, the advice from well-meaning people was overwhelming.

I was told: “Keep it private.” “You don’t need to share everything.” “What will clients think?”

These were people who had never had to navigate visibility in a conservative society or weigh authenticity against professional risk. They never had to choose between hiding and building something real.

If I had listened, I wouldn’t have built what I have built because the very thing they warned me against became my competitive edge.

Here’s the aha moment that changed everything for me.

Credentials and confidence are not the same as credibility.

Credibility is earned through experience. Through failure. Through doing the thing with real stakes attached.

I call this the Proof of Reps Framework. Before you take anyone’s advice, ask one question:

Where are the reps?

Not the theory. Not the opinion. Not the confidence. The actual repetitions in the real world.

Naval Ravikant calls this “specific knowledge”-what he terms “knowledge you cannot be trained for.”

It has to be lived and earned through experience that can’t be shortcut, replicated in a classroom, or packaged into a course. This is exactly why Tier 1 advice is irreplaceable, because you can study leadership, but you cannot study what it feels like to bet everything on yourself with a family depending on you.

Think of advice in three tiers:

Tier 1 — Have done it. They have been exactly where you are and built through it, so their advice carries the weight of lived experience. This is the tier you want most.

Tier 2 — Studied it deeply. They haven’t done it personally, but they’ve spent years studying people who have. These could be good researchers, therapists, and coaches who work closely with practitioners in this category. Their advice is useful but should be held more lightly.

Tier 3 — Got opinions. These are everyone else who is well-meaning and possibly smart, but speaking from speculation. This tier is where most advice comes from, so take it with caution.

The problem is that we treat them like Tier 1, not that Tier 3 people are bad.

This could be a person who has rebuilt their career after three layoffs has reps, or a person who’s never been laid off but has read about resilience.

It could be a founder who has taken a business from zero to revenue, has reps, or a consultant who advises on strategy but has never run their own business.

This is about being honest, not harsh.

The quality of your decisions is directly determined by the quality of your inputs, and right now, most people’s inputs are polluted with confident, well-meaning, completely unqualified voices.

How to build your personal advisory board in 90 Days

Most people’s default advisory board is whoever happens to be loudest in their life, like family, old friends, social media commenters, and so on, and that randomness is one of the biggest silent killers of potential I have ever seen.

Naval Ravikant puts it plainly: in a world of infinite leverage, being right just 10% more often compounds into dramatically better outcomes. The fastest way to be right more often is to take advice from people who’ve actually been right before — in the real world and under real pressure.

Here’s how to build that system deliberately.

Step 1: Run the receipts test

Before you take any advice, ask one question: where’s the proof?

You want actual results in the domain you are asking about, not credentials or follower count.

Did they build the business? Navigate the career transition? Sustain the relationship through real difficulty? Lose the weight and keep it off for years?

If the answer is no, treat their input as one data point, not a directive.

This is about calibrating how much weight you give their words. A good friend with no receipts still gets to speak, but they just don’t get to decide.

Start applying this immediately. The next time someone offers unsolicited advice, ask yourself quietly: Have they done this? You will be surprised how fast the noise drops.

Step 2: Audit your current advisors

Most people have never actually examined who they’re listening to.

Take 30 minutes. Write down the five people whose opinions influence your decisions most. Then ask, honestly: have they done what I’m trying to do?

When I did this exercise in the early days of Human Algorithm, I realised I was giving enormous weight to people who had never built anything independently. People who had spent their entire careers in employment advised me on entrepreneurship, and people who had never taken a public creative risk advised me on visibility.

The audit is about recalibrating the dial, not cutting people off.

Some voices get turned up, and others get turned down, which means relationships stay, and the influence gets reweighted.

Step 3: Seek scarred mentors, not polished ones

The best guides are not the ones with the cleanest story.

They are the ones who failed, lost something real, and rebuilt. The ones who know what the bottom feels like because they have stood there, because their advice tells you what it actually costs.

When I was rebuilding from scratch, the mentors who helped me most were the ones who said, “I have been exactly where you are, and here is what I wish I had known.”

Polished success stories are inspiring, and scarred success stories are instructional.

Brianna Wiest writes in The Mountain Is You that the people who help us most are rarely the ones who have it all figured out. Instead, they are the ones who have done the work of figuring themselves out.

There is a difference, and once you feel that difference, you stop being impressed by polish and start being drawn to depth.

Step 4: Create distance from noise

This step is where most people get stuck because the loudest advisors in your life are often the people you love.

Creating distance means changing how you receive their input, not cutting them out.

When someone close to me offers advice from a place of fear or projection, I’ve learned to respond with gratitude and zero compliance. “Thank you, I’ll think about that” is a complete sentence. It honours the relationship without surrendering your direction to it.

The blunt version: stop asking for opinions from people who aren’t qualified to give them.

We often invite the noise because we ask the worried parent, the sceptical friend, the colleague who’s never taken a risk. Then we’re surprised when we get fear back.

Share outcomes and protect the process, rather than broadcasting your decisions to people who can’t handle them.

Step 5: Build the 3-tier mentor stack

Deliberately build relationships across all three tiers.

One person who has done exactly what you’re trying to do is your north star because they have been in the terrain, which means their hard-won experience saves you years.

One person who has studied it deeply and works closely with people doing it. This could be a good coach, researcher, or advisor who synthesises patterns across many people’s experiences, because their value lies in breadth.

One person who is currently doing it alongside you. A peer in the trenches or someone whose wins remind you it’s possible and whose struggles remind you you’re not alone.

When I was building Human Algorithm, this stack looked like: creators who had built one-person businesses from scratch (Tier 1), coaches and writers who had spent years studying the creator economy (Tier 2), and fellow founders building publicly at the same stage as me (Tier 3).

The combination changed my trajectory faster than any single mentor could have.

Jim Rohn said you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, but it goes beyond who you spend time with socially because it is about who you let shape your decisions and direction, as well as your belief in what is possible for you.

Choose those people deliberately because the goal is to stop leaving your direction to chance.

You are the average of the inputs you allow, which is an operating principle, so choose your inputs as if your life depends on it.

If this resonated, the HALO Authority Club is where founders, creators, and leaders go to build with people who’ve actually done the thing and are doing real work. Join here.

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It shows up at 2am when you can’t sleep, and you’re not sure why. It shows up mid-run when a thought surfaces that you quickly push back down. It shows up in the middle of a meeting where you are nodding and contributing, and, somewhere behind it all, a quiet voice is asking the same question it asked yesterday and the day before.

That voice is data for you. As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk puts it, your body is not a machine. It is a messenger, and most of us have spent years learning to ignore it.

Most of us were never taught the difference between discomfort that is passing through and discomfort that’s trying to tell us something. We learned to push through and keep going, believing it would get better.

Everyone feels this way sometimes. So we suppress and wait it out, treating every difficult feeling like traffic that will clear if we just stay patient.

The problem is that some of it clears up, but some of it doesn’t.

Research on burnout consistently shows it is a slow accumulation when signal after signal is ignored. The body keeps score long before the mind is willing to look at the bill, so by the time most founders and professionals admit something is wrong, they have been tolerating it for months, sometimes years.

I know this firsthand. After my third layoff, I did not immediately recognise what my body had already decided. I kept telling myself it was the economy, the timing, bad luck.

It took me longer than three days, which felt longer than three months, to name what I already knew. That I had been building my identity within structures that were never designed for me to thrive.

The signals were there, but I had not learned how to read them yet.

The problem with “pushing through”

The standard advice for discomfort is to reframe it. For example, you are told to “zoom out because it’s just a bad week” or “you are probably tired”. Advice like “Sleep more, “" journal, “and "take a walk " is also common.

Look, I am not saying that is bad advice, because sometimes the advice is right, because friction is normal, and not every hard day means something is broken.

However, there is a category error that most high performers make, costing them their health, their businesses, and their relationships.

They treat all discomfort the same.

Road rage and Sunday dread are not the same thing. The irritation of a difficult client call and the slow, creeping feeling that the work you’re doing no longer means anything is also not the same thing.

One is weather, and the other is climate because the weather passes, and climate shapes everything.

The trap that founders fall into, specifically, is what Steven Bartlett calls the arrival fallacy: the belief that the bad feeling will resolve itself once something external changes.

They tell themselves they will deal with it once the deal closes or the quarter ends. Or once the new hire settles in, you hit the revenue milestone, etc.

So they keep deferring the signal and keep moving the deadline for when they are allowed to actually feel what they’re feeling.

I did this for two years in the media. Every uncomfortable week became “just a phase.” Every Sunday night, dread became something I would work my way out of by Wednesday. Until I couldn’t anymore.

The professional who stays in the wrong job for 18 months because “every bad week might just be a phase” is trained by a system that rewards tolerance, since bonuses go to those who stay. For example, LinkedIn celebrates the long tenures because you rarely see anybody post about the slow erosion of their sense of self.

Brianna Wiest captures it precisely in The Mountain Is You: "We think that if we just get through this hard thing, we will finally feel okay. But the hard thing keeps moving." That's the arrival fallacy in practice, because the finish line is always one-quarter away or one more sacrifice away.

There is a difference between discomfort that passes and discomfort that compounds. Passing discomfort has a cause you can name and a timeline you can see, but compounding discomfort has neither. It’s just there, underneath everything and getting heavier.

That is where the Three-Day Rule comes in.

If something is still alive on day three, like still sitting in your chest when you wake up, still surfacing in quiet moments, still answering you when you try to reason it away, it means your nervous system is filing a report and asking you to stop pretending you didn’t receive the message.

The real cost of ignoring it is drift because when you make decisions out of exhaustion and suppression rather than clarity, you start reacting to life. That is how founders end up in business models they resent, professionals end up in careers they have outgrown, and people end up living lives that fit them perfectly five years ago.

Losing (after refusing to walk away from) a $12,000 deal earlier this year because the signals were too loud to ignore taught me this the hard way.

How to actually read what the signal is saying

The goal is to stop burying the ones that matter long enough to understand what they’re telling you, not act on every feeling.

Most people lack a system for knowing what to change, and without that system, the signal becomes noise, which, over time, becomes the baseline you stop questioning.

Step 1: Name it without fixing it.

Sit with the feeling for 72 hours before you do anything about it. Don’t make a decision or try to restructure your entire life at midnight. Instead, write it down or voice memo it on your morning walk. Say it out loud in the car where nobody can hear you. The act of naming it without immediately trying to solve it is harder than it sounds, especially for people who are wired to fix things fast. Resist because the signal needs space before it needs a solution.

Step 2: Locate it.

Once you have named it, get specific. Ask yourself: Is the discomfort about a person? A pattern that keeps repeating? Or is it a place you show up in, like a meeting or a relationship where you consistently feel smaller than you are? Or is it about a version of yourself you are still performing even though you have already outgrown it?

Location matters because the action it points to is completely different depending on the answer, because a person's problem and a pattern problem have different solutions. Conflating them is how people make the wrong change and still end up in the same situation.

Step 3: Check the cost of staying.

This is the step most people skip. They focus on the cost of leaving — the risk, the unknown, the loss of stability. But nobody does the accounting on what tolerating this has already taken.

As Alex Hormozi puts it, the most expensive thing you can own is a bad idea you refuse to let go of.

Ask yourself honestly: what has staying already cost you? Sleep. Creativity. The quality of your presence with the people you love. The ideas you haven’t had because your mental bandwidth is being consumed by something you won’t name. The version of your work you could be producing if this weight wasn’t sitting on top of everything else.

When I finally did this accounting after my third layoff, the numbers were staggering. I had been paying a toll I didn’t even know I was collecting at every checkpoint.

Step 4: Identify the one honest next move.

Not the exit plan. Not the five-year pivot. Just the next honest move. Sometimes it’s a conversation you’ve been avoiding. Sometimes it’s a boundary you need to set and have been softening. Sometimes it’s admitting to yourself — before anyone else — that you already know what you need to do.

I spent a long time in my career making incremental adjustments instead of honest ones. Tweaking the surface instead of addressing the foundation. The honest next move is usually the uncomfortable one. That’s how you know it’s the right one.

Step 5: Set a deadline.

A signal without a timeline becomes background noise. You will acknowledge it on Monday, then life will happen, and by Friday, it’s just something you live with again.

Give yourself seven days to make one decision based on what the signal is telling you. Do it through one decision, a meeting you book or a conversation you have. Make it a commitment to yourself, and actually write it down.

I will leave you with what Charlie Munger said: "You cannot make a good deal with a bad person”. That applies to clients, yes, but it also applies to the version of yourself you keep trying to negotiate with, the one that knows something is wrong and keeps agreeing to stay quiet about it.

See you next Sunday.

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It does not have to be for anything specific. Just checked, opened an app, closed it, opened it again two minutes later. It could also be you refreshed a feed, looked at a number, felt something, put the phone down and picked it up again.

Most people do this dozens of times a day without registering it as a behaviour. It feels like staying informed, connected, and being on top of things. It also feels normal because everyone around you is doing the same thing.

However, every time you check for a response, a like, a reaction, or a reply, your brain releases a small hit of dopamine if something’s there, and if nothing’s there, it creates a signal that something might be wrong. So you check again.

Psychologists call this a variable reward loop. Nir Eyal, who wrote Hooked, describes it as the same neurological mechanism that makes slot machines addictive. You don’t keep pulling the lever because it always pays out, but you keep pulling it because it sometimes does.

The unpredictability is the hook, and every social media platform was engineered with this in mind, like the refresh gesture, the notification delay, and the algorithmic unpredictability of which posts land and which disappear. None of that is accidental because every feature is designed to keep you checking.

It is particularly dangerous for high achievers because the higher you climb, the worse it gets. Validation hunger scales with your ambition because a founder with 10,000 followers feels the same anxiety about a post underperforming as they did with a post with 100 followers.

A CEO who has built something real still refreshes their inbox waiting for the response that confirms they made the right call because achievement raises the stakes and the need for approval.

I know this from the inside. When I lost my job in October 2024 and started posting publicly with no safety net, plan, and therapy bills I didn’t know how to pay, I checked constantly. Every notification felt like evidence that this wasn’t a mistake, and every day with no DMs felt like confirmation that it was.

I was using the metrics to regulate myself and to borrow confidence I did not yet have.

The cost is in who gets to decide how you feel about yourself because every check hands that decision to someone else. A stranger who scrolled past your post between two other posts and an algorithm with no relationship to what you are actually building.

A silence that means nothing about your worth but gets interpreted as everything.

Decisions and content get made from that place, and the result is a version of yourself permanently calibrated to other people’s reactions instead of your own standard.

There is a different way to operate. The rest of this newsletter will show you how to build it.

Why the most driven people are the most hooked

The belief most high performers hold without ever examining it is that caring about results means staying closely attuned to feedback. The driven person checks their metrics because they are serious and monitors responses because they want to improve, because to them, seeking external signals is a sign of professionalism.

That framing sounds reasonable, but it is also what keeps the addiction invisible.

There is a real difference between wanting to improve and needing affirmation. One is about your work, and the other is about your worth. When those two things get tangled together, which they almost always do, the checking becomes more like self-medication than data-gathering.

For example, think about a founder who writes something honest and vulnerable. It took courage to post it and hit publish. And then, for the next 90 minutes, they are not working because they are watching the notification count and reading comments before any have been posted.

They are determining whether the silence means the post failed or is still early. The post was brave, but the two hours that followed undid it.

That pattern is everywhere, and the people it hits hardest are the ones who care the most.

Brianna Wiest writes in The Mountain Is You that self-abandonment is the root of most suffering and that we abandon ourselves most completely when we make other people’s perceptions the measure of our reality. I came across that idea at a point when I was building Human Algorithm from nothing, posting every day into what felt like silence.

I had been in the media for a decade, knew how to read a room, and used that skill to constantly scan for signals about whether I was okay.

What I did not see then was that validation widens the gap.

Every time external approval makes you feel okay, your baseline shifts upward because what used to feel like enough no longer registers as enough. You need more to get the same feeling, and on the days when nothing comes, the silence feels like evidence, like confirmation of a fear you have been carrying quietly for years.

The approval loop gives you a temporary reprieve from the absence of confidence.

For a long time, I was creating content shaped by what I thought would land, not what I actually believed. The voice that built a decade of journalism, that broke exclusive stories, that earned trust from sources who didn’t talk to anyone else, that voice had started softening its edges and hedging.

I found myself optimising for reaction, but I did not notice it happening because the drift was gradual. However, the result was a version of me calibrated for approval.

When I decided to start measuring my work against an internal standard instead of an external reaction, something changed. My decisions got faster, and my content got more honest. Ironically, that is when the business started to grow in ways the approval-seeking version never could have.

I call this the Internal Scorecard, which is a personal standard that exists independently of anyone’s reaction to your work.

It is about having a prior, like a set of questions you ask yourself before you ask anyone else, that anchors your sense of whether you’re doing good work, not about ignoring feedback or becoming unreachable.

Did I tell the truth in that post? Did I show up when I didn’t want to? Did I build something real today, even if nobody saw it?

Those questions belong to you because the likes count doesn’t.

You cannot build lasting confidence on borrowed approval because every time you outsource your self-worth to someone else’s reaction, you are renting it. Rented confidence is the most expensive kind: you pay for it every single day, and you never actually own it.

How to build an internal scorecard that actually works

Naval Ravikant puts it plainly: “You have to do hard things anyway — you might as well do things you’re proud of.” That line feels different when you realise how much of what most people do is shaped by what they think will be received well.

Most people have outsourced their self-worth so completely that they no longer know what their own standard looks like. They have been measuring themselves against reactions, numbers, and other people’s timelines for so long that the idea of having a personal benchmark feels abstract. Almost arrogant. Like, who am I to decide what counts as good work?

However, that question is itself a symptom, and the inability to self-assess without external input is what the approval loop creates over time. It makes you distrust your own judgment without it.

These steps are designed to break that pattern systematically.

1) Audit the checking habit

You cannot change a behaviour you haven’t observed clearly. For the next three days, every time you reach for your phone to check a metric, a message, or a notification — pause and write down three things: what triggered the urge, what you were feeling before you checked, and what you felt after.

What most people discover is that checking clusters around specific emotional states, such as after posting something vulnerable, having a difficult conversation, or a period of uncertainty. The check is an attempt to regulate and gather data indicating that things are okay. Seeing that pattern clearly is the first step to interrupting it because what you can name, you can change.

2) Name your internal standard

Before you can measure yourself against your own benchmark, you need to know what your benchmark is. This sounds obvious, but you will be surprised that almost nobody has actually done it.

Write this down: what does doing good work mean to me, independent of how anyone responds? Was I honest? Did I show up when it would have been easier not to? Did I create something I actually believe, or something I thought would be well received?

Your answers become your scorecard and a standard you set for yourself that nobody can move on you.

3) Create a 24-hour feedback delay

Post the content, send the email or publish the piece and then don’t check for 24 hours.

This is uncomfortable, but that discomfort is the point: you are training your nervous system to decouple creation from the need for an immediate reaction. Teaching yourself that you can put something real into the world and survive the silence. That the silence doesn’t mean what the approval loop has conditioned you to believe.

Do this consistently, and you will start to feel the difference between creating because you have something to say and creating because you need a response. Once you can feel that difference, you can choose.

4) Replace the checking ritual with a creation ritual

The urge to check doesn’t disappear because you decide to stop checking. It needs somewhere to go, and the most effective redirect is creation.

Every time you feel the pull to refresh, open a blank document instead. Write one sentence about what you are actually thinking and record a 30-second voice note. You can even sketch the rough shape of an idea. The point is to redirect anxious energy back into output rather than consumption.

Over time, this retrains the loop. Instead of the cycle running from anxiety to checking to temporary relief back to anxiety, it runs from anxiety to creation to something that actually builds.

5) Track inputs, not outputs

Naval is precise on this: focus only on what you can control because outputs are lagging indicators. The followers you have today are the result of decisions you made months ago, and the revenue in your account reflects the trust you built before you saw the money.

You cannot control outputs in the short term because you can only influence them over time through inputs.

So track the inputs. Did you write today? Did you tell the truth? Did you show up when you didn’t feel like it? Did you build something that reflected what you actually believe?

Those are the metrics that build identity because everything else is scorekeeping on a game that was never fully in your hands.

I spent months checking the wrong things, so for me, metrics that felt urgent meant nothing and silence that felt like failure and wasn’t. What changed for me was a better question: “Did I show up honestly today?”

The Internal Scorecard is about sequencing them correctly. Build the internal standard first, and do the work consistently from that standard. The external results will follow because you stopped letting them define you.

That is how you go from renting your confidence to owning it.

If this is the work you are ready to do, like building the kind of presence and authority that doesn’t depend on anyone’s permission, the HALO Authority Club is where that happens. It is a community for founders, creators, senior executives and leaders who are done renting their confidence and ready to build something that compounds.

See you next Sunday.

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Most CEOs are invisible until something goes wrong and then the comms team gets the call.

CARMA tracked 500+ articles across Singapore’s top 10 most-covered CEOs from October 2025 to January 2026. I spent time sitting with the findings, and what struck me was how clearly it shows the cost of waiting.

Read more

Christel Goh, Founder and CEO, Grow Public Relations

Christel Goh is recognised in the inaugural Human Truth Awards because her leadership is shaped by a quiet willingness to be seen before she feels ready, and she tells me that in the early days of building her agency, fear showed up in ways she did not fully recognise at the time.

“There were a lot of doubts,” she says, explaining that she often wondered what former bosses and peers would think of her decision to start her own agency, and whether she would be judged for stepping out on her own.

Read more

This week, Atlassian laid off about 1,600 employees, roughly 10% of its workforce, after announcing a move toward deeper AI integration inside the company.

CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes explained the cuts as part of a move to self-fund more investment into AI products and enterprise sales, while reorganising the company around faster AI-driven teamwork tools like Rovo.

The company offered severance, healthcare extensions, and support packages for those affected, yet the underlying message was clear to anyone paying attention. Even high-performing employees inside successful global tech companies can suddenly find themselves outside the system when strategy changes.

When I saw the news, I did not feel surprised, because it simply confirmed a lesson I had already learned the hard way.

I stopped being loyal to companies when I realised that loyalty in corporate life is often rewarded with more work and emotional investment but very little actual protection when the numbers change, because the truth is that most organisations will talk about culture, belonging, as well as being a “family” right until the moment they need to cut costs, restructure teams, or decide that your role no longer fits their plans.

I learned that the hard way after spending years building a career I thought would keep growing if I kept proving myself, kept delivering, and kept attaching my worth to the titles I earned, because I had worked hard to become a journalist, then a senior writer, and then a tech and media editor in Singapore despite being told early in life that I would never go very far as an ITE graduate.

Those titles felt important to me, and for a while, they gave me a sense of status and identity that I thought I needed, but layoffs have a brutal way of exposing how fragile that arrangement really is when your future sits in someone else’s spreadsheet.

Once I saw how quickly a company could separate performance from protection, I started thinking about ownership rather than romanticising work, because being a good employee and being dependent are not the same thing.

I still believe in doing strong work, hitting targets, and showing up professionally, but I no longer confuse competence with obligation or believe any company deserves access to my whole identity just because it pays my salary.

That changed everything for me, because instead of pouring all of my energy into proving I belonged inside someone else’s system, I started putting that same energy into building skills and assets that could travel with me anywhere.

That is when Human Algorithm became more than a side idea in my head and started becoming the thing I was actually building for my own future, because I took the skills I had developed across journalism, storytelling, interviewing, editing, sales, and relationship building, and I pointed them toward something I owned.

I built a personal brand rooted in my real story, not a sanitised version designed to fit corporate expectations, and I started creating content, coaching founders and creators, hosting my podcast, consulting on brand storytelling, and building a business that reflects how I actually want to live.

That mattered even more because I am not building in a vacuum. I am building as a parent to a neurodiverse daughter who needs my presence, flexibility, and emotional availability far more than any company needs another person trying to look useful in meetings, and that reality forced me to get clear about what I was optimising for.

I was no longer interested in chasing the illusion of job security if that security came at the cost of my freedom, my time, and my ability to be there for the people who actually matter to me.

What I wanted was self-security, which to me means having skills that cannot be revoked, relationships that are mine to keep, and a reputation built on truth rather than title.

The biggest change was internal, because I stopped waking up asking how to fit into a structure that was never designed around my life, and I started asking how to show up fully as myself while building something that can outlast any employer’s decision.

That is why I keep saying your company is not your family and your job title is not your identity, because when all of that falls away, what remains is your story, skills, judgment, and ability to connect with people as the real you.

That is the only kind of security I trust now, and it is the kind more people need to start building before someone else decides their future for them.

See you next Sunday.

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You have spent years building expertise, navigating career transitions, overcoming challenges, and gaining insights that could genuinely help people.

However, when it comes to positioning yourself, something holds you back. Maybe you are worried about judgment, or you think personal branding is fake and performative.

Maybe you have tried posting before, but couldn’t keep it consistent. Or maybe you are simply unsure how to show the world what you actually know without feeling inauthentic.

I understand this because I have lived it.

I went from zero to $88k in revenue by turning my own story into something that mattered, learning to translate my experiences into insights people actually trusted.

I have watched hundreds of people get stuck in the same place you might be right now, with years of expertise that feels invisible.

What I have learned is that the problem is that you lack a system and clarity on what makes your perspective different.

You lack a structured path forward and the accountability to actually follow through.

That is exactly why I created the HALO Authority Club.

HALO stands for Human Authority through Leadership and Originality. It is a membership-only club designed specifically for senior executives, founders, and leaders who want to build real authority without the fake in 90 days.

It is having real authority that attracts qualified leads, speaking opportunities, and partnerships.

Authority that comes from your story, told authentically, with clear boundaries and intention.

Most personal branding advice tells you to optimise, perform, and chase algorithms. They ask you to post more and follow trends. They say copying viral formats from bigger creators on LinkedIn is ok.

However, that approach leaves you feeling empty and inauthentic. It treats your story as a liability rather than your greatest asset, and it burns you out because you are constantly chasing something external instead of building something real.

The HALO Authority Club is built on a different foundation because authority comes from trust, and trust is built when someone shares a genuine experience, turns it into a real insight, and uses that insight to serve others.

When people see that you have lived through something difficult and learned something valuable from it, they begin to believe that you can help them navigate their own challenges. That belief becomes influence, and influence creates opportunity.

The question is whether you know how to tell it in a way that builds trust without oversharing, that positions you as an authority without performing, and that attracts real opportunities without chasing them.

Why join The HALO Authority Club?

In the first month, you will discover the stories that define your authority. Everyone has defining moments that shape how they see the world, but most people never articulate them.

Inside the HALO Authority Club, you will uncover and structure your most powerful stories. You will identify your core story pillars, discover your “Only I Can Say” perspective, and craft your origin story to show people not just what happened to you, but what you learned and why it matters. Your experiences start becoming the foundation of your authority, and you stop feeling random.

In the second month, you will learn how to share honestly without oversharing. This is where most programs fail because they tell you to be vulnerable without teaching you how to do so responsibly.

Authenticity means sharing with clarity and intention, so you will learn the vulnerability spectrum, the vulnerability filter, and how to communicate vulnerability in a way that builds trust rather than discomfort. You will learn the trust triangle: relatability, expertise, and aspiration.

You will also learn how to connect with people while maintaining professional boundaries. You will understand exactly where the line is between sharing your truth and trauma-dumping.

In the third month, you will master storytelling systems and integrate your personal brand into your business growth. Consistency builds authority, but consistency is impossible without systems. Most people struggle with personal branding because they don’t know what to say.

Inside HALO, you will build a repeatable storytelling system using the VOICE storytelling method, the M.I.N.E content framework, and the 1:3:5 content multiplication method.

Instead of asking “What should I post today?”, you will always have meaningful stories to share, and instead of creating random content, you will be building a content engine that attracts qualified leads, collaborations, speaking opportunities, and partnerships.

What’s inside The HALO Authority Club?

What you get inside The HALO Authority Club is a complete system for building real authority. You get the

• HALO Masterclass that teaches the complete HALO storytelling method and the personal brand story system with frameworks for discovering your authority story.

• The storytelling content engine that turns one insight into weeks of meaningful content.

• A 90-day content calendar with templates for LinkedIn, Instagram, and email.

• A weekly accountability check-in to keep you consistent and on track.

• A lead capture system module that teaches you how to turn your content into qualified leads.

• Monthly authority workshops focused on real authority building.

• Monthly group coaching where you receive feedback on your storytelling and positioning.

• Access to a private community of founders, executives, and creators who are also building authentic brands.

All of this is available for just $150 per month. The actual value of everything in the program is over $12,600, but I am offering it at a 99% discount because I believe the world needs more authentic voices, and I want to make it accessible to people who are serious about building real authority.

I am also offering founding member bonuses if you sign up by March 30. You will get

• the LinkedIn Authority Bootcamp

• a personal brand audit with direct feedback on your positioning

• the complete storytelling playbook

That is an additional $2,000 in value, completely free.

And I am backing this with a guarantee. If you don’t see results by day 90, I will extend your membership for free to help you succeed. We only win when you win.

This is about real opportunities, real income, and real authority built on your authentic story, not about vanity metrics or follower counts.

Who is The HALO Authority Club for?

The HALO Authority Club is for you if you:

• are a senior executive, founder, or leader with valuable expertise who has been hiding your struggles

• want to attract qualified leads and speaking opportunities without chasing them

• Have a story to tell but fears judgment or irrelevance, or who struggles with consistency in sharing your authentic voice.

• have spent years building expertise and navigating challenges, and you are ready to turn those experiences into a personal brand that grows both trust and business opportunity.

• are tired of generic personal branding advice and you want a clear and structured path forward with accountability to actually follow through.

Your story is your competitive advantage, and your experience is not a burden.

It is your unfair advantage, and the HALO Authority Club is designed to help you claim it and turn it into real income, real opportunities, and real authority.

Join here.

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Today is International Women’s Day, and while I could easily write about leadership, equality, or the statistics that circulate every year about progress and setbacks, the truth is that my mind keeps returning to one person who quietly shaped the life I have been able to build.

My wife has been the anchor through every change in my identity, my career, and my journey as a parent, and when I look back at the moments that defined the direction of my life, I realise that many of them only became survivable because she stood beside me with a kind of calm strength that never demanded attention and asked for recognition.

When people read my story today, they often see the business, the newsletter, the creator economy work, the coaching programs, and the personal brand that now sits under the Human Algorithm umbrella, but the earlier chapters were far less tidy and far more uncertain than the version that appears in a LinkedIn bio.

I went through arrests, bullying, and time in Singapore Boys’ Home when I was younger, and those experiences left marks that did not disappear simply because adulthood arrived, and when I later began navigating my identity as a gender‑fluid and pansexual person in a conservative environment, the emotional terrain did not suddenly become easier to walk through.

Through all of those seasons, my wife remained steady in a way that still humbles me today, because she chose love and partnership even when the road ahead was unclear and when the version of our future we once imagined had to be rewritten again and again.

Our life together has also been shaped by the responsibility and privilege of raising our neurodiverse daughter, who is non‑verbal and who experiences the world in ways that challenge the expectations most parents unconsciously carry into family life.

The therapies, the long appointments, the financial pressure, and the constant learning curve could easily have fractured a relationship that was not built on deep trust, yet what I witnessed instead was my wife leaning further into patience, compassion, and determination as we built a home where our daughter would never feel judged for who she is.

Watching her navigate that journey showed me how resilience does not always look dramatic or heroic in daily life. Instead, very often, it simply looks like someone showing up with quiet commitment day after day, holding a family together through circumstances nobody can fully prepare for.

The business I eventually built grew out of that same reality. When I left my corporate career and began writing online with no audience and no guaranteed income, the decision was not an abstract entrepreneurial experiment that I could casually abandon if it failed.

We had real financial obligations, therapy bills, and a child whose future depended on our ability to create stability in unconventional ways, and my wife understood that reality as clearly as I did.

She supported the leap anyway because she believed that a life built around authenticity and meaningful work was worth the uncertainty that came with it.

International Women’s Day is often framed as a moment to celebrate achievements in public life, and those celebrations absolutely matter because visibility shifts culture and reminds the world that progress has always been driven by people who refused to accept limitations placed on them by tradition.

At the same time, I think about the quieter forms of influence that rarely receive headlines, because the emotional architecture of families, communities, and partnerships is often built by women whose contributions never appear in statistics or annual reports.

When I write about storytelling, leadership communication, and the creator economy, I often say that authentic leadership begins with telling the truth about the people who shaped you, and the truth, in my case, is simple and profound at once.

The life I live today was built by a partnership where courage, patience, and belief flowed both ways, even when the future looked uncertain, and the path forward required reinvention that most people would have found overwhelming.

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The first time I realised how powerful a LinkedIn profile could be was during one of the most uncertain periods of my life when everything I thought defined me had suddenly disappeared.

I had just lost my job in media, my daughter had begun intensive therapy after being diagnosed with developmental delays, and I was navigating life in Singapore as a queer, gender-fluid parent in a society that still struggles with difference.

I remember sitting in a park for an hour after the meeting where I was told it was my last day, staring at my phone and wondering how I was supposed to rebuild my life when the identity that anchored my career had just vanished.

That was when LinkedIn stopped being a social network and started becoming something else entirely. It became a place where I could rebuild my voice in public, share the experiences that shaped me, and slowly construct a narrative that belonged to me instead of the companies I had worked for.

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Daisy Anne Mitchell went from $17 in her bank account to running Ang Mo Media, a six-figure creator consultancy helping influencers negotiate better deals and treat creativity like a career, not a side hustle.

With nearly 100,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram, Daisy is one of Singapore’s most vocal advocates for creator rights.

However, her journey wasn’t easy. From being the only white kid in a Catholic local school to navigating messy divorces and financial trauma, Daisy learned early that standing out means standing up for yourself.

In this episode, we cover:

• The $17 moment that changed everything (and why she shares her income publicly)

• How someone impersonated her to commit fraud, and what she learned about contracts

• Why “slow growth beats virality” for building a sustainable creator business

• The truth about Third Culture Kids and finding identity between two worlds

• How to negotiate brand deals without giving discounts (and why you should never say yes immediately)

• Why she hired a virtual assistant and stopped editing her own videos

• The mental health reality behind being a “vocal” creator in Singapore

This conversation explores:

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In 2024, I lost the role I loved, and for a moment, I genuinely believed my life was over because so much of my identity had been stitched into that title and the newsroom that gave me a sense of purpose.

I am an ITE graduate who was told repeatedly that I would never succeed in a competitive industry, yet I built a career in journalism and eventually became a tech and media editor at one of the biggest media companies in Singapore, where I broke exclusive stories and chased scoops that made me feel seen and respected.

The proudest moments of my career were not just the headlines with my name on them, but the quiet validation that I had outgrown the limitations other people had once placed on me, and I carried that pride carefully because I knew how hard it had been to earn.

Then I came out publicly as queer, and during Pride Month, which was also the same month my daughter was diagnosed with neurodiversity, I was placed on a performance review that felt less like feedback and more like a warning about the cost of visibility.

Although I passed the review, I was forced to take a pay cut, demoted, and placed on probation, and three months later, I was called into a room and told it was my last day, which is a sentence that lands differently when you have just moved into a new house with renovation bills waiting and therapy costs on the horizon.

A few weeks earlier, I had been planning paint colours and furniture layouts, and now I was sitting in a park for an hour, staring at nothing, trying to calculate how long our savings would last while my daughter’s future felt uncertain and fragile, beyond my control.

It dawned on me that I had no plan B, no safety net, and no experience selling anything or marketing myself, because I had always believed that good work inside a system would be enough to protect me from sudden collapse.

That afternoon stripped away the illusion that loyalty and performance guaranteed security, forcing me to confront a version of myself without a title and without the validation I had relied on for years.

With nothing lined up and no corporate logo behind my name, I started sharing my story on LinkedIn, building in public even when it felt uncomfortable and slightly desperate, because it was the only asset I truly owned.

Every night I questioned whether I should abandon the experiment and send out resumes to reclaim stability, and every morning I showed up anyway to write, comment, connect, and test whether my lived experience had any value beyond a job description.

Slowly, invitations began to appear in my inbox: first for podcast conversations, then for speaking engagements, and eventually for clients who wanted help shaping their own stories. Each small win chipped away at the fear that I had made a reckless choice.

By the end of 2025, I had earned $88,000 through my own one-person business, which was more than I had ever made in corporate, and while it was hard and exhausting work, it carried a different weight because it was built from scratch on the foundation of my voice.

Losing my job stripped away my title and forced me to build identity from the inside out, and in that rebuilding, I discovered that what felt like a public failure was actually the beginning of a more honest career shaped by my values rather than by institutional comfort.

If you are starting over and staring at an empty calendar or a severance letter that feels like a verdict, understand that rebuilding is a sign that you are constructing something that cannot be taken away by a single meeting in a closed room.

Keep going.

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I took my shoes off at the door, then followed Norhaziqah Rosli into her living room, where the air felt still, as homes do when they have learned to listen for breathing.

I saw Faziq on the floor, in his baby walker, cheeks full, eyes alert, and when she placed him into my arms, he felt sturdy, warm, and unaware of the timeline that shadows his life.

Faziq was diagnosed with a severe form of Spinal Muscular Atrophy, or SMA, a rare genetic condition that destroys motor neurons, the nerves that control movement, swallowing, and breathing. Without treatment, children with severe SMA often have a life expectancy of less than two years.

As muscles weaken, basic functions such as holding the head up, drinking milk, and breathing independently become difficult. The damage, once done, cannot be reversed.

“We really didn’t expect it to happen,” Norhaziqah tells me quietly, referring to the moment she discovered that her fourth child carried the same condition as her late son, Faris.

With Faris, they had believed it was a chance. When she found out during her pregnancy with Faziq, she was already five months along. “Every time you go for check up, you see him through the scan, the features,” she explains.

“As a mother, you don’t have the heart to go for an abortion.” She pauses, then adds softly, “It takes a lot of courage.”

Her mother did not tell her what to do. “She said that I cannot make the decision for you, but all I can do is give you the best support, no matter what your decision is,” Norhaziqah recalls. It was not only her mother, but also her husband and children.

It was faith and memory. She had already lost Faris in 2022, after years of hospital stays, breathing machines, and emergency rushes when his lips would turn blue. She had seen what untreated SMA could do.

Today, Faziq is on daily oral Risdiplam, a medication that helps slow the progression of SMA. Since birth, he has been taking it, and with it, he has achieved milestones his brother never could. He can move, kick, respond, and grow stronger.

However, Risdiplam must be taken long-term to maintain muscle strength and is not a cure.

It currently costs about SGD 4,800 per month at Faziq’s dosage. As he grows, that amount is expected to rise to around SGD 12,000 per month. The Medical Assistance Fund subsidises 75% of the cost for now, with the remainder covered by MediFund.

“So many things running through my mind,” she sighs when I ask about the future. “So many worries.” As someone who has a neurodiverse daughter going for therapy, I understand her worry because subsidies are not promises forever.

Doctors have recommended Zolgensma, a one-time gene therapy that replaces the missing gene at the root of SMA. When administered early, it offers the best chance to halt further muscle degeneration and preserve the strength Faziq still has.

The treatment costs SGD 2,397,300 and is not subsidised or covered under Singapore’s Rare Disease Fund.

For Faziq, time is not abstract because every month without gene therapy risks further irreversible muscle loss. If symptoms begin and progress untreated, the outcome is stark, where his muscles weaken, and swallowing fails, which means feeding tubes and breathing support become necessary for him.

And for many children with severe SMA, life expectancy does not extend beyond two years.

“Seeing him strong like this, we are very worried at the same time,” Norhaziqah tells me as I hold him. “Because we know one day, if the symptom… when it comes, all the strength will be gone.”

Ray of Hope is supporting the family’s campaign. Elisha Vishinpir, their marketing and communication manager, explains the weight of cases like this.

“Every case carries emotional weight,” she says. “When there’s a medical timeline and a figure most of us can’t even fathom, that weight feels heavier because the stakes are so real.”

She explains that Ray of Hope ensures transparency, that funds go directly to the hospital, and that families retain dignity and agency over what they share.

“We focus on the person and the life they are trying to build, not simply the crisis they face,” she says.

Before I leave, I ask Norhaziqah what she wants people to know. She looks at her son, then back at me. “I just hope that people can help,” she says. “To contribute as much as he can for Faziq’s treatment before the symptoms.”

In her living room, Faziq presses his forehead into my chest and then laughs at something only he understands. He does not know that his life currently depends on a deadline, a number, and a community.

But we do.

How you can help

Zolgensma costs SGD 2,397,300, a sum far beyond what Faziq’s family can afford. They are racing against time to raise this amount so he can receive treatment before irreversible muscle damage occurs.

100% of donations go directly to the hospital under Ray of Hope's supervision, subject only to payment processing charges imposed by third-party providers.

If you are able, donate; if you cannot, share his story. Every contribution brings Faziq closer to a future that is not defined by a two-year clock.

You can donate here.

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Valentine’s Day used to feel like a commercial script I was supposed to follow, with flowers, filtered photos, and a safe version of love that fit neatly into what people were comfortable seeing.

Still, over the past eight years with my wife, it has come to mean something far more confronting and far more honest, because loving loudly as an LGBTQIA+ couple in Singapore is still seen as controversial by some, especially when I am femme-presenting in a skirt with make-up on. We still choose to hold hands, hug, and show affection in public even when strangers stare.

We still do PDA when I am in full make-up, and we do not tone it down to make other people feel better, because visibility is not a phase for me, and love does not switch off depending on how masculine or feminine I look that day.

When my wife does my make-up before a shoot and carefully draws my eyeliner while we laugh about how much better she has gotten at matching my foundation shades from Sephora, it feels intimate in a way that has nothing to do with gender performance and everything to do with partnership, because beauty in our home is a shared ritual and not a rulebook.

We shop for clothes together, and sometimes I wear pieces she passes on to me, even though our wardrobes rarely overlap, since I love crop tops and mini skirts, and she does not. For me, clothing has always been a canvas for exploring who I am without apology.

I told her I was queer shortly after we started dating, and I was clear that I had dated different genders before, and her response was calm acceptance with no interrogation, no panic, and no attempt to shrink me into something more socially acceptable, which taught me that love built on the whole truth feels steadier than love built on selective disclosure.

We are raising our daughter outside narrow gender boxes because we want her imagination to grow wider than the roles we were handed. We never introduced traditional dolls and instead filled our home with educational toys, open-ended rainbow blocks, and even Gabby’s Dollhouse figurines that let her play without scripts.

When she imitates a doctor’s checkup or sets up her toys like a classroom, we see that she copies possibilities, not stereotypes, which tells us that children learn what they see repeated around them, and that we are careful about what we normalise.

We bring her to Pink Dot every year so she grows up seeing queer families and community as ordinary life rather than something whispered about, and those afternoons at Hong Lim Park surrounded by colour, laughter, and chosen family feel like quiet acts of resistance in a society that still debates our legitimacy. We also bring her into faith spaces that affirm who we are.

After growing up in churches that called my attraction a sin, I now attend Free Community Church in Singapore, where LGBTQIA+ people are welcomed without conditions, because I want her to learn that God is not an excuse for exclusion.

We train Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu together because we believe in teaching her both softness and strength. While violence is never the answer, we want her to know how to stand her ground in a world that may misunderstand her, question her, or try to define her before she defines herself.

So when people ask what Valentine’s Day means to me, it is not about roses or restaurants, it is about choosing each other in public and in private, choosing honesty over convenience, choosing visibility over comfort, and choosing to build a home where love is expansive enough to hold eyeliner, faith, martial arts, rainbow blocks, and a child who will grow up knowing that authenticity is her starting point and not something she has to fight to reclaim.

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Moonlake Lee, Founder and Executive Director, Unlocking ADHD

Moonlake Lee is recognised in the inaugural Human Truth Awards because her leadership began the moment advocacy became unavoidable, and she tells me that moment arrived when her daughter, then 15, was diagnosed with ADHD.

“I realised her underlying struggles were due to her neurodivergent wiring,” she explains to me, adding that what hurt just as much was recognising how little support their family had because of limited awareness and resources. The urgency deepened a year later when Moonlake herself was diagnosed with ADHD at 50, and she tells me that realisation reframed decades of underperformance, strained relationships, and lost potential that many people live with without ever knowing why.

As a parent to a neurodiverse child myself, with a possibility of autism, I understand her when Moonlake explains to me that undiagnosed and unmanaged ADHD often shows up not as a single crisis but as a slow erosion across school, work, and life.

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I didn’t do very much this week because I spent most of it sick, exhausted, coughing, sleeping, and slowly realising how uncomfortable it feels to be forced into stillness when your identity is usually wrapped around output and momentum.

The haze in Singapore triggered my sinuses first, then it turned into a full cough and flu situation that sent me to the doctor, kept me out of the gym, and grounded me at home eating proper meals, sleeping more than usual, and letting my body do the boring work of recovery, which is something I am still learning not to resist or feel guilty about.

When you are sick, the days blur together, and productivity becomes a strange concept because you are technically doing nothing while also doing exactly what is required, which is rest and patience, even if your brain keeps trying to negotiate a faster outcome.

I did manage to do a few things, though, and one of them was showing up for the fourth lesson of my masterclass, which is now in its third cohort, where we spent time talking about content planning through the 1-3-5 method and how to distribute one core idea across newsletters, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and long-form platforms without burning yourself out or repeating yourself blindly.

That conversation reminded me why I enjoy teaching creators and founders, because when people understand that content is not about volume but about intentional reuse, something shifts in how they see consistency and sustainability.

I also ran a Q&A session while I was sick, and although nine people signed up, only three showed up live. I have come to accept this without resentment, because I will always prioritise the people who want help over the numbers that look good on paper.

The first person asked about podcast sponsorships, because she had more than 20,000 subscribers but struggled to attract brands, and my advice focused less on pitching and more on format, retention, and structure, especially understanding where listeners drop off and how shorter podcast formats are becoming more viable unless you already have the scale and cultural weight of shows like The Diary of a CEO.

The second question was about showing up authentically at work, especially when you have side projects or identities that do not neatly fit into corporate expectations, and I shared what I have always believed, which is that authenticity takes courage and repetition, and that your colleagues already see multiple versions of you, whether you realise it or not.

If you wear a mask long enough, people will like the mask, not you, and that trade-off is something each person has to decide for themselves, because showing up fully means accepting that some people will never be comfortable with who you are, and that discomfort is not something you can manage or fix for them.

The third person surprised me because he announced a pivot from DEI consulting to writing a science fiction book, while also being deeply private and resistant to showing up publicly online. The question became how to build demand without becoming a visible creator.

My answer was simple and practical, because demand always comes before selling, and if you do not want to perform on social media, you still need to exist where readers already gather, whether that is Substack, Reddit, or niche sci-fi communities, especially when your process itself is distinctive, like writing an entire manuscript by hand without digital tools.

Documenting the process builds curiosity and anticipation, and a waitlist gives structure to that interest, so when the book exists, it is not released into silence.

Outside of that, I have been thinking about the podcast and how it evolves this year, because I recently connected with a production studio that is opening its space to podcasters in exchange for social promotion, which means you might start seeing different setups and a bit more experimentation in upcoming episodes.

Unlike my current studio, where production and editing are handled for me, this new setup separates filming from post-production, so I am testing it intentionally, without committing to it long-term until I understand the trade-offs properly.

I am also considering using a friend’s newly opened media studio, where he has offered me time to film episodes freely, and again, this is part of learning what flexibility looks like when you are building something independently without locking yourself into systems that no longer serve you.

One upcoming conversation I am especially looking forward to is with the drag queen Sammi Zheng, whose story is featured in a Netflix documentary called A Good Child, which I watched recently and cried through quietly, because it explores identity, caregiving, family reconciliation, and the long road toward being seen while caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s.

That story stayed with me because it reminded me how often personal truth, creativity, and responsibility intersect in deeply emotional, human ways, which is ultimately why I do this work in the first place.

That is all I have for this week, and it feels honest to end here without forcing productivity where there was none, because some weeks are about output, and some weeks are about staying alive and trusting that rest is not a setback.

If you want to catch up, my latest podcast episode with Andee Chua is live, and more conversations are coming soon, without rushing the process.

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For years, Andee Chua wanted to be invisible because visibility meant becoming a target and not because he lacked ambition.

Behind the polished LinkedIn Top Voice, international model, and DEI leader lies a journey from schoolyard bullying to building Singapore’s most inclusive run club.

Despite co-founding Kampong Collective and leading inclusion programs in tech, Andee spent his teenage years suppressing everything that made him different — his queerness, his love for dance, his need to be seen.

What Andee reveals in this conversation:

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