Build Business, Wealth & Family. By Design.
Here’s an evening nobody ever chose. Get home. Eat. Sink into the couch or scroll into the phone. Three hours pass without registering — no memory of time, no awareness of thought, hand moving snacks to mouth on autopilot. I know this state personally. In my TV years I didn’t watch television so much as … Read more
Last week my son David — nine years old — started playing “Dumb Ways to Die” in this the show he’s watching. I knew it instantly. That song is from 2012 — an Australian train company made it to stop people walking in front of trains. I’d half-forgotten it existed. Fourteen years later it’s colonising … Read more
By every rule of the early-retirement genre, I’m doing this wrong. The genre says you build the assets, hit the number, and exit. The whole point of the machine is to stop needing to work. And yet here I am — past the point where work is compulsory, opening two new clinics this year, by … Read more
In 2019 I wrote a post about how to stop complaining. I just reread it, and the strangest thing in it is one word I used without noticing where I’d taken it from. I wrote that repeated negative thoughts become “strongholds” in your mind. That’s not a self-help word. It’s Paul’s word — and I … Read more
On a Friday night in March 2018, my wife and I were in a cab heading home from IKEA — a date night, because that’s the kind of exciting couple we are kakakakaka — and the driver started talking business. Not small talk. Advice. Unprompted, structured, and delivered with the confidence of a man who … Read more
In December 2019 I wrote a post about happiness with one genuinely good idea buried in it. Here’s the passage, lightly cleaned up — it was the most alive thing I wrote that whole year: If you have a toothache. You can watch a movie, buy a phone, hang out with someone — whatever — … Read more
In December 2019, I published my money theory. Point three read: “Invest ruthlessly in very defensive, dividend paying stuff (I tend to avoid growth stuff).” That wasn’t a passing comment. It was core, central of the engine of the whole plan I was preaching: “Live off dividends and interests and passive income. All active income … Read more
In December 2019, I wrote a post and pinned it to the top of every page of my website. I just re-read it. Ugh. I’m going to show you parts of it, because it’s the most honest “before” picture I have — and because I wrote it, I can tell you exactly what I was … Read more
If a patient walks in with a fractured bone and you strap a plaster over it, the photo looks fine. The patient looks treated. Everyone in the room gets to tell themselves something was done. And the fracture goes right on being a fracture underneath — quietly getting worse — until the day it announces … Read more
My first salary as a physiotherapist at Changi General Hospital was $1,700 a month before CPF. After confirmation it went up to $2,050. If I had stayed on that path — salaried, public, dependable — I would not be earning more than $6,000 today, two decades in. I want to be careful how I say … Read more