Later, they passed some people who remarked, “What a shame! He makes that little boy walk.” They then decided they both would walk.

Soon they passed some more people who thought they were stupid to walk when they had a decent donkey to ride. So they both rode the donkey.

Now they passed some people who shamed them by saying how awful to put such a load on a poor donkey. The boy and man said they were probably right, so they decided to carry the donkey. As they crossed the bridge, they lost their grip on the animal, and he fell into the river and drowned.

The moral of the story? If you try to please everyone, you might as well kiss your ass goodbye.

I burst out laughing when I read that last line– did you?

But this story is a good reminder that we can never be everything to everyone, so there’s really no point trying.

My friends have been making some comments that make me, as a Singaporean, glow with pride.

“Wow, there are so many pretty trees! I can’t believe that Singapore is so green.”

“I don’t think Singapore’s urban planning could get any better than this!”

“The airport is beautiful. I need to take a picture of this!”

“The trains are unbelievably clean. I felt so happy just being in the train!”

When Courtney and I walked by Singapore’s National Library, she asked if we could go in to take a look. (Libraries are not typically considered tourist attractions, right? )

To me, it has always just been a beautiful 16-storey building. To Courtney, however, it is amazing not just because of its size and its state-of-the-art facilities, but because it signifies Singapore’s commitment to education and learning.

It dawned on me that things and events are only significant because of the meaning we attach to them. In and of themselves, they do not have any intrinsic meaning. And at the same time we must recognize that we cannot separate the thing or the event from the meaning we’ve given it.

It’s like how when you think of a banana you immediately imagine a yellow banana (I don’t think many of us would imagine an unripe green banana, right?). We cannot separate the yellow color from the “essence” of the banana.

(I hope I’m not becoming too philosophical and vague here.)

That’s how it is with things and events: we immediately think of them in conjunction with the meaning we’ve decided it has.

If that’s true, then shouldn’t we be very careful about the meaning we assign to things and events? Things and events are objective, but meaning is subjective. The meaning we give something affects how we view the world and even influences how happy we are!

I believe that this line of thinking applies to our personal lives, too. If someone has verbally abused you, if someone has lied to you, if you’ve failed at something, if you’ve made a mistake– you can’t do anything to change what has happened. But you can change the meaning of those events so that when you think about them, you will not be bitter or angry. Instead, you will view them as learning experiences, as vital episodes on this journey of personal growth.

In order to cultivate a habit of gratefulness, I’ve decided to assign new meanings to Singapore’s “old” things– the trees, the pretty buildings, the clean trains, the nice libraries.

Thank you, Courtney and Ying-Ying, for helping me to see old things in a new light

I’ve gotten very varied responses from the people I’ve talked to about this project. Most people have expressed a lot of doubt, asked some questions, and given no encouragement. I recognize that this is completely average behavior (but not necessarily “normal”), and I know that I, too, have been guilty of putting down others’ ideas because I was “just being realistic.”

In thinking about the comments I’ve received over the past few weeks, I’ve concluded that there are four types of people:

(1) “But” people

“But” people are a minority, but the destruction they do is not commensurate with their small numbers. They interrupt you mid-sentence to tell you why your idea will not work. They point out every flaw in your idea and are ruthless in crushing your dreams.

(2) “Yes, but” people

“Yes, but” people acknowledge some merits of your idea, but are quick to show you why you are not being completely practical or sensible. Almost always, they conclude that your idea will not succeed.

(3) “Hmm” people

“Hmm” people (together with “Yes, but” people) form a large proportion of the general population. They ask questions and do not explicitly criticize or belittle your idea, but their doubt simply cannot be concealed. “Hmm” people are actually just polite “But” or “Yes, but” people.

(4) “Yes, and” people

“Yes, and” people are an extremely rare breed. They are quick to encourage and show enthusiasm, and often imagine possibilities that you have not thought of. They are not purely “positive thinkers” or blind optimists; they discuss problems with your idea, but promptly suggest potential ways you can overcome these problems. In the words of Norman Vincent Peale, “Yes, and” people are possibilitarians.

Which type of person are you?

I can honestly say that I’ve been a “Yes, but” and “Hmm” person most of my life, but I’m making a conscientious effort to become an all-the-time “Yes, and” person.

“Yes, and” people are a joy to be around, and they help you to see life as the adventure it’s meant to be. Their affirmation challenges you to dream big and dare to fail.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place to be realistic and pragmatic, but I am saying that George W. Bush had it right when he declared that “opposing everything without proposing anything is irresponsible.” Not only is it irresponsible, it’s slightly annoying too, don’t you think?

It’s been said that (and I believe it’s completely true) you are the average of the five people you spend most of your time with. Do you surround yourself with “Yes, and” people? And more importantly, are you a “Yes, and” person? As James Allen wisely observed, we do not attract that which we want, but that which we are.

Together let’s work on becoming “Yes, and” people, shall we?

Singapore celebrated its 45th National Day three days ago. I love this picture of the National Day fireworks, courtesy of onextrapixel.

Being away from home for the past three years has made me appreciate Singapore and home much more. I’d go so far as to say that studying in the US has made me more patriotic!

Through being immersed in American society and culture, I’ve come to acknowledge some things which I feel Singapore ought to learn from the US.  I hope you understand– I’m not someone who thinks that the grass is greener everywhere outside of Singapore.

It’s wonderful to be able to walk around anywhere in Singapore at 3am and feel completely safe; it’s great to have a government that is upright and honorable; it’s very nice to have a clean and efficient public transportation system.

So don’t get me wrong, I am extremely grateful for Singapore and all it has to offer. But I’ve noticed that in America, people really believe in all that the US stands for– democracy, liberty, the freedom to pursue your dreams… that whole package. Their actions, at both the governmental and individual level, stem from these strong beliefs. Americans know what makes them uniquely American, and they’re proud of it.

In contrast, Singaporeans often do things because it’s pragmatic or wise or beneficial or “it’ll help me get ahead.” We rarely do things because we really believe in it. It’s not a set of values or beliefs that compels us to act in a certain way.

Singaporeans don’t really know what Singapore stands for, and we’re confused as to what our national identity is. Being “better” than other countries does not necessarily make you proud of your country. Singaporeans enjoy a higher standard of living than many other people in the world, but I wouldn’t say that we’re extremely proud to be called Singaporeans.

Shared values and identity are the stuff that patriotism is made of. That’s why Americans are proud to be Americans– it’s less about what you’ve accomplished as a nation, and more about who you are as a nation. Bono said it well: “America is more than just a country, it’s an idea.”

So as Singapore turns 45, it’s a good time to think about where we’re headed as a nation. Without shared values and identity, we’ll never really know who we are. I’ve always felt uneasy about the fact that many Singaporeans say that the best thing about Singapore is the food! I mean, the food here is definitely good, but a shared love for food is not going to pull Singapore through a national crisis.

There’s no simple solution to all of this. But if we continue to pursue pragmatism without a driving ideology behind what we do, Singaporeans will never be that proud to be Singaporeans.

I look forward to the day when Singaporeans are called the proudest people in the world– proud because of what we’ve achieved, but prouder still because of who we are and what we stand for.

“Singaporeans must believe that the building of Singapore is an exciting enterprise. For Singapore to survive in the longer term, we must have a core of Singaporeans who feel passionately that this place is worth fighting for. To succeed, we must be proud of who we are, of our country and our fellow citizens. We must feel that altogether, we have created something precious that belongs to all Singaporeans.” – Then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, 19 August 2001

As I was preparing the presentation slides, I thought about the opportunities I’ve been afforded by the Duke/US experience so far. I’ve gone skydiving, paragliding, hang gliding, horseback riding, skeet and trap shooting, bungee jumping, hot air ballooning, dune buggy riding; I’ve spent a week at a Benedictine monastery in the middle of the desert learning about what a monk’s life is like; I’ve done volunteer work in Belize and the Navajo Nation; I’ve had the privilege of teaching an ethics class to retirees and Duke undergraduates.

I never would have thought that I’d have the chance to do all those things!

Yet, in a strange sense, I feel like those “events” don’t count for much, even though I’m extremely grateful for them and I know that I am very blessed.

When I first enrolled at Duke, the president of Duke, Richard Brodhead, addressed all the incoming freshmen. He ended his speech by saying, “Depending on how engaged you choose to be, at the end of four years you will either leave with a Duke degree or a Duke education.”

A Duke degree or a Duke education.

I believe that it’s less important whether you study in Singapore, the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand, India, China, or any other country (or institution, for that matter)– and it’s much more important what you do with the opportunities that you are presented with. It’s less about what experiences you’ve had, and more about what you do with those experiences.

It’s all up to you whether you turn events into experience, and experience into insight.

After all, insight–and not events or experience– is the stuff that an education is made of.

I’m back in Singapore– it’s good to be home

As I mentioned in my previous post, working with the high school students has been very rewarding, but it hasn’t always been easy.

The experience of the past two months has been a lot of good with some not-so-good thrown in. One of my teammates summed it up simply (and well) when she said, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that doing good things is hard. It’s really hard.”

We came to the Navajo Nation with good intentions and a good (or so we thought) plan. But there’s an Irish saying that goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Good intentions and a good plan are necessary but not sufficient conditions to ensure success– especially when it comes to short-term service projects.

We’ve established meaningful friendships with our students and with others in the community, but we’ve also strained other relationships by our “privileged” and “proud” behavior. I think it’s unfortunate and unfair that some of our actions were perceived as such, but I also recognize that we judge others according to their actions, but we judge ourselves according to our intentions.

We took responsibility for our actions, and we extended a few apologies in our last week in the Navajo Nation. I really hope that any damage we’ve done is not irreparable!

One incident that happened two weeks ago encapsulates our DukeEngage experience pretty well.

It was a rainy day. We were driving on a dirt road in our 12-seater (and non-four-wheel drive) van. The road was extremely muddy and it was difficult to control the van.

All of a sudden, we spotted a motorcycle lying in the middle of the road and the rider next to it. The bike was a beautiful Harley Davidson that looked like this:

The rider was a tough-looking guy and was dressed kind of like this:

You kind of get the picture, right?

His bike was stuck in the mud, and it was obvious that he needed help to lift it.

Two of my teammates and I got out of the van to lend him a hand. We assumed lifting position.

“Okay, lift on three. One, two, three!”

“Whoops!” I exclaimed. I had grabbed part of the motorcycle’s seat cushion, and it had come off while I was lifting.

The rider let out a grunt of annoyance and shot me a disapproving look. I apologized, and gripped onto a different part of the bike.

We eventually got the bike upright, and the rider started the engine and rode off.

Interestingly, the rider didn’t thank us for our help– he seemed far more embarrassed that he needed assistance than grateful that we had provided him with some.

One of my teammates who had lent a hand later realized that he had suffered a pretty bad burn because his shin had rubbed against the hot exhaust pipe while we were lifting the bike.

All in all, not the best “helping” experience. But it does represent the not-so-good parts of the last two months quite accurately.

• Our intentions were pure and good, but I still accidentally removed the seat cushion and upset the rider.

–> Sometimes we carry out noble service projects, but we cause unintended harm to the communities we are trying to help. Most of the time, this is due to the fact that we don’t fully understand the “bike”– the culture of the people we’re serving.

• The rider was more embarrassed than thankful.

–> We all have some pride, and we’re not always happy to receive “assistance” or “service” (even assistance or service that we really do need).

• My teammate suffered a bad burn on his shin.

–> In short-term service projects, good actions and intentions are often misconstrued, and volunteers can be “burned” by unfair negative comments.

• We accomplished what we set out to do: we got the motorcycle out of the mud. But no one involved felt happy!

–> Just because you achieve your service goals, it doesn’t mean that all is well. Service, at the end of the day, is about people; we cannot turn people into just another statistic or measurable goal to quantify how successful our service project was.

I’ve learned a lot about service through this DukeEngage program– what service means, the importance of making service sustainable, the danger of attempting to serve a community that you don’t fully understand.

Doing good things is hard. It’s really hard.

But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying.

As part of the program, we’ve been doing standardized test preparation, teaching college life skills, going on college visits and working on college applications.

The response from our students, however, hasn’t been as positive as we’d initially expected. They occasionally fail to complete the assigned work, they sometimes lack motivation (it’s summer time and they’re enrolled in an exhilarating college-prep program, but still…), and they don’t always show up for class.

I’ve concluded that a big reason for this is that we are not role models for our students.

It’s not that we don’t try to be– it’s that we can’t. We don’t know what it’s like growing up on a Reservation, we don’t fully understand Navajo culture, we don’t know what high school is like for them, our family life is nothing like theirs. We’re simply too different from them for them to want to be like us.

And this college-prep program, in a sense, is about inspiring our students to be like us, to want to go to college and to overcome the apprehension of leaving home. It’s just that we’re probably not the right people to motivate such desires. It’d be a different story if our team consisted of Native American Duke students.

In thinking about the problems we’ve faced running the program, I came up with this Venn diagram (I know, I know… slightly geeky ) which illustrates what I believe is the relationship between role models, heroes and celebrities.

Because of the influence and pervasiveness of the mass media, there’s been a dramatic rise of the celebrity. It used to be that famous people were famous because they had done something courageous, selfless, inspirational or otherwise remarkable. These people were heroes.

But today’s celebrities have big names, but they are not necessarily big people.

On the other hand, a role model is someone you both look up to– a hero– and want to be like.

We are attracted to celebrities, we admire heroes, but we aspire to be like role models.

As John Maxwell says, change is inevitable but growth is optional. The last five weeks have taught me that we can’t be role models to everyone even if we try our very best, but day by day we can choose to grow so that we serve as role models to as many people as possible.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

After reading this post by my brother on excellence, I thought of a common problem faced by people who get serious about goal-setting: others think they are “weird” or “lame” or “ridiculous” or “overly ambitious” for putting their goals down in writing.

My older sister went to college in Australia, and she told me about a phenomenon called Tall Poppy Syndrome. Here’s its Wikipedia definition:

Tall poppy syndrome (TPS) is a pejorative term used in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand to describe a social phenomenon in which people of genuine merit are resented, attacked, cut down, or criticized because their talents or achievements elevate them above or distinguish them from their peers.

In other words, it’s a case of sour grapes which causes TPS sufferers to view the pursuit of greatness with disdain.

But if we allow others’ opinion of us to define us– and in so doing seek the applause of the world– we essentially place our happiness in the hands of others.

I like Daniel Amen’s 18/40/60 Rule:
“When you’re 18, you worry about what everybody is thinking of you; when you’re 40, you don’t care what anybody thinks of you; when you’re 60, you realize nobody’s been thinking about you at all.”

At the end of the day, goal-setting is not about being better than others, nor is it about achieving more amazing things than others.

It’s about cultivating a spirit of excellence; it’s about being better than who you were yesterday; it’s about being the best you can be. Goal-setting is about doing your best– which is far more important than being the best.

You’ll have to become a bigger person in order to achieve bigger goals, and who you become by achieving your goals is worth far more than what you could ever gain tangibly.

That’s not to belittle the quantifiable benefits of goal-setting. According to Dave Kohl, professor emeritus at Virginia Tech., 80% of Americans say they don’t have goals. 16% do have goals, but they don’t write them down. Less than 4% write down their goals, and fewer than 1% review them regularly.

That 1% earns 9 times as much over the course of their lives as those who do not write down their goals.

During the presentation, I focused more on the practical aspects of goal-setting: putting down your goals in writing, finding a support group of people who have goals similar to yours, reviewing and updating your goals regularly, determining emotionally compelling reasons for the goals that you set, etc.

But after reading this wonderful speech by William Deresiewicz today (you won’t regret taking 20 minutes to read it!), I’m reminded that the essence of goal-setting is the setting of goals, not the achieving of goals. Yes, there are many practical techniques which I’ve employed to fulfill goals in areas such as physical health, friends/relationships, personal growth and contribution to the community. The beauty of goal-setting, however, lies in knowing what things are worth doing– not in doing more things. Busyness is not synonymous with fruitfulness, and activity does not necessarily lead to impact and influence.

To borrow an analogy from Stephen Covey, goal-setting is less about finding the best ladder-climbing methods and more about ensuring that the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

If you’re not a goal-setter, will you commit to becoming one today? And ff you’re already one, may I encourage you to put the “being” before the “doing”– so that every goal you set and achieve will bring you closer to becoming that ideal person you want to be.

I’ll leave you with this excerpt from Deresiewicz’s speech:

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders.

I just read an essay by an English professor who has lived on the Reservation for the past 10 years, and I think it describes well how Navajos see everything– and not just every day– as sacred and spiritual.

…In Navajo, though, no single word exists for nature. That English term is barely approximated in the nearly untranslatable phrase, hanaagóó áhoot’éhígíí, which does not denote a place elsewhere that we can escape to when urban life grows oppressive. Instead it is an aggregate term which roughly means all that surrounds whatever is surrounded. My Crownpoint colleague Shirley Bowman, who teaches Navajo language and culture there, points out that the expression includes everything: hills, mountains, mesas, the four winds; plants, animals and people alike, insects, birds; the expanse of sky and all things evident therein night and day; and most especially all spirits visible or otherwise that animate whatever moves or dwells inside what is immovable, and of course those who interact with it all along with the full range of that interaction. It designates, as it were, one encumbering organism that contains all others, presiding over which are the moon, the individual stars, the constellations, and most especially the sun, which Navajos call   Jóhonaa’éí–The One Who Rules the Day.

…Likewise we humans cannot set ourselves apart from our surroundings or isolate our species from all others. We are all of a piece, we and nature—in that state Navajos call hózóón, which translates best by combining the trio of English words, “beauty,” “balance,” and “harmony”—-functioning interdependently as if one grand organism.  In coming to mind, that simile unites the systole and diastole of a single bloodstream with mighty solar revolutions and planetary orbits. Scientifically that may not be viable, I know; it is the spinning earth, of course, that revolves around the sun, and to condense all creation into a single body goes beyond literal credibility. But the image works, for with its similes and metaphors poetry has a way of conveying a deep truth that science alone cannot express.

- Paul G. Zolbrod, “The Rosy Fingers of a Navajo Dawn: Waking Up to a Reservation Sunrise”