Category: The Real Leaders Project

The Real Leaders Project 2014 edition is here. We have an exciting new year planned for you. We kick-start the year with an interview with Elim Chew, founder of Singapore Street Wear Brand 77th Street.

Aside from being one of Singapore’s respected entrepreneurs, Ms Chew was recently honored as a Forbes Asia Hero of Philanthropy. She sits on over 20 boards and committees of public service, youth and community organizations and has been inspiring students, educators, and budding entrepreneurs for many years now. Thanks, Ms Chew, for finding time for us!

 

 

As always, my favorite snippets –

“In the early days, it was a lot of human interaction that led to word-of mouth. In those days, we were the only street fashion wear. It was about being who you are and what you love – if you want to be quirky, then you be quirky – that attracts attention. We became friends with every customer, we know their names and their stories.”

“Kids as young as 9, 10 and 13 are building apps and starting companies. Today, it is about how early you start. There is a lot of knowledge out there that you can learn from.  I feel everyone should start as young as they can. If you want to be a chef, start cooking at home for your family and scout the internet for more. While reading is one thing, self-improvement and implementation is another.”

(On motivating young employees) – “I believe that this is a generation that is driven by purpose. You need to show them the purpose. Why are they in retail? Why are they social entrepreneurs. Why are they professionals. In this environment you see the people doing their part of retail. We show them the importance of their initiatives, the vision of helping the poor, the vision of taking an idea to implementation and becoming successful. And usually, its not about the money (Money is great) but the process is so much more motivating.”

“The reason for my success is the number of hours I put in ever since I got into the workforce – I worked everyday. And over the years I have gathered the experience and practice in everything that I do today. However there is a little bit of talent that helps with the starting phase. And that little extra effort you put in affects the olympic record you can break, no matter what your level of talent is.”

The full transcript, as always, is on RealLeaders.tv. Thank you, once again, to Ms.Elim for taking the time!

Alex Wolf is a friend I met on Fred Wilson’s wonderful blog community, AVC.com. Alex has been plotting to change the way children’s games are designed for the past couple of years and she’s been keeping us all engaged in her journey.

In this interview, Alex talks about her latest game “Ani-gram It” and her journey from designer to game inventor.

Enjoy!

 

 

My favorite bits –

“Ani-gram-it is a board game that’s a crossword style game.  I’m not allowed to use any big brand names, but it’s like that game that you play with a crossword.  Instead of using letters to build a word, you use body parts to build an animal.”

“One of my favorites is Sugata Mitra on TED talking about SOLE (Self Organized Learning Environments).  It’s not organized learning environments.  To me the game is really a soul in itself.  It’s a group-learning situation, but it’s not just group learning.   It’s play.”

“Knowledge is a bunch of stuff.  What you do with it is what happens after.  I think we spend so much time in education stuffing the stuff in that that’s the primary activity.  If we can make the acquisition of knowledge easy and elegantly structured in your mind, then you can start the real work.  That’s when you start having the fun.”

“I think that you have to choose as few things as you can get by with and make them really smart.”

“Another productivity hack is just not having a lot of stuff.  My productivity hack is that you don’t need a spatula and a cheese slicer.  You just need a cheese slicer that you can use as a spatula.  We don’t need as many things as we think we need.”

“Play has been where we are at heart.  The more I become involved in the thinking of game and toy design, new forms of learning, how we’re engaging children at school, how we’re engaging them at home, how they connect with their peers, and how we connect with them , the more I realize that play is really core.  Animals that play successfully are the ones who survive better.”

The full transcript, as always, on RealLeaders.tv

I was inspired to read “Improv Wisdom” thanks to Dan Pink‘s excellent book – “To Sell is Human.” I knew there was going to be more to the book than just the principles of Improv Acting. The book showed me that improv acting isn’t an art form but a way of life. We are improvising every day of our lives and that our improv skills play a big role in our happiness. I reached to Patricia immediately, of course, and was glad to meet someone who clearly lives the principles she’s written about.

I had a spring in my step after listening to Patricia and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did!

 

 

My favorite snippets as always –

“My students were not very good at that (acting without a script) at all, so I had to find some way to help my acting students be alive, be human, be able to be spontaneous.”

“I started back in 1989 working on the book.  It took almost 20 years which is odd considering it’s a book on improv.  I should have been able to just dash it off.  But the reality is that improvising is a way of doing something, but sometimes improvisation can take a long time depending on what it is.”

“Everybody is scared of looking silly or looking like they don’t quite know. The truth is that we don’t mind if someone doesn’t have the perfect answer if they’re natural and honest. Much more important than getting it right is being real.”

“When we improvise, instead of trying to accomplish any particular outcome, we’re trying to make sense out of just the next moment.I think that giving up control in favor of sharing and in favor of seeing where we go rather than directing an outcome a particular way is one of the big lessons.”

“He (Robert Pointon) says that improv can be boiled down to three things:  let go, notice more, and use everything.”

“I think an improviser is someone who is always cultivating that muscle of noticing, saying thank you, and being grateful for the many things that we have all of the time.”

“I make my bed every morning.  First thing when I get out of it, I make the bed and I put the pillows up and put the little quilt on the bottom.  There’s something about seeing the room nicely folded that makes my day.”

“An idea that inspires me is to notice and wake up to the gifts.  I think so often we’re stuck in our own shell, our own ego, our own desires, and the things that bother us or worry us.  The most important thing I’d like to tell people is to notice how much you are receiving from other people.  Your life is sustained by people who make energy, the food we eat, and the transportation we use.  If you can fill up with understanding how much of life is already a gift, that’s one of the great things that I’d like to share and pass along.”

Full transcript, as always, on Realleaders.tv. Thanks so much for taking the time, Patricia!

We’ve all been touched by Dan Pink’s work in some way. His insights into the changing world of work have either been mentioned in a talk we’ve listened to, a book we’ve read, or been implemented in places where we work. Dan’s interview has been a long time coming and it was great to meet him in person. As in the video, Dan is super sharp and concise. The video is packed with many interesting insights from his books and otherwise. Enjoy!

 

 

 

My favorite sections here –

“In job interviews, the interviewer is basically trying to decide if this person is going to make their life easier or harder.  If you can be the kind of person that others think will make their life easier, that’s advantageous.  I think that can actually trump a lack of experience.”

“Not only did I spend time with some of those great salespeople, but I asked them that very question.  There is a view out there that some people are naturals, that a certain person can sell anything.  It’s really amazing to me.  I asked this particular question to them: “Are some people just born salespeople?”

Almost uniformly, their view was no, especially now.  The reason for that was that whether they’re business buyers or consumer buyers, what matters more on the seller part is expertise.  That’s something I heard over and over again, particularly in B to B.  You have to have expertise.  What they were saying is that you’re not born an expert in computer systems.  You’re not born an expert in luxury sedans.  You acquire that.  You build that and you actually have to have some interest in it in order to do it.

The very best salespeople out there say, “No, I don’t think that there are some people who are naturals.  I think it’s something that people learn how to do.”

The other thing that fits into that is some of the research that I read about from Adam Grant at Penn about introversion and extroversion.  We have this stereotype that the naturals are super extroverted people.  What Grant’s and others’ research have found is that that’s not it.  People who do the best are in the middle, the ambiverts.  Most of us are ambiverts.  Most of us are naturals because it’s what human beings do.”

“Typically the way that I do things for a book is that I’ll write a proposal.  I end up writing pretty long proposals partly because it’s a test for me about whether there’s a there there and whether I’m interested enough to do it. I also think strategically about whether there’s a market for this book, too.  For example, let’s say I was keenly interested in collecting stamps from Estonia and I wanted to write a book about Estonian stamps.  That might be really interesting to me but there’s no market for that, so it becomes a hobby rather than something I really do.  There is a strategic layer on it as well.”

“When I’m writing I’ll start in the morning and commit to a certain amount of words and I won’t do anything else until I hit that amount of words.”

Full transcript, as always, is on RealLeaders.tv

I was introduced to Mark Suster’s blog by a friend and fellow technology enthusiast and took to it immediately. I loved Mark’s long and detailed posts – they all had a lot of “soul” in them and it felt Mark did really put his heart into them. I’ve been commenting on Mark’s blog for a couple of years now and we’ve had a few exchanges during the time. But, e-meeting Mark for the first time was a wonderful experience – one that I will remember for a long time. He was completely present, very gracious, and eager to share his experiences and learning. At the end of the conversation, I walked out feeling like I knew him for years..

I learnt a lot from my conversation with Mark and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My favorite snippets –

“If you are an Indian kid sitting in Singapore, people are going to define you whether you like it or not.  They’re going to define you by your age bracket, education, ethnicity, geography.  Given that people are going to define you anyways, wouldn’t you rather take control of that?”

“The advice I was given when I was young was to always dress like the part one level above where you are, where you want to be.  That’s part of people perceiving you as the next level up when you act and behave like that.”

“A new school of thought came out that said not to fix your weaknesses, but play to your strengths.  I’m a much bigger believer in that.”

“What I do is, because life is about working with other people, I always surround myself with people who are good at the things that I’m not.  Because I’m terrible at process, you will not find me doing anything with anybody where I don’t have a good process person with me, including my wife.  She’s the process person in the Suster household.”

“You should form peer groups and get peer mentorship.  I did that when I was a first-time entrepreneur.  I would simply have luncheons and I would invite other CEO’s and it would be private off-the-record.  I always started by opening up first.”

“With regards to finding more senior mentors, most people actually want to help people.  They want to give back.  They want to find ways to be meaningful and useful.  The problem is that there are too many people approaching you, so how do you decide?  Then there are just the people who are extra-friendly and extra-persistent.  They seem like they’re good people and they give back.  You end up just finding a way to be their mentor.”

“Unfortunately, most parts of our economy are very backwards and very conservative so they still need to judge you based on credentials rather than judge you based on capabilities.  The more we can break down that model and judge people based on capabilities, the further away we’re going to get from breeding indentured servants who graduate with debt and end up in dead-end careers and jobs.”

The full interview, as always, is on RealLeaders.tv.

I read Andrew Hallam’s book following my interview with financial theorist and author Bill Bernstein. Bill recommended Andrew’s book “The Millionaire Teacher” and I can’t thank him enough for it. I liked it so much that I’ve gifted about 10 copies to friends and family over the past couple of months.

Interviewing Andrew was a real blast – he is SO full of energy! There are plenty of great personal finance and life ideas in there and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

About Andrew

Andrew Hallam the author of the best-selling personal finance book, Millionaire Teacher—The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School. Andrew teaches Personal Finance at Singapore American School and I also writes a few regular columns for the Canadian Business magazine, weekly for The Globe and Mail , and at least twice a month for Assetbuilder , a U.S. based financial service company. Periodically, he also write for MoneySense magazine, where two of his articles were nominated as national publishing award finalists.

If you didn’t grow up in a wealthy household, Andrew and you probably have plenty in common. His dad was a mechanic, and his mom worked part-time at a retail store, earning slightly more than the minimum wage. As one of four children, his parents expected him to pay for my own college education. He developed an early respect for money because he never had any while growing up. And when he was 19, I met a mechanic who happened to be a millionaire. He learned that it wasn’t always necessary to have a high paying job in order to build wealth. He wanted to become a school teacher and figured that if a mechanic could grow wealthy on a middle class salary, then he could too.

So before his 20th birthday, he started to invest and along the way, he learned some vital financial lessons. And as he started to succeed financially, he grew more baffled at the absence of sound financial lessons in schools. His blog provides links to his published writing and more free-to-access content.

My favorite snippets –

“Even something as simple as choosing to go to Starbucks three times a week versus once every second week can make a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a lifetime.  What about other little decisions that get made?  For example, taking the five star holiday versus the three star holiday, flying business class versus flying economy class, or taking taxis everyday versus taking the MRT are huge differences.  For me the trick is getting the kids to come to these conclusions on their own.”

“Invest regular sums into the market  and ideally, for someone your age, you should actually be really happy if the market drops after you start purchasing.”

“One of my biggest mistakes in teaching people about money was learning that not everybody can manage their own money. Then I recognized that a lot of really smart friends of mine with IQ’s way above mine just aren’t emotionally wired to invest. If you can’t do that, then you can hire somebody to invest dispassionately for you with low cost indexes or ETF’s.  That’s the secret.  Don’t pay them more than 1% per year to do that job.”

“To me, it’s really inspiring knowing that every day I live is one day closer to my ultimate demise. If people don’t recognize that, I don’t think they truly live. You have to recognize that every single day is special.”

Full transcript, as always, on RealLeaders.tv.

As some of you may know, I just got married this July. A few months prior to marriage, I decided to read a couple of the best marital relationship books available. Dr Harley’s book “His Needs Her Needs” was very highly recommended on the internet and it ended up on my Kindle reading list very soon.

As soon as I began reading his book, I realized this is a book that I must read together with my wife. So, we waited till our honeymoon to read the book together and it turned out to be a wonderful way to really understand each other and what we valued – we knew each other pretty well after 7 years together but this book helped us a lot by giving us a framework with which to think about how we could enjoy the rest of our lives in each other’s company.

Of course, I reached out to Dr Harley post our honeymoon and enjoyed the chat. Hope you enjoy it as much I did!

My favorite quotes –

“I wrote a lot.  That’s a good lesson for people who want to become writers.  The point is that I didn’t start out with a great deal of talent, but I wrote a lot.  Every day I wrote something, and I wrote articles, I wrote ideas that I had.”

“In the first world countries we have now made women equal to men.  This is unprecedented in human history. Women were not considered to be smart enough to do any of those things, and in marriage men owned their wives to some extent.  He owned her, and she had to obey him.  Instead of telling their wives what to do and having them obey, they have to come to an agreement. “

“If you can get a man and a woman to find an enthusiastic agreement, you come up with a wiser choice than what either one of them could have come up with.”

“At Marriage Builders, we want them learning, that’s it.  It’s kind of like what you’re doing.  You want people to learn.  That’s what we’re offering.  Here is a learning experience in how to have a great marriage.  Use your own judgment to see whether you think it’s worthwhile and it didn’t cost you anything to find out.”

“Our emotional response to someone meeting our emotional needs is so powerful that we’re willing to destroy everything we’ve ever built to have that person in our lives.  It makes no sense logically and it has destroyed a lot of people, but people are doing it every day.”

“Those are the two things that bring us happiness in life – our marriage and our faith. “

“I think that the most valuable lesson we can learn in life is thoughtfulness by considering other people before we do things and trying to make sure that we are a messenger of help and support for people who need it.  Life is all about caring for each other.”

Full transcript as always on RealLeaders.tv

Arduino and Massimo Banzi are at the forefront of the revolution around customizable open source electronics. EB had a great time interviewing Massimo.

EB: I got introduced to Arduino through a colleague of mine a few months back. I managed to get my hands on the board 3 weeks back and I have been loving it. It was easy for me to start with it even without any knowledge in electronics. The Arduino is an open source project, and after reading a bit about open source hardware, I wanted to talk to the person behind the Arduino. Massimo’s views on open source and programming really resonated with me. I hope you enjoy the interview just like I did.

If you are looking to learn Arduino, visit www.arduino.cc. If you are looking to build some Arduino project together, feel free to reach out to me.

 

My favorite snippets –

“Everything we touch contains electronics.  Even the food processor you buy at the supermarket contains a piece of electronic that drives it.  We want people to be able to use this complex technology, and we want common people to access this technology, even kids.  If you can use this kind of technology, then you can really re-design the world around you. I think the big idea is to make the technology simple so that more and more people can participate in the creation of today’s world.”

”I also think another big idea behind Arduino is that it’s open source, so the design of the board and the software are all freely available.  Some people who can modify can build up on our work; they can create businesses that feed from Arduino.  I think that’s also important as a way to spread the idea more than just the technology itself.”

“If we lose that open source nature, we become a regular company which loses that spirit of cooperation, freedom, and helping each other – all that we like.”

“Now were having a chat in English, but English is not my first language.  Now I think programming is becoming the language that you need to be part of the 21st century.”

“I travel, I go see different places, I meet people, and during that time I get to hang out with people who use Arduino to do interesting things.”

“It’s important that we teach kids that technology is not only something that you buy,  plug in and play with, but that it’s something that you can build and modify.”

Full interview, as always, on RealLeaders.tv

Dan is one of the most popular behavioral economists in the world today. His books and research have had huge impact on our understanding of how our minds work. I finally managed to find a slot in Dan’s schedule after a year of trying and was greatly looking forward.

EB and I caught Dan in a very thoughtful and reflective mood. He had just finished speaking to a recent burn survivor and discusses his reflections during the interview. I am very thankful to Dan for all his great work – I’ve learnt a lot from him and it was a privilege to meet him on Skype.

I hope you enjoy the interview as much as we did.

As always, my favorite bits –

“There are a lot of things we do in terms of designing the world around us that if we understood human nature we would do very differently. I think it’s an amazing time for social science to try and help us redesign the world in a better way.”

On government intervention to ‘save us from ourselves’ – “To me, there are two principles that we need to think about. The first one is, is this intervention driven by data or not? And the second thing is to figure out how to weigh human freedom compared to human benefits.”

“I look at the whole world, and then I say, “Is this a place that is the outcome of 7 billion rational people? If everybody was perfectly rational this would have been the best world imaginable. If this world is not the outcome of 7 billion rational people, maybe we can do better. My hope is that as we’re learning more we will improve things.”

“When I get tired of one task, I move to another one. when I get tired of one task, I move to another one.”

“It just amazed me that you can put something out there in the world and people read it and think about it and take it seriously and maybe make a better decision or two. It’s such a tremendous feedback and motivation.”

Full transcript on RealLeaders.tv. Enjoy!