Ning-Jia.com

  Growing up, my parents drilled into me what it takes to be successful - hard work, hard work, hard work. My father always said, “without discipline, you can’t achieve anything in life.” (He was a disciplinary teacher back in his teaching days). As I built my career around being a consultant, I noticed that there was more to success than hard work. My dad previously worked in very reputable organisations like Toyota, BMW and UMW. He learned a great deal about the Toyota way, fortified with great people-managing skills developed when he designed a training program for all Toyota workshop managers in Malaysia. It wasn’t just his hard-working character that got him to where he was, it was also his management skills. After learning about that, I started asking around among my consultant seniors, and realised that they all had some management training on top of their basic hard-working values. One of my mentors - who was the ex-general manager of my family business - placed heavy empha...

  I wasn’t always like this. I remember a time where I was carefree, I did not quite have ambition and just took life as easy as possible. The tipping point was when I met my best friend in high school, AL. He was a smooth talker, he was really smart, and most of all, he had ambition. We were actively participating in as many student societies as possible to boost up our co-curricular activity scores. In addition to that, he influenced me to run for positions in ALL of them. We had key positions or played key roles in the prefectorial board, LEO club, boy scouts, etc. and those experiences built the foundation for who I am today. From the age of 15-17, I learned about in-group out-group dynamics. I had my successes and failures of building a name for myself as the cool kid. I learned about the politics of wrestling for influence and popularity. I learned about challenging authority. And most of all, I learned to hunger for power.  That might sound dark but these experiences se...

  A new chapter, a new career. One that I have been looking forward to all my life. I have always been a planner. I planned for this to happen. This is not a story where there’s full of surprises, plot twists and untamed lands. My stories - at least after a certain point of my life - have been as planned. That might sound boring to you, but it explains a recurring theme of one of my dreams (earliest record of this in my dream log was 2018-07-02). Where I am a time traveller - but I can only travel back in time and do not retain my memory. In these dreams, my trustee Casio watch has a secret function, I just have to press the top left button three times and hold, and a menu will appear asking when I’d like to jump back in time to. Basically like a computer save game. I digress. In this new chapter, I am on my way to becoming the managing director of a second generation family business. My entire life’s decisions (or at least the ones that I was sober and sane enough to make) have be...