The Final Boss Fight

 

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 been made to ensure I maximise my chances with success. Since high school, I’ve craved for positions of power because I wanted to practice leadership, politics and competition. I maintained a generalist approach to the subjects I took to maximise my exposure. When I was choosing my degrees, I chose subjects I thought would one day be useful in my family business. When choosing a career, I remember telling the recruiters I wanted something that exposed me to as many companies as possible. When choosing what areas to specialise in my career, I refused and stayed as a generalist as long as I could - until I found Agile and organisational design. With that, I moved to CBRE to fill in the final piece of my exposure, how to run a business. I went out of my way to wrestle control of my division's P&L in Malaysia, managed project delivery, business development and hiring.

I always imagined myself to be a character in a game. In this case, fully equipping myself and fully trained with all the necessary skills for the final boss fight. I am here now. Will I succeed?