That was 3 Hours Well Spent

So last night was the much anticipated dialogue session with Mr Ong Peng Tsin.

Perhaps the most important thing that i took away was that one has to have clarity in purpose. He stressed this several times over the course of the evening. Having a mere purpose in your life is not enough. You’ve got to have clarity in it. That’s what’s going to carry you through the tough times, and guide you through the barrage of choices that you have to make. And once you’ve found your purpose, all else is secondary. Very similar to what Steve Jobs mentioned in the Stanford Commencement speech.

For Mr Ong, he told us that his purpose was to make a difference. For him, it was enough. It was wide enough to enable him to do many different things. He also said that if he was on his deathbed, he would have no major regrets. Perhaps small gripes would be stuff like ‘i should have visited Mt Everest’, but nothing major in the direction that he has taken in his life.

Prof Ben brought up a good point about what Mr Ong was doing. He could have bought a house in a place nicer than Singapore and spent the rest of his life fishing. But no, he was back here in Singapore, putting his efforts into the causes that he believed in. That was his purpose. To make a difference.

Laurence then asked him about his definition of success. A short but piercingly insightful answer ensued: “Everyone has his own definition of success. Mine is different from yours. How’s that for an answer?” I think his point was this: there are many ways to succeed, and success means different things to different people.

Another brief point mentioned is that people who are world class in what they do seldom have a balanced life. They are entirely focused on achieving that kind of peak performance that all else falls aside. He mentioned a few examples, including the best golfer in the world. That was real funny, but I think the point was not lost on us.

Then, there were many more technical questions regarding entrepreneurship and running a business. Typical questions like the funding process and mentorship. Regarding mentorship, Mr Ong said that the best model was the investor-investee model. When the mentor had a stake in the mentee’s business, this would yield the best results, because the mentor would be to an extent, responsible for that venture’s success. He disagreed with ACE’s (action community for entrepreneurship) model of mentorship, whereby a random mentor was to be paired up with a random startup. At the end of the day, the mentor will complain that this programme is taking up too much time, and that the start-up will complain that there was not much value to this programme. The sad fact is that there just aren’t enough of quality mentors in Singapore.

Another thing Mr Ong seemed to believe in: go to work for an early stage startup after you graduate. If i understood him correctly, he seemed to encourage this over starting your own business straight out of college.

I had a few questions for Mr Ong as well, like “after you sold each company, what did you tell yourself you would do differently the next time?” He said it had to do with people, and that he would try to pick even better and smarter people. Perhaps this should be a lesson to us on the importance of having the right people on board, and perhaps in the right seats too. He then went on to explain about what ‘smart people’ meant.

I then asked him about about his typical hiring process. For him, prospectives are filtered out based on GPA alone, as there is simply no time to interview like, what, 150 applicants? After that, they would be tested their technical knowledge by at least a few managers. However, the final decision rests on whether the managers feel that if they could work well with that interviewee. If the answer was no, they would still reject that guy even if he had his first class honours.

Mr Ong mentioned about company culture a few times. I was particularly interested in this topic as I had spent the holidays reading up on companies that had great company culture, and how they achieved it. However, he did not give much insight regarding this.

Basically, I think the point is this. We have all heard enough about what it takes to succeed, and to live a meaningful life. How many of us will actually execute on it?