#57 - My Book of the Year?!

Hans Chan -

What I’m Reading

One Man’s View of the World is such an eye-opening read that I have to put this as a very strong contender for my book of the year. It’s written by Lee Kuan Yew, who arguably, is the greatest leader of modern history. He was the prime minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990, and he’s widely credited for building the thriving and prosperous Singapore we know today, from a small island that was quite literally a swamp.

He talks about the geopolitics, challenges and viewpoint of countries spanning across the continents. He writes with a lot of clarity and directness which is rare when it comes to this topic. You can also glean some of his philosophies in the interview format at the end of each chapter.

It’s no longer in print so you can either buy it on Amazon Kindle, or download the pdf in the link above.

Highly recommended!

Resource of the week

The sun is finally returning, so here’s your reminder not to forget sunscreen! Personally, I’ve always preferred buying sunscreen from Korea as I find a lot of brands here sting my eyes or rub off easily. So I recommend using Yesstyle, which I have been using for probably 10 years now. You get a small % off everything with my link.

Quote

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”

Gilda Radner

  • TikTok often gets labelled as a children’s app, which isn’t true anymore, with over 35s being the fastest growing demographic and over half of all users over 30. Whereas Snapchat still has a predominantly younger audience. They’ve recently announced large changes to their monetisation structure, resulting in some creators earning up to $30,000 in a few days. The current competition between social platforms is fierce to attract creators, which I feel is a good thing after years and years of dominance from Google and Meta. If you’ve ever thought about creating content, there hasn’t been a better time than now in a very long time!
  • The Zoopla house price report is showing house price growth average for the UK is at 4.1% and the current demand is higher than it was in 2019.
  • Block managers for flats come under fire over ‘large commissions’ paid to them by insurance firms. I’ve always felt that leaseholders have frighteningly little rights when it comes to service charge costs. Block managers basically have control over contractors and service providers which I felt is almost a conflict of interest as they just pass the bill on.

Thoughts

I’ve finally finished filming the videos for my handwriting class, so now it’s a case of editing. It’s been fun, but if someone were to ask me if they should make an online class, I would say to think very carefully about why and what they’re looking to get out of it. These classes always take me weeks and weeks of prep, filming and editing, and unlike TikTok, I don’t get any feedback along the way so there is a real chance it could tank (like a lot of my videos do, which I think are high quality). If this happens, it would have been a lot of work down the drain.

Personally, I don’t mind too much as I treat it as a passion project. Teaching something is probably the best way to learn something so it forces me to go back to basics and up my game. Also, it gives me a chance to practise as a content creator and educator which I take a long-term mindset to.

It can be a little tough but I try my best to let go of the outcome and follow my intuition in terms of what projects to work on. That’s something I’ve tried really hard to get into the mindset of these last few years. To feel comfortable that nothing is certain, to work on things that are meaningful to me rather than getting told to work on something I hate in return for ‘certainty’.

I feel like that’s probably one of the biggest challenges of being a creator, there’s no clearly defined roadmap, almost like excavating an archaeological site! But that’s the fun of it, it would be boring if we were just going through the motions!

Hans