The Lucky Cookies – My imaginary encouragement

When I was in Oxford, I used to visit this restaurant called Noodle Bar (Now renamed to Noodle Nation). My friend in the lab introduced me and we always have our lunch or dinner together.

One of the things that is very special is that everytime you have finished eating, they will give you lucky cookies, with each one per person. Inside these cookies, there will be a lucky note for you. (I remembered I ate the cookies + the notes the first time without realizing it until my lab partner told me! :p)

These are among the notes that I have kept with me. Some I have already thrown it away or misplaced it somewhere already.

Lucky notes in Lucky cookies in Noodle Bar. 🙂

Among the notes that I still keep are:

1. You’ll earn a lot of money in the future

2. Fortune Cookies will give you good health

3. A favour to a friend will be repaid in the future

4. Be direct, usually one can accomplish more that way

5. Fate has dealt you an unkind blog, but there is a bright and happy future ahead. Thought for today: Better be alone than in bad company

6. Your life will be happy and peaceful

7. Don’t worry; prosperity will knock on your door soon

8. Your companions will bring you luck 🙂 hehe

9. When you combine reflection with action, you will get good results

10. It’s not what we do but how we do it that matters (*And I personally think why we do it is even more important)

11. Adjust finances, make budgets, to improve your standing

That’s all notes I kept. Hope you guys learnt something out of it. 🙂

An afternoon with MDeC – Being sustainable, scalable and ambitious

I made a quick trip to Urban Village at Bangsar just to meet Datuk Badlisham of MDeC. There are about 20 other youths joining me during that session. Among the few key takeaways for the meeting with MDeC.

1. Sustainability and Scalability. To be honest, I have been hearing both of these qualities as a successfull determinant to any business model so many times during this 2-month-holiday vacation. :P. From Celcom Axiata, CitiBank, and now from MDeC. Google MSC (Multimedia Super Corridor) if you are not familiar with the term MDeC.

2. Size of the opportunity. Here, Datuk is talking about how big the opportunity can go and how ambitious we are in setting up our business plan. One of the project that I’m really interested is the project of bringing Silicon Valley to Malaysia. I knew that MSC is once considered as Silicon Valley of Malaysia once upon a time (*wink*), and that many big names like Bill Gates from Microsoft, HP and so on have invested in this opportunity land. It’s  still remained as a question mark whether it’s considered a successful plan now or not now. I hope if anyone of you know more about this, do comment below! 😀

3. We have to think big, in term of the market opportunity.

4. Given more input to GTP Social media and economy from youth side.

A very simple post I know! See you guys again for my next post! Hopefully I have the time to elaborate more! 😀

The perspective game – Dinner with YCM founder

I promised to write a post especially for this amazing guy, Wan Mohd Firdaus. If you are not sure who he is, google MSLS (Malaysian Student Leadership Summit), YCM (Young Corporate Malaysians), and IDEAS. He is the co-founder of all these organizations. Google JP Morgan too! :p Haha. I have decided to write the points he raised during our meeting at KL Central Hilton in point form as I don’t really want to elaborate all of them.

1. The 80/20 principle
2. If you want to help others, help yourself first.
3. Successful companies are those who have experience. He asked me what I wanted to do after graduation and whether I was limited to just engineering companies. I said no, and I said I wanted to eventually venture into the business field and have my own business. He straight away said, “Join consulting. You know, McKinsey and BCG.”
4. If you want to be a billionaire, work with billionares, and become one of them. He has personally met 9 billionaires in his life and has worked with all 9 of them. Brilliant!
5. Whatever you do, give it your full concentration. (This coincides with a video that I have recently watched on YouTube. It’s a Chinese show called ‘Dialogue,’ which interviewed Malaysia’s richest man, Robert Kuok. His advice to business owners, give full concentration to whatever you are doing.)
6. Time and money
7. It’s all about perspective. He told me that someone bought a watch that cost RM945,000. Yeah, it’s RM55,000 to a million. Just for a watch! Afterall, it’s all about perspective.

September – The happening month

I went to Mahathir and Marina’s Open house at the Mines last week on 4 September. Many people attended too, and I really love seeing people from all walks of life and all ethnicity groups come under one roof to eat and have a chit-chat session.

One thing that I really don’t like is the Malaysian mindset, still. For those who attended, you will easily observe that rubbish is everywhere. We like to take things for granted. We were given free food, and the used plates were dumped everywhere on the floor. Something is not right here again. Now that Malaysians don’t even respect our former Prime Minister’s home, will they respect any random roads all around Malaysia?

We then had dinner together at the Little Korea BBQ at Sunway Mentari. The food portion was huge, and I was satisfied, giving the fact that I seldom eat Korean food. Chris and I went to meet Firdaus the following Tuesday at KL Central Hilton. He gave a very good ‘lecture’ to Chris (LOL! I’m just kidding) and some advice to me. I wrote a post about that meeting Here.

Later on Friday, I went to the OUMC (Oxford University Malaysian Council) at the Ritz-Carlton. It was great having Dato Omar (another Oxford Graduate who started up Ethos Consulting in Malaysia) be the speaker there. I posted one line of his speech to my twitter feed – “I hope that you start with fear, but continue with hope for your journey” #datoomar. Later that day, Helmi, Theen Yew, and Irfan sent me back to Sunway (they are actually staying in Cheras). Thanks for that, bro!

I went to Animangaki that weekend and saw a lot of cosplay, including Yu-Gi from Yu-Gi-Oh, Kamen Raider, and Pikachu. (I hadn’t followed anime for a while so I don’t really know the other characters’ names).

Trip to CitiBank – Key takeaways

I made a few trips to CitiBank during my holiday and attended an Otak2 session, a discussion with Michelle, and a CitiBank-ICMS Industry roundtable with top management. I met Sanjeev Nanavati, the CEO of CitiBank, twice in less than a month, and he was always among the first to leave the room. But that’s the banking industry!

There were some points brought up, especially for the interns from Otak2. According to the person-in-charge, the interns are too one-sided. They are like men with an elephant. Everyone is holding just a part of the elephant. Their knowledge on certain departments is based just on what they are ‘holding’ instead of a more general view of the whole banking system.

A very good point that I would like to share with all the readers is that young people actually know and can articulate the real problem. The problem with young people is that they just stop there. They shouldn’t be just observing and not making real changes to society but should think of real solutions to the problem. I later joined a roundtable discussion with the top management. I shall write about this in another post.

End of Summer Review – Incredible August in Malaysia.

August has been pretty incredible. I have met with people like Hannah Tan, Ganesh Kumar (Group CEO of Friendster), David Lai, IDEAS, Otak2 people, MISC people,  Michelle Iking of CitiBank, JJ & Ean of Hitz.fm @ Astro AMP, Adibah Noor, Jeremy Teo, Prem (Malaysiakini CEO), and Jahabar (Malaysian Insider CEO).

Along with this is the passing of the century mark of SEC, one of the EYE Projects headed by Chris and Reza. Not to forget Nash, for sure! You can find the original message from the co-founder here in Facebook Notes. I’m now submerging myself in Investment Questions given by Chris, and three books bought from the KLCC book fest (Unfair Advantage, Common Wealth, and the Consulting Bible). I will write the reviews of these four books pretty soon (in addition to what I have done and experienced in my life)!