As part of the CMO program I’m currently on, we had a guest speaker come in to talk to us about personal branding. It’s the kind of bonus session you’re meant to be grateful for, designed to help you “craft your narrative,” “show up with impact,” and build a version of yourself that resonates more strategically with the world.

In performance marketing, we’re trained to hunt for signals. The click that suggests interest. The purchase that implies intent. The metric that hints at momentum. But the more you optimize, the more everything starts to look like a signal. You lose the stillness needed to question what the signal actually means.

They don’t tell you this when you begin… that writing a book will break your heart.

Not just once. It happens repeatedly. Brutally.

The act itself is a sheer, slow violence of extracting something real and alive from inside you and turning it into a product.

Writing is romantic until it isn’t.

I woke up this morning with an earworm stuck in my head. My old alma mater, sung at every assembly in both Malay and English, wrapped around the school motto: Simple in virtue, steadfast in duty.

There was a time when layoffs were treated as a last resort. A painful but necessary decision, made reluctantly, an outcome of deep structural change, economic downturn, or strategic pivot.

Now, they’re starting to look more like a performance lever. A line in the earnings call to assure shareholders that action has been taken. A signal that leadership is ‘serious’. A data point in the story companies tell to the market.

I wasn’t expecting anything unusual that morning. I simply followed my usual ritual -- stepping out to give my Roomba space and, as always, heading to Temple Court for coffee and to finish some work. One of those automatic gestures that quietly mark the rhythm of ordinary days.

There, I spotted Professor Brian Cox having breakfast a few tables away. It felt surreal. Not in the celebrity sense, but in the strange realisation that you’re seeing someone whose voice has narrated the origins of time, black holes, entropy, and cosmic dust suddenly appear, out of context.

I often wonder about my role in where we’re at as a society. Not in the grandiose sense of shaping world history, but in the smaller, quieter ways that add up. The nudges, the pushes, the choices we make that quietly steer things over time. That’s been my work, after all, marketing. Understanding people, finding the right cues, shaping behaviour in ways that feel invisible -- yet end up everywhere.

This year, I found myself living with a bit more urgency than I’m used to. Maybe it’s because I’ve started realising that we all just live on borrowed time. That tomorrow is never promised. It sounds cliche, but it’s true. 

I recently had a conversation with someone who reminded me of Obama’s speech about the “long arc of history”, about how when you’re a dot in that infinite arc, it’s hard to know of your importance and relevance and place in the timeline. 

After a night at the Met, I found myself thinking less about the spectacle of Salome, and more about the bargain at its heart… and how unsettlingly familiar that ancient transaction feels.

Lately, I’ve felt a subtle dissonance every time I hover over the “Subscribe” button on Substack. Not because I don’t want to support writers -- many of them deserve to be paid far more than what a newsletter subscription offers -- but because something about the exchange feels… off. Like I’m participating in a subtle shift I can’t quite name. A gate quietly swinging shut behind me.

This painting started with a headline: 23andMe sold to the highest bidder.

I don’t know why it hit me so hard. Maybe because I’d always thought of it as something intimate – blood, family, the story of who we are. Suddenly it was just... data. A portfolio asset. Another thing to be packaged and sold. And I felt something in me ache.

That moment became the inspiration for this painting.

I’ve just finished reading Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw’s The Quantum Universe, where they describe reality not as a fixed series of events, but as a set of possibilities. At the most fundamental level, the universe is not deterministic — it’s made of likelihoods. Everything that can happen, does happen… somewhere. And what we really experience is just one thread through that vast probabilistic fabric.

I once knew someone who told me, almost offhandedly,  that he always kept a mental ledger in his head. A running tab of what he’d given, and what he’d received. In every relationship. Every friendship. Every romantic entanglement. Every favor, every time someone showed up late or forgot something. All tallied. All accounted for.

Every few years or so, I sit down with myself and examine my values, attitudes, and beliefs.

I learned to do this at university, in a sociology class I half paid attention to. I don’t remember much else from that course, but that idea lodged itself somewhere deep.

So between the new year and my birthday in February, I do what I’ve come to call a ‘life audit’. I take stock. To ask what habits and thoughts have served me -- what needed to be shed, what still feels like mine, and what have I been carrying simply because it’s familiar?

Since working from London, I’ve noticed a subtle but telling difference in how corporate cultures operate, especially when compared to what I had grown used to in New York.

NYC is intensity, precision, velocity.

I am finally clearing out my London storage unit, and it’s funny what you unearth when you start clearing things out.

Old notebooks, pics you don’t remember posing for, conversations tucked away between the pages of time. The London years feel like they happened to someone else - someone who lived with more certainty and a worse phone camera.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the spaces in between.

The parts of life that don’t show up in performance reviews or product roadmaps. The quiet places between a decision and its ripple. Between precision and intuition. Between what we can measure… and what actually matters.