Bosses are humans too - thoughts on humanistic leadership

Recently I've been interested in this idea of humanistic leadership. There are many schools of thought on leadership, and some of them may already cover what I currently have in mind.

Nevertheless, this post is aimed at that frustrated subordinate and the fresh-faced executive, about our managers.

I've always sought to find a good mentor and manager as my number 2 priority after job-scope/exposure. The reason being is that we probably see our managers for longer hours than our spouses or family. It felt only logical. Monetary issues aside, if one can afford it, seek a job to grow and learn first and foremost.

However, not all managers are leaders. Many times we are frustrated by the decisions they make, or do not make. They also chastise us for things that might not be entirely our fault, or may seem unreasonable in terms of deadlines. No one likes OT (unless you like escaping from home), and certainly no one likes uncertainty or negative energy around the office.

So we immediately turn to the manager who gave us that instruction, or directive. Why B now when it was A earlier? We question, interrogate and some managers stonewall us and ask you to "just do it". So we bitch and moan over lunches with our colleagues, and then complain to our loved ones that my manager has been unreasonable. Crazy even, especially when emotions were involved and things felt a bit personal, words were heartedly exchanged.

Ultimately, everyone goes back with their relationship just a bit sour. Bits of you promise that you'll never help your boss anymore. S/he has betrayed you.

There are a ton of articles out there that suggest what you should do if you have a lousy boss. How to "survive" a lousy manager. It is all about coping and tolerating the Mean Manager. This is where I beg to differ.

Coping and tolerating is a stop-gap measure, it suggests that both parties dance around the bush and ignore the white elephant in the room. Truce comes with developing understanding, and some empathy, as well as crystal clear communication.

1. Understanding, maybe you misunderstood the messenger for the message.

Managers have meetings, they have closed-door discussions. They have responsibilities and emails that you are not privy to, they text their own bosses, they have greater responsibilities beyond the organisation.

Sometimes we see the blood but not the battle, and we blame the soldier who fought in the trenches than the politicians that instigated the war. Messages flow from the top, and managers are sometimes confronted with the difficult position of being the messenger - to fire, to discipline, to U turn - because of whatever reasons. They could have spoke up for you, but their decisions were overrode by other people and considerations. Ultimately, we need to ask the right questions before we jump to conclusions. Managers have bosses to please too. How they handled the situation reflects well/badly on them. So while we can feel that the message could be phrased in a better way, we need to be objective and seek clarity on where and how this decision came to be.

2. Empathy, because managers have families too.

So she was snappy at you - it must be PMS or she is has issues with your slides last night. He was distant- maybe he has unvoiced disappointment and the hammer's gonna drop any minute.

Maybe you don't care at all.

However we see it, our bosses can equally be met with frustrations from home, they are not our managers when they are home but husbands, wives, children, friends. They can very well have had their heartbroken that affected their day. It's not always about you.

Junior-entry executives don't always realise how sheltered they are. Personal performance is easy and while there are some relationships to manage, the goals are often very clear and directive. However the higher up the corporate ladder, the view is less clear, the relationships less obvious and suddenly the phrase, "with great power, comes great responsibility" start to really sink in.

It is always easier to be responsible for yourself, than to be responsible for others. That's why I'm quite resistant to the idea of the careerist individual, because more often than not, I see managers burn out and run ineffective and toxic teams that surrounds a person's ego. Without the support of family and friends, it is easier to be bitter, jaded and simply apathetic about other's predicaments.

3. You can never over-communicate.

A lot of misunderstanding comes from the lack of will and ability to simply tell others what the hell you are working on right now.

Sometimes when things are extremely overwhelming, boss forget to communicate, and because shit flows from the top, the landslide eventually lands on our 6pm shoulders.

Soldier on.

Shake it off like water off a duck's back and fucking grow a pair. It is not okay for any boss to tell you  to do something that was due 2 hours ago, communicate how this can be improved, mutually apologise and move on.

Of course with authority, no manager is going to tell you sorry for making you miss your movie with your partner, or worse still, the finals of EPL.

Yet, taking the first step to confront the issue achieves 2 objectives. First it tells you what kind of leader you have, and secondly, it opens a dimension of understanding that goes beyond passive-aggressiveness.

Nothing gets achieved if communications are reduced to passive aggressiveness, and people who are PA need to understand that this propagates and complicates the issue. If you feel you are not listened to, or are not appreciated for your opinions, just voice it out and see where the paint spray settles. If the organisation doesn't appreciate your skills and views, then leave. If you can't leave, then just press on. If you get brow beaten all the time, at least you did your conscience proud. Congratulations, welcome into maturity.

Bosses who are themselves PA, need to get a grip of their actions, and I fucking make no excuses for managers who are detrimental to their team due to ineffective (PA) communications. But all of us can do our part to improve things.

My point of this article, is that you don't need to have a shiny brass plate engraved with your name and title to exhibit leadership. In this day and age of rank-seeking individuals, we forget the software of what makes managers important. They are the muscles that hold the joints together, the nervous system that run effective communications, though while sometimes painful, helps the rest of the corpus understand that they have been burnt and back away.

It is not always about you, neither do people "have issues with your performance". Very rarely, people think about you if at all, and managers, those who are truly focused on the good work, have spare RAM to give a shit about your petty thoughts and drama. So grow a pair of bravery + transparency, and mature. This world is really not your polly-pocket universe.

Humanistic leadership is about understanding the individual and where they are coming from. Thereafter, to lead with transparency and empathy, to communicate clearly with people around you so as to develop healthy relationships. You may do it in any style, but you don't have to be a manager to lead - you can start with yourself.

Lifelong learning

I was searching my family document library 2 days ago, trying to get papers in order for an appeal application for my mother's step-down care subsidy. And my mum being the extremely orderly person she is, has kept everything in place and is a system we still use 7 years later despite her stroke.

Having said, I paused to flip through the numerous certificates, courses and accreditation that my mum has had throughout her career right up till her stroke. At first, it was O levels, and then a diploma in IT back when computers barely made it to the scene. My mother was a brilliant typist, scoring an impressive word/minute to qualify a shiny badge for it. She attended even more courses about logistics, learning advanced excel and so on. This was before systems like SAP and Oracle made it to our shores to help companies monitor complex logistics.

It was easy to pass these off as my mum's poor O Level grades didn't qualify her entry into a tertiary institution due to her poor English marks (she was Chinese educated). It is but of course, that she kept on learning so that she could continue to be relevant. It is a discourse we are familiar with and, with SkillsFuture, institutionalised.

However, being a university graduate, a person of middle-class privilege, it is easy to be comfortable in our worldly knowledge. To pass off my mum's pursuits as simply a necessity because she didn't have access to university. It is equally tempting to assume we know it all - and stop learning. A great deal of humility came when I entered the digital media world - where no such course is offered in Singapore, where the playing field is equal, that you feel that your entire educational hardwork seems less useful than when it first felt. My mum must have felt the same when she picked up IT as her profession of choice.

I find myself on the same journey as my mother now, learning and developing new skills, taking courses and getting certified for platforms I never knew existed or were possible.

Yet, a constant worry plagues me.

My mother had to also banked on a particular set of skills - and it was IT. Very soon after the 2000s, a vast majority of consolidation exercises and downsizing caused many to lose their jobs. My mother included - she had to de-skill and work in another field that demanded a strict paycut. The last few years leading to her stroke were the most stressful. Being older now, I am starting to understand her frustrations. Back in 1970s, the government promised developments in the IT manufacturing sector. However that strategy quickly changed when China because cheaper and opened its doors in mid 1990s. We lost our comparative advantage in a heartbeat. Many industries today still grapple with this change.

It must have been infuriating to invest so much into one's learning, and not have it pay off in the future you aspire to. I am somehow doubly pained for my mother, who have always shielded me from these worries and allowed me to pursue my passion and strengths. Perhaps if she were healthy now, she would shared more with me.

There are two kinds of learning - often dichotomised as incompatible. On one end of the ring, we have the academic approach of meta-knowledge. The abstraction of common phenomenon into concepts that can be adapted to analyse anything - a way of thinking if you will. On the other side presents a realm of practical knowledge that get things done. How to fix a generator on a bulldozer, how to create pivot tables, how to run a training session.

The former comes at too high a cost, often econimically and scholastically out of reach from many. The latter is too specialised and can, in my mother's case, be obsolete if the wind changes directions.

So what then? While one can certainly, theoretically, keep getting skilled - some boundaries are harder to cross than others. A salesperson selling books can hardly transit into a role that sells medical equipment. This structural unemployment is not simply distilled to just the lack of learning. The person may very be learning all this time, just within their own vertical that no longer exists.

It is this insecurity that makes me question the viability of some of the strategies posited by armchair economists, often relegating the structural unemployment as a problem of the lack of self-improvement.

But what is clear is that we cannot stop learning, and be closed to the idea that being in a lab analysing cell division is a farfetched idea when you were a geography major. No doubt it comes at a very high cost. However my point is that if we are no longer hungry to learn, we stand no chance at all.

This post addresses many parallel and intersecting issues - but the tldr; version is simply this. Just keep swimming, even if it was the wrong direction, we can always turn back, but never stop moving.

By the way, my mum wanted to enroll into university to pursue her dreams of getting a degree after I "grew up". She never went on to fulfil that personal aspiration. It doesn't matter because he carries enough knowledge already that universities will be learning more from her experience than what they can offer.  Her dream lives on with me, and I will carry that torch of learning forever in my heart.

What lying does to you

Lies are a form of narrative, a story or a fantasy we tell people. It is often rooted in some sort of truth, or phenomena experienced but can either be taken out of context. Facts distorts into falsehood because it has been misappropriated to fit one's selfish interests.

People might tell a liar when confronted face-to-face, because lying to someone is uncomfortable and much more difficult than one might think. It's loaded with a sense of sheepishness, guilty conscience and plot-holes to get straight that it often takes less effort to just tell someone the truth and get it over and done with.

However, lying, like most things, can become a habit. It gets easier every time you do it, such that it is all paradoxically, becomes the only truth you see. It starts to frame how you see things - your neurons travel the pre-emptive pathways on how you place facts within a story that has become familar to you. So lies ultimately become a worldview, and in that worldview through time and space, situations become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The fable of the Emperor's New Clothes is about not getting fleeced, but also and more importantly about vanity and pride of the Emperor. In a sense, he allowed himself to be deceived because he has already deceived himself that it is extremely crucial to have clothing that is made of the finest material as an affirmation of his lordly status. We allow ourselves to be lied to, or take into lies because the first lie starts with the lies we tell ourselves. We need that $2,400 bag because it makes us look good. We don't interrogate assumptions enough, especially the assumptions that echo in our minds.

So all in all, lies do something very particular. They feed. Rather than substract from your being, they add, feed, seduce and nourish. Whether it is desire, pride or even glory, it seeks yo affirm what may not be. And it is potent because since they are based in facts that do exist, we make logical leaps and jump to conclusions. When we lie to others comfortably, we have to lie to ourselves, and to do that easily, is to take mental shortcuts or erase outliers.

It becomes easier to find cause and effect, to sweep all other factors under the carpet. Dangerously, it becomes easier to blame, to seek justifications for extreme actions. We tell ourselves it is okay. And after a few times, lies replace truth as discourses that most accept. Not all lies are purposeful, and this is not the same as scientific theory that has been debunked due to new evidence or research practices. I am referring to the lies we tell ourselves, the personal touchpoints we have regularly that suck us in.

Lies are a false cucoon, one that is as brittle as diamond. It only takes 1 child on the street to say, "but he is naked!" to shatter illusions into a thousand pieces and have us all running back vulnerable and exposed.

Have courage my friends.

So you're stuck in a rut...

You sent some resumes, got through the door. Bought a reward for yourself with your first paycheck. You've started work. Hurray.

You go home after work day everyday, watch your Game of Thrones or Kdrama, chat with your friends. You maybe catch dinner with someone. Fall asleep.

Rinse and repeat.

Now what?

You've become what institutions envision you to be - a collared worker, productive and abundening.

Every once in a while, you head for a holiday, go to Universal Studios with your family or niece/nephew.

You return home, staring at the mundaneness of it all. Wondering if your life is resigned to this cogwork cycle.

Work can be exciting for some, not so much for others who feel that things are out of their hands most of the time. Agency, is the concoction that brews only in academic towers, the steam is what students inhale in lecture halls. The privileged, the non-caring, the ones who have it easier because life dealt them the right DNA and circumstances.

So suddenly you are 30, 35. You've worked so hard to be in middle management. The pay off doesn't seem as worthwhile as it was when you were 24 and decided that relationships were a distraction. You find your friends increasingly unable and unwilling to make time for brunch or soccer because "Little Jimmy" has playgroup on Saturdays. You go on an online dating spree, become increasingly critical of the guys who are of similar age - not earning enough, he is not "worldly" enough, he hasn't dated in 20 years!?

And you trudge on with a date holding the same fallible need to impress with their credit card or make up. At the same time, a little part of you dies inside. Yet pride prevents you from admitting that you've made a wrong choice. You're a manager now aren't you? Age is creeping up, and you know your younger colleagues are calling you that mean bitch/bastard who needs that stick out of his/her ass. Someone who just needs to get laid. Your male colleagues wonder if you're gay since they never hear you mention that you're meeting women.

And you did, it is not without a lack of trying - after all that is what the modern independent person is, isn't it? However you have too much self respect to render yourself at anyone's whim and fancy. You only want the best.

But the best are taken with the mundaneness of life you have grown so much to despise and yet also desire. That stability and burden of a family doesn't seem as "traditional". Maybe tradition endures not for its own sake, maybe your pride didn't let you see through your own naïveté at 24.

Eventually you resign, and quietly admit that you missed out. Life goes on, you settle for your games and Kdrama with the cuccoon of solitude keeping you chilled in this hot tropical weather.

Time is an investment, an instrument that does not return once capital has been invested. It is the riskiest, as well as the most precious commodity that most people take for granted. Until something happens, oft too late, will we fully grasp the sands of time.

Would you choose this unspeakable burden of two little feet, or the unimaginable endlessness of forever weightlessly floating through the city at night.

What legacy do you want in the end? What lives on what you have passed. Are you a guest of this earth, to come by and have passed, to never evoke memory ever again?

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People often misunderstand that career and personal life are incompatible - especially women. Even increasingly men.  We must have "enough" before we are "ready" to love and be loved. To settle down, to marry, to have kids. I strongly disagree. People are not complete, nor should they be. We are all growing and evolving, we are always work-in-progress. We are dependent on time and space, and the people that bump in snd out of our lives. We are the baggage we carry and the tears we shed. I want to grow old with someone, not start a business with him (or her).

While we can be married to our work at key points in time, it is equally important to return. To return to what matters most - to the people who care very much about it. Finding someone to spend time with is not so much as "lacking time" but a shift of perspective. In Singapore, we are often chastised for being unfocussed - students are conditioned towards a singular goal (the national exam) and if that goal is achieved, it all pays off.

Later people transfer that conditioning onto their careers. However as we grow older, we forget that we have agency to change some of the chains that bind us.

So life doesn't entirely make it incompatible, it's about what we're willing to sacrifice for what we want and the courage to admit our heart-felt desires. Family or no family, most importantly we need to be at peace for the choices we make.

In praise of gaming

4 years ago, a friend introduced me to the very alien world of computer gaming. Back then, I never counted myself as one of their target audiences. A "proper" girl doesn't game right?

Well, proper girls shouldn't be doing a lot of thing and that's why they have cats.

Which by the way, are furry movable furniture.

(Kidding, I love cats.)

In any case, I have had the fortune to experience first person shooting games like Battlefield and L4D2, to story-line pakour cinematics like Asassins' creed and Tomb Raider, and also multiplayer strategy games such as Dota2 and League of Legends.

Well no doubt they are really fun, I mean like hours-fly-by kind of fun. Which admittedly is longer than any movie.

There is a lot of resistance against gaming, especially women who almost see it as bad as their partners watching porn. I believe that it is lack of understanding that is proliferating this "judgy" attitude.

And no, I don't self-identify as a gamer girl because my reflexes, like my math, is tosh.

So here are 5 reasons why I am in praise of games.

1. Singapore is expensive and boring

It seems like an odd first point, but it lines up. Bear with me and you'll see why.

Singapore is a playground for the rich, extremely rich. We can't afford yachts and MBS-esque lives. But we can afford $12 of 4 hour game time to have a good time with friends. It is almost cheaper than a weekend movie ticket with twice the length of fun.

Popcorn not included. But most places allow food anyway.

Prices are inclusive of GST and service charge. You are welcomed.

2. You learn complex strategies à la the Art of War

Some games like DOTA and League of Legends require complex strategy. You have to decide from the moment have to pick a character with unique abilities, to the actual gameplay, to teamwork synergies. I call it complex chess.

Ultimately the aim of the game is to capture the opponent's team's "flag". Much like chess's aim is to capture the king.

So chess pieces are all inanimate but follow the same strategy. Characters have to work together with their abilities, they need to learn when to give someone the bounty so that their team wins over all, or when to wait for their turn to strike. Teams have to coordinate to focus down an enemy, and/or protect their damage-dealer so they don't give their own bounty away.

And the amazing thing is such decisions are also made in mere split seconds with multiple things happening at once.

So tell me how is this not amazing in and of itself?

3. It tells you what kind of person you are.

So previously, I thought that I was an aggressive decision maker because I'm very proactive. However, playing games (including Civ5) made me reconsider my assumptions.

I'm passive and defensive as hell. From my experience, some players go big and go home, others like me prefer to have all the information before proceeding. From these games, I am starting to realise how my passiveness can sometimes wreck results.

It is also true that you tell a person's true colours when you put them in hot water.

When the game is seemingly hopeless or when the odds are stacked against you, the feeling is eeriely real even though it's just a game. Do you stick through and find an opening? Do you blame others for what may be your mistake? Do you listen to 2nd opinions? Are you defensive?

4. You actually learn stuff

So Ezio and the Assassin's creed series just basically taught me the civil history in an extremely real replica of the cities they depict. It was so real, that when in Florence, I actually really didn't need a map because I've walked those streets in-game before.

Also, you learn about stuff like guns, how they fire, how recoil can affect your aim etc. It's not 100% the real thing, and no I don't feel the urge to go shoot people in case you're wondering. It's useless information, but at least I'm prepared for a zombie apocalypse, are you?

5. Some games, are basically sports.

Unlike doping, e-sports face no such issue. Unless you count red-bull as a drug. Before you scoff at the notion that computer games can be "sports", may I remind you that soccer started out as kids kicking a tin can around in some alley as well.

And like every community, there are crazy ass people who mouth off, as there are silent supporters who watch every game of their favourite (*ahem Puppey ahem*).

It is also not some small obscure community. The last prize pool of Dota2 The International was ~USD6 million, way more than the Wimbledon and mostly pooled through the community. The combined players of World of Warcraft in a city is too large to fit an Olympic stadium.

Like all things, if done in moderation, poses benefits. Phobias are irrational, so is the lack of will to try to understand. Addictions are detrimental, so find out what games do to our brains. Like with all addictions, often the medium (games, drugs, porn) are just stand-ins for something more fundamental.

So go try them out....good luck have fun people!

So about this thing called a start-up...

We've all got that one friend, who's involved in a start up of some kind. With the proliferation of Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin at the turn of 2010, to the recent hype of Uber and beautiful branding of Airbnb, it is hard not to be tempted to jump into the bandwagon.

I've been to a couple of start up talks, and networking events across the last few years and I'm constantly struck by the kind of questions that some would-be entrepreneurs ask, or the attitude they display.

Don't get me wrong, this post is not to suggest or downplay start-ups as a frivolous pursuit. Neither am I possessing the opinion that it is a waste of time, and that most of them are scams.

However I am of the opinion that the word "start-up" has become a brand in and of itself, and I have observed that some people have bought into the hype and think that being part of a start-up, or somehow being self-employed is desirable.

It is not.

As a loved one told me, the word start-up gives the would-be entrepreneur an excuse to fail, that it is somehow okay to do so because everything is "experimental" or "untested". As a result, incompetence is tolerated because we are all part of the "learning journey".

I find this notion uncomfortable to stomach. Incredibly, would-be entrepreneurs find capital and see it as a be-all and end-all solution to their insolvency, or the high costs of running a company. It is also extremely self-centered, that someone should trust their capital in your hands for a turnover when you have no track record, not even an inkling of what it means to analyse a balance sheet. A good idea is not enough.

Our parents and indeed some people now, would never have self-identified themselves as a start up.

Not-too-long ago, it was called running a business.

It was about feeding their families, about working for a better life - recognising that working for someone else offered limited opportunities because of the current career climate. It could also be that the person earned much more doing freelance outside, that slowly gained traction into a registered business.

I think in our pursuit of the dream of owning your own million dollar company, we forget that it was ultimately either a rich family's son/daughter's interest that grew into something, or one's desperation to get out of poverty at all personal costs. However some individuals see this start-up culture as an event to hand out business cards that says "CEO" or "MANAGING DIRECTOR" behind a wrinkle free face. It is not an avenue to bolster one's ego. Ask any SME and they can tell you that they have endless nights worrying about cashflow, and from mistakes they gain valuable experience.

Because experience is one of two things: age and exposure. Some fortunate individuals have had the opportunity to be exposed while they were in safe environments (schools, family businesses, universities), they grow quicker and therefore are well-poised to seize a new idea and turn it into a new business.

However, observing the small sample size I have, I feel that many would-be entrepreneurs have no idea what they are doing. There is a lot of wastage - time, effort and money - to get the same result. A lot of would-be entrepreneurs also reject the "corporate monolith", often setting it as a dichotomy to their own identities. Either seeing them as bullies or as stuck-in-the-mud institutions. Yet, I share a different perspective.

I see corporations as learning institutions and some have more lessons than most. Unlike the climate our parents face, many companies are rich areas of experience. The exposure in some companies can be better than most start ups. Furthermore, they have failed before and these lessons are passed on. There is received wisdom and modus operandi is a series of trial and error. There is a reason why they are stuck to their ways - it worked. The only failure is a company's lack of agility and vision, which understandably can be lost due to groupthink and set ways.

So ultimately, I've learnt plenty by working for organisations, that I didn't get while working for a start-up. Of course you get the office politics in a office of 500 instead of 15. Of course you have red tape when you have shareholders and authorities to account to. Of course there would be more control because your actions are consequential.

However consider this, control is labour intensive and time consuming. If no authority bats an eye, it may very well be that you're too small to make a significant impact. In that case, what kind of superstar start-up would you be?

Ultimately, I am against ill-experienced, self-important and indulgent start-uppers. Those that can't tell revenue forecasting from market analysis. Those that waste their parents' hard-earned money to bolster their egos.

It's good to have ideas, and above all, it is absolutely crucial to have better execution.

Sri Lanka 2016: Three Things

It has been some time since I've blogged - I've been busy recuperating from the topsy-turvy time back at my old job. There's simply nothing better to "cleanse the system" than a holiday.

So when a friend asked me 2 months ago, "would you like to go Sri Lanka?" I dived at the opportunity.  I mean my boyfriend's half Sri Lankan, and I used to work on the Sri Lankan Tourism Board accounts which really made me wonder about the place. It's not a destination that one immediately calls to mind, especially when they tout their beaches and heritage sites as a big draw.

1) Sri Lanka is a workout

I have never exercised as much as I did before going to that place. Even with a private driver to ferry us around this vast hilly land, I find myself walking and climbing more than any other holiday I've taken.

Temples are mostly on top of an endless flight of stairs. Understandably so, since the mostly-Buddhist country has not just beautiful naturally occurring caves and rock outcrops, Buddhists also believe in seclusion for meditation just as Buddha himself did.

The mere mortals like us - it's 200m worth of steps up. For more unfit individuals like myself, it felt more like 1297183788384234m worth of torture.



Trying to get down the boulders was a certifiable challenge at Pidurangala Rock. It felt like a Lara Croft Tom Raider Walkthrough in real-life. #achievementunlocked


The moment where I go "Does my travel insurance cover accidents like this?"



When the number of stairs make you see stars early in the morning.



I've officially reached my climbing quota for the entire trip when we had to climb yet another set of endless stairs to reach the top of the Cave Temple in Dambulla later that afternoon.

2) You can see so far that your eyes hurt

In Singapore, due to high-rises and skyscrapers, you don't really get to see the sky. It's one of my many regrets, especially since I'm a sucker for a fully lit night sky.

But day after day, I had views that take my breath away literally, and was greeted with the sense of immense respect for the vastness of the land that we take for granted. We had to work for the view (muscle aches were part of the package) but at the end of the day, you could say that it was worth every bead of sweat.

Nothing beats a sky filled with stars, a landscape full of trees and a peak bursting with clouds.

The best things come for free.


Winds were so strong, I had to have a model moment at the peak of the Cave Temple



4.5hours drive to the highlands and this place's views can rival that of Europe.



One of the many waterfalls we see in the highlands.

3) The best things in life are shared

From drinking Coconuts, to enjoying dinner, I'm grateful to have gone with 2 awesome companions who are the most easy-going and forgiving folks that I've ever travelled with. I admire their determination for climbing Adam's Peak at 2am in the morning and still make it to work the next day (a round of applause please).

I think without their help, I would have never enjoyed the view on top of Pidurangala Rock, nor awe at the sights near Adam's Peak. I would have never opened my eyes to another side of travelling - that it is okay to compromise comfort (and lay in a night's worth of bedbugs) because some experiences make such a deep impression, they become imprints that you carry for life.

It has truly been magical, and once again, thanks for getting my fat ass up and down the bloody Rock at 5am in the morning. Thanks for the many pictures and fond memories!

You guys rock....and durian.