So Enjoy. This is a rare and special piece of writing.
I remember the exact moment when my life changed.
I was fifteen and lazing about in my bedroom, an episode of Gossip Girl playing loudly on my laptop. Jenny—the teenage protagonist at the time—was apologising to her mother about something she had done when her mother says (and here is the moment where I turned to the screen with rapt attention), “Rather than apologising to me, you need to look at yourself and ask if you like the person you’re becoming.”I thought, “Whoa. That’s deep, bro.” Because—let’s face it—no one asks a kid if they like the person they’re becoming. Adults ask you what you want to be when you grow up or what kind of job you want to have but they never really ask you what kind of person you want to be. Until that moment, I didn’t even realise I was becoming a person. An actual person. Like Nelson Mandela...or Adolf Hitler.Each of them was just one person—granted, a person who changed the course of history and humankind as we know it—but still only a person. Just like you or me.
The epiphany I had can only be described as having looked at a painting for years and only recently realising that it’s not just one object but a collection of tiny, careful strokes, blending into each other to create a whole image.
In other words, every decision that I make will decide the sort of person that I’ll become. I could be a person that changes the human race or achieve nothing at all.
That was when I decided to take over the world.
It’s a work in progress.
Anyway, sitting there on my bed, staring up at the ceiling, I began asking myself what kind of person I wanted to be.
Not long after, I came across someone who believed in kindness. She was the type of person who talked to the cleaner in the same way she talked to the dean of a university—with mutual respect and empathy. That was something I had never seen put into practice before.
Being Singaporean, I come from a society where your job/income determines your status and your status determines how the rest of the world treats you. To see equality put into practice not only surprised me but moved me to re-think the way society places value on people.
This girl I met was also happy. Genuinely happy. Now I don’t mean that she was hyperactive and giggly; what I mean is that every time she spoke, it was with a contagious excitement. She was passionate about her studies, about her work—about people. For her, it was never about money or the materialistic success often measured in cars and possessions, it was about the pursuit of knowledge and about contributing to our world.
Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Now if anyone was standing on the shoulders of giants, it was this girl. She looked at life in a way that I could barely comprehend. Looking at the past, at human history, she saw how far we had come and she used her work to explore and understand what it meant to be human as well as a way to build on our past and shape a better future.
Every conversation with her felt like discovering an entirely new world.
My obvious crush on her aside, being friends with her also made me realise something. Who I am isn’t determined by my career, the amount of money in my bank, the clothes I wear, or the number of flashy cars I own. It’s the opposite. Who I am is determined by the effect I have on other people; whether I leave them with a nasty aftertaste or a warm feeling, and how they’ll remember me after my death.
As a fifteen year old kid, the realisation—that I didn’t like who I was becoming—also made me understand something else. Contrary to popular belief, we don’t discover who we are; we shape ourselves and our lives and everyone around us. So even if I don’t end up taking over the world, I’d like to be the kind of person who helps make it a little more worth living for.
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