Hello everyone!

Just want to drop in here to wish you guys Happy New Year!

Don’t be deceived by the nice fireworks picture there. That’s actually a picture Ming took of the Hong Kong fireworks this year.

I on the other hand had a rather uneventful New Year’s Eve. I had dinner at home, hung around with Fighter and then put him to sleep. After that I watched a movie and waited on my balcony for the countdown. Smoking a cigar with my brother.

I messaged some of my friends and asked them how they were spending their NYE and surprisingly a big bunch of them were just spending it at home too. Is this age that has finally caught up with us? I remember in my early twenties it was almost unheard of to hear of any of my friends staying at home for New Year’s Eve.

2014 was a challenging year for me but I’m really excited for 2015. This time last year I made a New Year Resolution to do more exercise. So I started cycling and playing badminton. New Year resolution fulfilled.

I’m still thinking about what my New Year resolution for 2015 should be. One idea I had was to make it a point to give an amount of money… e.g. RM500 every month to a charity or to someone I know personally who really needs financial help. I thought about this because just last week when I was wrapping up the year I was doing some math and realized that while I have made some donations, it hadn’t been as much charity as I wanted to for the year.

So in that last week I rushed. Making out cheques to people I knew personally who needed help to support their families and to charities. Besides my mom tells me that as long as we’re able to save and live comfortable lives, we should always find a way to give back.

I thought about this but I’m not sure if it counts as a New Year Resolution. Maybe it’s just one of the things I should be doing anyway.

Anyway I’ll think about it. If you guys have suggestions or thoughts for New Year Resolutions or have yours to share please do share them. I’m looking for ideas.

Happy New Year everyone. I hope 2015 will be really great for all of us.

The week we’re on now (the week in between Christmas and New Year’s) is a week of reflection for me. It’s when I reflect at everything that happened in 2014. The truth is I don’t think anyone really has a perfectly stellar year. Each year we’re met with a lot of challenges in our personal, work and family lives. In that respect this year has been a challenging one for me.

But if we look hard enough there are the good things too and the purpose of this post of mine is to reflect on those good things. To be thankful that they happened.

So here’s what I’m thankful for in 2014.

1) I Discovered Cycling

If you follow me on Dayre you’d probably realize that cycling plays a huge part in my life. I make it a point to go out on a ride as often as I can. This time last year though I hadn’t even owned a bicycle. It all started in January 2014. I was making New Year’s Eve Resolutions when I decided that one of the resolutions I need to make was to exercise more.

Sure I played golf and I occasionally went to the gym but that wasn’t enough (and golf isn’t really cardio). So I decided to take up cycling, buying my first bicycle somewhere towards the end of January if I remember correctly. It’s been an insane ride. Since then I’ve actually influenced a number of my friends to start cycling and we all go on regular rides together now. Not only that I’ve also met a lot of people from cycling.

Almost one year into cycling, I feel healthier and much more fit.

2) I was nominated for some awards.

This year I was nominated for the Prestige 40 under 40, making it to the Top 10 along with some of my buddies like Bryan, Kenny, David, Chan and Chung Lynn. The award night was good fun with all of us having drinks and joking around until our names got called and we all went on to stage. To my surprise I ended up winning the RHB Excellence Award that night too.

I also got nominated for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award under the Emerging Category. I didn’t win though. The winner was the guy behind a curtain company called MK Curtain and I thought it was well deserved because he had one awesome rags to riches story. Being nominated was enough for me.

3) I got to watch Fighter grow

This year I got to see Fighter grow from a newborn to an almost toddler. Watching him grow, learning new tricks each day has been such a joy.

4) We got Bump

This year we were blessed with another gift. Shorty is now pregnant with our number two. A baby girl.

Shorty is really excited and shopping up a storm for cute baby girl clothes now in anticipation for Bump.

5) I Found Balance

When I first joined Entrepreneur Organization a few years ago, they taught me about finding balance. About how we need to find balance in our personal, family and work/business life. Most of the time we find it easy to spend a lot of time with work and family commitments but hard to fulfill our personal needs. Personal needs mean two things… doing things that make you happy and doing things that make you healthy.

This year I found it. I love cycling, it fulfills both my happy and healthy needs and I love badminton too. Every week I end up playing badminton twice a week and then cycling another twice. That makes it four days in a week of healthy and happy stuff.

The rest of my time is spent at work and with my family. Fighter and Shorty. I struggled to find this balance in the past few years but I’m glad I’ve finally found it at least for now. I just hope i’ll be able to keep it.

6) Some of the stories on my blog went viral

This is something I never really expected before and has never really happened until this year. This year I shared some of the stories that seemed to have gotten quite a number of shares and comments.

Here are some of the notable ones.

The Story of a Mercedes Salesman

The Sacrifice my Filipino Maid Makes

Why you must never ask a couple why they haven’t had kids yet

Unfortunately I switched sharing and comments tools on my blog just a few months ago so that messes up the number of shares that some of those articles got but in any case I was happy to see more interaction on my blog.

7) Netccentric had a great 2014

Netccentric did well in 2014 and where I’m really happy was that this year we saw a lot of the growth of the group coming from overseas. It means a lot to me because in the early years of Netccentric we had invested in starting companies in foreign countries and we had waited for a long time for it to bear fruit. So long that at times I even began to doubt and wonder if we had made the right decisions.

This year though that doubt had all been dispelled. Nuffnang China, Nuffnang Thailand, Nuffnang Australia and all posted great results.

So that’s my 2014 everyone. I hope everyone has had an overall great 2014 and I hope 2015 would be even more awesome for you guys.

Happy New Year!

Hi Everyone,

I”m back in Penang for Christmas as I usually do every year. While I’m Christian, my family isn’t Christian so we don’t celebrate Christmas by going to church and all. But still Christmas is a time of the year where our family does try to get together… back with my parents in Penang.

I’m sure you guys are really busy with your Christmas plans today so I just want to say a very quick Merry Christmas to everyone!

It’s my favorite time of the year.

 

So remember how every year our office would have a Christmas Decorations competition between departments (click for last year’s).

Well this year we had it again and I feel everyone took it to a whole new level of competitiveness. They went with different themes and all. This time though someone suggested instead of just internal judging, that we would post the pictures on social media and then let people vote for it.

Not wanting to flood our official social media accounts with all the tons of photos, some of the Nuffies suggested we use my Dayre account and that’s what I did.

I gotta say I love how our office feels every Xmas. It’s the most Christmas-sy place in Malaysia to me. More so than even the malls. When you walk in you see all these Xmas decorations and hear Xmas music in the background.

Ah it’s so wonderful.

Anyway to see all the photos of the Christmas decorations in our office, it’s all on my Dayre here.

Merry Christmas everyone!

At my weekend cycling adventure today one of my friends brought his new bicycle. He had spent a fortune on his new bicycle, upgrading everything to almost the top possible spec for each thing. I suspect his bike cost somewhere around the region of RM40,000. That’s equivalent to a small car.

This is my bike. It doesn’t cost that much.

While we were admiring his bike he didn’t seem to talk so much about his bike itself but more about how stress he is at work. He is an entrepreneur behind a really successful business. I found it odd at first. Why is it he suddenly brought up the matter of work stress when we’re talking about something so happy like his bicycle. Then I began to understand.

He’s been really stressed with work. His business has been affected by some really tough challenges lately and he had been working very late and sleeping very little. So to make himself feel happier he splurged on the expensive bicycle. The bicycle that we were all admiring was something he loved but something he couldn’t help associate with the stress he was facing.

Then I thought about myself and whether I had bought nice things for myself just to make myself feel better when I was really stressed. The answer is yes. So when people say a tai tai spends a lot of money to make herself feel better of troubles she may have at home… while it sounds like sour grape talk.. there could be some truth in that. You don’t have to be rich to have retail therapy to make yourself feel a little better.

While I thought about whether retail therapy helped though I began to remember that yes it did distract me or make me feel a little better…. but it was short lived. In a matter of weeks or even days sometimes, I take for granted the new toy I have bought and it doesn’t make me feel as good as it used to. This reminds me of something my uncle once told me. He said he doesn’t believe in buying material stuff because there is no limit and no end to it. Once you satisfy a want, there will be something else you want and when you think about it… that’s really true.

That’s the nature of our materialistic world though. We have grown so good at making things that people want that there is no limit. Perhaps a better way to spend money to relieve stress is on holidays. Holidays don’t last forever of course so they suffer the same thing as buying a material item. However it offers something else. During the few days or weeks that you’re away you offer yourself an escape from your stress or your problems. And it gives you a new experience to focus on or at least distract yourself with … at least for a while.

So what do you think is better money spent when you’re stressed? Buying yourself a new handbag? Or traveling?

Having just battled one of the worst viral/bacterial infections I’ve ever had in my life, I thought a lot about how I got sick and the etiquette of a sick person (sick as in ill NOT sick as in… well… disgusting haha).

I thought about the few things that many of us Malaysians don’t really practice in our culture here and I’m hoping that we will do. Here’s what:

1) Stay away from crowded enclosed places like cinemas, airplanes… etc

When I trace back my steps on how I got sick this time round I remember exactly how I got it. I was watching a movie in the cinema some time before that. Seated behind me was a kid that had a very very bad cough. I could hear the thickest of phlegm every time he coughed.

To make matters worse, his parents never seemed to have taught him to cover his mouth when he coughed. So every time he did, he broadcasted his virus airborne into the entire cinema. Give him a cough every 10 minutes over a 2 hour movie and it makes sense that I (among many others I’m sure) caught his bug.

I find this very inconsiderate of his parents (more so his parents because he’s just a kid). The boy is sick. Not only do you bring him out with you instead of having him rest at home, you bring him to a crowded closed environment where people seated next to each other in very close proximity.

How inconsiderate! I wish we could fine people like that. So please… if you are sick, avoid watching a movie. Stay home and watch a DVD or something because you don’t want to get others’ sick.

2) If your kid is sick don’t send him to school either!

I’ve heard of parents who still send their sick toddlers to play school and result in the rest of the toddlers getting the exact same bug. Why any parent would do that to the other parents out there baffles me. If you’re a parent, you know that having to take care of a sick kid is really stressful. So by bringing your sick kid to school, you’re giving your headache to another 5-6 parents or so who are unlucky enough to have their kid infected by the same bug.

3) Wear a Mask

I was in Tokyo many years ago when I first noticed some people taking trains and wearing face masks. At first I thought the masks were to protect from the haze but when I looked up I saw clear blue skies. Then I realized what the masks were for.

The people who wear masks are sick and they are wearing the masks to prevent themselves from spreading their bug to everyone else be it office co-workers or strangers on the train. I’m told this practice started long ago since the days of SARS.

This however isn’t the practice in Malaysia at all. This time round because I’ve been so sick I’ve made it a point to wear a mask whenever I go out even to a mall or a restaurant.

I hope more Malaysians will do the same and we will one day have that culture of being considerate enough to not spread our sicknesses.

Wow I just realized I haven’t updated my blog in 5 days. I’m sorry guys. I have a bit of blogger’s guilt now.. you know… knowing that you guys keep coming back to my blog for an update but only get disappointed to see none. So I decided to quickly draft out an entry here. Let me tell you why I’ve been out of action.

On Friday I developed a bit of a cough. It was the kind of cough that preludes some illness although it didn’t show any serious signs yet. Whenever I coughed out phlegm it would be transparent and it was mostly a dry cough. I went about my day as normal and planned so many things over the weekend.

Mainly I planned a long 87K cycling ride on Saturday morning then off to Penang on an afternoon flight and another ride again on Sunday. All that changed on Friday night.

A fever started to kick in so I took a couple of panadols and it was during the middle of the night my fever really started to kick in. I was shivering in the cold air-conditioned room and I forced myself over to go through the shivers and take another dose of panadol. After a while the shivering stopped and I could go back to sleep.

Then came Saturday morning, the start of the day that was going to be the most suffering for me in a long while. In the morning my fever clocked 38.8 degrees celcius and so I went to see a doctor. The doctor diagnosed a viral and bacterial infection and so he gave me some meds and even said if I’m feeling well enough I could make my afternoon flight to Penang if I really wanted to.

I didn’t. I ended up sleeping the entire day right after the clinic, only waking up to have something to eat. My fever then had clocked 39.2 and Shorty was concerned because my fever kept getting higher and higher and the panadol didn’t seem to have any effect.  By evening she decided to send me to the hospital for a dengue test.

I waited 45 minutes in the Accident & Emergency room the whole time feeling a little cold because of my fever. When I finally got to see the doctor, the doctor told me that it’s too early for him to test if I really have dengue or not but if I wanted I could take the test anyway. Shorty decided I should do it anyway and since I was already there I okayed it.

I hate needles and drawing blood but some nurses have got a really good skill for things like that. They know how to make it as quick and as painless as possible. This nurse wasn’t one such nurse. She took a very long time trying to pull blood and she said I didn’t have enough blood and I could tell because she started pushing the needle deeper which hurt.

When she finally pulled out the needle I thought it was all over but she said she didn’t manage to get enough. She consulted the more senior nurse and they concluded that they needed to poke my other arm and try to draw blood from there. I was pretty pissed off but I guess they could tell because they were apologizing profusely.

After it was all done, we were told we needed to wait for 2 hours for the results. I couldn’t stay there any longer because I was feeling really weak and tired so I decided to head home first and told them to call me when they got the result. Within an hour they gave me a call and told me that they needed me back at the hospital to take a 3rd sample because one of the earlier samples was faulty. I got super mad and I decided I wasn’t strong enough to get out of bed and go to the hospital again to take another test. So I decided that if the fever didn’t come down by the next morning I would go for the test.

Saturday night was bad for me. By 2AM my fever had reached a temperature of 39.5 degrees celsius, a new peak. Nothing I did seemed to be able to bring my fever down. The panadols had no effect and the sponging hadn’t brought it down either. Fortunately my brother came to check on me around that time and I told him I was really worried about this fever. So the only thing we could do was for him to sponge me. He did so for about half an hour and managed to bring the fever down from 39.5 to 39.0. A number that was still high but a number that I was more comfortable with.

I went back to sleep after that and I woke up a few times before morning came. Subconsciously though I began to feel better. I began to feel less cold and Shorty who came to check on me told me that she could see I was sweating. So my body was getting back to normal.

I woke up the next morning with my fever almost gone. In the 37.5 degrees level. I felt a little bit more strength in me but I had new symptoms. Diarrhea and I still had my cough. So I ended up sleeping the entire day today until now.

So that’s why I’ve been out of action these few days guys. Sorry I’ve been away. Gonna take a rest now. Will update again as soon as I get well.

I was driving to badminton last night when I heard this programme on BFM. It’s about an initiative called “Human Library” where instead of reading books they have real people tell their real life stories.

The one they played last night was of a guy named David Mun, an ex-death row inmate in Malaysia. Here’s a few quick points about his story:

1) David had a history of smuggling drugs across the Thailand-Malaysia border. He would make two trips a month, each trip making him RM60,000.

2) He did it for many years until he got caught. He was sentenced to jail and death by hanging.

3) He talked about his life in prison, how he got around and the experience of appealing against the death sentence.

What happens next is something best heard from him rather than me telling the story.

In the recording above the story of David Mun starts at 20:00. So if you don’t want to listen to the first 20 minutes then go ahead and fast forward to 20:00.

I found this story really eye-opening for me about a life in a world very different from the life most of us know. Thank you for this wonderful story Human Library and BFM.

Many years ago I proudly went to my Dad and told him that I’ve won an entrepreneur award. I won’t say what award it was, but it was for a business organization. Expecting my Dad to be really happy for me, he gave me some tough love. He said

That’s good son. But the most prestigious entrepreneur award is the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of The Year Award. Win that and then you know you’ve won something big.

I’ve never heard much about the EY Award back then but as I did more research I began to understand why my dad has such a high regard for it. It was a strict process to even get nominated for the award. EY would ask to evaluate not just you as an entrepreneur but the financial health of your company.  Past winners of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award in Malaysia were Tan Sri Tony Fernandes, Lim Kok Wing and well the list goes on.

A year after talking to my Dad I got an email from Ernst & Young saying that they wanted to nominate me for the award and asked me if I would submit our financials to them and attend an interview. I politely turned it down because I didn’t feel I had achieved enough. I felt my company was still too small and that maybe they should check back again with us in a few years.

This year someone else from EY contacted me again. I talked to my accountant who happened to be from EY and asked her if she thinks we were big enough now. She nodded. So we submitted the application under the Emerging Entrepreneur category and went through the process along with some 70 or so other successful entrepreneurs.

Then came the night that they were supposed to announce the Top Nominees. I tried to ask EY if I was going to be one of the Top Nominees but they said they didn’t know until the actual announcement was made. I toyed about whether to go or not. After all I’m a super anti-social person and I avoid as many events as I can.

Then just a week before I happened to talk to my friend Bryan who won last year’s EY Entrepreneur of the Year under the Emerging category for bringing Chatime to Malaysia. I asked him if he was going and he said yes… and asked me to go along just for fun since he’s gonna be there.

I’m glad I went.. because to my surprise that night when they were announcing the Top Nominees, the name “Timothy Tiah” got called out.

Until that moment I hadn’t said a word to my father about joining the award because I didn’t think that I would win anything or even get shortlisted. That’s rare because I tell my father everything.

So after the award dinner I called my Dad and told him that I was Top Nominee now under Emerging Entrepreneur for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year. To my surprise he just went “Hmm ok”…

Then I said “Do you remember when you told me years ago that this was the one award that mattered the most?”

He replied “I did? I said that? Oh… good then”.

So this nomination taught me two things. That sometimes we don’t know what we’re capable of… and sometimes even our parents forget the impact they have on us.

Thank you EY for making me Top Nominee.

And thank you Dad… for unknowingly pushing me on!

Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t actually won yet. I’m just shortlisted one out of four. But being shortlisted is more than I could have asked for.

Guess what everyone!

I’m having a video shoot of me right now with a camera crew from a TV channel behind me. And we’re doing one of these insert shots where the camera man stands behind me or around me while I pretend to blog or do some work on my laptop.

So I thought rather than just doing some mock entry maybe I can take this opportunity to seriously update my blog and give you guys a quick update.

In other news a big personal high for me in my life is that I just bought myself a set of new rims for my bicycle. This is how my old bicycle looks like with the rims.

And this is how it looks like now.

Gotta admit that I took a really long time to decide on these rims because they were really expensive but now that I have it. I love it. Not only does it look badass but it also gives me a much smoother riding experience and improved my performance.

But I literally took like 3 months to decide on whether to buy this or not because of the heavy price tag. I decided to do it anyway after asking my readers on Dayre whether I should buy it or not. And most.. well okay… marginally most of them said I should. So haha tadaa.

Now that I have.. I’m glad I did.

The falling stock market in the past couple of weeks has erased a bunch of wealth from people all around. This kinda taught me one thing. That whatever money we have isn’t really ours to enjoy until we have spent it on something we like. Be it a holiday or a new phone or in my case a new set of wheels.

But we often hold back because of budgeting reasons or because sometimes we feel guilty if we spend too much money. I guess it’s about striking a balance. While we shouldn’t go into debt for buying little luxuries, every now and then it’s good to spend some money on something we like. Take it as an investment in our personal happiness.