Happy December! I hope you’re getting ready for a relaxing holiday season and wind-down to the year. Here’s this week’s list.
Next week’s guest on Before We Get There
I’m excited to welcome Christel Goh, founder and CEO of Grow Public Relations on the show. Christel has an inspiring story of turning her skills built from her office job into a freelance business, and then growing enough to start her company and even bring her husband in to help run the business! Her family dynamics have played a large part in her story, even leading her to hire her first employee and start scaling when she was getting ready to have her first kid. In this episode, Christel shares a lot of the behind-the-scenes of what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. She’s also an avid content creator on LinkedIn and has been adding new services to her business portfolio to diversify and empower others to take their branding into their own hands. Check out the full episode when it launches this Thursday!
What I read this week
I started reading A Tale For The Time Being before I left for Japan, but I wasn’t able to finish it until today. This novel is two intertwined stories connected by a diary that has floated across the Pacific from Japan to the Canadian coast. It is a story of adolescence, families, fitting in, depression, and more. It also had some mystical elements, which I usually don’t like, but they weren’t forced in this story and fit in well, being explained more by quantum physics than the supernatural, so I didn’t mind them. I don’t read a ton of fiction, so this was a nice change of pace. It isn’t a book I’ll be thinking about for a week, but it was still an emotional and enjoyable read, and it did highlight some interesting parts of Japanese culture which is why I wanted to read it in the first place.
What I watched this weekend
I was hyped for the Tyson vs. Paul fight, but as you already know if you are a boxing fan or watched, it was a snoozefest. I’m not sure if there was an agreement not to knock each other out, or if Tyson was just too old, but it sucked to watch either way. But I realized, like a lot of people, I dislike Jake Paul, but I have no idea why. I’ve never watched his YouTube videos, I hadn’t heard of him before he started his boxing career, and I’ve never watched the weigh-ins or lead-ups to the fights where he could have said something to make me dislike him. I guess it mostly comes from not liking that someone who has only been boxing for a few years can come in and beat legends. With that, I decided to watch “Untold: Jake Paul The Problem Child” on Netflix with an open mind and learn more about him and his story. Frankly, I almost stopped watching during the first ten minutes. But the documentary started to get better and I started to understand him a bit better. He’s really just good at marketing and playing it up so people get hyped for the fights and cashing in on that. And there’s no doubt that he is athletic and worked hard to get to where he is. I still wouldn’t say I’m a fan or will be rooting for him, but at least I understand him better. And I’ll still probably tune in to his next fight.
What I’m thinking about TEDxSingapore this weekend
TEDxSingapore Telling Time, our annual event is happening on Wednesday evening starting at 7 pm! This theme really hit home with me as I’ve been thinking about time a lot more since having my daughter. We’ve gathered an inspiring lineup of speakers from all different fields to share their ideas and how they relate back to time. It is going to be a super fun night with not only interesting talks but also amazing musical performances. We had our final rehearsal yesterday and it was awesome to see how all the hard work is coming together. At Telling Time we’ll explore what time means to us, from the echoes of the past, to the realities of today, to the possibilities of the future. We all spend our time in different ways. But in the end, are we telling time, or is time telling us? DM me for a special discount code if you want to attend!
That’s all for this week, have a great start of the last month of the year.