And we’re back after a week off for a family holiday to Malaysia!
Trip Recap: Johor Bahru and Desaru
We headed across the causeway to clear some leave and get away from the city last week. The main goal of this trip was fin for my daughter, and we definitely achieved that. We visited 3 different indoor play parks, all filled with tons of climbing structures, ball pits, slides, trampolines, and more. We had an awesome time and thoroughly tired ourselves out. We also visited two different animal parks with everything from capybaras, camels, and ostriches, to bunnies, alpacas, and goats. It took a little while for my daughter to get up the courage to pet the animals, but by the end she was still going for more when they were putting the animals away for the night. We also enjoyed some treats like ice cream and pizza, and I introduced here to A&W where she loved the curly fries. While it isn’t cheap to go over if you don’t drive or take public transport, it is still a lot easier than flying somewhere and the AirBnB options are great, I expect we will continue to do trips like this once or twice a year.
What I read this week
Even though I grew up in the suburbs, I’ve always loved cities, and have now spent 15 years living in Shanghai and Singapore. Metropolis by Ben Wilson caught my eye, and it was a great read. This book explores the history of cities and how they have changed the course of human civilization. There were tons of interesting anecdotes and stories from cities across time and around the globe that brought the book to life. It reinforced how similar many global cities are, with common themes and places that sometimes make you feel like you could be in any city, while still have their own personalities and traits that make them unique. It also brought forward one of my favorite things to think about when studying history, that the people we read about throughout history were just like us. They had different knowledge and cultures, but their intellectual capabilities, fears, and motivations were just like ours today. Overall this book is highly recommended if you’d like to learn more about what cities have been like through history.
Reflections on marketing in Q1
Q1 is always interesting in APAC. After the excitement and end-of-the-year push and enjoying Christmas and New Years, January feels like a waiting period until we get to Chinese New Year and only after that can we really get the year started. This year it didn’t help that I was sick for almost six weeks with a series of colds and viruses. I am still proud of a few things we accomplished this quarter, including our first ABM campaign in Australia and the first self-hosted executive roundtable in Singapore. I’m excited about these two activities because sometimes I try to make things too complex, but these were both simple campaigns, that got results and will be able to be replicated and improved in other regions. I’m getting super excited for Q2 which is going to be packed with more than 10 events across APAC and Japan.
What I watched this week
I’ve been zoning in on upping my personal finance game, and found a new guilty pleasure show, Financial Audit with Caleb Hammer. If you ever want to feel good about your spending habits and financial progress, just watch a couple episodes on YouTube. It is a bit click-baity, which Caleb himself admits. He doesn’t bring on people without problems and holes they want to get out of, that would probably be boring. But it is still amazing to see the financial situations some of these people are in and how much debt they are in. I feel like it is basically Dave Ramsey for Gen Z, so if you’re into that, you would probably like it. The financial advice itself is pretty basic, since most people have debt they need to pay off, or even realizing they just need to bring in more income, but there are also some good tidbits and you might identify some expenses you can cut down yourself.
That’s all for this week, enjoy the rest of your weekend!