I’m not someone who insists things must be done the “right” way.
I value tradition and authenticity. I appreciate the efforts to preserve the old-school. I empathise with those who reject shortcuts, changes, or modernity to preserve the spirit of the craft.
But I draw the line at being a purist.
One thing I would say, however, is that I live by principle.
That is to say, I have a particular set of values and philosophies that govern how I should think, how I should act, how I should live my life. These principles, they do not change.
I’ve come to see this way of life as an anchor to my work as an educator. Having interacted closely with children and parents in the last four years, being an educator requires far more than just educating, per se. It demands self-leadership. I can’t show up disorganised or uninspired and expect kids to match my energy. I can’t build trust with parents if my own parenting habits are inconsistent with what I preach. I can’t promote the outdoors as an essential ingredient for growth if I’m constantly indoors, afraid of the dirt, the heat, or some minor discomfort. The way I live my life—through writing, reading, exercising, exploring—makes up my rhythm of self-leadership by way of self-education, not because it sounds admirable, but because if I truly believe in what I say and do, I have to show it in action.
While not all of us are presidents, generals, or CEOs, we all lead in some way—as parents, teachers, lawyers. It’s an incredibly difficult job, and part of the reason why so many great men and women have failed in their line of duty. So whoever you are, whatever your role, all of us—and especially those under us—will benefit from learning the core tenets, principles, ideas, philosophies of leadership that, in the course of our busy lives, are often overlooked and under-appreciated.
Welcome hardship with open arms. I like to think of life as a series of obstacles to overcome in order to reach the end. This “end”, I can tell you, is a life that exemplifies toughness, courage, confidence, and hope. But to arrive at this point, I realise I must welcome hard things into my life, because hard things… are good for you. Of course, it’s absurd to welcome suffering, but that’s precisely what the philosopher Seneca meant when he said he pitied people who constantly avoid challenges: “You have passed through life without an opponent,” Seneca said. “No one can ever know what you are capable of—not even you.” You might believe in your own potential, but believe is not enough. Unless life puts an opponent in your way, you’ll never truly know the depths of your capabilities. I particularly resonate with what Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady and wife of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, said of her husband’s mental victory over polio, a virus which left him confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.“The thing that took most courage in his life was his meeting of polio, and I never heard him complain… He just accepted it as one of those things that was given to you as discipline in life… And with each victory, as everyone knows, you are stronger than you were before.” It’s only through hardship that we are made better. Get ready for it. Welcome it. Learn from it.
Keep your cool. Another U.S. president, Abraham Lincoln, when angry with a colleague, would engage in a practice known as “hot lettering.” He would write out, on a piece of paper, all his frustration with the person in question, signing off with the words “never sent and never signed.” Then, he would dispose of the letter. Once his emotions had subsided, he would proceed to resolve the matter in good spirit. When one of his colleagues was furious with a military general, Lincoln urged him to engage in a similar practice. “Now, what are you going to do about [this letter]?” Lincoln asked. “Why, send it of course,” his aide replied. “I wouldn’t,” Lincoln said. “Throw it in the waste-paper basket.” “But it took me two days to write!” “Yes, yes—and it did you ever so much good. You feel better now. That is all that is necessary.”
Get your hands dirty. There’s a story of Toyota founder Kiichiro Toyoda walking up to a technician experiencing problems with a machine, rolled up his sleeves, and without hesitation plunged both arms elbow-deep into the oil pan. Out came two handfuls of sludge, which he slammed onto the floor and said, “How can you expect to do your job without getting your hands dirty?”
The small things matter as much as the big things. In his memoir Coach Wooden and Me, NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar spoke about his first team meeting with UCLA head coach John Wooden. Wooden sat the entire team down and, instead of talking strategy, began a lecture on how to wear socks and shoes. This came entirely as a surprise to the players, many of them already elite high-school athletes and potentially future professionals. Was this some kind of joke? But Wooden was dead serious. He showed them how socks should fit smoothly over toes and heels, stretching out any wrinkles or flaps. He demonstrated how to lace up from the bottom eyelets with even tension, before closing the loop with a double-knot to prevent the laces from coming undone. His rationale was simple: wear your shoes well and the chances of winning the game will increase. A wrinkle in the sock, Wooden would go on to explain, could cause a blister. A blister could cause a limp. A limp could slow a player down. Slowness could lead to missed plays. Missed plays could cost a championship. The main point here was the attention to detail, the discipline, the respect for the fundamentals—that by giving our best to the simplest of task, we were setting ourselves up for success. It’s absurd to think the mechanics of footwear could indirectly win or lose us games, but as Wooden’s “pyramid of success” advocates, it’s the little details that are vital, the little things that make big things happen.
Lead with contextual intelligence. The poet John Keats once wrote that a man who wishes to achieve the great things of life must possess an abundance of negative capability—the ability to embrace uncertainty, mystery, and doubt without the anxious need to resolve or rationalise them. The success of an individual, he suggested, lies in their mental fortitude to entertain multiple, even contradictory, ideas at once. Given the world we’re living in today, it’s easy to be drowned out by the constant flow of information, news, and opinion. Issues are complex and multifaceted. Boundaries are unclear, with too many moving parts. And yet, we are compelled to transcend these challenges. Why is this important? Because our world is no longer characterised by calm waters, but by the ebb and flow of a raging river—complicated, ambiguous, paradoxical, and contradictory. To make sense of such circumstances, while not having all the answers, we must gather multiple viewpoints from multiple sources. We must acknowledge that the most powerful force determining our success is context. It’s everything. Operating a multi-billion-pound company versus a Boy Scouts group. Captaining a sports team versus raising a family. Leading a nation through war versus governing in peace. Every situation calls for a unique set of conditions—conditions that demand we draw from our reserves of experience and discernment. To begin with a one-size-fits-all framework is not only negligent but delusional. But those who ask—Where am I leading from? Who am I leading? In what space and time?—will go far.
Blend optimism with realism. Seeking universal principles of greatness for his book Good To Great, and wanting to understand how he survived those gruesome years as a POW, the author Jim Collins interviewed James Stockdale, an American pilot who suffered seven years of physical and psychological torture at Hỏa Lò Prison in North Vietnam. “I never lost faith in the end of the story,” Stockdale said, “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.” Collins then asked him, “Who didn’t make it out [of the prison camps]?” “Oh, that’s easy,” Stockdale replied, “The optimists. They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.” This is a very important lesson for anyone wanting to make a dent in the world, Stockdale said. “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
Accept every opportunity as training for something bigger ahead. Unless I was sick or bedridden, never in my career as an educator and business owner have I turned down a teaching or networking opportunity. In the course of building my business, I’ve come to realise that moments like these are golden opportunities to build experience, to improve, and to showcase what I’m capable of in front of decision-makers, investors, and potential business partners. And I know this well from my time as a rugby player, that the only way to get better at the sport wasn’t by sitting at home watching videos or talking about it, but by being out on the field, actually playing the game. I mean, how on earth are we suppose to become experts at our craft if we keep turning down the chances to get better at it? It reminds me of that irony about fresh graduates applying for entry-level jobs that require five years of experience—how can anyone gain “experience” if they’re never taken up the opportunity to do the work? And have we ever considered that the idea of compounding applies here, too? Over time, those pockets of experiences and incremental improvements add up to something that primes us for a life ahead. As the American biographer Steven Naifeh put it, all of our life experience is part of an “undefinable process of digestion” through which we build our lives—often unaware that we are being prepared for something much bigger ahead. Stop thinking if you should do it or not. Take up that opportunity right now.
Never look back. The photographer Yee Keat was once asked about his creative process. Was there ever a time you wished you had photographed a scene differently, or waited a little longer for the perfect moment? Have you ever regretted how you edited your pictures after it was published? “Of course the picture could have been better,” he replied, “but I just know it’s enough. Right there, right now, I tell myself: this is the best I can produce, that this is the most beautiful picture I can process at this very moment in time.” There will always be reasons to think something could have been done better—Oh, I should have signed my kids up for sports when they were younger. Oh, I’m not sure if this is the right job for me. Oh, I’m not sure if I like living here. But as the author Doris Kearns Goodwin once said, we shouldn’t “wear out the carpet walking up and down worrying whether [we] had done something correctly.” “We should never look back and ask, ‘Should I have done it? Oh! Should I have done it?’ No. The point is to know you made the best decision you could with what you had at the time, and that’s that. There’s no going back. For there is nothing worse than going back over a decision made, retracing the steps that led to it, and imagining what it would’ve been like if you took another turn. It can drive you crazy.”
Leave your problems at the door. No teenager should bear the weight of the stress you bring home. No toddler is going to understand the “bad day” you had at work. No newborn is going to empathise with your lack of sleep or me-time. That’s not their job. But, as Randal Stutman once said, “Your job as a leader is to make really fast transitions. Your job is to not carry the last conversation… and if that means you need to settle yourself and sit out in your car for a couple of minutes before you walk in the house so you can be a Dad, then that’s what you need to do. But your job is not to walk into that house and carry with you anything that came before.” If it’s not love, gratitude, patience, or humility you’re bringing—leave it at the door.
Never waste energy complaining about small things. As Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, “[if] they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice, you learn to say, ‘That’s all right,’ and drink it.” Conserve your strength and time, don’t waste it over trifles.
Enlarge your coaching tree. In sports, a “coaching tree” refers to the lineage of coaches and executives who have worked under a particular head coach and then gone on to achieve great success on their own. It’s a great way to quantify the impact of your influence by observing where your followers end up. How many of them are leading their teams to success? How many of them are mentoring other coaches? How many of them have achieved above and beyond what you have achieved? I think this is a great concept, and it fits well into every area beyond sports—business, education, parenting. I heard someone say the success of your parenting is seen when your children have their own children. How are our “coaching trees” fairing? Are we passing down the skills to the generation beneath us? Are they raising the ceiling of success? Or are they stuck at the status quo? Our job is to enlarge our coaching tree, to extent it far into the people around us.
Pursue wisdom by reading. I deeply admire those in the writing profession, not just because they craft beautiful, vivid stories, but because they have the ability to show me why they care so much. The author Haruki Murakami once said that writing is “a very uncool enterprise… hardly anything chic or stylish about it.” These writers could have spent their time eating good food, sleeping in, making love, keeping fit. Instead, they write. They take a topic and devote their entire lives to it. Reading is fun, fun enough that I spend at least an hour a day with my nose in a book. But more than that, I knew I was searching for something deeper: how to be successful, how to maximise myself, how to avoid mistakes, how to be a better parent, how to lead, how to truly live. And so, I thought, if I’m in pursuit of wisdom, it’s never a bad idea to seek it from the books, written by those we call the master communicators, the sufferers, the survivors. It’s never a bad idea to do what the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius advised two thousand years ago: “go straight to the seat of intelligence”—to those who’ve dedicated their lives to truth, who have shaped their inner world into words, who interweave humour with solemnity, hope with despair, order with chaos. In the end, I think it boils down to a choice: swipe down your smartphone… or plant yourself in a chair with a book. Honestly, I just don’t see any other way—you have to read. Not as a habit. Not as an occasional pastime. Not when a task demands it or when the mood strikes. You read as a way of life. A way to life. Now, if you’re not building wisdom through books—how are you doing it?
Win and lose in front of everybody. Recently, I had a conversation with some teammates about a particular player who, after spending his formative years developing as a rugby player and being given numerous opportunities to showcase his talent, decided to jump ship and play for another team. For his skills and talent, this player was considered a valuable asset to the squad. To be fair, the club was going through deep-seated management problems, and as a consequence, our competitive edge wore off—we lost almost every game in the league. Frustrated and disillusioned, he left for a place that could better meet his expectations. In amateur leagues, there are no contractual obligations to remain with a particular club. Players are free to play for whoever they wish. But this whole saga made me think about what it means to be loyal. At the end of Kobe Bryant’s basketball career, the Los Angeles Lakers management came to him and apologised. “We’re sorry,” they said. “We don’t have a team around you that can contend for a championship.” They offered to trade him to a stronger team. But Kobe turned it down. He considered the Lakers family, and he appreciated them standing by him through the years. “As a leader,” Kobe later said, “you have to be able to take the good with the bad. Just because the ship’s sinking doesn’t mean you swim to another ship. You don’t do that. If you can win championships in front of everybody, then you can miss the playoffs in front of everybody. You’ve got to be able to take both sides of it.” Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. We can’t claim loyalty until it’s been tested—for loyalty matters most when times are hard, when staying is better for the team than it is for you.
Be there at their lowest. That’s the job: to help people when they’re losing, to help them get unstuck, to progress. In other words, you must, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, be able to see that things are hopelessly impossible for them, yet be determined to make it otherwise.
You only own your values if you pay for it. Every time someone tells me how “lucrative” the children’s industry is, that is, how profitable educational services and products for kids can be, I wonder if they realise that Gosh! Kids operates around the creative arts, which is, perhaps one of, if not, the least lucrative of it all. There are certainly far easier and more profitable ways to make money than running photography, art, and overseas creative-culture experiences for children and their parents. Of course, this is still a business. We need to make money. And with a bigger pay cheque, could I afford more luxurious vacations, a bigger home, or a more expensive bag? Likely, yes. But when you’re not motivated solely by profit, you gain something more valuable than material wealth: clarity. Clarity about why you started in the first place. Given the world we live in, our young and old are being robbed of solitude and the ability to think, hijacked by a pervasive techno-culture engineered by certain billion-dollar conglomerates. Screens have replaced our innate desire to explore the world physically. Dinner table conversations have been replaced by the endless checking of phones. From the time we wake up until the time we sleep, many of us are trapped in a cycle of dopamine-driven habits. And the craziest thing is, we don’t even realise it! We started Gosh! Kids to offer families an alternative. A space to express themselves creatively, to imagine and observe, to slow down, and to reconnect with what matters most. If we were constantly bothered about the profit margin, perhaps we should’ve pursued something else. But we didn’t start Gosh! Kids to conform. We started it to speak up. To build what we believe is urgently needed, even if it’s not the most popular or profitable path. If your values don’t cost you something, are they really values? And if you refuse to take a leap of faith because you fear it will cost you, how successful are you really?
Same discipline throughout. The discipline required to run a company is the same discipline required to raise a child. The discipline to maintain your health is the same discipline needed to manage your finances. There’s no one or the other. Life demands that we show up with grit, focus, and presence across the board. It’s not always easy, for some things come more naturally to us than others. But it would be a shame if we do not try. It would be a shame to crush it at work, only to come home and find your child no longer confides in you. It would be a shame to build an empire, only to have no one left at the dinner table. It would be a shame to wake up one day financially free, yet emotionally bankrupt. Again, how successful are we really if we have the freedom to spend our money, but not the freedom to spend our time with the people we love?
Why. In the same way, ask yourselves the fundamental question: Why are we doing what we’re doing?
Aim for a coherent life. One of the questions I get far too many times is, how’s it like working with your wife? I usually reply, “It’s a privilege, even more so an honour.” And I don’t say this patronisingly. One of my biggest fears of working together was it would blow up our marriage and lives, but looking at how things have turned out, it’s been going pretty well. We’re happily married, our kid is growing up in our presence, and we’re thinking of expanding the family. Actually, it’s been great for us. This is not to say there weren’t moments of disagreement or tension, which there were aplenty of, but by pursuing a career alongside someone I trust and respect, we’ve learned a whole lot about each other than just from living together. In our line of work, we invest a lot of time reflecting on our interactions with a wide array of children, parents and educators in public and private, religious and non-religious settings. This gives us a fairly big and accurate picture of the current state of education and family culture, which then influences the way we build our own family, the way we parent our child, the way we build Gosh! Kids. We can’t help but unite in purpose and meaning. We travel for business and pleasure, together. We read and talk about books and creativity, together. We journey with the same group of friends, together. We pretty much do all the important things as a family. Of course, there were times when it was challenging to reconcile our subtle differences, and close ones often advise against working together. But it’s also in my experience that when your values align across life’s domains—work, family, purpose—everything gets stronger. It’s that when they move in unison rather than individually prying for your attention, you win more than you lose. So perhaps this is the kind of life we should be gunning for: a life where your work, your relationships, your values, faith, passion can move in harmony. Where in your life can you create that kind of coherence? What are the areas that need more support, that needs to be released?
Say no to remain focused. Jony Ive, Apple’s chief designer who designed the Macbook, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Airpods, once shared how Steve Jobs was always asking him what he was focused on and specifically, “How many things have you said no to?” By asking Ive that question, Jobs was making a statement: Knowing what not to do is as important as knowing what to do. It is but a sign of clarity, that every no! you say frees up the space for you to say hell yes! to what matters most. It means remaining in your purpose as a parent by rejecting the lesser things that take precious time away from your family. It means focusing on the one flagship product that brings in revenue while recognising the others are just fluff. When the author Ryan Holiday became a dad, his friend gave him a sound piece of advice: “Work, family, scene—pick two.” When there are too many things on your plate, the quality of your focus dilutes, which the actor Matthew McConaughey came to realise, “I was making B’s in five things. I want to make A’s in three.” Are we guarding our focus as the primary driver for great work and success, or are we unconsciously sacrificing it for some unimportant, urgent matter?
Take time to rest and recharge. Time and time again, I’ve had moments in my life as an athlete that, despite the warning signs telling me to stop, I choose to push through. I ended up injuring myself. A lot of it, I’ve come to realise, came from a place of ego and impatience—foolishly thinking that if I don’t give my hundred percent now, I was going lose out. But the irony was, because of the injuries, I had set myself further back from where I started! This is such an important reminder for those who find themselves constantly on the charge: Rest. Stop. More doesn’t always mean better. Don’t sacrifice sleep or nutrition for that extra hour of effort, because it doesn’t pay back in proportion. My physiotherapist use to say rest is not an obstacle to growth—it’s part of it. Rest improves performance. It primes the mind and body for higher output by building on the progress we’ve already made, progress that can only be preserved by the limits we set for ourselves. It pays to acknowledge we don’t get to where we want to overnight, but by patient endurance, keeping our ego in check and by progressively doing the work each day. Remember, you’re doing no one good if you’re too exhausted to function, mentally or physically.
The final one: Handle hard better. Don’t wait for things to get better. Head coach of the Duke women’s basketball team, Kara Lawson, during a practice session, noticed a freshman struggling to keep up, gritting her teeth, waiting for things to get better. “It doesn’t get easier,” she later said, and instead of hoping for things to settle down, you grow into “someone who handles hard better.” We mould those we lead—our staff, our family, the public—into someone who can “handle hard well, not someone who’s waiting for the easy,” because “any meaningful pursuit in life, it goes to the people who handle hard well. Those are the people that get the stuff they want.”
