But now that I’m a dad, I understand that transformational feeling.  

But there is still one big problem with the message:  parents are blasting this heart-felt declaration to everyone except the ONE audience that needs to hear it the most: their own kids.

I believe that powerful feelings of responsibility, trust and love are unleashed if once in a while you can  earnestly tell your child:  “I really want to thank you, because you make me a better person.” 

The few times I’ve said this to my kids they’ve been surprised.  So I’ve then explained how their observational insights often amaze me, and how much I treasure these moments of reflection.

I think we parents have an obligation to close the gaps that sometimes develop between us and our children.  And this message of acknowledgement should be an important message to preface conversations about ourselves and our family.   There is only one culture that I think truly matters, and that is the culture of my nuclear family. It requires constant nurturing.  It’s alive and influenced by each of my family members. Right now, my wife and I have the most influence in our family culture, but this naturally should become more balanced over time, if we want to keep it real.

Oh, I think there is one other prerequisite to everything I’ve said here.  You have to have a relationship of deep respect with your spouse.  If you don’t have that, your children are likely to be unsettled by your conflicts and you’ve probably weaponized them in your years of competition to have them be more emotionally attached to you than your spouse, which has also made you emotionally manipulative… but I digress…

I have to caveat all of these ideas with humility - my children aren’t even teenagers yet. How will I reflect on this essay in a few years as my family navigates the stormy seas of adolescence?

In spite of much talk about empowerment, kids really don’t have much power, and they know it. They have no voting rights, they're not allowed into many places, they are patronized in conversation on a daily basis, they’re told that they are cute or darling even when they hate being either, and generally have almost no control of how their time is spent.  They didn’t choose their parents, their country or their religion.  They are told to listen to teachers and relatives, but these people often make no sense. Of all the people in the world that most pre-teen kids, or at least my pre-teen kids, would most like to have a conversation with and just do stuff with, it is their parents.

I try to remind my children to speak up when they see lousy behavior from me or my wife. Truth is, they see lousy behavior more often than I’d like to admit.  But if we don't ask our kids to critically reflect on our mediocre moments and call it out, they may actually think those lousy behaviors are OK.

I believe that thanking your children provides a profound acknowledgement that they can understand.  It has the potential to empower your children to become confident and responsible of how they have an impact on your growth. 

My kids are small, but I know they feel big when I tell them with full honesty, "I love you and thank you for making me a better person."

Here‘s a quick recap of what I’ve been up to since my last weekly newsletter to you,  about a month ago...

• I completed my third (and hopefully last) Grand Tour de Taipei 145km bike race. 

• I finished reading Trust, by Hernando Diaz (7.5/10)

• I published an essay, Why do I Preach the Glory of Risk?, which I wrote for the Write of Passage (WoP) writing course

• I started alternating my almost-daily runs between sprints and ‘zone 2’ pacing

• I made three trips to Brisbane to progress a transaction

• I published my semi-annual list of 12 Favorite Problems, also a Write of Passage assignment

• I had lunch with my mother in law (“mum”) in Singapore, and was asked some probing questions

• I met an Uber driver in Taipei really into Rammstein and the Ukraine war. We let our disagreement about Ukraine get lost in translation of my lousy Chinese...

• I got my kids back into a daily piano-practice and fighting routine

• I structured a term sheet for an energy company looking to raise $20m in secured convertible notes

• I wrote a memo about bilateral investment treaties (“BIT”), litigation funding, creeping expropriation, and how the International Court for Settlements and Disputes (“ICSID”) in Washington D.C. can enforce on the offshore assets of States gone rogue. In an era of deglobalization and resource nationalism, this might just become an exciting new asset class.

• I was contacted by a Bloomberg journalist for comments on offshore USD China credits, offered some juicy and insightful soundbites to the delight of the journalist, only to then realize that she had somehow confused me for the Chief Investment Officer of a hedge fund in Singapore.

So, my mother in law,  "mum".  We were at the Singapore Tanglin club for lunch, coincidentally sitting next to a gaggle of my biological mami’s friends, and the gentle volley of questions began.  I thought I was just partaking in a no-one’s-keeping-score chit-chat before almost getting whacked by a cross-court zinger with top-spin.  Mum reminisced that up until the moment she first met me at a lunch with my parents she had no idea her daughter had been dating me.  I played along with that fascinating rendition of history until she then said, almost in a whisper, and rapidly while going for a last bite of chicken-rice,   “Sowhenyoufirstmetmydaughter, wereyoulikeohWOWshe’s so amazing, was it like love at first sight?”  I should have immediately exclaimed YES and for good measure recounted how upon the radiance of this beauty - in fact, a mirror image of her younger self - I inexplicably tripped and then slammed onto a lamp-post (not true, I was actually sitting down, right next to her, on an airplane when we first met), but for some dumb reason I said something idiotic like "mum, it wasn’t quite like that - I mean, I was really impressed - but at the time she was going out with someone else."  “Oh but that relationship was nothing serious at all, he wasn’t really a boyfriend or anything like that” my mum responded.  Hmm, anyway, that pointless ex-boyfriend resurrection allowed me to salvage it with a true anecdote that I think paid for most of my lunch.  Mum, I said, you’re daughter has often asked me what I would do without her, and I’ve always answered her emphatically with the exact same words: “I would shrrrivel up...  and die!”  Big smile on mum’s face.  Time for dessert.  Next.  She’s not happy that we live in Taipei.  It’s not just because China will attack, and it's like Singapore in the 1960s.  Dirty.  What about the earthquakes, and where do your kids think they’re from?  Nothing I say, short of a firm relocation commitment, will really resolve this angst, so I just tried to find a way to emphasize all the reasons why I think Taiwan is so great for my kids.  But where will you go if there’s war, America or Singapore?  Of course, I fly SQ lah.. Good good.  We shared dessert.

Quick review of Trust, by Hernando Diaz.  Look, I liked,  did not love.  7.5/10 - airport readable.  Loved learning about 1920s stock market shenanigans.  Brilliant twists of a story told from many perspectives.  The hidden power of the female protagonist was thrilling, though far fetched.  The portrayal of the billionaire - his insecurities, his emotional frailty, his propensity to start believing his own made up narratives - super believable, I've seen that with me-own-eyes in a few of the UHNW-types I've had to endure. The transformation of  Ida, from fawning over Billionaire Benjamin Rask to seeing the cockroach side of him - very credible.  A few favorite quotes:

Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail—we are ruined by forces beyond our control. During the last week of October 1929, it took most speculators—from the high-powered financier in downtown Manhattan to the amateur housewife trading at the San Francisco Stock Exchange—a matter of days to shift from the agents of their success, with nothing to thank but their own acumen and relentless will, to the victims of a profoundly flawed and maybe even corrupt system, which was the sole responsible for their demise. A dip in the indexes, an epidemic of fear, a selling frenzy driven by pessimism, a widespread inability to respond to margin calls . . . Whatever caused the slump that, in turn, became a panic, one thing was clear—none of those who had helped to inflate the bubble felt responsible for its bursting. They were the blameless casualties of a disaster of almost natural proportions.

Telephone lines had yet to reach the Institute, radio signals were too weak in that deep valley surrounded by tall mountains, and the relay system he had designed to transmit information from New York and London to Bad Pfäfers was much too slow. The developments of the market reached him only as “news,” which is how the press refers to decisions made by other people in the recent past.

“The orchestra played the kind of music where you know what’s coming next, where you can listen ahead.” In 1929, everyone heard D F ♯ E A and, listening ahead, thought A E F ♯ D. But when I heard D F ♯ E A, the response ringing in my mind was G C B ♭ D. In ’29 no bells were knelling in my mind. But looking back, this seems like an accurate allegory of what I perceived + thought. My wager against the mkt. was a fugue that would read backwards and upside down. Where every voice would result from vertical + horizontal mirroring of orig. motif. A radical version of Musik. Opfer.

But, back to mum's question, of where to live next.  Look, I've lived in places where the energy is good, where the energy is bad, and where the energy has quickly gone from good to bad.  Conclusion: nothing beats living in a place with good energy.  I love big cities.  So, if at all possible, I hope I can always have the choice to live in a big city with good energy.  At this time, Taipei is fully in the middle of that 'big city' + 'good energy' venn diagram.

Hope you've been well,

Stefan

You go for risk in the hope of tasting glory. But what do I mean by glory?  I mean the joy. The life.  The deliciousness of propelling yourself far.  Far unto unexpected new worlds.  

Embarking in risk is the ultimate luxury.  Ironically, I suspect the sadness of many rich people stems from their aversion to risk.  But they’re not the only ones.  We’re surrounded by naysayers reflexively conditioned to chant “don’t-do-that.” These people are destructively wrong.  Wrong to themselves, super-wrong to their kids, crushingly bad to their friends.  

But who am I to be peddling the virtues of risk-taking, pretending to be some sort of expert in this commodity?  I’ve been such a dumb-lucky survivor.  Just look at my journey: polite observers might call it a bloody miracle; cynically astute critics may quip it’s more like a dark tragi-comedy.

Truth is, the cumulative trauma from risks gone-bad has at many periods in my life really crushed my soul. If I were to write an “About Risk” letter to my younger self, this is what I’d say:

In our life we face a trinity of risks: those that might kill you (Killer Risk), those that might kill your soul (Trauma Risk), versus others that will bring you joy (Glory Risk).  You take risk because you must seek glory.  

A bit more on this trinity of risks:

Glory Risk - Reason for living.  Chasing grapefruits. Joy, deep satisfaction, hunger for new.  It’s about striving for things that are challenging, for the hope of big personal wins.  These challenges could be relatively superficial, or complex.  For example, I’m now trying (mostly failing) to develop a writing habit for the personal glory I believe will come from it, but I prevent myself from publishing and taking more writing risks for fear of making a fool of myself (trauma)

Trauma Risk - will kill your soul, if you allow it.  I wish I’d learned as a 10-year-old that failure is the natural waste-product of trying.  Obviously, try to make less waste.  Avoid the same mistakes.  But dwell as little as possible on how you screwed up and what others think of you.  There is no minimum mourning period for brooding over your failures.  The shorter the better.  This is not to say you should be flippant about your failures.  By all means, be contrite, reflect on it, but don’t dwell!  Truth is, nobody dwells on your foolish blunders more than you do.  But even today, I struggle to convince myself of this last point.  These are the Trauma Risks - just because they don’t kill you physically, doesn’t mean they can’t destroy you spiritually, if you let them…

Killer Risks - yeah these might kill you, or someone else.  Obviously, avoid death.  The funny thing about these killer risks - at least for me - is that although I’ll occasionally shudder at the stupid things that almost killed me, I’m not traumatized by these experiences, and I don’t dwell on them.  Killer Risks might kill you physically, but they’re unlikely to do what Trauma Risks do, which is to kill your spirit.  Many people pursue Killer Risks to experience Glory Risk, which I think is selfish to your loved ones and short-sighted if in life you’re going for the long game. I think we should try to pursue Glory Risks with low Killer Risk.

Examples of my Killer Risks (stupid stuff that was unnecessary and I fortunately survived):

Scene 1: Careening down gravel timber roads on my bicycle at over 60 km/hr in the mountainous  jungles somewhere between ChiangRai and Vientiane. Constant rain.  A pre googlian-era cycle journey with disintegrating paper-map.  Lost, dehydrated, with a broken spoke, no idea where I’d sleep: temples, police stations and rudimentary hospital set-ups.  The journey, conceptually OK, the downhill speeds: stupid.

Scene 2: Racing in the rain on a 150cc scooter after a drunken game of tennis with the doctors. Chaotic Saigon streets. In the flash of a second, wiping out and sliding across the wet asphalt, all the way onto the other side of the road.  Amazing, no broken bones, not run over.  Just lots of blood from surface scrapes. Stupid.

Scene 3: Convincing the pilot of a Merpati Fokker-27 Friendship traversing Kalimantan to give me the controls and take my seat back with the passengers, only to get lost due to my fear of flying straight through dark clouds.  Seeing pilots dripping in sweat is scary.  Crashing in Kalimantan would definitely have been a big stupid killer risk. 

Scene 4: Various drunken episodes that surprisingly weren’t on wheels or wings, but still: stupid.

Examples of my Traumatic Risk (it’s still not easy to write about these. I’d much rather recount 10 more Killer Risks):

Scene 1: In 2018 I faced a perfect storm of investment disasters.  Probably half of my portfolio was underwater.  I managed to compound, across a portfolio in multiple dodgy jurisdictions from Kurdistan to West Perth, pretty much every investment mistake imaginable.  My exit from the fund was surprisingly civil, perhaps because of the magical diversity of loss situations I was leaving to be explained to shocked investors in the context of systems and risk control.

Scene 2: Earlier in my career I was the advisor to a large conglomerate in the sale of their fibre-optic business to private equity funds.  I was perpetually underslept the whole time I worked at this investment bank.  My only social life came from the 5 jobless people hanging out in my apartment. I remember pitching the fibre-optic business to one of the biggest global PE funds and completely bungling up the sales process.

Scene 3: I was in the undergraduate honors program at my university, a select group of about 30 of us, studying together for four years.  But I graduated without honors because my thesis paper was absolute crap.  I got completely lost and went into a deep cave for all the writing and research, for some reason neglecting all the support available to me. It was hugely embarrassing.  I graduated without honors and became a recluse from my honors classmates.

Scene 4: In 5th Grade I became class president of about 150 fifth graders in my school in Mexico City.  This entailed making posters, participating in a debate and delivering a campaign speech.  I won by a landslide, but within about 8 weeks found myself being reprimanded by a teacher (in the middle of the soccer field) and a few disgruntled students.  Turns out I was supposed to be coordinating bake sales.  I actually had nightmares about this failure and never mentioned it to my parents.

Recalling my Risk Traumas was scary to write, but now feels a combination of ridiculous and cathartic.  What a shame I let them eat-away at me for so long.  The experiences definitely dampened my confidence, risk-taking spirit and overall mojo (some may rejoice).  

From a social economic perspective, I wonder if avoided risk-taking from fear of Trauma does more damage to potential GDP growth than Killer-Risks.  Social productivity would be higher if we were all better trained to be more astute yet fearless risk-takers.  For some unfortunate reason we delude ourselves into thinking that most risks entail far worse outcomes than is really the case.

So why have I written this essay?  For myself, and for my family.  

I want my family  to see me embarking on new ventures and learning new things;  failing in some, succeeding in others.  I occasionally get stressed wondering if the consulting career path I’ve chosen is too risky. I know that I need to be more strategic and astute in my risk taking.  

For my daughters, I’d like to help them learn to identify the traps of Risk Trauma. I want them to become aware of our mind’s tendency to over-amplify our failures, to pursue the art of brushing off failures, and to develop an enthusiasm for taking bigger bolder risks.  Glory Risks.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.  The credit belongs to the [one] who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; … who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if [failing], at least fails while daring greatly.

Theodore Roosevelt

Thank you for suggestions and feedback from Anna KN, Abhi K, Derek W, Chris W, Ann H.

I was traveling for a whole month away from my family. Mostly in Australia.  Finally made it back to Taipei last week.  And it’s so great to be back.

Great to be spending time with my wife and kids, eating delicious home-cooked meals, putting my daughters to bed, cycling through drizzling rain, returning to my serviced-office.

The day after I returned to Taipei, I was visited by my friend Kelley, who I actually met in Taipei 31 years ago, and was now visiting from Hong Kong with her daughter.  We enjoyed some famous beef noodles, Taiwan style ice milk-tea, and cycled around the city.  She remarked on the magic of Taipei’s small alleys; the fun of peering into ramshackle apartments to see hanging laundry, and the relaxed pace of this city.  I agreed.  Taipei does often feel like a sleepy city of 10 million, and that’s meant as a compliment.

Spending a month in Australia away from family was way too long, but my spirits were kept up by great colleagues and the exciting challenge of helping to unlock a complicated corporate situation. 

I was mostly in Perth, where I stayed at the Ocean Beach Hotel (OBH), in the beach-side suburb of Cottesloe.  The five story and decidedly 2-star OBH is painted a faded egg-yellow that only for a brief sunset moment once-a-day glows resplendent.  The single elevator rattles and screeches as it moves up or down.  The sole person at the front desk, usually Cornelius, acknowledges with a smile that it should be replaced, but at least gets serviced once a month.  

My room windows have a little mechanical crank that I turn just enough to let in the sea-weed infused breeze and the sound of waves breaking onto the beach across the street. My recipe for blissful sleep.  The rooms are kept clean by a cheerful crew of 3 early morning Filipinas. If they haven’t woken you up with their chatter as they march up and down the hallway, they’ll do so as they barge into your room (no chains or bolt-locks on these hollow planks) to tell you (regardless of your condition) they’ll just change the towels. 

I’m usually up at 6 and go barefoot to the beach at around 6:50, the time of sun-rise. Early mornings are chilly, at around 9C (48F), and the sand is colder.  The soles of my feet get numb as I do my 20 minute barefoot jog up and down the beach. This is the conditioning I need to then go plunging into the waves, joining a small tribe of regulars.  About 20 meters into the water there’s usually a thick mess of not-yet washed-up seaweed.  On days when the surf is rough, I get tangled up in it and half of it seems to somehow get into my fluorescent-green swim shorts.  One person told me sharks like to lurk in it.  Another that they’re attracted to contrasting colors.  I make it through the other side of this vegetable muck and do a few dolphin-dives into the crystal clear sea, coming out to spray saltwater out of my mouth like a 5-year old - sparks of joy.  I like the sting of the sea in my eyes and imagine the good stuff that comes from getting it into my sinuses.

My month in Australia allowed me to read-up (mostly in the Australian Financial Review) on a few of the current national obsessions.  In [brackets] I’ve written my take on each of these issues.

• Skyrocketing home rentals [no politicians actually care.  The easy fix is to fast-track the re-permitting of commercial real estate into residential.  This isn’t even being debated]

• Runaway inflation. [Australian Central Bank deserves a lot of blame. They’re stuck protecting the banking oligopoly of which they seem to be a Panamanian subsidiary]

• Deep worries about a slowdown in China. [a fully merited concern.  Just as Australia was the best way to invest in a rising China for the last 30 years, Australia may offer the same opportunity if you want to place bets on a slowing China]

• Paranoia about PRC political, economic and military encroachment. [Australia should be more worried about the social and political fragility of some of its pacific neighbors, and about global warming.  Australia’s foreign policy seems to be excessively dictated by the U.S.]

• High vacancies in the commercial office building sector (though no one dares call it ‘distress’)  [this is not looking good, and banks are probably becoming very good at ‘extend and pretend’]

• The Australian dollar getting smashed [Australian’s can thank their Central Bank for this]

• The Prime Minister losing support on a referendum to grant aboriginal Australians extraordinary political representation as acknowledgement of systematic mistreatment and neglect [it’s clear that something radical needs to be done to help, but I don’t know enough about this referendum]

I’d like to be writing at least one essay a week, but for now I’m just trying to crawl, with at least this - a weekly newsletter.  Here’s to week #1.

Best wishes,

Stefan

Ouch. It's been a year. Here's an overdue update, with a renewed commitment to share more of my thoughts once-a-week :)

Where am I?

Still in Taipei with the family, and thankful for it.

Haven’t flown since landing here in Feb 2020 'for a few weeks' to avoid school closures in Hong Kong. I know the world has changed a lot post covid, but HK is one of those places that has changed the most. I feel that HK’s rebellious spunk has been quashed; there’s no longer any tolerance for living on ‘borrowed time in a borrowed place’ (a phrase beautifully immortalized by writer Richard Hughes). What is it that's no longer tolerated? Ambiguous loyalties, yearnings for exceptionalism and unfiltered attitude.

I get too much credit for the timing of my move to Taiwan; it’s mostly luck. Luck that we came here the day that we did (borders closed a few days later), luck that Taiwan has turned out to be one of the best places to be during Covid (kids schooling was almost uninterrupted), and luck that Taiwan has welcomed my family to live here.

5 Things I've Been Doing:

Reading more books: I’ve read more books in the last 2 years than I read in 10 years prior to moving here. The secret has been no 12-hour-a-day job, less time reading news and joining my father’s Singapore-based book club. I’m currently ⅔ through a masterpiece of writing and analysis: the Power Broker by Robert Caro.

Improving my Chinese: My biggest impediment is that I’m not socializing enough in Chinese, mostly due to lack of time. So I’ve been focusing a lot on my reading skills. Two important developments have been to switch off my Chinese to English dictionary so that explanations are now all in Chinese, and to prohibit myself from daily reading of FT and Bloomberg. I now mostly read a Taiwanese news provider called CNA.

Getting into better shape: This October I’ll be competing in my 4th half-IronMan distance triathlon. My biggest barrier to improving my time has been my terrible running speed. The last few months I’ve been focusing on my running and I can now easily run a 5k at a pace of around 5:15/km, and I’m hoping to bring this to under a 5-minute pace for a 10 kilometer distance. I’ll be running a 10k race in October and a 5k relay race this August.

Working with energy and mining companies: My professional transition since moving to Taipei has been more haphazard than methodical. I’m lucky it’s worked out, but I need to get more methodical. I’ve principally been helping Australian natural gas companies. I worked extensively with one company in the state of Victoria seeking to develop Australia’s largest underground natural gas storage reservoir. This is a fantastic project to assist Australia’s transition from coal to renewable power sources. The storage reservoir acts as a massive battery that can allow natural gas fired peaking stations to be quickly activated when renewable sources are not able to meet demand. I’m also on the Board of a Perth-based company seeking to develop a sizable offshore gas and liquids deposit.

Spending a lot of time with my kids: The most amazing thing of the last 2+ years has been the amount of time I’ve been able to spend with my kids. I loved my job in Hong Kong and never begrudged the consistent 12 hour work-days, but having time to spend with my kids every afternoon has been priceless. 

4 Projects I'm Considering:

Publish credit stories on LinkedIn: I continue to follow credit markets and have discussions with friends still active in the space, but I’m not contributing. I’d like to change that by writing credit related pieces weekly on LInkedIn. Those links will also appear on this weekly newsletter, although the focus of this newsletter is more personal. Stories that I’m particularly interested in at the moment are the impact of China’s property slowdown on USD credit markets, the situation in Sri Lanka and Indonesian credits.

Taiwan Energy Strategy Projects: There are two projects that I think Taiwan should be seriously considering: 1) an underground natural gas storage reservoir to provide greater energy security and to complement its planned transition to greater use of renewable sources. Taiwan at the moment really lacks storage reserves; any disruption to supplies could be devastating for the island. 2) Direct High Voltage connectivity with Japan. Direct High Voltage power cables are expensive, but the technology is now proven. Such a cable linking Taiwan to Japan would be expensive (US$2bn?) but is technically feasible. The idea is for Taiwan to purchase nuclear power from Japan and at the same stroke solidify its economic connectivity to Japan. In exchange Taiwan may be able to also export any future excess renewable energy back to Japan. Depending on how the cable is routed, the cable could be beneficial to smaller Japanese islands that are close to Taiwan.

Taiwan Creative and Research Industries Promotion: Taiwan already has a few initiatives to attract talent from abroad, but these are mostly focused on attracting individuals, rather than companies. Now that Hong Kong and Singapore are seemingly becoming more restrictive to foreign residents, I believe there’s an opportunity for Taiwan to promote itself as a wonderful and affordable destination for companies involved in research and creativity. Initially I think Taiwan should focus on the research side of fund management (allowing trade execution and the fund structures to remain in HK and SG), media, advertising and analytics. I hope to be able to work with Taiwan’s National Development Council to develop a plan and address some of the barriers (which I believe mostly involve permitting bureaucracy and ambiguity). I’m also not entirely sure how I can monetize this project, but there should be a way…

Taiwan Biking Initiative: Taiwan, and specifically Taipei, has the potential to become Asia’s capital of family-friendly cycling mobility. There’s no reason why in 10 years people could not start to associate Taipei with bicycles the same way in which the world today thinks of Amsterdam. Taipei is mostly flat, not too spread out, has plenty of road space (though almost none of it is currently allocated to safe bike commuting), and boasts 2 of the world’s largest biking companies. Taiwan derives almost no value-add from the car industry, although its urban planning bends over backwards for the car and does relatively little for the bicycle. I’d like to work on projects to convert one lane of a few of Taipei’s larger roads to dedicated (segregated) bicycle lanes to facilitate safe commuting. I’d also like to see two of Taipei’s main arteries adopt a Sunday ‘car-free’ strategy to facilitate urban family riding across the city.

I look forward to connecting with you again next week, with what will hopefully be a smaller note with a few more focused thoughts I’m exploring and keen to share.

Have a great week,

We’re all chameleons, but most of us don’t realize it.  Bilinguals know it; so do most people that live with an alter ego, a pseudonym or a stage name.  

What is this inner chameleon? It’s simply that potential we all have to express ourselves with a large variety of permutations, just as a chameleon can alter its appearance depending on mood.  Many of the most accomplished artists, entrepreneurs and scientists are people that have the audacity to periodically experiment with something new and different.

We cheat ourselves and the world loses out when our inner chameleons are suppressed.  Think of the inspiration Farrokh Bulsara has brought to millions of people through his alter ego, Freddy Mercury, and what a loss it would be if he had not found a way to unleash his inner performer.

But because it may be hard to relate to famous celebrities, I think it’s important to stress how there’s already a bit of chameleon in all of us, and it’s particularly evident in bilingual people.

My friend and colleague Hugo is a great example. He’s a bilingual French and Spanish speaker who uses English as his language of business and investment memos.  In English he is a deeply skeptical credit analyst, perpetually taking a glass-half-empty view of how a transaction may perform.  Colleagues in the office, especially those trying to get a deal approved, find him frustrating and boring; grudgingly admitting (with a curse) there might be some basis to his paranoias.  But in our Spanish conversations, he is a non-stop stream of jokes.  In Spanish, Mr. Can’t-Take-That-Risk talks to me about the joys of vacationing with his 3 young kids in Southern Yucatan, going from town to town eating street food.  His face in Spanish comes alive with silly jovial features that are just nowhere to be found when he’s in English mode.

I became aware of my inner chameleon in my early 20s during a journey with my girlfriend to Peru and Bolivia.  She had only known my English-speaking self and was finding it astonishing to suddenly hear me speaking a lot in Spanish, repeatedly telling me that I seemed like a different person.

But nearly 30 years on I’ve become a little frustrated, having this awareness of the chameleon potential and not exploiting it.  Possessing two or three language modes is no better than one if you can’t muster the courage or organization to regularly get on a ‘stage’ to perform - whether that performance be publishing, launching business ventures, or a new community event.

Why is it so difficult to perform?  Besides disorganization, I think it’s because we’re conditioned to conform and to be much more paranoid by the thought of individual failure than group failure.  Society hates chameleons, but we all have chameleon potential. Culture is a psychopathic boss that demands loyalty over truth. 

Why do I think it’s so important to constantly push ourselves onto a new stage? Simply because it may turn out to bring you joy, and isn’t the potential to improve joy always worth exploring?

I signed up for Write of Passage to force myself onto a stage that requires me to bring out a creative side of me that I know is badly malnourished, but necessary for my overall growth.  Although I have a number of interests, I have no idea of where the mysterious river of writing will take me.

There’s one other thing I’ve come to realize is critical to unleashing my inner chameleon:  community.  Immersion in a community that embraces funkiness is key.

Whereas up until 20 years ago finding that community necessitated physical immersion in a particular place (probably a big city), today the internet is the much larger, much more accessible, and possibly safer place to congregate (and just as there are rules for how to survive in New York, there are rules for how to survive on Twitter).

I’ve come to realize that we each have an obligation to nurture our inner chameleon, and this happens when we force ourselves to be public creators and immerse ourselves in communities that encourage and embrace funkiness, because a little crazy can be deeply rewarding.

Inspired by the ‘12 Favorite Problems’ habit developed by physicist, writer and teacher Richard P Feynman, the Write of Passage online writing course at the beginning of every cohort likewise asks all participants to think of their current 12 Favorite Problems. For more on Richard Feynman’s 12 Problems habit, here is a good summary which I probably should have read before having drafted my own list, below.

My 'Me' Questions

1. Will I find a way to balance the trinity of personal time with family time and making-money time?

2. What can I do to integrate the personal time with the making-money time? Can writing get me closer to this paradigm?

3. How can I be more accountable and responsive to my far-away friends? 

4. What can I do to further optimize my strength, endurance and flexibility?

5. How can I reconcile my desire for clean-eating with my obsession to discover the next best croissant?

My Family Questions

1. What should I do to better provide each of my 3 children with fair and meaningful time with me?

2. What more can I do to instill in my children a life-long passion for creative production and learning?

3. What can I do to help my brother break out of his long funk?

4. What can I do to meaningfully engage with my parents?

My World Questions

1. The world seems to be pivoting towards narrow loyalties of nationalism, culturalism and choosing sides. How will this impact my children?

2. What can I do to improve my engagement with the local community?

3. What more can I do to help the environment and reduce pollution?

One of my friends today sent me a link to a New York Times editorial titled “Reversing Gears”: China Increasingly Rejects English, and the World.  

The editorial draws on anecdotes (it is the NYT afterall) to conclude that China’s leadership is discouraging its best and brightest from joining the international language of cultural, scientific and financial exchange: English.  

Unfortunately, I don’t doubt the conclusions of the article.  However, although state mandated barriers to education are never a good thing, I must confess that part of me is sympathetic to the de-emphasis on bilingualism, unless it can realistically be attained without sacrificing other learning experiences.

Being multilingual can be an incredible accelerator to understanding different ways of thinking, seeing and laughing; but I don’t think it’s the only road to getting there.  And frankly, very few people who study a new language ever get anywhere close to proficient (let alone fluent), and one has to ask if the cumulative hours spent memorizing words and syntax could actually have been used towards a much more enriching endeavor.  For most people, the answer must be Yes.

China is not the only country that has chosen to de-emphasize bilingualism; many others have done so.  My friend Jeff today pointed out to me that the Philippines did the same thing after the Americans left, in what he nicely described as “misplaced nationalism.”

That’s the thing, many countries that stop teaching a foreign language probably do it for the same wrong reason - misplaced nationalism - as opposed to for good practical reasons: to allocate more time for science, math, humanities… and physical education!

The other reason it may make sense for China to de-emphasize bilingualism is that, surprisingly, China is still struggling to provide most of its population with a high school degree.  According to Stanford professor Scott Rozelle, only about 30% of China’s population today has a high school degree, compared to over 80% in most OECD countries. For more fascinating insights from Dr. Rozelle on education in China, I recommend this youtube video starting at around minute 18.

Notwithstanding my defense of monolingualism, not all languages are equal.  English is the global language superpower. You join the English speaking tribe with whatever accent and grammar you may have, to absorb and influence a vibrant global discourse controlled by no-one.  While the most powerful native English speaking countries contribute less than 20% of global GDP (sources A, B) and less than 20% of the world speaks English, about 60% of all content on the internet is in English (source). It’s pretty understandable why parents want their kids to learn English.

Finally, and since this essay is happy with NY Times anecdotal conclusions of how the world works, I think bilingualism is terrible for boys.  Anecdotally, girls seem to not only be faster and better at speaking their own native language, but also second and third languages.  Here’s my money-anecdote: my 8 year-old daughter today spent the day with a friend that has a 10 year-old older sister and a 7 year-old younger brother.  The two sisters speak with each other exclusively in English, even though no one else in the family speaks English and the school they go to with my daughter is all in Chinese.  They just watch TV and read in English, and they’re fluent! They even fight with each other in English!  And here’s an article to back up this anecdote.  The outperformance of girls vs boys is not limited to language, there’s a boy scholastic crisis happening around the world, according to thisauthor on TedX, whose social ramifications are being ignored.  Yet another example of how the current educational system almost everywhere is in need of complete reinvention… a topic for a future essay… 

I thought I’d write a brief essay of why I write, but I came to the realization that what I should really be exploring is all the reasons that I don’t write.

As much as I’d like to proclaim myself a writer, nothing in my track record so far can substantiate this claim. But if deep inside I have this voice shouting at me telling me that writing is something I must do to get meaning and clarity in life, then why the &*^% am I not doing it all the time?

This week I’ve joined the 7th cohort of the world’s most amazing on-line writing course, Write of Passage, by David Perell. If you want to experience how the future of learning should be, you must check out ‘WoP’. To me, WoP is an empowerment experience: how to develop the wrestling techniques to use the internet and data to my own advantage as opposed to only giving away digital footprints of my life to big tech. If I have no choice but to give up my privacy, then I might as well develop the muscles and agility to engage with these platforms and exploit them to my advantage, on my terms, with my voice.

Why Do I Write?

1. For the feeling of synthesis. I mean, that process of clarified thinking. That’s not to say I won’t or can’t change my mind; I’m talking dynamic synthesis that may change over time, not static synthesis! I get deep pleasure from the feeling of understanding concepts better, and for me nothing creates synthesis better than writing.

2. For the epiphanies. Writing for me catalyzes new questions and ideas that I hadn’t even thought about before I had begun the writing process. Quite often, these epiphanies are more valuable gems than the original synthesis that I was seeking.

3. For meaningful interaction. I write first for myself, but just as importantly as a way to stay connected and hopefully ‘in-dialogue’ with a few of my closest friends, as well as to experience the wonder of making a few new friends along the way.

Why Do I Not Write?

1. I’m terrified of publishing incomplete or vacuous material

2. I’m disorganized and need to improve my habits; particularly to shed routines and commitments that have no compounding value

3. My writing-gratification pathway is subtle and indirect. When I go cycling, running or swimming I get a quick ‘high’ within 20 minutes of starting the activity. Writing for me is more like stretching or meditation. Pain or fear receptors are firing and there’s not that quick flood of endorphins to drown them out.

One of my objectives is to start publishing a short essay every day. This is because I feel that I need my most precious desires to become part of a daily habit. Write of Passage demands the creation of more substantial essays, and I’ll need to learn how to manage larger creations that are in-development for many days while at the same time publishing a short daily piece.

I’d be interested in knowing if any of my thoughts resonated with you, or if you have some other strong reasons for why you write, or don’t write!

March 11, 2021

Almost Free from From

“Where are you from?”  This is the one question I’ve been asked the most my whole life. The question doesn’t bother me; it’s a natural conversation starter.  However, I’ve come to realize that if you’re someone whose response to this question is complicated, it’s usually best to answer with the simplest believable answer that you’re happy with.

Why?  Well, for one, not all people are interested in complicated answers, so why burden them?  It’s like responding with detailed truth when a stranger asks “How’s it going?”.  However, there’s a more troubling reason, which is that some people may not accept your answer; you see, the ‘from’ question is also one of tribe, culture and home.  Try as you may, some people will always feel an urge to pigeon-hole you into one of their particular imagined communities.

Don’t fight it.  Don’t force the from.  You think you have the right to tell people whatever ‘from’ story you want.  But you just have to accept that most people will not tolerate a response that contradicts the microsecond judgements they made before you even opened your mouth.  

My dad is one of those that likes to force the ‘from’.  Tells people he’s from Singapore.  Fair enough, he’s retired there and has lived there over 20 years.  But he was born and grew up in Salina, Kansas, USA.  And while there may be many good reasons not to tell anyone you’re from Salina, Kansas, USA, his piercing blue eyes and nordic complexion do make him look more Salina than Singapore.

Seriously, don’t fight it.  Your ‘from’ story might even be legit, as in you actually were born there or did grow up there.  With the exception of a very few number of places in the world, like New York City, if your beautiful face or accent doesn’t match what the average interrogator imagines to be the face of that place, good luck convincing.  

In this respect, I’m lucky. I was actually born in New York.  But I’m an impostor New Yorker, and I don’t mean like the hipsters from Brooklyn that tell you they’re from New York. I mean really an impostor because I was born there, but that’s it, I’ve never lived there.  My parents, life-long small-town runaways from Salina and Iquitos, Peru, shipped me out of New York a few weeks after I was born.  I then grew up in the following sequence of cities: Mainz, Bogota, Mexico City, Summit NJ, Mexico City, Bogota, Miami and Hong Kong.  As an adult I’ve lived in the following sequence: Ann Arbor, Bangkok, Singapore, London, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Hong Kong and Taipei.

I’ve been able to distill two key points of interpersonal friction that are often catalyzed by forced ‘from’ responses.  First, are those that simply refuse to accept a ‘from’ response that doesn’t fit their first impressions.  Typically these are people that want to categorize you either generally as a foreigner or of a specific tribe (Jew, Arab, Hindu, etc.).  Second, and more insidious, are those that quickly leap to a conclusion that based on what you’ve just described, you’re actually a homeless, untethered rootless nobody.  I know this because I’ve had the fortune of having a few people politely or impolitely actually tell me this.  If you happen to have parents of mixed nationality or heritage, you might make the mistake of telling someone you’re half X and half Y, which is the perfect set-up for them to ask   “So is your Peruvian half the one on top or bottom?”  

This “where is home” issue is a huge deal for people who believe that a specific geographic location must exist as an essential foundational pillar of identity.  If they for whatever reason don’t think you have a home, you’ll often be viewed with a mixture of suspicion, dislike and pity.  I remember when I was 17 I spent a summer in a German university town living with family friends that had a son a year older than me.  The chemistry between us wasn’t great, for reasons I couldn’t comprehend until a few weeks later when he finally and very emotionally told me he had huge issues with my lack of a fixed home and cultural identity. This ridiculous issue finally convinced me to leave small-town utopia (my foster parents were incredibly understanding) and I had a great time the rest of the summer in Hamburg and Berlin.

The problem with this ‘from’ question is that it forces us to be cultural flag carriers, which is very unfortunate.  Think about it: each culture carries its own unique collection of so much objectionable garbage.  Fine, so you’re a post nation-state enlightened type. Still, you can’t escape the culture, man.  And when you give whatever fake from answer you happen to like, you’re implicitly making a cultural statement and making yourself a flag-bearer of that culture.  This sucks, but don’t fight it.  And by the way, none of this I’m from planet earth BS and let’s save the world.   

The from question is tied to culture, and culture is unfortunately universally placed on a sacred pinnacle.  I’d be very happy to see a social revolution that saw us proactively questioning culture, starting from our own: how does our culture treat women, minorities and nature?  I can’t think of any culture that would score very highly on these three questions.  The most logical place to try solving the world’s problems is at the local level, in that culture you’ve been assigned to that you never had a choice of being born into.  I think it’s incredibly damaging that most educational systems explicitly try to indoctrinate young students with a blind love for their culture.  The portrayals of other cultures are then by necessity ridiculous caricature, often with patronizing undertones.  Schools talk about critical thinking but the reality, especially at the elementary level, is that teachers are petrified of offending parents with the introspective topics of discussion that children would find the most amusing and comprehensible.

The great thing about the internet, is it allows us to reframe, with almost anarchic power, our own version of local; our own from.  The local movement is still necessary and powerful, but now it can be catalyzed with a virtual base of locals that just happen to be physically scattered all over the world.  This is why I’ve decided to start writing my thoughts; in the hope we can become part of a shared from.

Interestingly, becoming a father has introduced me to what is probably the second-most asked question in my life, and a very appropriate question indeed, though I wish it didn’t come screaming at me at 6 in the morning every weekend.  

“Papa, where are we going?!”