What I'm Doing Now

🗓️ Updated: 1st August 2025, Singapore

It’s been half a year since my last update, and it’s been full of unexpected challenges and discoveries. Here’s what’s been happening.

Officiating My Best Friends’ Wedding

A few months ago, my best friends surprised me with an unusual request: would I officiate their wedding? (Technically Civil Partnership Party, but equally momentous and joyous occasion.) I was honoured but also stressed - what if I somehow ruined the most important day of their lives?

Cue me frantically rewriting ceremony scripts on a 30-hour journey to the Lake District from Singapore, second-guessing every word choice.

Turns out, all those demos and workshops I’ve been running at work was training me for high-pressure moments like this. The ceremony went beautifully, and I had the best view in the house.

Now I’m slightly obsessed with improving my public speaking, funny how life pushes you toward skills you never knew you needed.

Wearing All the Hats (Literally)

The startup cliche is real. On any given day, I’m juggling roles a data scientist, program manager, product manager, trainer, and technical delivery manager for our new banking AI platform project. Although there is a lot of context switching, I’m enjoying the variety, learning new skills, and prioritising how I can make impact.

Working with teammates from Singapore, America, Czech Republic, and India, to name a few countries, has been eye-opening learning experience. Reading The Culture Map provided the framework I needed to understand why some conversations felt like we were speaking entirely different languages, even when speaking the same language.

Asian cultures tend toward implicit communication — context matters as much as words. That different cultures follow different hierarchical structures, so you need to adapt who you speak with and how you speak to them - to get things done. I’ve learned to be much more explicit — confirming understanding, spelling out next steps, and asking direct questions. It’s eliminated so many assumptions and misaligned expectations.

What continues to be the best career investment I’ve made? Improving my writing skills. When everything’s ambiguous and moving fast, clear writing cuts through the noise and keeps everyone aligned. Clear writing means clear thinking, and if it’s not clear, you’ll soon find out. It’s like giving people a glimpse into your brain.

Racing Toward Discomfort

April brought my third half-marathon and first in Singapore’s humidity. Lesson learned: arrive stupidly early for races, even if it means a 2am wake-up call. Missing your start wave and being stuck in a human sea of traffic is definitely not conducive to personal best conditions.

Then came HYROX in June at Singapore’s National Stadium - the latest trend in fitness racing. A decision born from curiosity, accountability, and honestly, wondering what all the hype was about. I signed up after listening to the HYROX co-founder on the Business of Sport podcast and wanted to see if it truly delivered on its promise - a new sport for gym-goers, and making them feel like an olympic athlete. To be fair, it does.

I naively signed up for singles thinking, “How hard could it be?”

Very hard, as it turns out. But I hit all four goals:

Goal A: Beat my friend Paul ✓ (such a relief, otherwise I’d never hear the end of it!)
Goal B: Beat the global average (1h28) ✓
Goal C: Beat Singapore’s average (1h45) ✓
Goal D: Finish in one piece ✓

I’m genuinely pleased with my performance, especially considering my minimal HYROX specific training - the half marathon training definitely helped though! My years of lifting and running finally paying off. Just needed a few sessions to learn the station techniqiues.

Although I love climbing as a sport, I have missed that external competitive spark in my life. There’s something addictive about these endurance events, that mental battle when everything hurts but you keep going anyway. I’m already eyeing up another HYROX race and planning my first full marathon next year.

Building and Learning

My friend and I built a social productivity app, called dailywin.app, after I inspired him with my daily tracker of highlights and learnings. The app’s aim is to bring friends closer by sharing our goals and what we’re working on and the steps we’re taking towards them.

Our app actually got daily users - a big W for a side project. The real win wasn’t the product itself but learning to vibe code and ship something real into the world - with proper authentication, storage, and deployment. But between work demands and life happening, we’ve hit pause for now. Balancing side projects with everything else proves more challenging than anticipated.

January me had too many ambitious goals. Current me has learned that habits form naturally when they genuinely matter, while the activities that don’t stick probably weren’t that important in the first place.

What’s Coming - Building a Digital Business

I just signed up for a 6-week online entrepreneurship course, called the $1k Challenge, that’s about learning and applying the minimum skills to make money online, with the aim for me to make $1,000 after 6-weeks. Technically, I’ve made money online from data science freelancing, but that was essentially a day job. My time was coupled to earning money. Here, I’m trying to decouple that and build digital assets.

I’m confident in my technical building abilities but less so on the pricing, sales and, marketing. I’m excited to develop the following business skills and push outside my comfort zone:

Creating offers
Finding customers
Handling payments
Validating what people actually want
Scaling systematically
Pricing confidently

Excited to see if I meet the aim of the challenge - making $1K online. I’m fairly confident of achieving this, especially if I #buildinpublic. Here’s the outcome after day one - setting up my digital store and creating my first digital product: https://stan.store/vincelam.

If you want more frequent updates on my progress, you can sign up above 👆

Update: I’ve already made my first £1 online.

I’m looking forward to wrapping up this AI platform project and diving deeper into GenAI and AI Agents. Pre-sales is on the horizon, along with more races, more travel plans that don’t involve last-minute wedding officiating, and definitely more pickleball.

The theme of this year? Embracing the unexpected and finding out what I’m actually capable of when pushed.

Inspired by Derek Siver’s /now page. A now page that tells you what someone is focused on at this point in their life.