What I'm Doing Now

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 friend 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 that all those demos and workshops I’ve been running at work was training me for 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 AI platform project. Although there is a lot of context switching, I’m enjoying the variety of learning new skills and prioritising how I can make impact.

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

Asian cultures tend toward implicit communication —context matters as much as words. Understanding how I’ve learned to be much more explicit—confirming understanding, spelling out next steps, asking direct questions. It’s eliminated so many assumptions and misaligned expectations.

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.

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. A decision born from curiosity, accountability, and honestly, wondering what all the hype was about. I naively signed up for singles thinking, “How hard could it be?”

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

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 and planning my first full marathon next year.

Building and Learning

My friend and I built a social productivity app that 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. 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 (like weekly family calls and Wednesday Waffles), while the activities that don’t stick probably weren’t that important in the first place.

What’s Coming

I’m looking forward to wrapping up this AI platform project and diving deeper into GenAI. 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.

I just signed up for a 6-week online entrepreneurship course that’s all about taking action, not just theory. I want to level up my business skills and see what I can build. Curious to see what comes out of it.

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.

Then - past Now entries

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