Maintain good relations
Whenever I join SMC's weekly hiking, I never fail to meet new people and learn new things, and this time was no different. This week's location was Bukit Timah nature reserve, where we met upat 09:30am outside Hillview MRT exit A. There were 2 mentors this week, Mr Wong Joo Seng and Mr Zhong Guo Liang, who were successful businessman and entrepreneurs. During the hike, I had the chance to interact with the different youths present as well as the 2 mentors as we would walk in groups of 2 and switch partners even few kilometres.
I got to talk to many interesting people, such as the founder of a start-up who specialised in refurbishing antique cars into electric vehicles, an Austrian who grew up in Switzerland of Chinese decent that came to Singapore to work in finance, and Mr GuoLiang, who was a chemical engineering graduate who worked in IT after graduation and shifted to finance afterwards.
I learnt a lot from all of them, and one key message that they all shared was the importance of building meaningful connections. People all have different experties, and you never know when you might need someone with that experties, hence it is important to maintain good relations with people you meet.
They also shared with me the importance of having a good problem statement. Often times when coming up with a solution, we end up forgetting what the main problem is, causing our solution to not be effective. Thus, this initial step of figuring out the problem stepis the most important, so that everyone in the team is working on the same problem, and to ensure that there is even a problem worth solving in the first place.
After hiking along the planned route of about 8km, we stopped to rest inside a shelter where the 2 mentors shared their knowledge with us.
Mr Joo Seng shared in great detail about his life journey from joining a bank to slowly climbing up his way up the ranks and eventually founding his own three successful startups in different durations of his remarkable career.
I definitely gained a lot of knowledge from this hiking trip and would love to join more often!