Walking Late

8 January 2026. Eight days into the year, which did not feel significant on its own, and yet something about it stayed with me. Maybe because earlier that night I had just finished a long conversation with my children about identity, language, Chinese, and I could still feel the weight of that conversation sitting quietly in my chest.

Parenting keeps reminding me that the hard part is never logistics. It is never the planning, the scheduling, or even the discipline. It is persuasion. Convincing someone you love to do something difficult, not because it is fun, not because it feels rewarding now, but because it matters later in ways they cannot yet see.

Learning Chinese is hard. There is no clever way to soften that truth. Linguists may classify it as one of the most demanding languages to learn, but that does not make it easier when you are the one struggling to form sounds that do not exist in your mother tongue.

It is much easier to bring people out for a meal. Easier to entertain, to create enjoyment, to associate leadership with comfort. That works for a while. But when comfort becomes the method, something subtle begins to erode. What once felt special becomes expected, and satisfaction fades faster than you realise.

I found myself repeating the phrase less is more that night, not as advice, not even as a belief I was trying to sell, but almost as a reminder to myself while speaking.

The Quiet Cost of Comfort

The paradox is uncomfortable. The less you have, the more clearly you often feel what matters. The more you are given, the harder it becomes to feel content, even when nothing is technically missing.

I see this tension everywhere now. In children who grow bored faster than they can name why. In adults who upgrade endlessly but feel no lighter. In leaders who confuse generosity with direction and wonder why it stops working.

There were two things I wanted my children to do recently, and neither of them was comfortable.

The first was exercise.

I did not want to monitor them constantly. No shouting, no threats, no punishment dressed up as discipline. I have learned that habits enforced externally rarely survive once pressure is removed. What lasts tends to be tied to identity, to the slow shift from I should do this to this is who I am becoming.

I have been busy with work, coming home late, mentally stretched. And yet one evening, they told me on their own what they had done that day, how long they exercised, what they worked on. There was no prompting. Just reporting.

I stood there listening, slightly surprised, and quietly proud.

Earlier, during our family goal setting, I had shown my eldest son his BMI. Not to scare him, not to shame him, but simply to make something abstract visible. I explained how his heart works harder, like carrying extra bags everywhere he goes, how his knees take the load, how late suppers affect sleep in ways you do not feel immediately.

He had never really believed he was overweight until that moment.

So now he has cut down supper, which already feels like a sacrifice to him, and on top of that, he has added exercise. Double discomfort. Not because he suddenly enjoys movement, but because starting a habit almost always hurts more than maintaining one.

Leadership That Costs Something

This is the kind of goal I quietly think of as a leadership goal, though it does not look impressive from the outside. It does not generate applause. It generates resistance first.

I have met many leaders who are afraid to offend, or more accurately, afraid of how they are perceived. When that happens, identity slowly shifts from internal conviction to external approval, and leadership turns into impression management.

Doing less for more requires courage. It requires helping people walk a harder path, not for you, but for themselves. People will endure difficulty willingly if they can see why, though seeing why rarely happens all at once.

Different people respond to different triggers. You have to know them well, their fears, their aspirations, the things they care about but cannot yet articulate. Not to manipulate them, but to guide them toward possibilities they have not imagined for themselves.

Because the truth is, many people do not actually know what they want. Not in a deep sense.

Imagining What You Have Never Lived

I think about this often when I reflect on my own life.

At one point, my wife and I thought we would have 2 children. That felt complete. 4 children was never in the picture. It felt excessive, unrealistic, completely outside our imagination.

Today, I cannot imagine life with only 2.

This is not a moral argument. It is not a prescription for anyone else. It is simply an observation. There are territories in life you cannot evaluate accurately until you have entered them. Before that, everything is theoretical.

I was fortunate to have a mentor who showed me what life as a father of 4 could look like. Without that window, I would never have imagined it for myself.

That same night, after the conversation about exercise, I spoke to my children about Mandarin.

They have grown up in an English-speaking environment from birth. Slowly, subtly, identity follows environment. Over time, language becomes more than a tool. It becomes a marker of who you think you are.

So we talked about identity, about history, about who they are beneath the convenience of what they speak most easily. And somehow, that night, something shifted. Not mastery. Not fluency. Just interest.

They started speaking Mandarin, awkwardly, hesitantly, aware of every mistake.

That was enough.

A Confession About Skipping Class

There is something else I have been meaning to admit.

I skipped class. Often.

University, to be precise.

I have always been impatient. I also carry guilt easily, and I have always wanted to make my parents proud. Those three things shaped how I lived my student life more than any formal rule ever did.

If something felt meaningless, I struggled to sit through it. But skipping class came with a rule I followed instinctively.

If I skipped because I was lazy, I did not skip.

I tried once, went back to my hostel to sleep, and the guilt stayed with me far longer than the rest did. That feeling taught me something before I had words for it.

If I skipped, it had to be for something I genuinely believed was more valuable.

I remember choosing to attend a talk by Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah instead of a lecture, listening to someone speak about real journeys and real decisions, and feeling that this was time better spent, even if it meant letting something else go.

I began thinking in terms of trade-offs. Giving up one thing for another, not because one was bad, but because another felt more meaningful.

I misjudged sometimes. I skipped lectures that turned out to matter more than I expected. When that happened, I adapted. I bought an MP3 recorder, hid it under a seat, collected it later, and listened at my own pace.

During my master’s, something shifted. Lectures felt different, not just for content, but for people, for perspectives, for conversations that happened in between. By then, I was already a lecturer myself, collecting stories as much as notes.

I also stopped taking money from my parents. Survival became real. Responsibility sharpened attention in ways comfort never did. Less pocket money forced clearer choices, and those choices shaped judgment.

When Consensus Feels Safer Than Clarity

Today, I see young people making decisions based largely on perception. I see leaders hiding behind consensus, mistaking agreement for wisdom.

Consensus has its place. It reveals blind spots. But vision rarely lives in the majority, especially in situations no one has experienced before.

During the pandemic, I made a decision that went against most opinions in the room. We moved the school online early, messily, without preparation. People were unhappy. Some left. Pressure was constant. Plans failed and were revised again and again.

If we had waited, if we had chosen comfort, we would not have survived. That decision, unpopular as it was, changed the trajectory of the school.

What Keeps Returning

I keep coming back to this thought as I walk, not because it feels clever, but because it keeps resurfacing on its own.

Skipping class was never about rebellion. It was about judgment, even when that judgment was imperfect. Leadership feels similar now. There are moments when sitting with everyone feels safe and familiar, and moments when standing alone feels necessary, even when you know it will cost you something.

The difficulty is that both choices often look the same from the outside. Only time reveals which one carried weight.

What I am learning, slowly, is that leadership rarely announces itself when it happens. It usually arrives as quiet discomfort, as a sense that choosing ease now will demand a higher price later, even if no one else can see it yet.

And sometimes, it begins in very ordinary places, in a conversation with your children, in deciding whether to attend a lecture, in choosing not to sit down, even when sitting down would have been the simplest thing to do.