Dare to be difference

Friday, September 21, 2007



My brother and I.
I was the eldest of 3 siblings. My brother and I excelled in mathematics and science subjects while we were growing up. We were extremely high achievers in our studies. Both of us were extroverts. My brother has a photographic memory. He excelled not only academically, but he also excelled in music and sports. He thought himself to play guitar and piano; he represented my state in swimming tournaments, and also represented his middle school in the state football tournaments.

My sister and her security blanket.
We have a younger sister who was extremely introverted and shy. She had this security blanket which she carried all the time. She took the blanket to Australia when we went to Australia for our high school and undergraduate studies. She is 43 this year and I bet she still keeps that stinky blanket !

It must be very frustrating for my sister with 2 siblings who pushed her into the unknown corner. She hardly talked at home; she was quiet and often kept to herself in her own corner.

We often laughed at her security blanket because whenever we had visitors, she would often cover herself in the blanket and slowly walked in her room with her face wrapped in her blanket. She often hid in her room till the visitors left.

We often asked her what did she want to be when she grew up for we knew she could not get her simple arithmetic, such as 12x6=72 right. She had never failed to say that she wanted to be a cartoonist when she grew up. We had never failed to tell her don't be stupid for a cartoonist will not make ends meet.

As we grew into our adult years, as expected , my brother and I went into the Science stream, he into architecture and I into Computer Science and our little sister went into the Art Stream. We pitied our sister and would spend time with her coaching her on the most simple Arithmetic that we thought a grade 12 student should not have any problem with, but she did.

Her different path.
She studied law, economics and some accounting. After she graduated, she was with an International auditing firm for a couple of years, and they trained her on Change Management. Over the years , she had the chance to work for a few good international companies and built on her expertise in Change Management. Her expertise in her field was very rare in Asia during that time. She was well sought after by the head hunters in Asia. They were looking for local people with Expatriate skills. The rest is history because she is one of the most sought after professional women in the Asian Pacific region. And I bet one of the highest paid ladies in the Far East.

She, dared to be different.
Sometimes in our Chinese New Year family reunion dinners, we asked her what were her thoughts growing up with two strong older siblings. She told us something that made our jaws drop. She said that since she was a young girl, as young as 8, she knew she was going to do something totally different from us. She said that she knew that there's no way that she could outdo what we were good at. Instead, she said all along that she had planned a different career path for herself and had succeeded ! In terms of salary without factoring in the exchange rate, she of course outdid both my brother and me.

Reflection.
I think I wrote this post as a reflection on my blogging experience. I read a lot of professional bloggers' blogs. I often wonder how long would it take for me to be as good as them ? To add insult to my injury, my handicaps in php and html languages increased my learning curve two fold. So a lot of times, I thought about my little sister's strategy and wondered how it could be used in my own blogging journey ?

Have you ever wondered how a blog like this could make it big ?

She was sought by a comedy site to produce diagrams for content on the site.

So, do you dare to be different ?

Share with me , my readers ! Life is a learning process !

What then shall you do ?
To take the first step to let the blog world take us seriously, I urge you to stumble this post !

2 comments:

Nightwing said...

Thanks for sharing your stories and encouragement to improve oneself. Your posts never fail to amaze me.

JamyTan said...

Thank you !