Why Community Matters More as We Age, and How to Look After It When we’re young, we tend to collect people. Friends, colleagues and acquaintances pile up the way experiences do, and a full diary seems like evidence of a full life. Few of us stop to ask which of those relationships will still matter in twenty years. That changes gradually. Most
Why I Treat My Contact List More Like a Science Than an Art When I was starting out, I assumed the people who seemed to know everyone had some kind of gift. They walked into a room and remembered names, asked after people’s families, and always seemed to be the first person others called. I put it down to personality, and I
What Childhood Games in Hong Kong Can Teach Us About Life Before smartphones and digital entertainment became part of everyday life, children in Hong Kong found enjoyment in much simpler things. A piece of chalk, a handful of stones, or a long string of rubber bands could turn an ordinary playground or street corner into a place of excitement. Traditional childhood
The Power of a Clear Vision: Becoming a Better Learner and a Stronger Leader Every great achievement begins with a vision. Before we can accomplish something meaningful, we must first be able to imagine what is possible. Vision gives us a sense of direction, a reason to keep moving forward, and, perhaps most importantly, a purpose behind the effort we put into learning and
The Part of Life We Often Miss We spend a great deal of our lives thinking about what comes next. It starts early. At school, we think about university. At university, we think about finding a job. Once we start working, there is another position to reach, another business to build or another target to meet. Along
Unlocking Your Potential Through a Constant Desire to Learn Potential is not simply something we are born with; it is something we develop throughout our lives. Every person carries abilities, ideas, and strengths that may not yet be fully visible, and often, we do not discover what we are capable of until we are challenged to learn something new.
When Did Doing Nothing Become So Difficult? There was a time when waiting meant waiting. If you arrived early for a meeting, you sat there. If someone was late for lunch, you looked around the room. If you were standing in a queue, there was not much to do except move forward slowly with everyone else. Today,
What Older People Often Get Right in Business When people talk about age in business, the conversation often focuses on what older people need to learn. Technology moves quickly, younger customers have different habits and ways of working that seemed perfectly normal twenty years ago can suddenly feel outdated. All of that is true, and anyone who stays
Why We Misunderstand Each Other in the Digital Age A message arrives saying, “Fine.” There is nothing particularly complicated about the word. Yet depending on who sent it, what was said before it and how long they took to reply, “Fine” can mean that everything is fine, that nothing is fine, or that the conversation is definitely not finished.
Why Strength Training Becomes More Important as We Get Older For a long time, exercise after a certain age seemed to mean walking, swimming or something described as “gentle.” Lifting weights belonged to younger people in gyms, usually surrounded by mirrors and considerably more enthusiasm for protein shakes. That view is changing. One of the more interesting developments in the
Staying Young Is About More Than Age We spend a great deal of time trying to slow down the physical signs of getting older. We exercise, watch what we eat and pay more attention to our health than we probably did when we were twenty. All of that matters. But I have met people much younger than
What We Carry Forward I have spent much of my life around a family business, and one of the things that experience has taught me is that inheritance is not as straightforward as it sounds. When something has existed for generations, it is tempting to think that your role is simply to preserve it:
Innovation Begins With How We See the World When we hear the word innovation, we tend to think about what is new: artificial intelligence, scientific breakthroughs, new businesses or technologies that promise to change how we live. But I have always been more interested in what comes before the innovation itself. Before something new can be created, somebody
Learning to See More in Yourself We spend a great deal of our lives learning how to see the world around us. We learn to understand other people, recognise opportunities and adapt to unfamiliar situations. Yet one of the most important things we can learn is often much harder: how to see ourselves clearly. I have
When AI Starts Giving Us Advice For most of my life, advice came from people. You asked a colleague who had encountered the problem before, called a friend whose judgement you trusted, consulted an expert or simply made the best decision you could with what you knew. Artificial intelligence introduces something quite different: advice that is
There Is More Than One Peak in a Life We tend to imagine success as a mountain. We spend years climbing, eventually reach the highest point and assume that, from there, the only possible direction is down. It is a useful image for an athlete trying to produce a personal best, but I am not convinced it is a
What Gen Z Can Learn From Life Before Everything Was Online I sometimes wonder what the early 1990s would feel like to someone in their twenties today. People worried about careers, relationships, money and the future just as they do now, and we were no more certain about our choices than young people are today. What was different was the environment
Why the Strongest Networks Are Built Before You Need Them The word “networking” has acquired a rather transactional meaning. It can suggest exchanging business cards, making useful introductions or meeting people who might one day be able to help us. Yet the strongest networks I have encountered rarely begin with any of those objectives. They begin with relationships, and relationships
How I Decide What to Pay Attention To Young people in Hong Kong today have access to an extraordinary amount of information. News, markets, opinions, messages and increasingly AI-generated answers arrive continuously. I grew up in a world where information was harder to obtain. The interesting reversal is that scarcity has become abundant, and the challenge now
Reaching Your Peak Reaching Your Peak Is a Practice, Not a Moment We often talk about reaching our peak as though it were a destination. An athlete reaches peak performance, a business reaches its most successful period, or a person reaches the height of a career. The expression suggests a single high point followed, inevitably, by a journey in the other direction.
Why Is Everyone So Tired? Ask almost anyone how they are and the answer rarely changes. "Busy." "Exhausted." "Running behind." Those responses have become so familiar that they barely register. Fatigue no longer arrives only after an unusually demanding week. A low-level sense of mental depletion has become
The Secret Behind Great Interview Preparation Many people assume success depends upon finding the perfect answer to predictable questions. They rehearse responses to "Tell me about yourself", prepare examples of leadership and memorise carefully constructed stories about overcoming challenges. Preparation often becomes an exercise in anticipating what another person wants to hear. That approach
Reaching the Peak Isn't the End Early this month, one of Hong Kong's best-known landmarks was reimagined. Illuminations at The Peak invited visitors to experience Victoria Peak through light, colour and perspective, reminding us that even places we've reached many times can reveal something new when we choose to look differently.
Living Longer, the Hong Kong Way Hong Kong is home to one of the longest-lived populations in the world. Yet according to the latest government health survey, almost 97 per cent of adults consume fewer than the recommended five daily portions of fruit and vegetables. At first glance, those two facts seem impossible to reconcile.
Education Is the Only Form of Wealth That Grows When Shared Most forms of wealth become smaller when we give them away. If we donate money, we have less of it. If we give away land, we no longer own it. Even time, perhaps our most precious resource, can only ever be spent once. Education is different. Knowledge is one of
