Edmond Chan

If you were asked to introduce yourself, would you sell yourself short vs what the objective reality was?

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Angelique told me about something that happened at her work. She was in a meeting where a new senior hire from the Product Team came to introduce himself to her team.

Everyone in her team introduced in turn introduced themselves back to the new hire. When it got to Angelique, she said that she was a bit nervous, and stumbled a bit, and when she sat down afterwards, she was mortified. Bear in mind that Angelique is an experienced professional, with nearly seven years at her company, and is also a veteran public speaker. If it can happen to her, it can happen to all of us. It could certainly happen to me.

Lots of career advice I read says that we should all have a short description of ourselves ready to be deployed whenever someone asks about us. It should be memorised. It’s good advice.

However, what would you actually say about yourself? If you’re anything like me or Angelique, it would be self-deprecating, full of caveats, loaded with the passive voice, and almost apologetic. I think it’s a fallacy that we’re all in need of reining in our salesy-ness. If anything, we need to become more salesy when it comes to talking about ourselves, to counter our natural self-deprecation.

Why do we do it to ourselves? Sell ourselves short? Jordan Peterson talks about our inner critic and how we let it talk to us horrendously. We wouldn’t let anyone talk like our inner critic to somebody that we cared about. Why do we let it talk to us like it does? Why do we listen to it?

Knowing that this internal berating is going on should free us to be more objective about ourselves. Let’s look at two examples of how Angelique could describe herself. Both describe the same thing, but one sounds weaker than the other.

Weak version:

Hi I’m Angelique and I’m a developer here. I’m originally from Wollongong, a city about 2 hours south of Sydney. I’ve been here about 7 years now. Yeah, that’s me. Great to meet you.

Strong version (and still more than true):

Good morning, my name is Angelique. I’m from Sydney, Australia. I was an art director at Fairfax Media, for the AFR (the Australian Financial Review). I transitioned into developing on the Methode CMS platform, and then I was recruited into the FT, to work in the Methode team here. I’ve been here about 7 years now and I’ve learned a great deal, and it’s a great team to be on. I also founded and co-chair the FT Women’s network, which runs monthly events and helps hundreds of women develop their skills in networking and so on. Great to meet tyou!

Which one sounds better? The second one right? I don’t think it sounds boastful. It’s all 100% true and factual. There’s not any exaggeration there but it still has hidden points in it that convey strength and value to any listeners.

  • For example, Angelique was recruited from Faixfax to the FT. This tells people that she was in demand and worth the effort to recruit from the other side of the world.
  • She might not be born and bred in Sydney itself, but most people here won’t know where Wollongong is, and will be thinking about that whilst you’re speaking about something else. She did live and work in Sydney so that’s more than true. Why confuse people otherwise?
  • She did found a women’s group, one that is successful, and so why wouldn’t she put that in her intro.

How would it work for you? What would you normally say about yourself? Are you selling yourself short? How can you make what you say about yourself stronger whilst still staying true to reality?

Write a short paragraph about yourself like the one about for Angelique and memorise for the next time you need to introduce yourself.

Definitely feeling the benefits of implementing some of Aubrey Marcus’s book “Own The Day, Own Your Life”

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I love airport bookshops. It’s like the best of books distilled into a few shelves. I can never resist even though it will double my carry on luggage.

The domestic terminal at Melbourne Tullamarine had some enticing books: 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson (which I’ve read but only on Kindle, so I bought a paperback there and then), First Man In by Ant Middleton, who I’ve only recently discovered on Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins, and Own The Day, Own Your Life by Aubrey Marcus.

I snapped it up alongside Peterson’s. (Will get Middleton’s book soon.)

The premise of Aubrey’s book is that by making the right small decisions throughout our day, we optimise our health, mindset, productivity and overall well-being. This helps us to win our day, and if we do this day after day, we win our life.

The section I really like is on supplements. Now Aubrey is CEO of Onnit, a health company with a big focus on supplements, so you’d think of course he would be recommending supplements. But on the other hand, it’s reassuring that he does recommend them given that that’s his livelihood. But the best thing is that he doesn’t say that only his company’s supplements are the ones to get. Lots of company’s produce these supplements.

The ones he recommends that I’ve started using are:

Greens blend. He describes this as like ‘raiding the shelves at Home Depot when you’re trying to maintain your house’. It’s full of good stuff that your body needs to be healthy. I looked on Amazon and found this one by Hion which was very well rated. The ingredients are: “Wheatgrass, Barley Grass, Maca Root, Flax Seed, Green Tea Extract, Lucuma, Spirulina, Chlorella, Baobab, Acai Berry, Raspberry Fruit Extract (20% Ethanol 80% Water) 10:1.” That just sounds good for you doesn’t it?!

Krill Oil. This apparently is fish oil on steroids. Not actual steroids! But just an amped up version of fish oil. This is the one I bought on Amazon. The description states:

  • Superior source of EPA and DHA because the polyunsaturated fats are packaged as phospholipids, which can be used immediately by your body
  • More stable than fish oil because it includes astaxanthin, a powerful antioxidant, that protects the fragile fats from oxidising

Vitamin D3. I was already taking this. I use this one by Nutravita and I bought it on Amazon. From the blurb on Amazon: “Nutravita Vitamin D3, (The Sunshine Vitamin) provides the preferred form of vitamin D3. Vitamin D3 is the more potent form of Vitamin D, because it is the specific form made by the human body.“

I’m going to start taking magnesium as also recommended in the book.

So how do I feel after a few weeks of taking them? Really, really good. Full of energy and almost feeling a surplus of strength and energy. That may well be down to other factors, including sleeping well, doing lots of running, and also lifting heavier weights than normal. But I do think that small improvements stack up on top of each other over time. It all counts!

Do you take any supplements? And if so, which? Let me know in the comments!

Can we apply what makes a great city/country to the individual level?

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I had this thought in Melbourne. I think from visiting the marvellous State Library of Victoria and the National Gallery of Victoria. Melbourne is regularly voted one of the most liveable cities in the world, and I thought what if we could take the elements that make Melbourne (and other great cities) and apply that at the micro-level, the individual level. So here’s a stab at what makes a great city:

A great city has:

  • Superb art galleries
  • Excellent libraries
  • Magnificent parks
  • Great architecture
  • Good schools and great universities
  • Bustling markets full of great produce
  • Strong sense of culture and identity
  • Food that you would travel for
  • Wonderful music performances
  • Quiet spaces
  • Proximity to water
  • World class sports teams

What about what makes a great country? There’s going to be a lot of overlap from the list above. But here’s some other factors I can think of:

  • Strong defence capability
  • Strong diplomatic ability
  • Willingness to help other countries and do its bit for the world
  • Investment in art and sciences
  • Commitment to R&D
  • Great infrastructure 
  • Commitment to production over consumption 
  • A desire to be great
  • Great universities
  • Looks after its weak
  • Open not closed worldview

Let’s take each list above and try to fashion some ideas about how to apply this to the individual level.

A great city has:

  • Superb art galleries
    • Can we have more art in our homes? Yes. 
    • What should that art be? Reproductions of great works
    • Have more art books in our homes
  • Excellent libraries
    • Can we build great libraries in our homes? Yes. What could you do with 1,000 books? That’s a great library and probably two or three full walls of books.
  • Magnificent parks
    • Maybe a full and rich garden? Or live near a good park? Or if you’re in an apartment like me, then maybe a decent selection of house plants in every room
  • Great architecture
    • Ideally live in an area with magnificent buildings around you
    • Photos of great buildings on your wall
  • Good schools and great universities
    • Take regular courses online from great universities – a lot of these are free now
  • Bustling markets full of great produce
    • Go to markets regularly and soak in the produce
    • If you can’t get to a market like the Victoria Markets in Melbourne or Borough Market, then go to a decent supermarket and go to the fresh food section and the deli counter
  • Strong sense of culture and identity
    • Who are you? Are you a culture vulture, a cross-fitter, a music obsessive, a vegan, a minimalist, a maximalist, a right-winger, a traditionalist? Whoever you are, own it. 
  • Food that you would travel for
    • Brunch in Australia is excellent, pizza in Italy is excellent, iberico ham in Spain is excellent. You can’t always get out there, so see what you can do at home. These days, it’s pretty easy to get good butter, good meat, great vegetables, nourishing bread. Try and knock up the best dishes you can at home. It doesn’t need to take ages or be lots of work. It could be as simple as putting great produce together on a plate. 
  • Wonderful music performances
    • We can’t always get to the opera but we can stream great music at the touch of a button. Get decent speakers and decent headphones and play the greats
  • Quiet spaces
    • We all need some peace to recharge. If you live on a busy road, or have noisy neighbours, then maybe you could put on some noise-cancelling headphones or even put in some inexpensive earplugs
  • Proximity to water
    • Great cities tend to be near water. Think Sydney on the coast, or Paris with the Seine. How often can you get to see big water like lakes, rivers, and the sea? I’m lucky enough to live near the Thames, but I don’t make the effort to see the water as often as I should do.
  • World class sports teams
    • Play more sport
    • Follow your local team or adopt a good one that appeals to you

A great country has:

  • Strong defence capability
    • How secure is your house? Your job? Your assets and your money? How well can you defend yourself from violence?
  • Strong diplomatic ability
    • How well do you get what you want from other people?
  • Willingness to help other countries and do its bit for the world
    • Help out your neighbours? Support local events?
  • Investment in art and sciences
    • How much of your paycheck can you commit to developing your artistic and scientific knowledge? Through books, magazines, courses etc?
  • Commitment to R&D
    • What is R&D? At its simplest, I think it’s seeking out new ways of doing things. This could be new ways of living, new ways of thinking. There’s no way that we’re living as optimally as we can be. We’re often just happy with the status quo as it’s comfortable. Committing to R&D need not be expensive. It could also be commitment to taking the time to do it. 
  • Great infrastructure 
    • A great country has excellent roads, bridges, energy supply etc. What about something as simple as installing great wifi in our houses? Efficient heating and water supply? 
  • Commitment to production over consumption 
    • A great country has to produce something. It’s the same surely in the individual. Grow vegetables, build things, craft something, write something. We can all produce something. 
  • A desire to be great
    • Seek some glory. Achieve some feats. Do something noteworthy.
  • Great universities
    • Can you read challenging works? Debate in clubs? Design a syllabus for yourself?
  • Looks after its weak
    • Help the homeless? Give to charity? Sympathise with those less fortunate instead of judging them?
  • Open not closed worldview
    • Do you travel? Read foreign newspapers? Know what’s going on in Central Asia and Africa?

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

I learned to swim at 39 years old. Here’s how I did it

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I’ve always been a terrible swimmer. I never learned as a kid. And the times that I’ve swum, I’ve more thrashed about than technically swum.

I remember two times where I’ve swum in the sea and both times felt like I was in serious trouble. 

I thought that I might well have died. 

In fact, without help around me, I could well have died. (I’d never thought about that until writing this just now. Oops.)

The first was in 2009 in the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland, Australia. Me and my mate Grant were backpacking and decided to do a boat trip. We did some snorkeling which was okay. But then we had the chance to do some scuba-diving. With some rudimentary instructions on signalling and breathing, we were off. I didn’t feel nervous because I felt that with flippers, I’d be able to swim easily. At least, it looks easy in the movies. Boy was I wrong. At one point, deep below the catarmaran, our leader signalled to rise to the surface. I tried to rise but instead everything I was doing was taking me towards the coral reef. I knew this stuff was jagged and sharp and I tried to swim away but every stroke was taking me closer and closer instead of further and further away. Luckily, our scuba leader came to help me out and guide me to the surface.

The second time was with my mate Colin in Palawan, Philipines in 2015. We were in clear blue, pristine waters, in amongst islands. We had a boat to ourselves with a pilot taking us from island to island. The skipper said to go into the water, so I did. Oddly, I’ve never learned to tread water effortlessly, so it became a bit of struggle. I made my way to the rocky edges of the island nearest to me, but the edges were razor sharp and I couldn’t hold on. I motioned to the skipper that I was in trouble and he threw me a life jacket much to Colin’s amusement. I knew then that I had to learn to swim properly.

Recently, these thoughts have become deafening. For example, my in-laws live in Bulli, NSW, and as in the rest of Australia, there’s a strong beach and swimming culture. I want to be confident in the sea. I want to be good in the sea.

And finally, I want to be a strong swimmer for when I have kids, which should come pretty soon. I want to be able to go swimming with them and also know that if they ever got into any trouble in the water, that I could rescue them.

Which all led me and Angelique to Nuffield Gym for lessons in Wandsworth, as well as me getting new prescription goggles. 

New prescription swimming goggles

One thing that’s always put me off swimming is the fact that my eyesight is terrible and that I wear contact lenses. Contact lenses and water don’t mix, and they get damaged by non-saline fluid. Chlorine would destroy them and make wearing them painful. 

So I looked up ‘prescription swimming goggles’ and found this great company that does them for around £20. What a bargain.

Here’s the company: http://www.prescription-swimming-goggles.co.uk

So armed with my new goggles, I was ready for the next stage:

Getting lessons

We decided to get professional instruction and we found a great teacher called Sophie. She’s a school teacher in her day job and teaches swimming in the evenings. 

My first lesson was just me thrashing around in the pool. It turned out that my technique for freestyle was just instinctive and terrible. My arms were like side-on windmills and chopped into the water. My legs were sinking and very low in the water. And I couldn’t do more than half a length without stopping.

For the next few lessons, we worked on getting my arms to come over into the water at a much straighter angle and to engage my core so that my legs would sit straighter and more horizontally in the water. 

We used swimming aids such as pullboys (which go between your legs at your groin), and floats. The pullbuoys help with engaging the core and encouraging good leg action. The floats allow you focus on your leg action and good arm motion.

After 5 lessons, Sophie said that we should take a break from lessons and that I should practice on my own and get my endurance up. My lack of endurance was holding me back from making good progress. She was right. My endurance was weak and left me gasping for breath and a rest at the end of every length. Every lesson felt like a beasting!

By the 5th lesson, I felt like I had made progress. My technique was definitely better. I could do lengths pretty comfortably. And then Sophie said something that gave me confidence. (No wonder she’s a teacher!)

She said that I’d done 25 lengths in the 30 min lesson we’d just finished and that this would be our new benchmark. In the future, we would never do less than 25 lengths, no matter how long it took. She said that she could see me doing a kilometre in a session. It had crossed my mind, but when she said that, it breathed new life into my confidence levels. I started to believe it. And that’s what a great teacher does: they push you and stretch you and encourage you to look beyond what you thought you were capable of towards what you’re really capable of. 

I joined the two local Nuffields through PayAsUGym which allows unlimited access for a month at a time and for the last month, I’ve swum around 4 times a week. 

I LOVE IT!

My goals now in swimming are:

  1. Get to 200m without stopping (10 lengths in our 20m pool)
  2. Get to 500m without stopping (25 lengths)
  3. Get to 1km without stopping (50 lengths)
  4. Finish a sprint triathlon (that’s a 750m swim)
  5. Finish an Olympic triathlon (that’s a 1.5km swim)

I had hoped to do achieve these goals by the summer of 2019, but it’s looking more like the end of 2019, given those triathlon distances.

My freestyle tips for beginners 

I’m no teacher (!) but here’s what’s worked well for me: 

Get your face in the water and your chin to your chest

For some reason, this makes your body lie more horizontally in the water, which is good thing.

Roll your body to the side as you swim

This will feel weird but it will allow you to breathe easier to each side.

Master your breathing

I’m not a master of this yet, but it’s fundamental to good freestyle swimming.

Look behind you as you breathe

This will help your body to be more streamlined as you take a breath.

Swim as fast as you can 

This will develop your cardiovascular abilities specifically for swimming.

Takeaways from learning this life skill

  1. It’s never too late to learn anything. It really isn’t! If you want to learn the guitar, do it. If you want to learn Italian, do it!
  2. Get good coaching and instruction. This is a shortcut to learning the right technique and doing the right drills. You could teach yourself, but how’s that going to go vs getting good coaching. Even Tiger Woods has a coach.
  3. Learning new things opens up horizons you never dreamed of. Before learning how to swim, I had no idea how much I would enjoy it. I love it! Now I want to go scuba diving, learn how to dive off the high board and go surfing. What could you learn that would open up your horizons?

Invest in yourself and compound the investment!

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Warren Buffett said that the best investment you can make is not in the markets, but instead, in yourself.

That’s pretty deep and until today I had no idea what he meant.

Yes, you could learn a new skill like data analysis and translate that into more money at work or something, but I think Buffett meant something slightly different.

He’s big into the power of compounding. Remember Einstein said that compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. To get the full power of compounding, you have to start something (like investing) early, and do it for a long time, so that you start making money on the money you make.

Imagine that you learned a new skill like touch typing early in life. Think on just one variable, time-saving, just how much that would have saved you. Imagine that I had done this at 19, and not at 39. That’s 20 more years of touch typing wizardry I would have had, and 20 years of faster typing. It isn’t just this variable that would have been impacted. Faster typing would mean that I could have typed at the speed of thought and not had to slow my thoughts down every time I two-finger typed. Think about all that lost thought. That’s a loss of a return on a return.

Invest in yourself now. Now is as early as you can do it. And the earlier you invest in yourself, the longer you can compound the investment.

What would you do? How would you invest in yourself? Would you get fit? Learn a language, learn to code, learn to cook delicious meals, parachute, sell things well, paint, write better, memory training, conversation skills etc? Imagine you learned all of that in the next 2 years. Not crazy or ridiculous. Imagine compounding all that knowledge, all that interweaving of new and old knowledge? And then compounding all of that with new skills, knowledge and experience? Now that would be an incredible investment.