The Invitation

I hadn't been a particularly active alumni so I was surprised when I received an invitation to be a Guest of Honour at one of the school's Graduation Day Ceremony recently.

I had to deliver a ten minute speech during the ceremony. What do you say to a bunch of high achieving students and their parents? As I stood on the stage and looked at the sea of expectant faces looking back at me, I knew my inner promptings were right - you give them hope. Hope that their efforts have created excellent options; and even if not, that there is a whole lot more to life and in this World than academic success.

Now on to the speech ...

Honoured Guests, Principal, Teachers, Students; and most of all, 2013 Graduands,

Thank you for this invitation to join you in your Graduation Day. It is a great honour.

One of the junior staff who recently joined my team is a Hwa Chong graduand. A few months after she started working , her supervisor came to me saying enthusiastically that she was a good worker – she was intelligent, made good decisions, she was proactive and creative… I listened for a while and then I said “Hwa Chong, you know, of course will be good.”

What was even more interesting was that my colleague smiled but she didn’t object. So first and foremost I want to compliment all of you students and teachers, that through the years you have kept up that excellent performance to keep the flames of Hwa Chong burning brightly. Whether in universities, scholarship boards or the workplace, the name “Hwa Chong” remains highly valued. For the graduands, now as alumni of Hwa Chong Institution, you can hold your heads up high in the world out there. I can see that our motto: 自强不息 are not just words we say but also acted out in our daily lives.

I accepted this invitation, not so much because I believed I was worthy of it. I almost fell out of my chair when the invitation came. I accepted this invitation because it gave me a valid reason to block off time in my calendar to come back to visit Hwa Chong. I graduated in 1986. I guess I had always planned to return but somehow once I had left, life took over and it had just not brought me back till today. I enlisted into National Service in December of that year. In one of my calls home, my mother said excitedly “The Hwa Chong Buidling collapsed! The Hwa Chong Building collapsed! Everyone had to vacate!” Well, that’s my Mom for you - cracks in the walls become buildings collapsing but I guess that’s what makes life exciting. I visited the Woodlands then the Bukit Batok sites subsequently but it was just not the same as coming back here.

I have great nostalgia for my 4 years in Chinese High and the 2 in Hwa Chong JC. We had great teachers who always keeping us on our toes.

I also made my best friends here. It’s unbelievable that our friendships have endured 30 years of ups and downs; and these friendships are important. We just met on Tuesday for lunch. I was stressing about the my short lunch time and getting back to work on time until my friend reminded me "Public Holiday OK?". It is your friends who keep you grounded to what is important no matter how successful you become in life. What kept us friends all these years? I believe it’s because we did’t measure each other by standards of material success but we kept each other true to who we were and what we learnt in Hwa Chong – that the right thing to do is to do what is right, to work hard and to do good for the people we meet; and for society. With this mantra, we have gone on to contribute at a national level, and others even at an international level.

I am always intrigued by the notion that we take off from the same starting line when we leave school, yet thereafter, where life leads us depends on the decisions we make. For myself, after Junior College, I chose to study Medicine – not for any special reason except that I thought I would like to work with people and, of course, because my parents really wanted me to. Yes it was hard work, it was very, very hard work. I remembered one Saturday night as a House officer on call at the hospital and received pages from my friends to come out to play. I was thinking to myself “What am I doing here?”. But I committed myself to it, giving my best, one patient at a time. Slowly but surely I gained an interest and then a passion for the work.

My wife always teased me about this - I had told her early on that I never wanted to work in the hospital if I could and I would never do admin work. I thought what I always wanted was to be in the frontline taking care of patients in the community. Well I did do that but I was wrong as that was not the destination for me but only part of the journey. Life kept moving on and here I am standing before you a hospital administrator - exactly what I said I did not want to be and finding that I love the work anyway. I have been given that rare chance of being part of a team to start Jurong Health Services, the newest health cluster in Singapore. So never say "Never!" Be open to opportunities because you never know what life is going to offer you.

Today standing here, I see myself as an explorer who has gone ahead of you into the big wide world out there; and you’re asking me “What did you see? What is out there waiting for us?”

I bring you good news – the world out there is big and wide and wonderful. There is no limit to what you can see, hear, learn and experience. To me, the greatest tragedy is that people can feel bored and become jaded. Why do people feel limited by life? I see them limited first by the fear of not making the perfect choice. There are many good choices around them but they would rather not make any choice at all because they can't be sure which is the perfect one. The truth is that, more often than not, when you come to a fork in the road, there is no way to know which is the perfect path to choose. The world is big enough that rarely does one choice lead you down a one way path to a dead end. Adjustments are possible to every choice made. I do not mean that we need to make decisions hastily, that we roll a dice and see what life dishes out. As you shall hear later, my wife bemoans the speed I make life decisions but I do make them eventually; and I've never known in any of these if they were the perfect choice or not but I must say most of them have turned out pretty good!

A second thing to note is that … … people who make choices don’t commit enough to their choices. When it came to marriage, of course I wanted to choose my life partner well. I was careful - that took time and my wife tells me now that many times she almost gave up hope that I would even make a choice but of course I did eventually… Now 15 years and 4 kids later, we’re still very much in love. Yet, it’s never what Hollywood makes you think - it's not all candlelight dinners and roses. Making a good choice is only the first half of it. It is our daily commitment to make our marriage work - through good times, fun times, but also fierce quarrels, stresses, sickness, and disappointments – it is this commitment to our choices that makes the good choices the right choice.

Whether it’s relationships, work, friends and life in general – choosing and committing to that is the key to a fulfilling life. I do not want to misrepresent myself - the good life does not have to be an unwavering stream of happiness and good fortune. This is too narrow a definition of success and such lives can be boring. We know and I have seen in the patients I have treated, people who have chosen to be honourable, kind, faithful, patient and committed inspite of terrible tragedies in life. It is through these choices that they continue to live their lives with dignity and not be bitter or angry with life.

And so now it just remains for me to wish everyone here, good journeys, good friends, good choices and a good life. I leave you with this quote from Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein: