On Happiness and Clarity
Reflections on independent life
People have been asking if I’m happier now.
It’s been just but over 6 months since I left a full-time job at MAS. From two decades of a routine job to the uncertain world of a free agent. This question comes up quite often.
I have no idea how to answer such a question. Cause I have no idea what the term ‘happy’ actually means. Sometimes playing nice music already makes me happy. Or waking up to my wife next to me. Or even a Whatsapp chat with a good friend.
I think a better state to think about the shift is ‘clarity’.
And the past week of building and delivering has led to some thoughts on this. A webinar for insurers. A talk for Prudential. Slides for my upcoming deep dives into AI risk management for the Association of Banks in Singapore. Slides for an executive education programme for some Chinese banks at the end of July. A lunch with a collaborator on risk management for Agentic AI and my ex-colleagues. And pilot testing of the first product for a startup with a collaborator (not on AI risk at all). And lots of watercolors.
And when it comes to clarity, leaving a full time job is both the worst and best thing.
Why?
Worst & Best
Leaving a job is the worst for clarity because everything tied to that identity disappears. The title. The salary. The schedule. The structure. For someone like me who spent ~ two decades in the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the public service, it’s inevitable that my identity is tied to such a solid institution and the sense of mission there. Having finding yourself in a space with no clear role, no clear identity, and perhaps no clear idea of what you what is quite disorientating.
But it may also be the best for clarity. Because you find out very quickly what you actually need to reach out for when there is no one and nothing telling you what to do. To be clear, I’ve not reached a state of clarity yet, but I’m happy that I have found 3 things that help me get there.
Freedom
The first thing. Being free to say what I want.
2 decades in an institution trains you to be careful. To hedge. To represent a position rather than hold one. To speak on behalf of something larger than yourself. And unfortunately, that sometimes means saying a lot but meaning nothing.
I walked into the Prudential session this week and thought - no risk here. I’m going to say exactly what I want. And that has been my approach for the past few months.
So I did. That prompt engineering is not a skill and that one should not waste time on it. On the useless things in AI governance. That principles alone are just decoration. That the most important thing in AI is the boring stuff. The lesson here - don’t book me for a talk if you just want hedged points.
This is also what the weekly reflections have been. And many other posts and talks. The institutional filter, finally removed.
Building
The second thing. Building.
Not just asking questions. Or theorizing about things. Or meeting people.
Actually making things. Over the past 6 months, I have been trying to build my training practice - Quaintitative. Somewhere that I can deliver training that I believe in. It’s still not there yet. But I will persist.
But also not just that. Also a product that assesses AI competencies with a collaborator. And more things are coming - a platform to make AI and AI risk management more accessible. Follow on to find out more.
Building things makes me happy. And it helps to ground me.
Art
The third thing. Something surprising.
The problem with being able to say what you want, and to build what you want is the inability to switch off. With a full-time job, I don’t find it hard to detach. No matter the workload. It is after all, someone else’s demands.
But when it’s your own ideas, the mind never switches off.
Being an entrepreneur is different. You are never settled. The mind keeps going on after midnight. There is always something unfinished, something to build, something to worry about.
And I have found a solution. A watercolor every night before bed. Even when it doesn’t work. Even when the piece ends up in the bin. The brush in my hands, dipping into the water, mixing colors into gradients on paper. Letting the water flow and glow.
The art turns it off. One hour before bed where presence is required and everything else waits. You cannot paint and worry at the same time. Try it.
It also does something else. In a world where AI is eating everything - identity, creativity, and the bullshit is overwhelming - making something by hand is the most uncorrelated thing I have.
Slow. On paper. No prompt. No model. Just observing whatever is left of Singapore before it disappears.
There is no happy
People ask if I’m happy. I’m not sure what that is.
What I know is this. Six months in, I have no regrets. Not about leaving. Not about the plans that failed.
And I am happy that things are getting clearer.
#Clarity #IndependentLife #Art #AIRiskManagement #Transitions #Reflections