Dear Muslim friends, as the month of Ramadan comes to a close, I would like to wish you and your loved ones a joyous and blessed Hari Raya Aidilfitri!
Every year, I witness my friends fasting, and always appreciated their will power and spirituality. This year, the difference is that I am doing prolonged fasts that lasted up to 88 hours, and have a deeper appreciation of the meaning behind fasting during Ramadan now. Noting that a water fast is very different from fasting during Ramadan, I went to find out more about what goes on behind fasting, about Ramadan fasting being about promoting self-discipline, self-control, and empathy towards those who are less fortunate. It encourages Muslims to practice patience, humility, and compassion, as well as to strengthen their faith and spiritual connection with God.
I have similar insights. Even though my beliefs are different, I have found a deeper connection to my spiritual self through prolonged fasting, a greater sense of gratitude for everything around me, and more empathy to the fellow human being. With this, a deeper respect and appreciation of the different traditions and experiences that people have, even if they may be different from my own.
I would like to wish all my Muslim friends be filled with love, happiness, and togetherness as you this special occasion with family and friends. Selamat Hari Raya!
I saw this quote by Tony Robbins, which reminded me about how true it was.
Have you ever felt like you’re constantly caught up in a never-ending cycle of pain and suffering?
That was how it felt when I left The Royal Singapore. I was left with a deep feeling of loss and betrayal. I had poured my heart and soul into that role, and in return, I felt like I had been taken advantage of and my abilities as a leader were called into question.
It was painful, and at first, I was consumed by my suffering. I couldn’t eat or sleep, and my mind was constantly racing with thoughts of what I could have done differently. But then, along with the thoughts was a reminder that pain is part of life, but suffering is an option.
I realized that the pain I was feeling was a natural part of life. It’s okay to feel sad, angry, or disappointed when something doesn’t go the way we planned. But suffering is different. Suffering is the story we tell ourselves about the pain we’re feeling. It’s the constant replaying of the same negative thoughts and emotions over and over again.
I can decide to stay in that state of suffering, but I made the choice not to.
I decided to take action and focus on what I could control. I started to look for new job opportunities and worked on rebuilding my confidence. It wasn’t easy, but I knew that I had to keep moving forward.
Looking back, I’m glad that I didn’t let my pain turn into suffering. I “surrendered” to the pain and then took steps to move past it. It’s a lesson that I carry with me to this day. Pain is a natural part of life, but suffering is optional.
We have the power to choose how we respond to the challenges that come our way. However, I would like to remind you that I found that it was not helpful to blame our previous selves for suffering either. It was a part of our journey to learn more about ourselves. By saying we “can choose” not to suffer, we should also remember and understand that our previous selves didn’t really have a choice back then.
You would have heard about the buzz around generative AI and its potential to revolutionize the creative industry by now. I just saw a friend post a survey on LinkedIn asking if we are getting tired of hearing about it yet.
If you have spoken to me within the past 10 years, I have been shouting about AI for a long time now. I am concerned about the impact of the technology on us as professionals, as well as the economy at large, but I will share these on a separate track. As a player in this industry, you may be apprehensive about its limitations and possible dangers but if you’re not willing to play, you risk losing out in the long run.
So in this post, let me shall three steps I recently shared with my team at Brandcore to help them get started with generative AI, I hope it helps you too!
Step 1: Play
The first step is to try it out. There are plenty of platforms available to experiment with, such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Bing Chat for text generation, and Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, or even Bing Image Creator for image generation. Keep an open mind and see for yourself what the limitations are. You might be surprised by what you can achieve.
Step 2: Learn
The key to using generative AI effectively is prompt engineering. This involves writing a prompt that enables the platform to produce something useful for you. There may be some jargon to learn and unique idiosyncrasies to each platform to be aware of. For instance, Bing image doesn’t respond well to the word “fat,” while Midjourney has no issues with it.
Step 3: Mix
At this stage, we are not at the point where the technology can replace professionals. It’s essential to combine the capabilities of the platform with your experience and training to achieve the desired outcome. Visualize what you want, and direct the platform towards that outcome. Then use tools like Photoshop or Canva for design work and search engines for writing tasks to complete the final product.
In conclusion, generative AI is a powerful tool that can help you optimize your results. By following these three steps, you can get started on your journey to exploring the potential of generative AI. Remember to approach the technology with an open mind, be willing to learn, and mix it with your skills to achieve the best outcome.
Let us take a look at exhibit A. On the left was Why Keen a year ago, and this is the same guy now, 16kg lighter than before.
I am telling you this not because of pride about my appearance. If you know me, you would know I don’t care much about how I look. I am sharing this with you because I found an amazing secret to our health that I hope to share with the entire world.
I will touch a little bit about what I have found, but I think this topic has a lot of details and I would probably revisit over the next few months.
Not an Image Problem
That’s not to say I was fully happy with how I looked, it was more of me coming to terms that I would not look any better than how I was so might as well embrace reality as it was?
This was important because of the next point
Liver Let Die
I had a health check done 4 years ago which found that I had a fatty liver. Doctor advised me to check my diet, and abstain from alcohol. Alcohol was easy, as I was always just a casual drinker, but I am a lover of tasty food, and tasty food is almost always unhealthy.
Diets Did Not Work
Over the years, I tried everything to change my diet. I tried totally abstaining from sweet things (still important to cut, but totally stopping was almost impossible), replacing all carbs with beans and vegetables only, eating meat only (a form of ketogenic diet, even though I didn’t know what that was initially). Everything failed. What was the reason?
Because each time I got on a diet, I hated myself for it.
Start with Compassion
On the fitness front, I started doing what I could, tried running, swimming, and going to the gym regularly. I found out very early on that I needed to make sure I enjoyed myself in the process of doing that activity. It was about starting with compassion for myself.
The trick is finding something I enjoy the process of. In my case, it was jogging and walking long distances. At the start, I made sure there was a little reward (usually tasty food!), then over time, I could ramp up the difficulty, by either increasing the distance, or the speed.
It worked because I ‘tricked’ myself to enjoy the jog. Related to my recent framing of a “Shadow Self” or my roommate as I called him, I must get myself aligned with my programme of a better health.
If “trick” doesn’t sound positive enough, to put it in a different way, I was able to convince my body and my mind that this was something fun. I have been regularly jogging and walking for at least half an hour at an elevated heart rate of about 120 bpm every morning for more than a year now because of that.
So why the diets failed was because diets were troublesome, and expensive. Most of the time, it was also difficult to find diets which tasted good. Hence, there were many layers of pain, and I hated it.
Was there thus a different way to ‘trick’ myself into eating healthy without causing so much pain?
Fasting was the answer!
Part 1 – Intermittent Fasting
I began fasting in December 2022. It was an intermittent fasting, so I had 16 hours of not eating, then a window of 8 hours where I would get my meals. First of all, fasting 16 hours was not too difficult for me at all, it just meant skipping breakfast in the morning.
On top of that, how I got myself on the program willingly was to allow myself to eat anything I craved in the 8 hours of eating. That included ice cream, and char kway teow.
Also, I was not super strict on myself. Even during the 16 hours of fasting, if I ever felt pain or discomfort, I allowed myself to eat. The idea was to do this over the long run, and breaking the pattern was acceptable.
Over time, my weight dropped by 6 kg within a little more than a month.
Part 2 – Prolonged Fasting for Long Term health
Some time in February, I found an interesting documentary on Disney Plus. Chris Hemsworth, famous for playing one of the Avengers on the MCU, Thor, was on a journey to discovering secrets for long term health. In one of the episodes, he did a 4 day fast.
In that episode, they featured doctors and scientists who talked about the benefits of fasting, which are amazing (I would share more about what I learnt later). The TLDR version of it was, prolonged fasting had the potential to put the body into ketosis (which burnt fat as a main source of fuel), and autophagy (which gets our cells to go through renewal) if a person fasts up to 3 days and more.
Since I was already getting used to Intermittent Fasting, I just tried fasting for 3 days, and I have not looked back since.
Essentially, this kind of long term fasting was almost painless (I will share more later), I had more energy during the day, I ran faster, and I felt lighter. Thor essentially taught me how to unlock a superhuman power within my own body.
Some caveats I need to state here is that I am not a doctor, so do talk to your doctor to check if fasting is safe for you, especially if you have some underlying health problems! But if you like, we can talk about it too, and I will share more with you about this.
It’s been more than a year at Brandcore (brandcore.sg), and I have been enjoying my role here as Head of Video Productions in the company. We’ve been running rather lean, and I have been doing what I have been doing all this while, filming, writing, directing while also figuring out what are the upcoming trends in the use of A.I in our work.
Why Keen eyeing his latte being madeVideographer Why Keen taking a shot at Changi Airport JewelVideographer Why Keen taking a shot at Changi Airport JewelVideographer Why Keen taking a shot at Changi Airport JewelVideographer Why Keen taking a shot at Changi Airport Jewel
It’s been an awesome journey, but I realised that there had been not much opportunity to have some shots of me taken behind the scenes. So here I am, with the help of an old friend, Mr. Gilbert Chua from 9Frames Photography, who took some shots of me! Thank you for providing these perspectives bro!
