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Synopsis
Somewhere between a therapy session and a sparring match, this episode has Faith and Isaac putting each other on the spot with questions they actually want answered. No guest, no agenda — just two doctors who’ve both strayed pretty far from the expected path, asking each other the hard stuff: Was there a moment you knew the default wasn’t for you? What did you have to unlearn to get here? And what’s the biggest misconception people have about your life right now?
They get into the Singaporean timeline pressure most of us grew up with — the relentless march from JC to uni to job to BTO — and what it actually feels like when you clock out of that race. Faith talks about going from “squash those feelings down, deal with them later” at 17, to eventually forcing herself off the path; Isaac opens up about the chaos underneath what looks like a stable multi-hyphenate life. There are side quests that turned into unexpected vocations (Faith’s blog accidentally becoming a go-to resource for med school applicants; Isaac’s scuba diving becoming a masterclass in building systems), stories about friends who became professional barbers at 18 or aerospace engineers in Alabama, and a genuine conversation about whether doctors — of all people — are the worst at taking care of themselves.
Then it closes with the hypothetical that sticks: if $10 million dropped out of the sky, what wouldn’t you change? It sounds like a fun icebreaker, but the answers end up being a pretty good map for how both of them actually want to live — and a nudge for viewers to think about it too.
Episode Transcript
Isaac
Isaac here.
Faith
Faith here. And welcome back to the We Didn’t Plan This Podcast. Okay, so Isaac, what are we going to talk about today?
Isaac
So I guess in a lot of our episodes, we do it chronologically. We talk about, you know, someone’s life story, our own journey, bit by bit, blow by blow. But I thought today we could change it up a little bit. And we’re going to be asking each other some very, very difficult questions that we came up with. And what this will map onto is to different parts or rather like different themes in our decisions. So we’ll have a little bit of a segment about the decisions that we made and the times where they wait on us that made us cannot sleep at night. And then we’ll talk a little bit more about the side quest that we’ve done as well. Sounds good. And then we can have a… So this is one of our favourite segments that we agreed on, which is the really stupid but also hard-hitting hypotheticals. And so we have a rapid fire thing later. Okay, so to recap, I guess, you’ve had such a long and winding, sometimes good, sometimes bad route through med school, medicine itself, going out into the private sector, trying entrepreneurship, all with every single artistic, creative, and personal thing that you’ve done on the side, right? So there’s lots of decisions that we have over here. But I remember when we first talked about your whole journey, it felt like walking the default path and just going through the motions. So I don’t know, did you have a moment where you felt like this default path wasn’t right for you?
Faith
Well, I guess in Singapore, a lot of us grew up very conditioned to, you know, that’s like the idea of the Singaporean dream, right? We just do go to a good school, go to a good uni, get a good job and live that life. So I feel like there was always this part of me that struggled, like wondering, do I really want to spend my entire life feeling this way? I think the feelings first started when I was maybe in secondary school. But back then, it was just like, okay, just squash those feelings down, just deal with them later on in life. Like after you’ve established yourself, then maybe you have a little bit more wiggle room. So I think like seeing all my friends just so happily hustling within medicine or within their respective fields and being very successful, spending hours at work. And actually, I mean, I could see that they were very happy and fulfilled by work. They weren’t like looking at the hours on the cloud being like, when it’s 5pm, when can I go home? Yeah, and then I was like, why don’t I feel the excitement when they are also happy to go to the OT, like the operating theater, scrubbing and home retractors for like three, four hours and they come out saying that they still want to be surgical residents or yeah, I was like, I don’t resonate with that. So maybe this default path within medicine isn’t necessarily right for me. So I guess that was the scary part, right? Like when we realized that maybe you have to chart your own path that no one else has walked on before and you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but at the same time, you can’t live your whole life inauthentically.
Isaac
Yeah, I totally agree. And one thing I really liked about the idea was that the concept of a default path to begin with, right? I’ve always been very obsessed about philosophizing about this because it feels like universally, everyone does kind of generally follow this education, okay, no matter a little bit more, a bit less, and work and family, retirement, etc. But I suppose in Singapore, it becomes, I feel as if it’s even more time sensitive, you know, it’s like, okay, you go JC versus poly is one year versus three years and then oh if you go to medicine you defer your NS or do you finish all of your NS and people get very in depth about these individual one year six month deviations and we really get very caught up in it you know what I mean?
Faith
Yeah you get unnecessarily pressed over like just six months or one year but it could impact the rest of your life like maybe just take JC slower or go to poly if it’s the right path for you
Isaac
Exactly and I felt as if you know as we as a natural part of growing up meet people from all over the place obviously we’re in secondary school we’re too busy studying in our own little holes right but you meet more people whether it’s from other countries other ways of life or industries within Singapore and and you realize that people don’t often do exactly that I one of my I think one of my my friends who I met in medicine I realized that he’s the exact same age as me but then he didn’t seem to have any you know anything that accounted for the later timeline right and and and then what i realized was that okay he’d taken several get years here and there he spent a year he spent a year in another course he took another get year after doing his scholarship and all that and then made me realize actually you know and then plus plus when you go traveling you meet people who are gap yearing in southeast asia right
Faith
Yeah, a very different genre and they’re like such free spirits. Like what’s a timeline they’re just like oh i’m not not in a rush to get a house or to save up or to get a job or get married exactly
Isaac
And then you have people talking about BTO in Uni Year 2 versus BTO in Uni Year 4.
Faith
Yeah, and then they try so hard to meet someone at 19 or 20, and they’re like, okay, I’ll get my BTO by the time I graduate, and I can qualify for more grants. But they don’t think about the big picture.
Isaac
Yeah, we’re trained to time everything to a T. I don’t know, is there any, I guess going off that, do you feel as if there was any point where milestone anxiety, as they call it, weighed on you more than any point in time.
Faith
I feel like the most stressful part of my life was like A-levels. Like, you know, there’s so much riding upon that like two weeks of exams. It’s like if you screwed up your entire future, you could go down the drain or you might have to go overseas like to study medicine or some other course. It felt like there was so much hinging upon that. So that was like a bit of milestone anxiety. Like if you don’t make it into local medicine, then what? I mean, okay, maybe I was a bit of a one-track mind back then. So I guess that’s something I would go back and tell my 18-year-old self. Don’t be so obsessed with just focusing on this one part. Think about what you want in the future and based on values rather than targets. Yeah. I guess if you could go back in time, what would you tell yourself? Like your 18-year-old self before loss?
Isaac
So I actually would 100% agree that A-levels was the worst time of my life. Ever. Collective trauma. collective trauma so I remember something very distinctly from my from my best friend told me when he went to uni and then after that he said that I was wondering okay is it going to be more difficult than A-levels he said no A-levels was the worst exam ever and I was really confused because you know I thought uni would be harder it would be a harder course things like that and when I did go into it I realised that was 101% true and it feels a lot like that was because were all at that stage, kids studying and all that, you’re correct to describe it as a one-track mind. It’s not because you knew it was easier. I think the content was categorically obviously and reasonably harder. But what happens at that point is that now suddenly you think about so many other things. You have jobs, you have friends, you’re wondering, as an autonomous adult roaming around, it’s time to start prioritising, planning for our future. So I suppose when you ask that question, when milestone anxiety catches up and things like that. I think once that left in A-levels, it’s still there. I’ll admit that it’s still there all the time. You have this rapture and this eureka moment, but then it’s always still there because you can’t help but look at your friends who are, some of them are earning more, some of them are earning less, but they’re so much more relaxed than you. So the ones who are earning more are doing better in every respect of the world. Then you question what you do and I guess it’s just coming back to the decisions that you have to stand by. And I suppose that, you know, a lot of people might get the impression that, okay, you know, like from reading your blog and from seeing all the decisions that you make, everything is carefully planned, everything is carefully weighed out. But have you heard anything that sounds like a huge misconception? You know, you look at it and then you’re like, my life is definitely nowhere as good as you think it is. or actually there’s a huge part that you risked out on.
Faith
Yeah, honestly, when you say that people probably assume that I’m great at planning my life and stuff. I mean, yeah, I’m good at planning the day-to-day, but honestly, a lot of the big decisions in life were probably influenced by more emotional things. I mean, if I had been completely rational, I would have said stay the path, just persevere, do the full five years, slog it out, because rationally it makes financial sense and it was good for training. but I guess in my heart, I knew that that wasn’t what I wanted. So I forced myself off the path. And maybe I don’t actually like stability that much. I mean, we can do with a little bit more excitement in all our lives, I feel like collectively. So I guess for you also, what’s a misconception people might have about your current path?
Isaac
So one thing that people seem to think is that everything is very stable and planned out. The future is kind of laid out in front of you. And I mean, there’s no untruth to it. I feel as if we can’t deny that we are honoured and privileged to be in a position where there’s this core profession that we have that allows us a decent amount of stability. But people don’t quite realise how tamal to us and chaotic a lot of my day-to-day decision-making is. For example, last year, around this timing actually, For legal reasons, I cannot explain more, but essentially there was some legal disputes and conflicts that we had to navigate as a baby business. And sometime around this year, in fact, in many ways, I’m in the midst of it now. What I’m doing as my core business is going through a lot of shifts, be it looking into a bit of international expansion. And all of these things are high risk, high reward things. at the end of the day, the fallback is not like, you know, people think that it’s a matter of deciding between, oh, you know, you’re definitely going to be living in this amazing condo penthouse when you’re 20 or 30 or whatever. And then the fallback to that is just living in a less big condo penthouse. But it’s more of like, you know, either you make it big or you get zero or even lose money out of it. So I think the stability is a big misconception people tend to have, especially when they see that, you know, a lot of things are going on. And I suppose inside of us, we spend a lot of time questioning what we are investing our time and all our things, all our efforts in, right? So I think on that note, my question to you is in order to get to wherever this is, right? However chaotic.
Faith
Yeah, where am I? I don’t even know.
Isaac
Right, right.
Faith
What are we doing?
Isaac
Yeah, there’s so many things that had to be unlearned or undone to kind of open new doors, right? So are there any big things that you unlearn along the way?
Faith
I guess I have to think about my answer for a bit, but maybe you can answer that first if you have an idea.
Isaac
For sure. I feel as if… And so, okay, this comes from a point where I think I learned a lot of bad habits. So this is common sense to a lot of people. But I felt as if I had to unlearn the concept that you need to really have everything prepared, scripted, ready, a huge plan, everything ready to go before you start acting on something. I think that’s something that we carry with from school in many ways.
Faith
Yeah, it’s always like plan before you execute versus you plan on the fly.
Isaac
And you’re always made to feel as if in secondary school you give these presentations and people get hugely criticised were saying that you don’t even know this, you don’t even research this. And you realise that when you go out into doing things, I would like to repurpose this thing that one of my old teachers said, which was like, “always over promise but under the limit.” And I realised that obviously you kind of get nowhere if all you do is just waiting until things happen before you act on them.
Faith
Yeah, because so much of life passes you by while waiting and you’re losing precious time.
Isaac
Exactly, like starting a business, forming new partnerships, exploring new opportunities. Sometimes you do have to do your preparation, but it’s not like I can fly to a new country only when everything is ready to be done. I have to at least promise something. I can be honest that it’s a future something and what is the present something. but I think one thing I had to unlearn is to just not try to be overprepared for most of the big life things, right?
Faith
Yeah, I guess I agree with you on that. So maybe the thing that I felt like I had to unlearn is the concept of the arrival fallacy. So the arrival fallacy is basically like you tell yourself, when I have this thing, then I will let myself be happy or when I get into residency, I’ll be happy. When I have this car or condo, I will be happy and let myself rest. So I feel like we set a lot of expectations on ourselves as higher performing people. We put all this pressure to achieve certain milestones, especially when we compare ourselves with our friends and other seniors who have done great things before us. So yeah, I guess unlearning the arrival fallacy means that you just let yourself be happy in the present moment. I mean, maybe it’s a little bit lazy of me, but I’m just like, why do I want to set such high targets? I just want to live within my means. I’m not trying to buy branded bags. I’m not trying to live in a penthouse or fly a private jet someday. I’m like, okay, I’ll just live simply and enjoy the moment now. Because I feel like in medicine, we see so many people just fall sick. Someone can come in with an aneurysm, 40-something years old, and just drop dead. Or people get a stroke, and then they were planning to retire, but now they have a stroke with a bit, but they can’t enjoy it. So why wait? We should just enjoy the present.
Isaac
Yeah, no, I actually resonate with that to different levels, which is that, I don’t know about you, but seeing relatively young, and by relative, I mean probably people in their 40s and 50s, seeing them have very life-limiting conditions that you might not expect, it hits you very, very differently. And on another level, I think what that, I suppose in the career that we’ve worked in, we are suckers for delayed gratification. I think first of all the system itself is built out of residency subspecialties, subspecialties, wait time to get into residency and you know it’s that you’re gonna get this holy grail but in 10 years. I think the crazy thing is that it works also because it attracts the exact kind of people who are very good at accepting the late gratification because it’s all about I I mean, for better or for worse, the main filter to get into this career is studying, right? And most people who do well in standardized testing and exams are people who are willing to study and study and study. Like there’s no end in sight. Just so that you can get some dream A level score to get into your YVON dream course. So you’re already, I think with many of the students or even peers that I talk to, right? I feel as if that, you know, there’s that statement that goes, B students work for C students and A students do something, something or another, right? And I feel like that’s really true because especially at this age, when we were 17 or 18, you can see that these friends do better, these friends do worse. But at this age, you realise that actually some people who may not have done as well as others in exams, they straight away realise, okay, I’m not going to put much more effort into this, but I’m going to straight away start starting a business for myself.
Faith
Like they just jump in, they just try first.
Isaac
Exactly, exactly. And one of my very good friends, One of my very good friends, he, by the age of 18, this was like before he even went into NS, he’d been a professional barber with one of the most well-known shops in Singapore for two years.
Faith
Oh wow, so like an apprenticeship.
Isaac
Yeah, exactly.
Faith
Oh, this is unconventional. I mean, in Singapore, it’s always just like, okay, finish studying, then you can do this. And then finish studying, then you can do something else. Like, we put so many limitations on ourselves, but who asked us to do that?
Isaac
Exactly. And I mean, I look up to this guy so much as well. even though he’s way, way younger than me. Because at that age, at the same time, he’s also doing things like, he had a whole creative design thing going for him. He’s a very good graffiti artist. He’s been commissioned by real people with real money to paint huge miles on walls. He’s done so many things, right? And he’s also very good at it. He’s in a band that tours Southeast Asia regularly. And all of this is done with what we’re doing, like studying at Starbucks, right?
Faith
I feel like time passes so differently for medical students or people who are stuck in this path versus people who are like, they skip uni, but all those years are spent gaining life experience. I mean, who’s to say which one is better? Yeah, I mean, to put things into perspective for viewers who don’t know the medical system, I mean, how many years is that, right? Let’s count. Okay, you spend 12 years of your education just grinding towards med school. Five years. Yeah, and then five years in uni, or I mean, six years for some. and then one year of housemanship. If you’re lucky, you get into your residency on your first try. That’s like five years. Five, six years on average.
Isaac
If you don’t have to wait. Yeah. Maybe half the people do have to wait.
Faith
Yeah, most people have to wait at least like two, three years nowadays, depending on the specialty. Wait, so I lost count already. That’s at least 10, 11 years. And then you exit as a consultant if you’re lucky, associate consultant. And then you try and get a promotion to consultant and then professorhood that’s like what 15-20 years at least before you can really you know start living life.
Isaac
It feels as if you’re working towards JC graduation, except that JC graduation is a notion that just keeps pushing down and gets pushed down and down.
Faith
It’s like you’re kicking your happiness as a can down the road but like what happens if you stroke out from all the stress or all the late nights or like I don’t know drinking Red Bull right.
Isaac
yeah the monsters that are sitting in my fridge right now will have something to say about that. So I mean, I don’t know if you’ve already answered this question, but then if you could boil it all down to, is there one thing that you strongly believe in now that you didn’t quite believe in or even know this existed when you were 18? What is that belief or what is that value?
Faith
I guess it’s like, you know, having a sense of self-identity. But I mean, at 18, we really had not lived enough life. I mean, living in Singapore, we literally just go to school and go home. So our worldview was very limited back then. But I would have probably told myself back then to, you know, get out there, experience the world, try all the other hobbies that I might have wanted to turn into actual jobs or careers. Like, I don’t know. I mean, there’s so many things that all of us could have explored. Maybe I would have gone into, like, journalism. Yeah, or, like, something arts here. What would you have done if you had? Yeah, what would you, like, as a secondary school student, have wanted to explore?
Isaac
Oh, wow. I was one of those dreamy kids that had those big, big flashy ambitions like be a pilot. Oh, that’s fun. And then the other thing was like, I actually wanted to join the army for a bit. Oh, I know that’s what? Yeah, I don’t know. Something that involves jumping out of planes or flying planes.
Faith
Oh, you have been on a flight that’s like cool. Basically, you’re a pilot.
Isaac
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s not too late. Yeah, maybe at the age of 40, I’ll find myself in Australia in my pilot life.
Faith
Yeah, oh no, for real. I have a nurse friend. He quit his job in Singapore and he’s migrated to Australia. So now he’s working as a pilot. I mean, he’s working as a local nurse there and he does pilot training. He’s working towards becoming a commercial aviation pilot.
Isaac
Wow.
Faith
Yeah. It’s really cool. When I heard his story, I was like, oh my gosh. I didn’t know that was an option. Like, you know, just up and leaving.
Isaac
Make your dreams fly, you know. Yeah. And I think there is value to even the mere act of action. on those dreams, even if it don’t come fully through. Because now you make me think of one of my really, really close friends from Italy, who I was still in very, very close touch with, but then he’s like 18 hours across the world living in the States. And he wanted to become a commercial pilot at some point in time. So he went for the SIA interviews, which are notoriously tough. He’s very good, but he didn’t get it. But he then continued in the same kind of aerospace space. So aerospace engineering. And now he started his career in Alabama, where he lives and resides right now. And for a year or two, I think a lot of our conversations were around how he’s really in the middle of nowhere. He did manage to live out the dream of moving out, just seeing somewhere in the world that wasn’t here. But it was really like…
Faith
It’s not a conventional spot that people go to.
Isaac
It was some kind of town somewhere. But then now he managed to… I think he didn’t change jobs or change roles. I haven’t talked to him in a little bit, but he’s now living in a very, very nice house in Texas somewhere. You’ve got to, you know, his job is like taking off and he’s partnered up with an American now.
Faith
He can stay there. Yeah, yeah.
Isaac
So I think, you know, there’s so much value to actually just trying it out because you don’t know, it’s like the butterfly effect, right? You don’t know what path it’s going to chart out for you.
Faith
Yeah, it’s like you have to give it a chance. If not, you never know. I mean, you can just always sit in your room and think about all the what is, but if you never act on a single one of them, then you haven’t really lived life.
Isaac
Yeah, and I guess if you’re thinking about hypotheticals, you know, you’re a good writer, you’ve developed in the arts and all that. Is there any of your side quests that you thought would last only a while? It’d be a temporary fun thing you try at 19 or 20, but actually it started with you throughout.
Faith
I guess maybe my blog perhaps could actually have been a little bit of a side quest because I did not expect people to react the way that they did. I wrote just one post and then I didn’t expect it to actually suddenly get thousands of views and people asking me more questions but I think maybe the first year that I posted it I got at least 100 comments I was like what and I’m like suddenly okay I actually have I feel like I must help people because it will be negligent of me to just suddenly just kill the blog and then there will be no one to answer these questions and then people might make the same not same mistakes they will make the same choices that we did and then they will wonder why no one told them otherwise
Isaac
And you’re hoping that they would learn more from all your diseases.
Faith
Yeah, correct. I mean, we can only learn from other people’s choices and other people’s mistakes. So more information out there is always a good thing. So yeah, I always thought it would just be a side quest and that it would just be one post a year. And then in the end, I was like, okay, I actually really enjoy this. I grew into it. And then from there, writing about it gave me so many other opportunities.
Isaac
You know, as a reader of your blog, I will say that maybe it’s the way you write or maybe it’s some good SEO. But if you search for like medical school in Singapore or you don’t like getting it, your blog pops up is one of the first things.
Faith
Yeah, because blogging taught me all these extra skills like website design, SEO, how to market myself. Yeah, I mean, it’s so many fun extra skills that I wouldn’t have gotten. And I think a lot of doctor friends don’t have because I mean, they’re not in the same spheres as content creators.
Isaac
So it’s fun.
Faith
Yeah, so like for you, what’s a side quest that you thought would just, you know, die of what stuck around?
Isaac
I think one of those things would be, one of those, I’m like struggling between two outdoorsy things that I sometimes like to do.
Faith
You can do both.
Isaac
Okay, the first one would be, would be scuba. I first got into it just together with my friends. You’re done with NS, you have a bit of time to want to go travel and it’s just one of the things that, you know, everyone thinks like, let me go get my party, right? It’s just a conversation that always crops up somewhere. Some people end up doing it, some people don’t. I just happen to end up doing it. And I thought that would be the end of it, you know, like, boys trip to Bangkok, get your first step to go and dive for the first time and then get on with life afterwards. But I think there was, the crazy thing was that there was one of the very few activities that I’ve ever done that I felt as if it is just pure, intrinsic enjoyment when I was doing it. I don’t think, I don’t think it’s very easy for me to feel that way than a lot of the other things. I mean, obviously, work is work, right? I don’t wake up in like rounding notes and feel I am happy right now.
Faith
This is the best moment of my life.
Isaac
Yeah, like mostly hobbies, right? But I think even then with most of the other things I’ve tried out, I’ve never felt that, you know, it’s like that same feeling that you’re in the middle of the ocean.
Faith
Yeah, it’s like the euphoria and like even the experience that you’re actually immersed in. Exactly.
Isaac
And I thought that, you know, what would happen is that, okay, this becomes an occasional thing, you know, same way that people love going skiing or snowboarding every now and then. But, But I think what serendipitously came into the picture was that I felt, I mean, I did really like it, but then what really changed things was COVID. When no one could travel, I had a whole list of destinations I wanted to go to, but then I was like, huh. So then I started diving in Singapore with this community that I currently dive with right now. And they have a boat to go out on weekends. The guy who runs this is a very good businessman, but he’s also a very good diving instructor. and I stuck around them for a while and that’s when the idea of starting to become a bit more, I guess, professional in that aspect came to me and then I did all the courses to become an instructor, guide, etc. And then I realised that I really enjoyed it and now not only I realise do I learn a lot about being a good diver and teaching people to dive, which is really fun, right? I really resonate with the idea of just sharing knowledge if and when you can. And I think the other thing that I accidentally started learning so much more about is how this particular dive company, they’re called Turtle Buddies, shout out. You can find them on Instagram. But basically, I really like how they grew from a really small outfit during COVID to something much bigger. I think there’s a lot of things that they did well, be it seeing how my boss or my mentor grew the community. he likes to say this thing which is like oh just go and make friends we just like to go and make friends and be everyone’s friend and that really kept the community growing and growing and growing and how you know as they expanded they started doing more different kinds of courses running trips overseas and all that I take a lot of those practices and apply it to my own business as well so I think yeah that’s useful yeah it leads you down the road
Faith
Wait so what’s the weirdest overlap that you’ve discovered between like this diving thing and your main career or your business?
Isaac
I think that it’s the way in which systems are run when you are not there. I suppose having interacted with some people starting their own businesses, some of which are similar or dissimilar to mine, you realise that a lot of businesses are very founder-centric, which I think is good, especially if you have a strong story. We are very founder-centric and I have to, you know, I spin all kinds of nonsense about my own experiences or for whatever they are worth, right? But I think then when you go from just starting out at day one or even fundraising and things like that to actually having something that lasts, what I learned is how to try and let things run in your absence to build systems that work. And what I thought was really good about diving is that I’m not sure how, I think just for bit of context, the way diving courses are run and all that, it’s all under certain agencies, right here, pardon me, but basically there’s a very fixed curriculum that every person goes through whether you’re learning in the Philippines, America, Singapore.
Faith
Yeah, so a standardized experience.
Isaac
Exactly.
Faith
So you don’t need the same instructor teaching hundreds of people because they can’t scale.
Isaac
Correct. And then even with individual shops or individual organizations that deliver this, then once you train up instructors who can do it. The main guy, I guess, the main person who started all of it, he can have a reasonable trust that his instructors will do certain things, right? And I think that’s something that a lot of startups, a lot of businesses don’t really have. Like, it’s always like, I do the sales, I do the ops, I do the marketing, and I don’t trust anyone to do it.
Faith
Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, we’ve all definitely encountered founders in our life who are like, I mean, founders in the past, or like we’ve seen businesses where they’re just like a bit of control freaks. They’re like, I must do everything by myself. I want to do everything because they, I mean, they love their baby. I mean, business is a baby. But at the same time, it also just creates like burnout and you can’t scale it in the long term. And imagine if you fall sick or like something happens to you, then your entire brand and company just collapses. So I think it’s great that you learn that skill. I mean, who have thought learning diving, linking to all of this?
Isaac
Well, I mean, you’ve had your little experiences with entrepreneurship as well. They’re not so little. They’re not so little. In fact, I followed all her pursuits.
Faith
You followed them. I have a period of my life which will be redacted.
Isaac
But what are some of the, I guess on that tangent, what are some of the big lessons you’ve learned from trying out entrepreneurship?
Faith
I think, I mean, there was an itch that I always wanted to scratch but that obviously I couldn’t when I was in the system. Because I mean, I simply didn’t have the time or bandwidth or like, I mean, you can’t moonlight anyway. So I think being able to dive into like entrepreneurship or like, you know, I’ve done consulting for like health tech firms is it’s just interesting to I mean I mean I’m sure you as a business owner also you you know like you have to really put yourself out there in a way that doctors don’t normally do like you have to sell yourself and tell people you need to I mean I have these services would you like to try them and you actually have to go out there and network like I remember when I founded my clinic when I co-founded my clinic last time I set up like a local longevity group called the Don’t Die Group Singapore. So it was all centered around Brian Johnson’s health movement. And we actually managed to build a pretty sizable community of like 400 members in the WhatsApp group. And then I would host monthly meetups. So I think that experience and getting to meet so many new people, exchange ideas with them and actually be able to help them. I mean, I was offering just health advice for fun. I think finding connections with all these people is kind of a beautiful experience in itself.
Isaac
yeah that made it worth it side question then um having having having experienced uh the longevity community right uh what what are some things that you do in your life to also try to not die i want to learn too yeah yes so i guess i guess i realized that the branding of longevity medicine
Faith
scares quite a lot of people off because it feels a bit inaccessible like it sounds like something when you reach people or people have a lot of time to exercise get a fitness instructor do So I prefer to call it like lifestyle medicine. Lifestyle medicine feels a little bit more accessible. So like in clinic nowadays, like as a GP, I would just counsel people, I’d be like, oh, what’s your diet looking like? Maybe you can incorporate more vegetables, include these new like vitamins like from Whole Foods rather than asking people to buy expensive pills or like just making sure that they’re exercising enough and clocking steps. So I’m like, okay, if you can just clock extra steps or if that job is really menial, I’m not going to say, oh, you still have to go to the gym on top of that. Yeah. And I mean, of course, stress management. I mean, all of us are so stressed out. I mean, honestly, doctors are probably the worst people to give medical advice. I know so many doctors who just go and eat KFC because they’re stressed or they go and just drink beer and lots of alcohol because it’s the lifestyle of their department or they’re just stressed. So I mean, we have to take care of ourselves first. We can’t set ourselves on fire just to keep our patients alive.
Isaac
I kind of felt very called out like that because two calls ago, right, I tell you, I was in my call room at 5am and I ordered on grab food for myself a carbonara chicken cutlet. At what time? At 5am. I ate it for breakfast.
Faith
Oh my god. Wait, there was a carbonara chicken place that was open at 5am?
Isaac
Yeah, there’s like 24 hours. I was like, okay, I really need a Boreal Boost this call. You know how by the time it reaches 4-5am, you get a bit of loud activity.
Faith
Yeah, and then you get the munchies also, but you don’t want to go now for 7-Eleven. because you just end up eating cup noodles and the eggs
Isaac
So I was like, let me have a nice balanced meal, carbonara and fried chicken for breakfast. So that, you know, I think lifestyle medicine is very important for everyone. Most of all us.
Faith
Yeah, most of all us. Like, doctors really need to take better care of themselves. I mean, anyone in a high stress job, I mean, your job will replace you in a day if you drop dead, but your family will be very sad. So please take care of yourself first.
Isaac
Yeah, PSA, PSA.
Faith
Yeah, PSA.
Isaac
We might have another episode talking about lifestyle and diet.
Faith
We should totally bring some other doctors on. Yes. That would be fun.
Isaac
And some people who are actually in fitness.
Faith
Yeah. We need to get people who are like, you know, they look the part.
Isaac
Correct. I definitely don’t look the part right now in my life. But anyway, I guess back to talking about side quest, this is a somewhat more hard-hitting question, which is I think a lot of times when all of us have all these different things going on, it’s hard to wear different hats at the same time, especially to different people. So have you ever had instances where your side quests or your different portfolios have ever clashed with your identity or career credibility? Have people in any settings, I suppose, doubted your worth in that setting, if you get what I think.
Faith
Yeah. So I feel like, I remember when the, so I think in August, like last, August last year, I think, yeah some articles about like my whole bond breaking came out and obviously online there was discourse about it actually the discourse was surprisingly just negative than I thought it would be but of course I was worried like oh is this going to impact like my career or my reputation would people only ever know me as like a bond breaker because I mean there used to be a much more like negative stigma against it in the past but I feel like nowadays people actually seem more neutral towards it especially within the medical community I surprisingly I mean yeah of course course there was backlash among the older generations some people were like trying to throw shit at me on linkedin which was kind of funny because i was like it’s okay they’re just giving more views but yeah i mean i was worried that that would affect my career credibility of people would be like oh she’s too young she’s too inexperienced what does she know she talks about systemic issues in health care but like she hasn’t been in it long enough to actually know it or feel it. So I do feel imposter syndrome sometimes, but I am working on that. Yeah, but for you, you’ve done so many side quests. Which one do you feel like you’ve learned the most from?
Isaac
Or that’s challenged you the most? I would think that I would not even talk about a side quest here. I would talk about my main quest. So this is a funny one because I think I’m not going to talk about it in the sense of dealing with patients or in you know like learning how to make it all of that I think I think all that comes with a job but I think what surprisingly I felt was very valuable from medicine is the ability to communicate and not necessarily with the care recipients but with other people in a professional setting I think people who are in healthcare be in nursing medicine etc are seeing where i’m going with this but every time you shoot one single message to someone you need to make sure that all the information is lined up in the exact same order yeah you want them to be receiving it in you need to have an exact call to action in the last sentence for them you do a lot of tiptoeing in the medical system around the many many many stakeholders you have to interact with every single day and when you come out and have more professional interactions outside, you realise that actually these things help so much when I am trying to, you know, interact with someone to get a task done. Are you able to get a person with this soul and soul skills to start this task and at this date, but if not, the contingency is as such. And you can do that without having a needless one-hour meeting going back and forth. You can achieve so much in just one quick SMS.
Faith
Yeah, just one clear SMS.
Isaac
And the funny thing is that, you know, most of us in the medical system probably don’t know how to write an actual sentence in English anymore. but communication is one of the biggest things that we have to employ on a day-to-day basis. So that was a huge takeaway that I think felt even more impactful than all the already, I would say, quite impactful and fun medical knowledge that I took to come. Yeah. But I think, you know, as we segue away from useful and professional skills, let’s throw some quickfire questions at each other, right? Okay, I’m down. Okay, in your life right now, you have all these things going on and you’re busy all the time. If I just give you, not me, okay, obviously, but if you were just given…
Faith
What do you want to give me?
Isaac
If $10 million dropped out of the sky, or to your left, like calm, like that, what would you not change about your life?
Faith
Honestly, I mean, a lot of people for me say, oh once I earn a certain amount of money I can retire forever and not work again right so I actually considered that at some point in time I was like okay maybe if I suddenly cash out really well or like you know do well in stocks I can actually just retire forever but I was like what would I do if I retire I think I fundamentally do enjoy like clinical work like talking to patients and knowing that I’m actually making an impact in their health and in their lives and you know keeping them healthy means that their families back home are also healthy and happy so I think that’s one thing I would not change. I would not retire. I mean, I will still work the same number of hours as I do now. Yeah. And, yeah, because it gives me the perfect work-life balance, I would say I’m actually really happy with where I’m at in life and career fulfillment-wise. Yeah. So, if I give you 10, okay, if I give you back the $10 million that you gave me, what doesn’t change about your life?
Isaac
Without interest or leverage.
Faith
Sorry. $10 million flat.
Isaac
$10 million flat. I think, Okay, what I would change is definitely the sleep cycle, definitely the diet, definitely the exercise regime. But I will say one thing that will never change is the human relationships that I have with my friends. I think a lot of people talk about, okay, in retirement, I’m going to enjoy this money for all my family, right? Like they’ll be in a nice house, my kids will go to uni, I’ll buy 10 cars, 5 cars, 2 cars, 1 car. But I think that aside, one realises that if I, it guides a lot of how I spend my time now, which is that even if I had $10 million all the time in the world, I would still want to carve out as much time for the friends, for my partner, my girlfriend, who’s been with me in this whole very bad journey where I barely get any time to spend at home. Yeah, very funny. Yes, but I think all those things will not change and they should not change. because I think it signals to me that if suddenly I have so much time with my friends that I spend zero time on right now, it means that I’m not making the right time for the right people now. So I think that’s something that I suppose beyond it being a thing to aspire to, it’s kind of a hypothetical that I also carry myself. Like if I had this $10 million, all the material things, all the loans that I’ll pay off, all the other life security I’ll try to pay off, what is going to stay the same? and that thing I want to say the same, I make sure I implement it in my life like today and right now.
Faith
Fair enough. That’s kind of my thought about this.
Isaac
Okay, so $10 million into our conversation. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there’s so much to this, right? Which I think there’ll be many, many, many more conversations to come about the individual decisions that are made along the way as well as all the other ups and downs of all these side quests. I think that’s enough for today see you next time on the We Didn’t Fan This Podcast
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