Growing up, I have always been among the shortest of my peers. My shyness and 'far-younger-than-age' face didn't help too, making me an easy target for countless bullying sessions. I gradually formed a "keep quiet" and "away from people" personality.

I got a job immediately after school as a programmer. After working in several places and on some audacious projects, I later resigned to start my own software development firm.

Business was good for some time as I had 3 sources subcontracting projects to me. Tragedy struck when all 3 got disrupted in quick succession.

I had no client acquisition strategy of my own and my chronically introverted personality did not help matters. As client ‘drought’ descended, confidence and self-esteem began to disappear.

Rather than continue to wait, I tapped into savings and assembled a team to build what I thought was the ‘world's next big’ software. After nine months of hard-core programming, we built a solution that didn't fit the market. We tried and failed at two more startups after this.

At this point, I had lost almost all forms of belief in myself or my worth. I had exhausted all personal funds and borrowed from nearly all possible names I could remember.

My turning point was when I figured out how all my failures featured a similar pattern of gaps in internal wiring, knowledge, and approach.

There was much more to success beyond my comfort zone of coding from the corner of my room.

I hit the road hard, working on these vast gaps in knowledge, skills, and personality shifting. I was so engrossed in how to unlearn my personality defects and wrong internal codes that I took up a scholarship opportunity to study another undergraduate degree in Psychology after 3 previous degrees.

All these, together with insights from mentors and coaches, completely reset my thinking and approach to life.

Interestingly, even business started picking up.

I also realized that my active learning, over a decade of corporate experience, and my long string of failures changed me so much, including enabling me to communicate passionately and engage deeply when passing on knowledge.

I soon founded The GEM Group, where over 10,000 people benefited from our programs in the first two years alone.

My philosophy is “kaizen”, a Sino-Japanese word for “continuous improvement”, popularized by Toyota. It strikes a chord in me and inspires me to keep growing, having seen the positive transformation it has brought in my life, by God’s grace.