There are few worse places than hanging onto a capsized sailing boat off the Belgium coast, being buffeted by 25 knot winds and three-metre-high waves but that was where my teammate and I found ourselves back in 2011 as our latest attempt at sailing glory capsized on us and ended in us being rescued by the onlooking safety boats.
That ignominious incident took place during the Junior European Championships in Belgium. At the age of nine, my parents enrolled me and my sister in sailing lessons at the Singapore Armed Forces Yacht Club (SAFYC) and since that day, my sailing pursuit took me to many places around the world including, but not limited to Italy, France and Croatia.
While I haven’t sailed in years, I still look back at the ups and downs of my sailing career as some of the most formative years of my life that still help me today in my tech journey.
Here are some of the skills sailing taught me that I still lean on today:
Complex and strategic thinking
Singapore is an inherently tricky place to sail and requires a high degree of strategic thinking. The typical condition of light and shifty winds combined with strong currents can be attributed to the fact that Singapore is surrounded by other countries.
I learned how to read charts showing where the currents would come from and began to understand how to read and predict wind patterns.
Discipline and hard work
Sailing involves a lot of discipline, long hours and hard work. I would spend hours rigging my boat at the beginning of the day and de-rigging it at the end.
In this process, we would adjust ropes and strings up to the centimetre to make sure our equipment’s potential was maximised. This was all logged knowledge we accumulated through hours of training and testing optimal set-ups.
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Honing my competitive spirit
As I grew more competitive, I began to learn more about myself through serious competition. The support that was offered to me through the Singapore Sailing Federation and the Singapore Sports Council was invaluable.
In addition to my great coach and physical trainer, we had access to a wonderful psychologist who taught me to channel my emotions towards achieving my goals, a nutritionist who kept me on track for my weight-gain programme and a physiologist who helped me with recovery from our intense training sessions.
My proudest achievement was winning the Byte CII World Championships in 2009. I eventually stopped sailing three years later in 2012 after many more international regattas due to my commitment to pursuing my career instead.
After returning from university in the US in 2017, I worked for a tech firm for a short while before taking a leap of faith and completing a three-month UX Design Bootcamp with General Assembly.
I enjoy the freedom design affords me and how most design projects directly impact people. Post-bootcamp, I managed to work on contract or freelance with some pretty great companies, but I did miss the sense of being part of a team I loved when I sailed.
After a couple of months, I finally landed a full-time role at Tribe. Tribe is a government supported Blockchain Accelerator dabbling in future tech. We have helped facilitate more than S$50 Million in addition funding for blockchain startups from around the world, with a total valuation of over USD$1 Billion, that are solving some real-world problems from food security to medicine deliveries.
Accredify, for example, has developed a blockchain-based digital health passport that allows users to conveniently access and store test results via mobile app for travel declaration. AID:Tech, on the other hand, is supported by the WEF and uses blockchain technology to provide a legal digital identity to those without more traditional documentation.
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They’re currently working with Women’s World Banking to offer micro-insurance to 2 million uninsured and underinsured women in more than 10 emerging markets.
While working with the Tribe team is great, I also indulge in a not-so-secret guilty pleasure — gaming. I believe my love from gaming arose from my love of competition (which was probably the only part I loved about sailing since I don’t even sail recreationally now). During my time at university, I picked up a game called League of Legends and the rest was history.
Currently I am trying to merge my design expertise with gaming through my involvement myself in the local gaming community. My design-mindedness impacts everything from understanding my community when streaming on Twitch to the player experience when I host tournaments online to providing feedback after attending gaming initiatives that I get invited to participate in.
In fact, looking back, it feels as if my life as a whole, especially in sailing, contained many parts of a general design process that made me the design-minded person I am today.
For example, the trial and error of testing setups in sailing is similar to A/B testing, while my exposure to many friends and people from all around the world in my travels exposes me to a plethora of perspectives — an important advantage to have in design and the tech world.
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