It’s a hassle to transfer PayPal money for Malaysians. I do not know why it’s taking PayPal and the Malaysian banking authorities so long to provide this much needed service. It’s been quite some time since PayPal opened their regional headquarters in Singapore.

Anyway, I think the most hassle free way to transfer your virtual PayPal money into rock-solid bank notes is to simply head down to Singapore for a holiday, open up a POSB Bank account and then simply do a bank transfer to the Singapore bank account. I have done it and it’s completed really fast.

Here’s how. Head down to any POSB branch and open up a bank account. You can simply open a bank account with just a Malaysian IC. No need passport or any other crap. Cool right? Some features for you to consider with this POSB account - Internet banking and MasterCard Debit Card. I’m still waiting for my Internet banking package to arrive. But the MasterCard Debit Card is the single most useful piece of feature from my POSB account. It works exactly like a Credit Card and can be used online anywhere. It’s how I validate my PayPal.

I wanted this same Debit Card with my Maybank, but sadly they don’t provide it. Their Visa Debit Card can’t be used online. What crap.

Anyway, once you opened up your POSB Bank account, use the following details to key into your PayPal account. This is provided to me by a POSB Bank officer and it works perfectly fine for me.

Bank Name: DBS Bank Ltd.
Bank Code: 7171
Branch Code: 081
Account Type: Saving

The bank name is DBS because POSB is owned by DBS. Oh do note, if you are above 21 years old, you need to maintain a S$500 deposit balance else they will deduct S$2 per month (if I’m not wrong).

The entire process took about 3 working days before the money appear in my POSB account. Cool stuff I would say. Oh PayPal will deduct S$1 for bank transfer of less than S$200.

If you need to check your bank balance or report stolen DBS debit card, call this number: +65-6327 2265
And if you need to call PayPal for any reason, call this number: +65-6510 4650
Oh this PayPal number will be rerouted to a Shanghal call centre, so have fun talking there!

Don’t be discouraged to call the Singapore numbers listed above. It’s actually quite cheap to call Singapore. If you are on Digi, you can call Singapore for 18sen/minute. I’m not joking. This is serious shit. It’s cheaper than calling my neighbour on his mobile phone! I saw some adverts for Maxis and Celcom too, but I’m not too sure the exact price to call Singapore, but you can try for about 1 minute to get a rough gauge of the price. It won’t slaughter you, that’s for sure.

Hope this helps.

I never liked the idea of working for people. I always liked the idea of owning my own company and being my own boss. Even if I do not own the company, I fancy the idea of becoming it’s CEO. Perhaps it’s got to do growing up seeing my parents running their own small stationary business. I did not know how I got interested in business, but very early on, perhaps in late primary school, I found the daily business section in newspapers fascinating. Around 13-15 years old, I started reading business books. Books such as Rich Dad Poor Dad, Jack - Straight from the Gut, Who Moved my Cheese are exceptional books which greatly influenced my outlook in life. I immediately liked the idea of me being a CEO. Also I started realising I did not want to spend my entire life running the rat race just to be a CEO. I want to be a CEO young.

Hence I shall now let this inner dream of mine be public. I want to be a young successful CEO by 30. The only way I can achieve this is to set up my own company.

I had dabbled in business since secondary school. It was never big ventures but I would like to document them here, to write my thoughts and my reflection about them here. I would like to write learning points and mistakes that I have made so that these thoughts will be eternal over here.

I shall start with my first 2 business forays which are really small and minute sometimes I think I should just exclude them. For the first story. I said earlier that my parents operate a small stationary shop. Well, my mom brings me to the office everyday after school. When I was 14 years old in Form 2, I realised that perhaps, I could take or buy stationary from my parents cheaply and sell them at market rates to my classmates. There was this ink pen that was pretty slow moving in my mom’s office. My mom agreed to let me have it for free and to sell it to my friends. Went to school and managed to sell some, but I figured out it was not worth my time and effort. It was too small a monetary value to bring about significant profit unless sold in large quantities. So I ditched that idea.

Around the same time I started learning some BASIC programming. I coded a simple maths program to help us out on some simple maths stuff we were learning in school. I managed to sell several of that programs for a few ringgit each to my classmate. Thinking back now, I was either a damn good salesman or my friends are simply too rich they just bought the programme to shut me up. Either way I learnt that programming a unique software can make you rich, but only if you can be a good coder to code some really valuable stuff to solve some problems. I did not develop my skills further and so the coding experiment never progressed.

Then when I was 16 years old, blogging was all the rage in town. People are earning lots of money catering to all kind of niches on the internet providing information for the world. I saw an opportunity here too. Since I was an avid participant of contests (radio, online, on-ground, etc - you named it, I’d most likely won something somewhere), I figured out I could start a blog and start aggregating contests from around Malaysia. And I could also write some interesting blog posts on increasing the chances of winning certain kind of contests. They are tricks in the trade, trust me and sometimes they work. I wanted a dot com brand and bought myself MalaysiaContests.com (I allowed it to expire after 1 year). The blog started out pretty fine, but soon I realised it was hard aggregating all the contests from everywhere. Again, it’s just simply not worth doing. My learning point here was that, there was money to be earned through blogging, but it required insane amount of work to keep it updated and as a student, there was simply not enough time I could devote to this side project without having my grades affected. Luckily I gave up on it and concentrated on my studies and extra-curricular activities which yielded benefit to me a year later.

In Form 5, my friends and I started doing crazy stuff in school. We created crazy videos of each other and thought of creating a community of links of crazy videos. We started 69Tribe.com (Again I allowed it expire after 2 years, but not before it created some controversy while I was in Singapore studying, haha) to allow a platform for us to connect with the rest. This time this project went a little futher with cooperation from our friends, but the lack of technical skills hindered us from creating what we had in mind. We did not have the costs nor the connections to get a technical person to create our visions. Soon after SPM everyone else splitted up (I went Singapore, Bryan went NS in Terrenganu etc) and we kind of abandoned our project. As said, controversy cropped out and I removed all the content there and made it my GP blog in Singapore and milked some money out of it writing paid posts.

Now for some real business dealings. After SPM I was offered the chance to do A-levels in Singapore. It was not an easy life down there. I did not experimented with much business ideas down there because the hectic pace of life and the difficulty in passing exams kept me on my toes. I had to get an average of Cs for exams to keep my scholarship but even then it was hard. However despite that busy schedule, after my year-end promotional examination in JC1, I saw an opportunity to exploit a frequently cited term in Singapore - Mugger. However this term is used not in its standard English meaning. Well, the standard meaning is  ‘A person who assaults others in order to rob them’. But in Singapore it simply means a person who studies a lot and has no life. Somehow the Kiasu attitude of Singapore at times made each other proclaim others as Muggers, Closet Mugger etc (My school is known as the Mugger school, wtf right?). In Singapore it was made to look uncool to be a Mugger and cool to be a Slacker (and if you can score in exams while slacking, it’s an added bonus!) I decided to exploit this already made Singapore brand by printing t-shirts - I’m a Slacker (front)/You Mugger (back) and the also the opposite version - I’m a Mugger (front)/You Slacker (back)

I printed the Maroon version first. Took a risk to print 40 (20 for each design). It was not a small amount of money k. I printed it in Singapore because of the obvious ease instead of having to get it in Johore, thought this would increase my profit margins tremendously. I sold one shirt to Julian, the guy in the picture with me and that was all was needed. Thank you Julian, you did the promotion for me. Living in a hostel of 450, there was a ready market. I did not have to promote the shirt. I just wore it and it self-promoted. In other words I was a walking advertisement. The fact that Julian was an extremely popular figure among the Indonesians helped me a lot. The shirt was a marketing success. It was it’s own advertisement. The more people wore it, the more others are intrigue with the novelty of the idea. And before long I started receiving many calls to buy the shirts. It was not long before I ran out of stocks.

Thus I had a reprint in the dark blue colour. This time I made 50 (25 each). I did not dare take a bigger risk because it was already nearing the school holidays and most people would have left for home. However, most of the dark blue shirts were sold out too. I’d easily broke even and made a small decent profit from it. I started toying with the idea of bringing this brand nationwide (ok, islandwide since the Singapore island itself is a nation, haha) and penetrating other hostels since scholars are my target market. The holidays dashed any plans I had, and after that the following insane schedule of school, extra-curricular activites etc made me forget about any business plans that I might have. You see Singapore, it’s your education system that is depriving people from exploring a lot of possibilities (read my Musings of the Singapore Education System here). Had I been more confident of my grades, I would not have thought twice about expanding this Mugger/Slacker brand. Perhaps I could still expand this if I were to study in Singapore after this, but I doubt so. In other words I missed the boat.

Well, the first learning point from this venture was to get your product endorsed by a popular figure. It works and no wonder companies are paying millions to get celebrities endorse products. They just have the mojo factor to boost sales. Secondly, an idea must be strong and unique, possibly exploiting a certain inherent tendency that was already there. Lastly, when printing t-shirts, always have more smaller size shirts and lesser larger size shirts. Use a Christmas tree system to determine the breakdown of sizes (eg S-30, M-25, L-15, XL-5 XXL-2) to be printed. This ensures that there would not be much unsold stock after this.

At the same time, Bryan, my best buddy started out an Eat & Sleep brand in Malaysia. Created t-shirts bearing this brand and it took on pretty well among friends and strangers. He sold 50 tees of a really simple design of Eat & Sleep Sdn Bhd. And thinking that he did all this while he was undergoing NS in Terrenganu is even better. 2 years down and after I’m done with Singapore, we met up to talk about opportunities. Youth 09 was around the corner and we decided to sell ILoveKL t-shirts to a crowd of 20000. We took our biggest risk to date and printed 200. Read more about my in-depth experience selling ILoveKL t-shirts here.

So that’s about it. All my business experiences documented here with learning experiences. Well, I hope you are inspired to start your own businesses and avoid the pitfalls that I have had.

Anyway, I’m starting on another huge online youth project. It’s gonna cost quite some investment on my part. This time I’m doing some real homework in doing market research and planning. I have 8 months to see this project to a success. I will keep you guys updated on it soon.

This is weird. I am still getting used to this lifestyle - a lifestyle of slacking and bumming. After 2 years of hard work, it is rather strange not having anything to do.

When you are so busy, you wished for time to relax. When you have all the time to relax, you wished for things to challenge yourself. Life is ironic, isn’t it?

8 months to kill time. What shall I do? I had wanted all the time in the world to slack last time, but I did not really give much thought into what I will do during that free time. I was too busy studying I did not have the time to dream and imagine about the future – my favourite past time.

Laugh as much as you like, but I like dreaming and imagining up stuff. I used to do it a lot back in secondary school but I had to cut down on them in Singapore.

Read this: Life in Singapore, especially the junior college is simply too rigid and stressful for me to imagine stuff.

Look Singapore, you want to create creative students right? You want to remove the conventional, conformist, indifferent attitude of people right? You want people to think in unique, out-of-the box ways right?

Well, your education system DOES NOT encourage the above. It’s too RIGID, too ORTHODOX and too EXAM-ORIENTED. Students are encouraged to chase NOTHING ELSE but As in examinations.

Yes, it’s a process called meritocracy; I understand that. Perhaps it’s a trade-off between conflicting education policies. You push your students hard to ensure they are strong in their Science and Maths, but at what expense? I understand the need for Singapore to be the best in this globalised world; your teachers did a terrific job in drumming that into me. But I pity your Singaporean kids. They slog all their way through from Primary 1 all the way to JC2.

Those stronger ones might have the opportunity to develop other aspects once they are strong in their academics. They might EXPLORE other avenues. But how many of your students actually DARE explore things beyond their text books? Doing so might cause their exam results to deteriorate A BIT and cause them to LOSE OUT a lot. Is it worth it?

I had a serious misconception about your country before coming. My perception of your country and your education system before starting JC was this: Because Singapore is a more developed country, it will have a better education system as compared to Malaysia. And when I mean better I mean an education system that encourages creativity and unorthodox thinking. And this often means it is LESS EXAM-ORIENTED because exams FORCES students to think in a RIGID, INFLEXIBLE manner.

Maybe I did not do my research well enough. Maybe I did not watch I Not Stupid. And that probably gave me a cultural shock when I first entered my JC. I am surprised at the frequency of tests. I HATED the fact that the only way for me to succeed was to ROTE-LEARN my lecture notes.

The amount of things I had to MEMORISE used up so much of my brain capacity that at the end of the day I just have no spare brain cells to indulge in my imagination. Just ask Albert Einstein how important imagination is.

‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’

Anyway, I’m not out here to deride the Singapore education system. The system is also good in the following aspects.

1) The Singapore education system encourages one to think critically of a subject matter. Yes, all those studying and those tough tests actually improved my analytical skills, something that I did not learn very well back home. After 2 years I’m a different person; I can look at anything now and analyse it to bits and pieces – and the weird thing is, I actually enjoy doing so!

2) The Singapore education system makes a student more determined and competitive. Losing is not fun and the Singapore education system is excellent in making people lose. It is not uncommon for half the cohort to fail a certain subject. I thought exams are designed to pass students! Well, not here in Singapore. It’s design to fail student. Well it demotivates you, but it also encourages you to push harder to succeed. As long as you do not give up, the whole process just makes you a stronger person.

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Ah, just my personal musings of the Singapore education system. I diverged a lot from my original thoughts. Perhaps I gotta write a more objective piece of the education system soon. 8 months to go - all the time to write.