Not long ago I watched this video from Gary Vaynerchuck about how we should “drop one loser friend“. He suggested that we do an audit of the friends we have today, spot the loser and then just stop hanging out with him (or her). The theory goes that we are the average of our closest 5 friends so if we hang out with better people, we become better ourselves but if we hang out with worse people, we become worse.

That’s rough. It’s tough because this approach forces you to be judgmental and to some extent ruthless when it comes to auditing the kind of friends we should have. The challenge doesn’t end there though.

The big question is “How do you differentiate a winner from a loser friend?”.

It’s certainly not by who has more money, or power, or fame or anything like that. We can to some  extent look at how driven or motivated people are but how can you really tell? I’ve seen people talk the big game like they’re really driven or motivated but actually have little to show for themselves after years.

So I really struggled with trying to define what Gary considers a loser. What about a friend of mine who doesn’t have any ambition to do great things but is really really happy with life. He can’t be a loser… because hey he looks happier than me and that’s one thing he’s winning at.

After some time I sat down and put together the things that define a “loser friend” or just someone I don’t want to hang out with. At the risk of sounding judgmental, I’m going to share with you my unfiltered checklist I use to filter out “loser friends”.

1) He always talks about himself.

Have you ever been in a group of friends where there’s always one particular person that constantly dominates the conversations the group has. Even when the topic isn’t about him, he’ll make it about him. If you talk about something totally unrelated to him, like say how your friend got mugged, he’ll bring it back to talk about how he once thought he was going to get mugged too.

Now it’s not that this kind of friend never listens. Sure… during the span of a two hour outing with a friend there may be a few minutes where he quiets down and listens instead but in proportion of all the time spent.. you would notice he dominates the conversations some 90% of the time.

This kind of friend too often doesn’t take kindly to friendly debate. If he believes in something like “Trump is the best President the USA has ever had”… no matter how you argue with whatever data you can prove, you will never win the argument. It’ll only make him angrier.

2) He’s boastful and arrogant.

In my experience, arrogance is often caused by deeply set insecurity in someone. That person may feel that he’s not good enough so he needs to brag, show off his wealth or put down someone else in a group. It may not be about material wealth. I’ve seen people who have a lot of wealth but have insecurities that lie from their own abilities.

One particular person I’ve known comes from a rich family and does reasonably well at business but constantly puts down the success of his other friends. You’ll see such a person try to find a fault in a particular business (which isn’t hard because every business no matter how perfect has a fault). Things like “My other friend bought his product and he thought the service was terrible”. Or if he hasn’t had the time to find something bad to say, he might go with “At least I sleep well at night without having the stress he has”.

3) He treats people differently based on who they are in society.

I personally can’t stand people like that. If you really want to know what someone is like, don’t base it on how he or she treats you. Pay attention to how he talks to the security guard at your condo, or a waiter at a restaurant, or any of his employees that work under him. That… is how you can really tell what someone is like.

If you know someone is an asshole from how he treats people he considers “beneath” him, then chances are… one day if you’re nobody to him… he may treat you the same way. Life is too short for friends like that. But if you feel that you still enjoy such a person’s company then go ahead and mingle with the full realization that this is a “fair weather friend”.

4) He never fails to tell someone else what to do but never practices what he preaches.

This kind of loser friend often has a lot of opinions not just about world affairs or about himself but also about how you should live your life. Pay attention to whether he holds himself to the same standards or does the very same things he tells other people not to do. Don’t bother calling them out if you see inconsistency in their behaviour. They’ll likely get offended and have some reasoning anyway on why his situation is different than yours was.

Don’t bother. Just drop the loser friend and walk away.

5) He talks about all the great things he has done only for you to learn that he had little contribution to that.

Loser friends are constantly talking about their past successes. It works very well because people generally don’t suspect everything that someone says is a lie or exaggerated or taken out of context. We don’t because we just don’t have enough mental capacity to be suspicious of everything everyone tells us.

By some chance if you do dig deeper though and find out that someone played a small role, or even took things out of context then you know he’s bullshitting you. But even if it’s true. Even if he did do certain things, losers constantly get hung up on their past successes. Winners always look for the next success. Which brings me to my next point.

6) He always talk about things he’s going to do but never does it.

This is pretty straightforward. So I won’t elaborate.

7) He blames everyone but himself for his mistakes.

Have you ever heard someone say “It’s because of him that this happened to me” or they sometimes come with a partial concession like “Yes sure I made a mistake BUT it wouldn’t have been like that if it wasn’t for what this person did”.

Losers blame others over themselves because they can’t help it. It’s too much weight on their insecurity. Winners on the other hand always blame themselves, even if it’s not totally their fault. It’s only when you acknowledge that you made a mistake that you can start working on what to fix.

8) He talks bad about other people all the time.

This again is one of the things contributed by insecurity. The need to put other people down so that he comes off better. Gossip can create bonds and can be exciting at times but we can’t ever forget that if someone talks bad about other people with you, at some point he’ll be talking bad about you too.

I’ve used these 8 steps to identify what a “loser” friend is. Since then I feel like the quality of my life has improved tremendously. I have friends that I can count on, deeper and more meaningful relationships and more importantly I don’t have to put up with the negativity that “loser” friends bring. I guess Gary Vaynerchuck is right on this one.

Notice that at no point does any of my definition include how rich, how powerful or how famous anyone is. In recent years, I’ve learned to choose my friends based on who they are rather than what they have.

The additional benefit I derive from this kind of thinking is that I reflect upon myself every now and then to see if I fall into any of the 8 points I just mentioned above. Sometimes I do… like maybe I’m dominating conversations with friends in a group and when that happens I spot myself becoming a “loser” and start arresting that behaviour of mine.

It’s true that we are the average of our closest 5 friends but it’s also true that when we’re our own hardest critic, we become better.

Growing up there was one characteristic of me my mom never liked. That I just like my father before me and my grandfather before him, had a very bad temper. If something didn’t go as planned, if someone attacked me or if I felt that I wasn’t getting a point across, I would erupt.

The funny thing is that this behaviour of mine was in stark contrast with how I normally was. At my steady state, I’m normally very cheerful, I smile a lot, I laugh a lot and I joke a lot. But when that temper gets the better of me, I am another person.

I’ve heard all sorts of advice growing up from “count to ten before you erupt like Donald Duck” to “try not to take things personally” but it never ever worked for me.

Then two years ago, change came from a very unexpected place. It wasn’t from some self-help book or therapy or a huge incident or anything. It was from reading a book called Sapiens by Yuvan Noah Harari, about our evolution of human beings from our cavemen days to where we are today. According to the book, human beings in our current form have been around for over 200,000 years. That means that even assuming if we lived a 100 years, our lifetime would equate to a tiny 0.05% of the time human beings have been on this Earth.

During this period of 200,000 years, many human beings have lived and died. Some Kings, some nobles, some rich men, some peasants, some great men, some not so great men. Yet no matter how important a particular person was during his time, that person’s name is rarely uttered in our daily conversations today. When was the last time for example you talked about King Henry VIII?

If even King Henry VIII, the man who is responsible for splitting the Church and them being Protestants and Catholics today so that he could marry another wife is not talked about by us on a daily or even monthly or yearly basis…. who the fuck then am I… Timothy Tiah, some boy from Penang, an island in a small country of 30 million, in the world of 6 billion people.

So if I am nobody, do my opinions or thoughts or wants matter? If they don’t, what is there to be angry about? If I am nobody, why do I feel entitled to lose my temper and hurt another person?

This is hard to accept because all our lives we are brought up to think that we are special. That we are somebody because everyone wants to feel important.

This now brings me to the next part. My first revelation was that I am nobody and then I realised that everybody wants to feel important. So what if I decided to practice this on a daily basis. That I accept I am nobody and that everybody else is important.

Here’s what I would normally lose my temper on in the past and how I deal with it now.

1. When I have a disagreement with someone because of a different point of view.

If you think about how all arguments start, it’s always because both parties feel that they’re not being heard. That’s why they end up raising their voices and speaking louder and louder until it reaches a shouting match.

Now when I feel that someone is raising their voice, I try to catch myself from raising mine in return. Instead I remind myself that this person feels like he’s not being heard. So I change my posture. I stop doing anything else, lean forward, look that person in the eye and sincerely ask questions to try to understand where he’s coming from. Once he’s answered those questions, I ask more clarifying questions until I find that I fully understand how he feels. I resist the urge to respond even to any accusations he may have of me. I just focus on listening to him. Why do I do that? Well if I am nobody, and if I know he wants to feel important, shouldn’t I make it a point to listen?

I find that in most situations once I follow this process, the other person calms down very significantly. Here’s the amazing thing though, once he does that and have said their piece, I find that he’s wholeheartedly waiting to listen to what I have to say. I no longer find the need to be angry or to lose my temper and we resolve things very constructively.

2. When I don’t get what I want…

We live in a time of “ME”. We are constantly reminded on social media or marketing messages that we need ME time. That we need to do things for ourselves, go for holidays, buy things for ourselves.. whatever it takes to make ME happy. Sometimes we justify this by saying we work so hard or sometimes some of this stress come from work. That things at work don’t go the way we want it to go and it pisses us off.

Let me give you an example of how I overcame this.

In the past say if I went out for a event with Audrey’s friends and the event drags on that it encroaches on the ME time I had allocated for the day to play games or go for a run, I would get angry and sometimes lose my temper. I don’t get angry about this anymore. Whenever I feel like getting angry I would remind myself that hey… I am nobody. Why do I feel like I deserve ME time.. and on the other hand, Audrey is IMPORTANT. So even if she event drags on till night, deal with it because that’s more important than my run, or games or whatever else I have that may seem important.

3. When people talk bad about me…

In the past this would have me justify some reaction because hey, again we are thought by society that we have to defend our name if someone attacks us. In my case though, now that I have established that I am nobody and nobody apart from my own family and close friends give a shit about me, why do I feel the need to get angry about it or defend myself?

This has lifted such a huge burden off of me. Even if I were someone of importance, say a prominent corporate figure… do people really really care? Does anyone still even talk about how Mark Zuckerberg kicked Eduardo Saverin out of Facebook?

Now this mindset is really easy to adopt but there is one thing that really gets in the way of being able to do it consistently. That is the ability to control our emotions. Sometimes I have lapses too whenever I can’t control my emotions but hey… on aggregate I’ve done it.. and it has worked really well for me.

My relationships with friends, family and wife have improved.

I find it easier to manage teams at work. Heck try applying this at work. Treat all your colleagues, vendors, partners, investors like they were the most important people in your life and you’ll find they’ll go further for you. I attribute a big part of the modest success Colony has had to this.

Most important I find myself a lot happier. It’s liberating to feel that you’re nobody and you don’t have to defend anything about you. On the flip side it’s exhausting to feel that everything is about you. We all have that one friend who feels that way right?  That everything is about him (or her). If someone does something that affects him, that someone must have done it because of him. That he is entitled to strong opinions and that he must defend his ego. That in any social setting he talks the most, always about himself.

It’s exhausting being that person because this normally stems from a deep insecurity. But it would be great if we could also have the empathy to understand that there are many reasons why someone like that might feel like that. Make that person feel important and maybe that might help. For me though, hanging around people like that tend to exhaust me too so I tend to just fade away from their orbit.

Anyway I digress.

All in all I think this change for me has been really significant.  People who I’ve met in the past two years can’t imagine me losing my temper. More importantly my parents, my family and my wife realise that I am no longer hot tempered. I still have a long way to go because eliminating hot temper isn’t about just doing it for a month or a year… but doing it consistently for the rest of my life.

As I lazed around in my family home in Penang, the one thing at nagging me at the back of my mind was to write my customary year end review post on my blog. It did cross my mind about why I would do such a thing. It’s not like many people would read it. It’s an article about myself, and who cares about me.

Then I remembered why. I do it because the process of reflecting on my year helps me to remember the failures I’ve made and appreciate the success I’ve had in whatever things I’ve done. It’s also perhaps something that one day Penny and Fighter could read back to hear what his Daddy was doing with his years.

So here goes.

1. Colony closed another round of funding in the first half of this year valuing the barely 1 year old company then at over US$15-20m.

When I first started Colony, I didn’t expect to grow this fast so quickly but I’m grateful that it did. The best part is that a chunk of this new round of funding came from a PE fund that was introduced by one of our existing investors. I’ve learned that if we do a good job, treat our own investors with respect and radical honesty, they’ll be our strongest advocates in introducing new investors.

2. Colony continues to grow

We opened Colony @ Eco City in July 2018 with a huge anchor tenant deal and as I write this, we’re about a couple of weeks away from opening our 3rd Colony @ KL Sentral. We’ve also signed two more deals for two more locations. One at Star Boulevard and one more that hasn’t yet been announced.

The company is a good place, growing well but of course not without our own set of struggles. The best part though is that I enjoy every day at work. I once told a colleague of mine that I can’t believe our job is to build beautiful offices and work in them.

3. I’ve built many new relationships.

I don’t know if it’s because of Colony or serendipity but this year I’ve had the opportunity to meet and build strong relationships with a lot more people. I pass on the favour best as I can too, introducing people I know to others so they too can maybe start something.

4. I’ve picked up my reading habit again.

I’ve always been reading books all my life but sometimes I go into periods where I fall out of the habit. This year I’ve quite consistently had a reading habit and I’ve learned that it has come at the expense of Netflix and iPad games. Though in the last month of the year I’ve just picked up PUBG with some enthusiasm so lets hope that doesn’t get in the way.

5. I’ve never been skinnier thanks to intermittent-fasting.

Somewhere in the middle of this year I hit 75KG which was my peak weight. So I started intermittent fasting and I don’t know if it’s the fasting itself or that I stop doing my late night munching while watching Netflix (because I watch less TV), but I went down to as low as 69 KG. Now I’m about 69-70KG and I’m trying to stay around 70-71.

6. I’ve learned how little I know about managing people.

Before this year I think I belonged to a group of people who thought we knew how to manage teams because of our past experience. Well this year, thanks to my reading habit I’ve read a lot about management and it became obvious to me that I was doing a lot of things wrong in the past. That really whatever success I had with managing teams in the past were a fluke.

I’ve learned so much and implemented the things I’ve learned in Colony and I think that’s a big contributing factor for the success we’ve seen this year. The thing about learning though is that the more I learn, the more I realise that I don’t know. So it’s still a work in progress to me.

7. I’ve learned to truly be proud to be Malaysian

I’ve always loved my country which partly explains why after graduating in the UK, I wanted to come home. Loving my country and being proud of it is another thing though. I used to love my country but hate what the leaders were doing to it. The corruption in the ruling government and the regular stupid things our ministers would say that would make me feel so embarrassed that these leaders were meant to represent my country.

Then 9th of May happened. Our country showed that against odds and a rigged electoral system, we threw out the corrupt ruling government at the time. It’s hard to describe that feeling but I felt a sense of camaraderie with my fellow countrymen who worked together through the ballot box to say no to the way the country was being run.

Since then, every day that passes has been a delight. News about politicians in the past that we suspected were corrupt being charged and scandal after scandal being dug up. Our new government was given a daunting job of repairing a damaged country but looking at the way they were handling things, I was and still am happy. For the first time in my life I am able to say now that I love my government. Yes I sometimes disagree with some of the new leaders on some issues, but in aggregate I’m happy and proud of the new government in aggregate.

I realise that I wasn’t the only one experiencing this newfound pride. My friends, family and fellow countrymen were all experiencing it as well. For the first time, in spite of the situation our country’s finances are reportedly in, I feel hopeful. For the first time in my life I’m thinking that maybe I don’t have to have a backup plan for my kids to migrate overseas and have a better life. For the first time I am truly truly proud to be Malaysian.

That is something I never expected 2018 would give me. And that is something I am so thankful for. May 2019 be a great year for us all.

Not long after Ching Ern picked up her phone with a “Hello?”, I went into a passionate argument about why I disagreed with one of the decisions she made at work in Colony.

Ching Ern is one of my colleagues at Colony Coworking Space. Before joining Colony, she was an engineer for a Korean firm in Seoul, having landed the job after she finished her university there in Korea on scholarship. After her many years there, she speaks, reads and writes Korean fluently.

Our heated debate carried on for a while until finally she remained quiet for a while and said she understood. At that point, sensing she wasn’t fully sold on my reasoning I asked her to tell me why she still disagreed with me. I said

“I hate it when people just agree with me because I’m the boss. Agree with me instead because you really think I’m making the right decision”.

I pushed her a few more times until she finally let out a few more points she had inside her until I felt like she was finally fully convinced.

Why did I go to this extent when she seemed to agree with me the first time round?

One of the biggest traps that I’ve seen leaders fall into is the trap of confirmation bias. That we believe in a business decision so passionately that we only want to look at reasoning that supports it, ignoring the reasoning of those that does not.

How often do we see in companies where we think the boss is making a mistake but we keep quiet because we’re afraid to stick our neck out and offend the boss. Worse still, how often do we know he’s making a mistake but continue to openly support his decision because we’re afraid to get scolded for not being a “team player”. That isn’t culture that will lead to a company making lots of good decisions.

How do we prevent this? The answer to me is to have a culture where people are willing to argue against any decisions even by the boss. The tricky part though is forming the culture to do so especially in Asia where people are non-confrontational and in many companies for better or worse, it’s almost seen as disrespectful to argue against the boss.

I disagree with that. At Colony I take great pains to make sure people feel safe enough to voice out their thoughts especially if it’s in contradiction to my own. How do I do that?

1. Before I make a decision or answer how I would handle a situation, I normally ask my colleague what they think. I hear out their thoughts first before I deliver mine. I do this because it helps them commit to a position without being influenced by my position.
2. I have never said to anyone in the team “I’m the boss so when I say do it, just do it”. The problem with pulling the Nike (ie Just Do It) is that it imbues a culture where the leader isn’t up for debate anymore. It turns the whole organisation into one that takes orders rather than one that thinks on their feet. So no matter how painful the process, I take it upon myself to convince my colleagues on the merits of my decision or ideas.

But… don’t leaders have to be decisive?

I think being decisive and never changing your opinion once you commit to it is overrated. We must always be open to changing our opinions when there is new information in play and the way to have new information is to create an environment where people aren’t afraid to give their thoughts and opinions. A leader’s role isn’t just to make a decision and stick to it forever. It is to curate an environment where the best ideas win based on merit and not because the boss says so.

A lot of my time as the leader of Colony is spent trying to find the best people and then coaching them to peak performance. What’s the point of having the best people if we’re going to tell them what to do?

I’m going to end this article with a quote from the late Steve Jobs,

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

To my team at Colony, we owe it to ourselves to always argue against me if I make a decision that you think is wrong. Always have the courage to convey the merits of your argument and stay true to the commitment to let the best ideas always win. I can tell you often that my ideas, and my decisions… are often not the right ones. Your role is to show me how they aren’t.