Mentors and Mentos

A lot of recent business books or articles talk about the mentoring system. I am also a champion of mentoring and I think one really learns a lot and grow a lot if one has the right mentor.

For me, in my career, strictly speaking, I have only one mentor, without whom I will be no where near what I am today. He took the time to know me, took the time to converse with me and took the time to teach me and inspire me. He will go to great lengths to even write several pages of notes explaining some things to me, often reprinting articles that is relevant to my job and when I have an idea, he will go to great length to test it and if it works, he is my first champion. I remember quite early in my career, I came up with a way to predict the success probability of movies based on a set of criteria and a point rating system and it somehow seem to work with the data. He loved it and encouraged me, even using it as part of the production proposal.

There are so many things that he helped me with, nurtured me and planned my career growth path. He even included me in his PhD. thesis, a very rare privilege of which I have in return learn a great deal. He has influenced my love for movies and enhanced my understanding of the principles of economics. I reminisce the time spent with him with the fondest memories and all of us that are trained under his wings will remember just as fondly. He is no other than Dr. Nihal, a person to whom I will be eternally grateful to.

In Weiqi (or Go), the person that I will be eternally grateful to is Mr. Tiong, the president of our Weiqi Association. From the first day I knew him, he is tireless in imparting weiqi skills and knowledge to us. His passion in weiqi is as great as ever and his passion to help new weiqi players is legendary. Never ever being stingy and without holding anything back, his only wish is to see more and more strong weiqi players in Malaysia. There was a time when I really thought I will quit playing weiqi and just play once in a long while and give up hope on improving, I think of him and somehow I am inspire to not let go of the game and to at least maintain my playing strength. Now that I am beginning anew my training, he again proved to be ever passionate and teach me the game, explaining in detail the game and playing with me, even after evryone is long gone. For this, I am very thankful and with this, I hope I can increase my skills one or two more levels. I will be eternally grateful to him for inspiring me to play this wonderful game of weiqi.

I herewith, thanks both of my mentors and I believe anyone who have experienced what I have experienced will agree that the mentoring system is a very powerful system.

P/S: By the way, just watch INCREDIBLE HULK today and thought it to be a very good movie. The character development is superb and after the movie, I seem to know HULK a lot better despite watching him since I was very young. I can feel this HULK. Unlike the Ang Lee HULK.