Living The Lives We Choose – Gary Chan

Christmas is just around the corner and back home, we have finally put up and decorated our Christmas tree.  Like many people, Christmas has long become a special season for me, not only because of my religious belief or the history and meaning behind Christmas but also because it symbolises the ending of a year and it is a good time for reflection.

This year’s Christmas is going to be a special one as we are capping off an extraordinary year that many of us have ever experienced.  I started the year with high hope, especially when this year being 2020 and I often read it as 20/20, a term hinting to this supposedly to be a year that offers good vision and clarity.  But instead, for many people around the world including myself, this year has been filled with confusions, anxieties, and sadness, from loss of normalcy in our daily routines, loss of jobs and businesses and, in many unfortunate situations, the loss of loved ones.

Nonetheless, 2020 is drawing to a close and a new year is about to begin.  This offers the chance for all of us to start afresh with renewed hopes.  As challenging as it might have been, to some degrees, this past year has indeed offered many of us the clarity we need to start 2021 with confidence.  With the whole world having been forced to slow down, it has allowed us time to rethink how we live, our ways of doing business and the purposes behind them.  It has allowed us to recognise what really matters to us and realign our lives and refocus our energy.

For the past six years, through our work at the CFO Centre, we have come across many businesses, worked with many entrepreneurs and helped many businesses grow.  However, while our work naturally brings us to focus on numbers, we have also learnt that businesses, especially among SMEs, are so much more than just about growing revenue and making profits.  In most situations, businesses are founded and built on passions – the passions in founders wanting to revolutionalise an industry or to make lives better by introducing creative designs.  Also along the founders’ journeys in reaching their dreams through entrepreneurship, there are all sorts of human emotions that come along – joys and sadness, excitements and disappointments.  Businesses are not only about numbers on spreadsheets.  Businesses are about people living their lives and chasing their dreams.  At the CFO Centre, 2020 has allowed us to gain the clarity that our true purpose is about connecting with entrepreneurs and helping them live their lives they choose.

In about two weeks, we will be welcoming 2021.  I hope you have also had a chance to discover your purpose in the past year.  With clearer purposes, it is time that we put our thoughts into actions and start 2021 with our newfound passion and energy.  I look forward to building something together with you all and helping each other live the lives that we choose.