9 June 2022

Sometimes, something happens out of nowhere, or for a reason that’s never made clear, and an idea somehow grows beyond one’s initial expectations and becomes something like, well, The Yin Yang Sessions.

These Yin Yang Sessions take the theme of Bringing Good Times Back that some of us have been working on recently to another level. And with a couple of people in multi media who I truly respect giving this project the wings it needed to fly by simply saying, “We’re in”, things are pretty much set to move those chess pieces forward.

They’re in, all-round creative person and Chef Margaret Xu Yuan is more than ready to get involved and, hopefully, The Yin Yang Sessions will bring together a small and specially invited group of individuals from the creative side of very different industries and see what might happen.

Maybe nothing will happen, but we need to start somewhere in trying to make sense of it all, or even just a tiny part of the whole enchilada.

The plan is for this group to meet every six weeks or so for lunch at- where else?- the very chilled out private kitchen and beach house that is Yin Yang Coastal in Ting Kau.

It’s a very very cool place- uplifting and with a calmness to it as the sea breeze blows in.

This will be the meeting place to exchange ideas and explore how to make things better- and everything in between.

There’ll be none of those committee decisions and having to tick tack tow all the boxes to the point where any initial burst of enthusiasm is quashed, dulled and dumbed down.

Instead, we’ll rely on that thing known as experience and gut instinct.

With so much Zooming going on, there’ll always be the opportunity to have special and relevant guests from here, there and everywhere dropping by.

It could even evolve into a series like, let’s say, “Entourage”.

We can dream, can’t we?

What else?

How long are the noodles being held by pair of chopsticks?

Or something like that.

#yinyangsessions #bringinggoodtimesback #youngentrepreneurs #YES #create #inspire #motivate #yinyangcoastal #teamwork

Spontaneity and letting the good times roll...

“Hong Kong was allowed to flounder by those who should have seen the cracks appearing long before these turned into manholes that has seemingly swallowed up an entire city”.

The above was part of a presentation I was making in Melbourne about creating a young entrepreneurs club plus the decline of what was one of the greatest cities in the world, and looking at what might happen next.

No one knows, and Hong Kong will continue though it depends in what guise and whether someone is going to hit a home run out of the ballpark like Robert Redford did in “The Natural”, and instead of shooting out the lights, help switch them back on again.

Some might think this is something not even Mandrake The Magician and Elon Musk can make happen, but Hong Kong has a knack of surprising itself.

Let’s hope this resilience still exists because, gawd knows, there are many who left the city with their bags of ill gotten gains made from “playing the game” taking a perverse delight in enjoying watching from afar what Hong Kong has become today: Nothing to get jiggy about and seemingly no one around to drag it outta the swamp.

Looking back at everything, one thought that keeps recurring is whether there were enough mentors- or more to the point if there even were mentors- to help give the next few generations direction and inspiration?

From personal experience, over the past couple of decades, I have seen the Peter Principle at work. Incompetence has been rewarded with things like titles that once had to be earned, given away like fortune cookies.

When these different groups of incompetence personified are allowed to grow and expand, none of this results in anything more than everything being on formulaic auto glide.

Hong Kong had a brilliant ride back then with everyone thinking that The Longest Cocktail Party would continue.

Of course, nothing lasts forever without constantly looking after the garden and weeding out the deadweight.

Unfortunately, when lost in the mist of being legends in one’s own lunchtimes and not managing things well enough- like bringing in new talent to invigorate and shake things up- everything plateaus out until there emerge bumps in the road and everything gets sidetracked.

This is at the epicentre of what’s had so much go wrong with Hong Kong: “Forget it, Jack, it’s only Chinatown” nonchalance plus poor leadership in way too many areas.

The current government cannot be blamed for everything. It hasn’t helped, but the Fawlty Towers “governance” of Hong Kong has been on shaky ground, especially from the days of Bow Tie Donald, Horse Face Henry and their cronies.

Beneath all the superficial golden times, the middle kingdom of Hong Kong was shaken and stirred and skating on very thin ice ice, baby.

With many doing the maths and looking at their retirement plans, standards were allowed to fall and teamwork fell apart. Self interest set in.

These days, Hong Kong aside, that thing called Happiness is in short supply almost everywhere in the world except for Denmark- if we are to believe polls that tell us that here is The Happiest Country In The World. Maybe.

It’s interesting to think that not that long ago, Hong Kong had weekly and fun entertainment driven Happy Wednesday nights at Happy Valley Racecourse that attracted a young and very international group of regulars.

At the venue Adrenaline, the ‘live’ music was good for what it was, but what made those nights really special were those moments of spontaneity, which lit a chain reaction of real communications without masks and veils and walking on eggshells.

I was reminded of this when a friend recently mentioned missing our weekly conversations at Adrenaline after the races where we, two completely different individuals, covered a wide range of topics and found solutions to problems and spontaneously came up with new ideas.

This wasn’t happening in the click bait world of social media. It was real time interactivity between two people where we accomplished more than any of those pretty useless corporate meetings.

What’s needed is more of this- spontaneity. Without spontaneity, minds are locked down with many ideas imprisoned in some invisible bubble.

Like Django, Hong Kong needs to be unchained.

There’s a need for even one small home run to start the ball rolling. Success breeds success anywhere in the world.

In Hong Kong, it’s about not giving in to “Why bother?” and instead asking, “Why not?”

This is what’s always separated the doers and leaders from the Dunnos and the Sheeples.

This is what’s at least going to kickstart Hong Kong into thinking spontaneously without overthinking things to an inevitable death while taking sips from that half empty glass and always looking to see what’s wrong instead of what’s right.

Dig it, man and change from within so that the new changes that are waiting to be made are coming from the right place that’s waiting to be discovered in the Now.

This is why rules are meant to be broken. Having everything on Repeat doesn’t move anything forward. There’s no spontaneity.

#spontaneity #mentoring #leadership #thepeterprinciple #bepositive #hongkong #create #change #newentrepreneurs

Creativity can be contagious...in a good way.

The world is desperately in need of whatever you might want to call it- a reboot, a makeover, a Renaissance period, newness, chutney, a Bento box etc. It’s needed because one day rolls into the next, and it’s one long Groundhog Day with a blanket of boredom, fear, anger and depression covering the world.

Wherefore art thou, Creativity, in all your many forms? And, to some, it’s not what you might have done and who you met decades ago and still living on the crumbs of fading memories, but what have you done lately?

Working from home, it appears, has not only dulled social skills, it’s short-circuited what once might have been inquisitive minds looking for answers in everything around us. You know, trying to find solutions to problems along the way and maybe stumbling onto how to bring that crazy little thing called happiness back into lives.

Almost a year ago, the very small team here in Hong Kong worked on a series of online messages of positivity about how Creativity cannot and should not be locked down.

Produced was a music track and accompanying music video. There was an original short story written and produced.

It was designed to be a Wake Up call to arms and how we need to move away from the somnambulism that had taken over lives and slowed everything down to, not just a crawl, but a numbing and soulless thud.

Thinking back, I guess I was reminding myself not to ever give up. How I had loved everything I was doing, and that even the mean spiritedness of some to trip me up when trying to get somewhere, never dulled my excitement for adventure.

Of course, the more I travelled, the less I knew and this unholy quest for excitement took a toll on my marriage and hurt the only woman I will ever love.

As Dylan sang, “I must have been mad, I didn’t know what I had, I threw it all away”.

Still, they’ve all been lessons learned and, hopefully, helped re-arrange my life by bringing in a new interior designer.

These life changing lessons have also made me adamant not to repeat them and become a dullard commenting on every one of those click bait Facebook questionnaires and living in the past.

Memories are great to have. Often, they’re all we have. But living inside these sometimes throws up a false sense of reality.

Right now, many of us are caught between a rock and a pretty nondescript place, somewhere between Nut Bush City Limits and the soft shoe Lido Shuffle.

Though one can try and create, this adrenaline rush is thwarted midstream when realising that it’s a locked down upside down fruitcake world where everything is functioning pretty much on the downbeat.

So what’s the point? Why bother? Maybe to prove the doubters wrong and still trying to make your parents proud. They’re still living with and without you.

It’s also weaving one’s way through an obstacle course with that green eyed monster known as Jealousy often making its presence felt. But as jealousy must be earned, you must be doing something right.

Though the ironically labelled “Social media”, with those “Like” buttons and emphasis placed on hashtags and upping numbers for sale don’t help, life goes on and needing new challenges to create new opportunities.

Sometimes it’s like being Noah and travelling against the tide of some weird new version of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scrolling and trolling, scrolling and trolling...

Negativity only shows up character flaws that were perhaps always there- even amongst one-time friends. It was a different and unmasked world back then and perhaps everyone was too busy doing The Macarena and thinking that those good times will last forever.

Today, any morsel of success is often envied. Maybe individual success is in short supply...

Trying to break away from the monotony of mediocrity is often discouraged as, well, it’s easier. It might also actually lead to a healthier and happier place.

We can’t have that, can we? But we can.

Instead of looking at ways to tear things down, surely, we should make it our job to help things grow by inspiring others, and which, in turn, will make a U-turn and inspire us.

Selfish thinking never leads anywhere. Instead, and as Otis Redding sang, Try a little tenderness along with honest to goodness kindness.

It’s all free- and at your fingertips.

#creativity #lockdownscannotstopcreativity #create #imagination #inspiration #motivation #bobdylan