" A lot of people think that when you become more powerful, you become richer. The truth is the opposite. The richer you become, the more powerful you become, the more criticism you get. Right now, everybody is on Elon Musk and cursing him. Kamala Harris is lost and everybody is complaining about her and critiquing her. There is a lot of blame and she does not know who we are. She does not know this Twitter thing. She does not wake up in the morning and around the world people are criticizing Trump or Kamala, whoever it is. They do not know you. They have not done anything to you. They are just getting criticized. " - Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast


" What's important is that I encourage you to choose your pain. Life is not easy. If something was easy to do, then it is already done by a robot or on the verge of being done by a robot, and there is no value in easy stuff. If the job is just moving a chair from left to right 10 times in a row, it is easy, has no value, and I will not get paid for it. We get paid to do hard things. Those hard things are where the value comes in. Hard things by nature are painful, but you can choose your pain. Psychology shows that when you choose your pain, it feels less painful. If you do not get to choose your pain, you feel helpless. Choose the pain you want to do because that is the value you are going to create in the world. " - Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast


" You have to be your own best friend. Even though we all face criticism, you have to be your own best friend. A lot of people will try to be your best friend, and that will be your tobacco companies, your whiskey companies, your nice watch. Everybody will try to be your best friend by telling you that if you do not feel secure, they will make you feel secure, and that is how they will make money. Be thoughtful about how you become your own best friend, how you treat yourself with the language and kindness you would use with your best friend. If your best friend came to you and said, I screwed up in class today because of A, B, and C, you would support that person. But if you are that person feeling terrible about yourself, would you treat yourself with the same kindness? " - Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast

Jeremy Au shares why long-term career success depends on investing in health, cultivating purpose, and learning to handle inevitable criticism. He explains the link between purpose and happiness, why choosing your challenges makes them more bearable, and how treating yourself as your own best friend helps you grow despite setbacks.

02:00 The Role of Relationships: Research shows people with more high-quality relationships live happier and longer lives, and university is when most people have the largest friend networks.

04:15 Purpose Over Pure Happiness: Happiness is a fleeting biological reward; purpose sustains motivation even through tough times.

06:00 The Purpose–Happiness Trade-off: Some high-purpose jobs offer low day-to-day happiness but bring deep fulfillment over time.

08:00 Criticism Comes with Power: Greater influence brings more public scrutiny, and avoiding criticism by conforming means losing individuality.

10:00 Being Your Own Best Friend: Self-kindness turns criticism into useful feedback without damaging self-confidence, enabling long-term resilience.

(00:00) Jeremy Au: The purpose of dopamine is to give you a taste of happiness so that you will feel hungry to pursue the things that make you happy, right?

(00:08) So, it's about the pursuit of happiness that's important. What I'm trying to say here is you have to be careful, and if by setting your purpose in life, you will get a lot further.

(00:18) Welcome to Brave Learn from Southeast Asia's Best tech leaders build the future. Learn from our past, and stay human in between LBS unsu success. I'm Jeremy Ow, venture capitalist Sarah, founder Harvard MBA science fiction nerd and dad of two daughters. Every week we debate startup news, interview change makers, answer listener questions, and share personal insights.

(00:46) Join our movement of over 40,000 members and get transcripts, resources, and community at www brave s se Do com Stay well and stay (01:00) brave.

(01:00) Jeremy Au: if you die, you're neither happy or unhappy, you're just dead. And the biggest drivers for that is having a finite life is of course alcoholism, addiction like smoking, poor health. But the truth of the matter is that you can't be a success in your career if your career ends in 10 years.

(01:17) You tell yourself, " Jeremy, I wanna be a CEO one day." You're not gonna become a CEO in 10 years. It'll take you 30, 40 years to become a CEO. But if you underinvest in your health, your exercise, and you end up having a stroke in 10 years time, then, you're just never gonna get there. You're not gonna get your career success.

(01:32) And one thing I was thinking to myself personally, was I think, if I invest in my own health and I'm doing the professions that I want to be a master at and be great executive, be great at startups, I wanna be great at venture capital, in 20 years, 30 years, more people will retire, my bosses will retire from the ecosystem.

(01:49) Then I will become 56 years old, and then I will become the new leader of the industry domain by nature, as long as I'm still around. And so, that's really important for you to think about it. And what you (02:00) think about yourself is, the joke that I was reading was like, 'Hey, if you tell your friends that you're not eating a hamburger, if you tell your friends that I'm just eating like a steak or carrots or vegetables, then all your friends will laugh at you and they say, "why you on a diet?"

(02:13) Feel free to eat my taco, or porky or biscuits, it's all kinds of stuff, right? So, the joke that we have here is like eating the natural foods that your grandparents ate is a dieting, and then the normal modernized consumer packaged food version is actually the norm from society's perspective.

(02:33) So, that's something for you to be thoughtful about because the reason is that alcoholism, addiction, poor health, there are billion dollar companies that make money from you sacrificing your health in pursuit of those things. And of course, one of the big studies that I had from triumphs of experience, the book, is that the people who had the best relationships were the happiest for longest.

(02:51) So, if they had people to talk to, whether the spouse or children or friends or colleagues, but the more that people had high quality relationships, the happy they were. And the less relationships (03:00) you had, then you get unhappy and alone, which is not a great outcome for people. But of course, what is known is that for people, during this time period at university is the period that humans have the most number of friends.

(03:13) So, I'm not telling you this now because I need you to invest in high quality relationships now. Statistically, at us as of this time, you have the highest number of friends that you ever will have. The problem is that over time after university, most of you will start shedding or dropping friends, and it's okay to shed and drop friends because you're not in a life stage or whatever it is.

(03:29) But the question is, are you adding new friends and making new friends? So, I've been telling you this advice, not because you need it now, but just something for you to be aware of, is that if you find good friends that you trust and they're helping each other to achieve those goals, continue to invest in them and don't let them go.

(03:45) I don't even remember it now, but it's something for you to remember in four years time, five years time, six years time. What's important is that I also encourage you to choose your pain. So, what I mean by that is that life is not easy, right? If something was easy to do, (04:00) then it's already done by a robot or on a virtual being done by a robot, right?

(04:04) And so, there's no value by easy stuff. If the job, all I had to do was move the chair from left to right 10 times in a row, then it would be an easy job and there's no value being done for it, and I won't get paid for it. So, we get paid to do hard things, whether it's data analysis, whether it's public speaking, whether it's about asking questions, whether it's about being a good public moderator.

(04:26) So, all those things are hard things and those where the value comes in. So, hard things by nature are painful, but you can choose your pain. And one of the interesting things about psychology is that when you get to choose your pain is less painful, right? If you don't get to choose your pain, you feel helpless and that you didn't get to choose your pain, then the pain feels higher and harder and more painful.

(04:46) Choose your pain that you wanna do because that's the value that you're gonna create in the world. And what you need to do is that you should set your purpose . And what I mean by that is, you gotta choose your pain, but you also gotta choose the direction, whether that's taking care of your family, taking (05:00) care of your loved ones, being part of the Singapore's judicial system, I'm thinking about some of my friends, that's their purpose. They care about it. And the reason why is that happiness is a very difficult emotion to go after. So, a lot of us will say, ' Hey, our job is to be happy', right? And I can tell you right now that biologically, you can never be happy all the time.

(05:22) It's literally physically, biologically impossible. What I mean by that is happiness is your body rewarding you for doing the right thing. It's not meant to be a baseline. In other words, if you, in the lottery day, your body rewards you by saying, "Wow!", you've got lots of resources, you'll be very happy. But what's proven is that about one to two years after the lottery winning, your happiness reverse the normal. Some of these lottery effects, your body will always reset you, right? Because what you have is you have dopamine in your body, right? And dopamine is a hormone that worms have it. Rats (06:00) have it. Turtles have it. Whales have it. You have it. And dopamine is a hormone that makes you happy for having done the right thing so that the worm who moves and gets food is rewarded for it.

(06:12) So, dopamine is a movement hormone, but it's also a pursuit hormone. It is something that by creating a reward at the end for having done the right thing, whether that's eating well, sleeping well, having good conversation, that umami happiness, your body's job is not to create happiness. Because if not, you can take cocaine or heroin and inject yourself and be happy the entire time.

(06:36) And then guess what? You become a worthless member of society because you can't do anything because you exhausted all your endorphins and everything to give yourself reward 24/7. In other words, if you think about your professions in terms of happiness and unhappiness, and obviously, talking about purpose versus on-purpose, there's actually be, there are high purpose and low happiness.

(06:55) And what I mean by that is that if you are a soldier or a police officer or (07:00) pastor, what's interesting is that these jobs tend to have low happiness because they tend to be working in very difficult problems and they're often very unhappy as measured on a day by day accounting of their happiness moments.

(07:12) But they tend to have very high purpose. They feel strong satisfaction from their job 'cause they're doing something they care about, they think is valuable. And so, I want you to think about that two by two all the time. Which is obviously, there is unhappiness and happiness. I'm not asking you to be unhappy all the time.

(07:28) I'm not asking you that you don't have money and be broke or whatever it is, because when you earn money, obviously, you get to remove the things that make you unhappy, right? You get to drive yourself, you get to not have to take out the trash because somebody else does it for you. You don't have to avoid some difficult moments or the commute because you know, you are in a chauffeur. So,

(07:47) obviously, you can reduce unhappiness. I think i'm not saying that you can always reduce unhappiness in your life. Try to reduce unhappiness. But you never be able to achieve a hundred percent happiness every day for the entire day. You can't. It's just biologically, (08:00) hormonally, impossible.

(08:00) Unless you use drugs, right? So, that's the happiness scale on x-axis but on a y-axis, really think about your purpose. What job can you do where you can choose your pain, right, and you feel happy. And it can be finance, you can be consulting, you can be in logistics, can be whatever it is. But if you feel that it is high purpose and you enjoy it, then the pain that was associated with it is something that you enjoy.

(08:22) And everybody cannot compete with you for that job because nobody wants to do that job when you love that job. And I wanna share that, at the end of the day, criticism is inevitable. And a lot of people think that when you become more powerful, you become richer.

(08:37) And the truth is, it's totally opposite. The richer you become, the more powerful you become, the more criticism you'll get. Right now, everybody is on Elon Musk and everybody is like cursing Elon Musk, and then now Kamala Harris is lost. And now everybody is complaining about her and critiquing her thing and blah, blah, blah.

(08:55) So, there's a lot of blaming. She doesn't know who we are. She doesn't know this Twitter thing, (09:00) right? She doesn't wake up the morning. And around the world, people are criticizing Trump or Kamala, whoever it is. They don't know you. They haven't done anything to you. This is getting criticized, right?

(09:10) So, what I'm trying to say here is that, so, I just want you to just break that dynamic here, right? Which is that some of you would think that I'll be more well liked if I'm more famous, right? And I was just gonna tell you right now, that if you become more famous, you'll just get more criticism.

(09:24) Now, nothing wrong with becoming more famous, nothing wrong with becoming more powerful, nothing wrong with becoming more influential, I just wanna tell you that you just have to be aware that you will not get what you want. If what you want is less criticism, the best way to not be criticized is to be like everybody else.

(09:39) Be a totally vanilla, bland person who only uses bland business English generated by AI to say stuff. You'll never be wrong, because it's the lowest common denominator, right? And that's the conformism that a lot of you will face as a form of social pressure, but also internal pressure. And what I wanna (10:00) encourage you all to do is you have to be your own best friend.

(10:02) Okay? So, even though we are having those dynamics and with all criticism, you have to be your own best friend. Because I can tell you right now that a lot of people will try to be your best friend. And that will be your tobacco companies, your whiskey company, your nice watch, right? Your AI companion, everybody will try to be your best friend.

(10:22) 'Cause what I'll tell you is that if you don't feel secure, I will make you feel secure. And that's how everybody's gonna make the money. So, if you are thoughtful to yourself about how do you become your own best friend, how do you treat yourself with the language right? And the kindness that you would talk to your best friend.

(10:40) If your best friend came to you and said, 'Hey, I screwed up in class today because A, B, and C', you would support that person, right? But if you are that person feeling terrible by yourself, would you treat yourself with the same kindness or would you shit on yourself and criticize yourself and feel horrible, right?

(10:56) Because if you treat yourself well, if you can forgive yourself, then (11:00) you'll be able to accept the lessons, the feedback. You'll incorporate that, and then you'll learn from it. Okay. When people criticize you, it's a form of feedback and you will accept it and say, yeah, that's your point of view. That's your feedback.

(11:12) I'll incorporate some of it. I disagree with some other parts of it. I don't feel personally affected by the criticism. Is there something for me to be thoughtful about? And I'm gonna learn from this, because it's not emotional. It doesn't feel terrible. I'm not criticizing myself. It's you criticizing me, but that's you.

(11:27) That's on you. I'll accept the lesson and I choose to react to that criticism. And so, it's very important for you that what I'm trying to say here is that people will criticize you over time, but don't be the person who criticizes yourself. Be the person that learns from every piece of feedback that we have.

(11:43) And we look at Abraham Lincoln, he failed multiple times in his career. He had depression multiple times in his career, in his personal life, and he still was able to recover from his depression to eventually become President of America. He was depressed while was President of America because he was dealing with a civil war.

(11:58) It was highly stressful. He was (12:00) criticized by everybody and he saved the country by unifying the country. And how was he reordered? He was assassinated, right? So, all of us today look at him as a fantastic person who unified country, but his criticism came in the form of a bullet, right? So, that's something for you to be thoughtful about is that even if you're powerful, you'll still be criticized.