"What does it mean for you to be happy? What does it mean for you to be healthy? What does it mean to have a good family, to feel loved, to love? If you are thoughtful about those things, you can avoid that career ambition treadmill. Bourdain ended in a spot that I'm pretty sure if he had gone back to his early 40s and been asked, do you want to die alone and unloved, he would have said he wanted to live a long, happy, and healthy life. Somebody who is at the top of his game with financial resources, the love of the world, and an international brand name can still make the wrong decisions, even while thinking to the best of his capability." - Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast


"It's important for you to be a personal success first and then a professional success because that will give you career longevity and health. It gives you perseverance to make it over the long term and succeed as a person as well as an executive. I'm not a perfect person on these dimensions, but I warn myself repeatedly about those sacrifices. That ties into Ikigai, the Japanese word for the reason for being. In your career, you should think about four major dimensions: what you love to do, what you are good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs." - Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast


"The sweet spot can move. Just because you're aiming for something doesn't mean that when you get there it's actually what you want. I said to myself I want to be a social entrepreneur and a founder. I got there. It was a good spot for many years. Then I said I want to do something else. The spot moved. When I was an MBA student I said I want to do this. I became a founder again in the US. I paid for it. Then it changed. I decided I want to come back to Southeast Asia because that's where my family is. I want to raise my kids in Singapore. So that's my choice. The Ikigai can shift. Don't look at this as static. The world is changing tremendously in terms of what you can be paid for. Two years ago you could be paid for marketing and creating a Facebook post. Today ChatGPT does it. The world will no longer pay you to write a Facebook post." - Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast

Jeremy Au spoke about the dangers of chasing only professional success and why it can lead to emptiness despite external achievements. He explained the importance of balancing career ambition with personal happiness, introduced a shifting framework for finding purpose, and shared stories that highlight resilience, injustice, and the values that truly define a meaningful life.

02:45 Defining Personal Success: He urges listeners to think about health, love, and family as true measures of success, warning against sacrificing them for career ambition.

03:40 Ikigai Framework: Jeremy explains ikigai as the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs, stressing that this sweet spot shifts over time with career and life changes.

05:15 Career Shifts and Change: He shares his journey from Bain consultant to founder in the US to returning to Southeast Asia, illustrating how life choices evolve with circumstances and values.

06:00 Ray Jefferson’s Sacrifice: Jeremy recounts Jefferson’s bravery in holding a malfunctioning grenade, which cost him his hand but saved teammates’ lives, and his later struggles to rebuild his career.

07:30 Eight-Year Injustice: Jefferson fought for years to clear his name after false accusations during his public service career, showing the harsh realities of politics and unfairness.

(00:51) Jeremy Au: I wanna talk to you about your professional success being a professional failure, and I wanna share with you about being a person of failure versus a person of success. (01:00) Growing up, I loved Anthony Bourdain. Because you can see this guy, he's so cool.

(01:04) He's out, traveling the places, eating food. He's famous. He wrote his book, and the more you dug in his story, the more fantastic he was. He was somebody who grew up and became a chef. He only succeeded when he was 40 plus. When he wrote a book, Kitchen Confidential, it's a fantastic story of somebody who went through much professional failure in his early career and eventually became a professional success.

(01:27) And so, it's a wonderful story they have. And I looked at him, I said, 'Wow! Who wouldn't want to have this life, to be flown around the world, to sit down with Obama and eat a bowl of pho in Hanoi? Isn't that a wonderful life?'

(01:40) And if you look at the biographies of the book, one of the things that you realize was that he was a very sad person.

(01:45) Where people around the world all love him, but he doesn't feel loved and he feels that he must get that love from somebody who doesn't love him. So, he died alone and unhappy. This is a horrible life. Because how can you be someone who's at the peak of professional success that all of us respect, (02:00) but he dies sad and alone,

(02:01) insane. With all that money, you could hire a million friends, you can do whatever you want. And he ends his life. What I'm trying to tell you here is that this is an interesting story that you need to be thoughtful about the role models that you look at, right?

(02:13) Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Hillary Clinton, these are all professional successes because these are people that we know, right? But I also challenge you to be thoughtful about your personal failure, your personal success. What does it mean for you to be happy? What does it mean for you to be healthy?

(02:27) What does it mean to have a good family? To feel loved? To love? Because if you're thoughtful about those things, they can avoid that career ambition treadmill that you have. Anthony Bourdain ended in a spot that I'm pretty sure that if you had gone back to his early 40's and you said, 'Hey, do you wanna die alone and unloved?'

(02:45) I'm a hundred percent. I would like to live a long and happy and healthy life, right? No brainer. Somebody who is at the top of his game with all the financial resources, with the love of the world, with an international brand name can still make the wrong (03:00) decisions, even though he's thinking to the best of its capability into a corner of the maze where it's a dead end

(03:06) so, what I'm trying to tell you, is that it's important for you to be a personal success first, and then, a professional success. Because that will give you the career longevity, that will give you the health, it'll give you the perseverance to make it over the long term and succeed as a person, but also succeed in an executive.

(03:22) I'm not a perfect person on these dimensions. But I warn myself over and over again about those sacrifices. And that ties into the "ikigai", the Japanese word for, the reason for being.

(03:34) Some of you have already seen this in your Instagram, but what does it mean? It means that your career should be thinking about four major dimensions in your career, right? Which is, what do you love to do? What are you good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs? If you love doing something and you're good at it, it's a passion of yours, you're good.

(03:53) But it may be something that people don't wanna pay for. Maybe the world doesn't need you to play the (04:00) guitar badly, for example. Nothing about being passionate and playing the guitar badly, right? Because it's something you enjoy. Sometimes a lot of people will choose to do what you love to do.

(04:08) Some of you also try to go for what the world needs, and so there'll be a mission that you go for, whether it's nonprofit or social enterprise or government. There may be a mission, may not pay well. Some of you will be working in jobs that you can get paid for. The banks will pay and so forth. And then, you're good at it because you've been practicing for it.

(04:26) You'll be a profession, but it may not be something that you love or maybe it's something that you love. What I'm trying to say here is that you want to end up in a spot where you're in a sweet spot.

(04:33) The most important thing I wanna tell you is that the sweet spot can move. Just because you're aiming for something doesn't mean that when you get there is actually what you want. So, when I was a consultant at Bain, I said to myself, I wanna be a social entrepreneur and a founder. I got there.

(04:47) It was a good spot for many years. then I said, I wanna do something else. The spot moved, right? And then, when I was at Harvard MBA, I said to myself, I wanna do this. I became a founder again in the US, got paid for it, and (05:00) then, it changed, right? So, I decided that I wanna come back to Southeast Asia because it's where my family is. I wanna raise my kids in Singapore.

(05:07) So, that's my choice. The ikigai can shift. So, don't look at this as a static thing. The world is changing quite tremendously in terms of what you can be paid for. Two years ago, you could be paid for marketing and creating a Facebook posts. Today, ChatGPT does it. The world will no longer pay you the right Facebook post.

(05:24) They'll only pay you if you can manage the ChatGPT bot that pays for the marketing posts. So, things can change dramatically and they'll change multiple times the next few stages of career. And I wanna share with you the story of Ray Jefferson, which is a person I shared over WhatsApp, the story. And I gotta meet him about three months ago.

(05:41) And he shared his life story, and it was a tremendous moment because I wasn't expecting much. But to hear this guy about how he grew up as an immigrant in America and how he had this dream of being in the military, how his life changed when he decided to try to protect the lives of his teammates (06:00) by holding a grenade that was malfunctioning and losing his left hand and destroying his Special Forces career, was inspiring.

(06:07) It was something to hear him describe his personal story about how he had that experience of knowing that the grenade is malfunctioning and trying to make a decision about where to throw it, and realizing there's no way to throw it. And him deciding to hold the grenade to protect the lives of his teammates.

(06:25) A practiced grenade exploded in his hand, not a full grenade. But he held it by his hand and he lost his hand. And he spent years depressed and in recovery in the hospital, getting his hand put together. And there was this, a crazy sacrifice to make.

(06:41) And so, he went off. He rebuild his life. And he decided to go into graduate school. And he decided to apply for graduate program and he was able to get into Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard for his MBA. He was very happy. He built a new life and started into public service. And the story that I shared on WhatsApp, he joined the Obama administration.

(06:59) He (07:00) decided to fire two people out of the entire agency. And after they were fired, he tried to do the right thing, let them have a graceful exit period. They did a whistleblower complaint against him and he lost his job. He shared a story about how he resigned because his boss told himself and he thought he was gonna fix it. And the next day,

(07:18) he woke up in the morning and his phone was buzzing because his friends were saying, 'Hey, your boss is doing a press conference about you.' And his boss was basically saying that this guy had conducted fraud and corruption, and he had never done any of those things. And he took him eight years to fight the government with his own lawyers and own savings to clear his name.

(07:36) And so, this guy didn't do the right or wrong thing, he just did what he thought he had to do, and he got. Unfairly injustice. And he was unable to find a job. There were so many jobs he couldn't do at Egon Zehnder or other places, and he unfortunately was able to do that. So, he had moved to Singapore.

(07:54) He moved across the world to figure out his next steps and build that. He was sharing about (08:00) how he cried, how he saved money, paid the legal fees. It took him eight years. Imagine eight years of your life proving to the everybody that he did not commit those things, so horrible.

(08:13) But eventually, he succeeded. And so the good news he was sharing with us, and the reason why he was talking to us, was that four years ago, he was able to clear his name and he was able this year to talk about his life. And Harvard had published a publication about his life and this year was the first year of his life where he was being able to be public about a story.

(08:34) And how about story? So, it was documented by Harvard, that was the context of where we met him. Three months ago, he died from a heart attack. I was inspired by him, a fantastic role model. He finally is innocent. He goes on holiday with his girlfriend and he dies from heart attack. And he died right after checking out his hotel room.

(08:52) So, imagine you spend all this time and all of us are in that room. When we found out that he died, we were so disappointed because we felt that this (09:00) was his time to shine. Finally, getting a hand blown up by finding a new career, unfairly fired. Got your name cleared, and now is dead.

(09:07) And so, all of us, just two weeks ago was his funeral , in memorial service. And there was just so much love from all 50 of us. Some of us knew him very well, some of us did not know him very well, but all of us agreed that he was a fantastic human being who did a great job taking care of the people around him.

(09:24) And this is an inspirational person for so many people. And so, what I'm trying to say is this, I think all of you will be making decisions by your career. There's absolutely no guarantee that your career is gonna go well. I cannot promise you that, and I'm not gonna pretend I can. I guarantee you that in your career, in the future, you'll face half times and you will face injustice, and you'll have to confront politics and be ostracized and judged. You'll feel like shit, face bad luck and curse those moments. I cannot promise you a fair career, but I can promise, you will face unfair moments. The most important thing is to be thoughtful about not (10:00) only your career. But also about your own perspective on life, which is what makes John, what makes Sarah, what makes you.

(10:08) Those are things that are really most important to you. Because all of us, we're all gonna die one day. And no matter how many PowerPoints or memos you do, no one's gonna remember you on a tombstone and say, he generated 500 PowerPoints in his life. Good job. And he got honors degree at this college.

(10:25) When you are at memorial service, we're gonna remember, were you kind? Were you human? Were you somebody that people looked up to? Those are things that people remember your name for. So, on that perspective, what I'm trying to say here is you need to be thoughtful about your career, your perspective of the future, and you need to stay in touch with the values that I brought to you.

(10:45) Thank you so much and wish you all fantastic chapter ahead! I pray and hope that you have a successful career. I pray and hope that you have a successful journey. I hope that you all have a great human life ahead.

(10:57) Thank you for listening to Brave. (11:00) If you enjoyed this episode, please share the podcast with your friends and colleagues. We would also appreciate you leaving a rating or review. Head over to www.bravese.com for member content, resources, and community. Stay well and stay brave.

want. And he ends his life. What I'm trying to tell you here is that this is an interesting story that you need to be thoughtful about the role models that you look at, right?

(02:13) Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Hillary Clinton, these are all professional successes because these are people that we know, right? But I also challenge you to be thoughtful about your personal failure, your personal success. What does it mean for you to be happy? What does it mean for you to be healthy?

(02:27) What does it mean to have a good family? To feel loved? To love? Because if you're thoughtful about those things, they can avoid that career ambition treadmill that you have. Anthony Bourdain ended in a spot that I'm pretty sure that if you had gone back to his early 40's and you said, 'Hey, do you wanna die alone and unloved?'

(02:45) I'm a hundred percent. I would like to live a long and happy and healthy life, right? No brainer. Somebody who is at the top of his game with all the financial resources, with the love of the world, with an international brand name can still make the wrong (03:00) decisions, even though he's thinking to the best of its capability into a corner of the maze where it's a dead end

(03:06) so, what I'm trying to tell you, is that it's important for you to be a personal success first, and then, a professional success. Because that will give you the career longevity, that will give you the health, it'll give you the perseverance to make it over the long term and succeed as a person, but also succeed in an executive.

(03:22) I'm not a perfect person on these dimensions. But I warn myself over and over again about those sacrifices. And that ties into the "ikigai", the Japanese word for, the reason for being.

(03:34) Some of you have already seen this in your Instagram, but what does it mean? It means that your career should be thinking about four major dimensions in your career, right? Which is, what do you love to do? What are you good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs? If you love doing something and you're good at it, it's a passion of yours, you're good.

(03:53) But it may be something that people don't wanna pay for. Maybe the world doesn't need you to play the (04:00) guitar badly, for example. Nothing about being passionate and playing the guitar badly, right? Because it's something you enjoy. Sometimes a lot of people will choose to do what you love to do.

(04:08) Some of you also try to go for what the world needs, and so there'll be a mission that you go for, whether it's nonprofit or social enterprise or government. There may be a mission, may not pay well. Some of you will be working in jobs that you can get paid for. The banks will pay and so forth. And then, you're good at it because you've been practicing for it.

(04:26) You'll be a profession, but it may not be something that you love or maybe it's something that you love. What I'm trying to say here is that you want to end up in a spot where you're in a sweet spot.

(04:33) The most important thing I wanna tell you is that the sweet spot can move. Just because you're aiming for something doesn't mean that when you get there is actually what you want. So, when I was a consultant at Bain, I said to myself, I wanna be a social entrepreneur and a founder. I got there.

(04:47) It was a good spot for many years. then I said, I wanna do something else. The spot moved, right? And then, when I was at Harvard MBA, I said to myself, I wanna do this. I became a founder again in the US, got paid for it, and (05:00) then, it changed, right? So, I decided that I wanna come back to Southeast Asia because it's where my family is. I wanna raise my kids in Singapore.

(05:07) So, that's my choice. The ikigai can shift. So, don't look at this as a static thing. The world is changing quite tremendously in terms of what you can be paid for. Two years ago, you could be paid for marketing and creating a Facebook posts. Today, ChatGPT does it. The world will no longer pay you the right Facebook post.

(05:24) They'll only pay you if you can manage the ChatGPT bot that pays for the marketing posts. So, things can change dramatically and they'll change multiple times the next few stages of career. And I wanna share with you the story of Ray Jefferson, which is a person I shared over WhatsApp, the story. And I gotta meet him about three months ago.

(05:41) And he shared his life story, and it was a tremendous moment because I wasn't expecting much. But to hear this guy about how he grew up as an immigrant in America and how he had this dream of being in the military, how his life changed when he decided to try to protect the lives of his teammates (06:00) by holding a grenade that was malfunctioning and losing his left hand and destroying his Special Forces career, was inspiring.

(06:07) It was something to hear him describe his personal story about how he had that experience of knowing that the grenade is malfunctioning and trying to make a decision about where to throw it, and realizing there's no way to throw it. And him deciding to hold the grenade to protect the lives of his teammates.

(06:25) A practiced grenade exploded in his hand, not a full grenade. But he held it by his hand and he lost his hand. And he spent years depressed and in recovery in the hospital, getting his hand put together. And there was this, a crazy sacrifice to make.

(06:41) And so, he went off. He rebuild his life. And he decided to go into graduate school. And he decided to apply for graduate program and he was able to get into Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard for his MBA. He was very happy. He built a new life and started into public service. And the story that I shared on WhatsApp, he joined the Obama administration.

(06:59) He (07:00) decided to fire two people out of the entire agency. And after they were fired, he tried to do the right thing, let them have a graceful exit period. They did a whistleblower complaint against him and he lost his job. He shared a story about how he resigned because his boss told himself and he thought he was gonna fix it. And the next day,

(07:18) he woke up in the morning and his phone was buzzing because his friends were saying, 'Hey, your boss is doing a press conference about you.' And his boss was basically saying that this guy had conducted fraud and corruption, and he had never done any of those things. And he took him eight years to fight the government with his own lawyers and own savings to clear his name.

(07:36) And so, this guy didn't do the right or wrong thing, he just did what he thought he had to do, and he got. Unfairly injustice. And he was unable to find a job. There were so many jobs he couldn't do at Egon Zehnder or other places, and he unfortunately was able to do that. So, he had moved to Singapore.

(07:54) He moved across the world to figure out his next steps and build that. He was sharing about (08:00) how he cried, how he saved money, paid the legal fees. It took him eight years. Imagine eight years of your life proving to the everybody that he did not commit those things, so horrible.

(08:13) But eventually, he succeeded. And so the good news he was sharing with us, and the reason why he was talking to us, was that four years ago, he was able to clear his name and he was able this year to talk about his life. And Harvard had published a publication about his life and this year was the first year of his life where he was being able to be public about a story.

(08:34) And how about story? So, it was documented by Harvard, that was the context of where we met him. Three months ago, he died from a heart attack. I was inspired by him, a fantastic role model. He finally is innocent. He goes on holiday with his girlfriend and he dies from heart attack. And he died right after checking out his hotel room.

(08:52) So, imagine you spend all this time and all of us are in that room. When we found out that he died, we were so disappointed because we felt that this (09:00) was his time to shine. Finally, getting a hand blown up by finding a new career, unfairly fired. Got your name cleared, and now is dead.

(09:07) And so, all of us, just two weeks ago was his funeral , in memorial service. And there was just so much love from all 50 of us. Some of us knew him very well, some of us did not know him very well, but all of us agreed that he was a fantastic human being who did a great job taking care of the people around him.

(09:24) And this is an inspirational person for so many people. And so, what I'm trying to say is this, I think all of you will be making decisions by your career. There's absolutely no guarantee that your career is gonna go well. I cannot promise you that, and I'm not gonna pretend I can. I guarantee you that in your career, in the future, you'll face half times and you will face injustice, and you'll have to confront politics and be ostracized and judged. You'll feel like shit, face bad luck and curse those moments. I cannot promise you a fair career, but I can promise, you will face unfair moments. The most important thing is to be thoughtful about not (10:00) only your career. But also about your own perspective on life, which is what makes John, what makes Sarah, what makes you.

(10:08) Those are things that are really most important to you. Because all of us, we're all gonna die one day. And no matter how many PowerPoints or memos you do, no one's gonna remember you on a tombstone and say, he generated 500 PowerPoints in his life. Good job. And he got honors degree at this college.

(10:25) When you are at memorial service, we're gonna remember, were you kind? Were you human? Were you somebody that people looked up to? Those are things that people remember your name for. So, on that perspective, what I'm trying to say here is you need to be thoughtful about your career, your perspective of the future, and you need to stay in touch with the values that I brought to you.

(10:45) Thank you so much and wish you all fantastic chapter ahead! I pray and hope that you have a successful career. I pray and hope that you have a successful journey. I hope that you all have a great human life ahead.