Aspirations for the Future: 2025
New year, new me. What are my aspirations for the future?
Aspirations for the Future 2025
Introduction
As the new year begins, I believe it is a good time to reflect on the past year and set goals for the future. In this post, I outline my aspirations for the future.
Career
It goes without saying that Singapore is known for its pressure cooker environment: not just from the education system, but also from the working world. I don’t believe this is a bad thing, as knowing this has helped me to remain competitive and driven. Those who know me will know that I aspire to be a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) one day. I believe that the industry grows and evolves rapidly, and I want to be at the forefront of innovation and change, leading a team of like-minded individuals to success.
Before I can achieve this goal, I believe it is important for me to hone my soft skills at the same pace that I have been honing my technical skills. Having worked in a startup that spanned multiple countries, I know from experience that different cultures have different ways of working and communicating, similar to how different teams prefer different tools and methodologies.
I have always believed an unspoken requirement of reaching a senior leadership position is the requirement of working in multiple countries, and although I have only worked in Singapore so far, I believe that it is vital to my long-term career growth to work in other countries as well. Hands-on experience with security frameworks such as GDPR will always be valuable, even if I may not work in a geographic region that requires it.
Knowledge
As I have alluded to in my previous post, I have been given the opportunity to work on projects that involve skills that I have learnt in university, but have not had the opportunity to apply in the real world. It is gratifying to be able to combine that with the knowledge I already have from my work experience, leading to something akin to a DevSecOps approach. I am planning to continue working with code mainly for the purpose of automation, as I believe security relying on manual processes is doomed to failure.
I have been working on a few smaller projects as part of my university’s capstone project, and one such project involves performing quantitative risk analysis using statistical methods such as Monte Carlo simulations. I am looking to keep developing the project to expand it to more use cases, and I have been open about the development process on my GitHub repository risk_quant_calculator.
While it is currently still in its infancy, I believe that quantitative risk analysis is a skill I have seen to be extremely rare in the industry, and I believe my work can help me to bridge that gap. The open-source nature of the project is intentional to build trust in its calculations, and I hope others can benefit from it as well.
More details on the project will be shared in a future post, but I am excited to see where this project will take me in the future.
Strength
I have kept intentionally low-key about this, but I have been working hitting the gym for the past half a year. When I started my internship, I recall an experience where carrying my laptop with one hand led to soreness and trembling in my arm, even though it did not affect me for that long. I took the opportunity to connect with a few friends over in the gym, and they have been helping me develop and practice strength training. While it isn’t exactly my first time at the gym, I have previously only really focused on cardio training, which has not really given me the results I wanted.
I have been enjoying the strength training process a lot more, and if I had to admit, the primal satisfaction of lifting progressively heavier weights every few weeks has been really enjoyable. Some key records as of the end of 2024 include a 90kg squat, a 90kg deadlift, a 40kg overhead press, and a 260kg leg press. I think these are pretty good numbers for someone relatively new, and I am excited to see how far I can push myself in 2025.
Having the gym as a topic to talk about has also been a good conversation starter, and I believe that it has, and will continue to, help me connect with others by speaking about a common interest. In that sense, going to the gym achieves two goals: improving my physical health and opening up opportunities for social interaction.
Personal
The desire to purchase more tech gadgets has always been strong in me, and I have even shunned overseas travel in favor of purchasing a new addition to my desk setup. While the rate of purchase has slowed as I have become more satisfied in the completeness of my setup, I am still looking to refresh the oldest parts of my setup, like my desktop and maybe some accessories.
Those who know me well also know that I have visited and eaten at every hawker centre in Singapore. What started as a challenge to visit the hawker centres I was missing back in May 2022 has turned into a hobby. I have been to both new hawker centres open this year: Anchorvale Village Hawker Centre and Woodleigh Village Hawker Centre. I am looking to maintain this streak and be sure to make my pilgrimage to every new hawker centre that opens in the future. Even though I might not travel overseas as much as others, I believe that the desire to explore and experience is still strong in me, and I have channelled that into exploring the local food scene.
Conclusion
Developing body, mind, and soul is a lifelong journey, and whatever the future holds, I know that whatever progress I make can never be taken away from me. I am as much excited to see where my journey takes me as I am to see others embark on their own journeys, whether inspired by me or not. The four focuses of career, knowledge, strength, and personal growth are what I believe will be a good foundation for me to build upon, and I hope you too can find a foundation to build upon in your own life.
References
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