The Culture of Saying #ThankYou

Everyone wish to be appreciated because it motivates us, both at work and in life. 

In XiMnet, saying genuine "Thank You" is not uncommon among the team members. It's an incredibly powerful pair of words to keep us going despite the challenges we face. It builds stronger and meaningful relationships. In fact, saying thank you with a heart of gratitude can change lives.

And by saying thank you and meaning it, you could change a very bad day into a day of joy. Have you changed somebody's bad day into a better one?

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Persistence Hunt : Hunting by running down the prey.

A good lesson in Perseverance, the attainment of success by relentless pursuit of what we seek until it lies before us, like a much deserved prize.

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Building On Your Failures

I love to read. I’ve read all sorts to feed my seemingly insatiable hunger to know. From fiction to non-fiction, from poetry to rock stars preaching on novel ways to alleviate poverty, I’ve read across the shelves like I would pick my way across the Sunday buffet lunch spreads.

And I love to read self-helps and business books.

A large part of business publications sell us the formulaic easy ways to achieve success. Everybody wants to learn that Quick & Easy 3 Steps to Become Rich & Famous or the 5 Simple Steps to Make Your Million Before 30 while sipping Latte over a Saturday afternoon between surfing the Internet and talking to friends.

Truth be told, true success comes only to those few who refuse to give up on their dreams.

No, not just any dreams, but that ONE DREAM. That one you cling on to everyday with every breath you take. That ONE DREAM without which nothing really matter much anymore. To get to that ONE DREAM, you would have bet your life on it, get thrown to outside your comfort zone,  take the blows, kneel over to stand up again, and most often than not, you will be taken down, torn inside out and kick you about many times over before Life finally decides you are worthy of your ONE DREAM.    

You see now, that glittering word success is not for everyone.

Yes, success takes Perseverance. A neat little word with a lot of mess packed into it.

It takes Passion. Not MTV-styled passion, but Passion with its root meaning, “to suffer” for something you care deeply for.

You’ll never get to wrap your hand on the handle to Success if that ONE DREAM isn’t packed with that ONE REASON why you want to wake up in the morning and live your life for.  Victor Frankl says if you have the meaning for being, you will live through even the most horrific experience in life. He lived through the holocaust and survived to tell his story. He wanted to tell his story so he survived to tell it.

I built XIMNET for one reason. I wanted to make a difference to people’s lives through deeply-engaging, meaningful work that produces beautiful results for paying customers. I believe we should live to serve and to love with our actions daily  in exchange for a fulfilled existence.

And that brings me back to where I started. The journey towards Success has been hard all along for me but it’s been meaningful all the way. I’ve made mistakes, I’ve done things that I don’t respect myself later,  I’ve tripped over foolish things but I know I will get there soon. I can feel the wind on my face now.

To all my customers, my partners, my team-members and friends, I promise the success is as much for you as it is for me.

So if you are having a hard time now, remember there’s a season for everything. If you are on your knees, or have fallen over, you can stand up, dust off the dirt and stay in the fight.

I’ve stayed in the fight long enough to know that Life crowns the one who finds meaning in the hardest black-out blows. You just need to stand up before the count of 10.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4 …

Image taken from http://wakpaper.com/

Come on,  you can stand up and punch again!

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Reaching Out to Pulau Ketam with TFM

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”
~ Nelson Mandela

Do you remember your first day at school?

Do you remember waking up that fateful morning wearing your slightly stiff white and blue school uniform after a cold shower? Do you remember that sense of anticipation tempered with anxiety?

Do you remember the noise and the chatters greeting you as you arrive at school; the smell of the new place, the faces of all those little kids. Do you still recall the look of that one adult who was surrounded by all your little classmates, sitting in front of the class?

I’ll always remember my first trip to the school on my father’s bicycle, the same he uses to get to work every day as a rubber tapper. It was in the month of January 1971, and I remember holding on to his hand as he lead me into the school. I remember thinking to myself, how big the school compound was.

I remember a tree shedding red blossoms in the breeze as they swirled downwards and scattered across the pavement outside the building where people wearing a serious look walk in and out of. And oh, I’ve never seen so many little kids like me all in lines, in white and blue, watched over by bigger ones in ties.

 Primary School Class Photo (1971)

Looking back, I now know how my life would be forever changed for the better from that day onwards. And I am thankful for the education I was given. I am grateful to my father who truly believed in educating his children.

I am still inspired by all my teachers who lit my curiosity and gave me fuel to continue my quest for knowledge through the years. I am what I am today because their love for teaching still burn within me.

Education is a great liberator. A good education can open up a child’s mind and lift her out of the limitations of her surroundings. A good education sets a child on the path of life with affirming choices and opportunities. A well-educated child changes not only her life but the lives of her family ultimately.

For that very reason, I’ve been a fervent supporter of TEACH FOR MALAYSIA (TFM). There’s nothing more inspiring for me than watching bright young graduates side-stepping their career goals for 2 years to dedicate their lives to make a difference to school children in far-flung places.

Left: Ken Ming & Priscilla (TFM Fellows) and Wiley. Right: XiMnet Representatives for Career Week.

It has been 2 years now for me as a fellow for TFM. Together with my team members at XIMNET, we are humbled and we feel privileged to have the opportunity to share our life stories and contribute in our little ways to inspire young schoolchildren at the Pulau Ketam Secondary School to reach out further than their little fishing village for the lives they hope to live.

If I can only alter the trajectory of ONE CHILD’s life from suffocating mediocrity to a life of self-actualization and fulfillment, all our time and effort that my team and I have put into this will be deemed well-spent.

So go ahead, feed a child’s curiosity today with love and watch her blossom.

 Pulau Ketam Secondary School Career Week.

Support Teach For Malaysia (http://www.teachformalaysia.org/Get_Involved-@-Get_Involved.aspx) in whatever ways you can, so we can all reach out to all those beautiful children of Malaysia and make a difference to their lives. And ours too.

“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”
~ Victor Hugo

 Trip to XiMnet Office organized by Teach For Malaysia.

http://teachformalaysia.org/

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The Coffee Propaganda

A colorful video animates and broadcasts facts about the coffee you consume on a daily basis, in a way that is very easy on the eyes found in Vimeo to kick start your Tuesday morning.

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Peanut Ways To Be More Productive @ Work

In today’s busy world, we seem to be obsessed with the idea of “productivity” and “work hacks”.

It’s easy to see why: being able to get more done allows us to get ahead in life, and even gives us more time to do the things we love outside of work.

The problem we run into, however, is that it is easy to get motivated, but hard to stay disciplined.



Source: AsapScience, Sparring Mind

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Discovering The Way

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~ Robert Frost

I remember pondering over the poem above as a literature student many years ago. With the road ahead of me, how do I want to live my life?

Several years later, with the fire of my youthful idealism burning out as I live through the daily grind of making meaning out of an uninspired work life, I picked up a book at MPH Bookstore and read the first line.

“Life is difficult”. How true that is…

Over the past decades, I must have read M. Scott Peck’s book, “The Road Less Travelled” no less than ten times now. Life is indeed difficult. I saw it as a child, within my family and in my Kulai neighborhood of the 1970s.

I once thought I can make a difference to this world by being a writer. I read literature of all kinds and experimented with various types of philosophies, religious thoughts and beliefs. And I wrote. At the same time, I thought perhaps I can be a singer/songwriter and rock the world with a new dream played to an uncommon rhythm. I formed a band with some friends and rocked for a while.

Then I fell in love and got married. So I had to get a job to pay the bills.

As a young adult making a living in Kuala Lumpur, I saw it is indeed true as Henry Thoreau, the American philosopher had said “…the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”. In a bank and a few jobs later, I realized the darkest place in the world is the workplace.

That’s when I made a decision of take the road less travelled. And I want to do my part to make life less difficult. I want to put the light back into people's eyes.

I swore to myself I will build a workplace lighted with Love.


The chief alchemist Show & Tell session in collaboration with Teach For Malaysia.

Love for the work, love for customers, and most important of all, love for the community that is coming together with a shared mission to make a difference with our lives.

So I founded XIMNET.

Come join me, and take the road less travelled.


XiMnet Malaysia Team with a total 15 members of as of 2013.

Wiley Chin was interviewed by BFM, talking about how he gets his feet into the business to change the world. Download the podcast and listen to the interview here.

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