Arriving at the Gem in Progress

I stepped off the plane in Singapore in 2005 and the heat hit me before the terminal doors had fully opened — not the dry shock of desert air, but something closer to the interior of a greenhouse: dense, total, personal.¹ It does not so much surround you as inhabit you. The island sits just over one degree north of the equator, and the climate is completely indifferent to how important your meeting is or how crisp your shirt was when you left the hotel.

For most visitors, that might be a complaint. For me, it was a reminder.

Here was a country with no oil, no gas, no mineral wealth, and no agricultural land to speak of — a tiny island of just 733 square kilometers clinging to the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, without so much as a significant mountain range or major river to its name.² A country that, when it was thrust into independence in 1965, had a GDP per capita of barely US$500, an unemployment rate hovering around 14 percent, and nearly 70 percent of its population living in slums or severely overcrowded conditions.³ A country that, by every rational measure of the time, was not supposed to make it.

And yet, standing there in 2005, I could feel something that statistics alone could not fully capture: the unmistakable imprint of deliberate, disciplined leadership on every corner of the city.

Recognizing Trajectory Before It Becomes Consensus

I was born into a culture that prizes two things above almost all else: efficiency, and the honest assessment of value. Not the sticker price — the real value. What you actually get for what you invest. It is a lens that shapes how I evaluate everything, from a business decision to a travel destination to a school.

That lens told me, standing there in Singapore in 2005, that this city was something rare: a place where the investment — in governance, in infrastructure, in civic discipline — was paying compounding returns. It was not yet the finished article. But the trajectory was unmistakable. And recognizing a trajectory before it becomes consensus is, to my mind, one of the most useful skills a person can develop.

I had experienced that feeling once before — when I chose to attend UCLA.

At the time, UCLA was not widely regarded as an elite institution in the way that the Ivy League schools commanded immediate, reflexive reverence. It was respected, certainly, but it was not the name that made dinner party conversations stop. I enrolled not because the rankings demanded it, but because I could see what the institution was becoming — the quality of its faculty, the seriousness of its students, the ambition embedded in its culture. The value was there. The recognition would follow.

It did. UCLA went on to be named the No. 1 public university in the United States by U.S. News & World Report and held that distinction for eight consecutive years, from 2017 through 2024.⁴ It was not luck. It was trajectory made visible, for those willing to look.⁵

Singapore, in 2005, felt exactly the same way. And behind that trajectory stood one man.

The Decision to Stay

I came for a project. I stayed for four years.

Not because Singapore was perfect — it was not, and I never mistook it for such. But because there is something deeply compelling about living inside a genuine work in progress when the people steering it know what they are doing. Singapore in the mid-2000s was a place where you could feel the intentionality behind every policy, every public space, every rule that seemed strange to outsiders but made coherent sense when you understood the larger vision it served.

I eventually became a permanent resident — a status I did not pursue lightly.⁶ To me, permanent residency in Singapore was not a transaction or a convenience. It was, in a quiet way, a statement of respect: that I believed in what this country was building, and that I wanted to be part of it for as long as circumstances allowed.

Those circumstances, eventually, required me to leave. In honesty, what I lacked was what Singapore had spent four decades building for its own people: a safety net — personal and financial — that would have made staying possible when things became difficult. The island that had mastered the art of giving its citizens a stake in tomorrow could not give me one by proxy. That was no one's failure but my own. But Singapore never left me.

And neither did the curiosity about the man whose fingerprints were on every corner of what I had experienced.

The Weight of the Inheritance

To understand Lee Kuan Yew, you must first understand what he inherited — or rather, what he did not inherit.

When Singapore was expelled from the Federation of Malaysia on August 9, 1965 — not by choice, but under pressure from Malay ultranationalists who viewed a Chinese-majority Singapore as a destabilizing presence — Lee broke down at a press conference. "For me," he said, "it is a moment of anguish."⁷ It was not theater. It was the grief of a man who had staked his political career on the belief that Singapore's future lay within a unified Malaysia, and had been proven wrong not by argument, but by force.

He was left with an island of 1.9 million people, no natural resources, a freshwater supply controlled by a neighboring country that had just expelled them, ethnic tensions between Chinese, Malay, and Indian communities that had already boiled over into riots, a British military presence that was withdrawing, and a foreign press already writing Singapore's obituary.⁸

What he had — and what no inventory of resources could capture — was a mind of extraordinary clarity, a will of iron, and an absolute refusal to be defined by his circumstances.

"We had been asked to leave Malaysia and go our own way with no signposts to our next destination," he would later write. "We faced tremendous odds with an improbable chance of survival."⁹

He was right. The odds were improbable. The survival was not.

The transformation that followed — the demolition of slums and construction of planned townships, the systematic eradication of corruption, the aggressive courting of foreign investment, the elevation of education as a national priority, the engineering of an improbable multiracial harmony — is a story that deserves to be told in full.

And that is precisely what we will do next.