What A Boarder Can Learn From...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Tan Hooi Ling Initiative, The Courage to Begin, and the Person Who Turned a Harvard Assignment Into Southeast Asia's Most Valuable Tech Company In 2011, Tan Hooi Ling was a Harvard Business School student with a McKinsey career behind her, an offer from Apple in front of her, and a class assignment that was about to change everything. The assignment was a business...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Ho Ching Quiet Leadership, Strategic Vision, and What It Means to Prove Something Without Saying a Word When Ho Ching was appointed CEO of Temasek Holdings in 2002, the criticism was immediate and pointed. Temasek is Singapore's state investment company one of the most significant sovereign wealth funds in the world, holding assets that underpin the financial arch...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Samantha Cristoforetti Preparation, Perspective, and the Woman Who Took an Espresso Machine into Space In April 2015, four hundred kilometres above the earth, Samantha Cristoforetti floated in the International Space Station, pressed the button on the first espresso machine ever launched into orbit, and drank the first proper cup of coffee in the history of human spac...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Dr Hannah Fry Curiosity, Mathematical Beauty, and the Person Who Makes the Terrifying Make Sense In 2021, Hannah Fry was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She is a mathematician. So she did what mathematicians do with frightening things, she looked at the numbers. She examined the data on detection rates, treatment outcomes, and probability of recurrence. She understood...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Indra Nooyi Purpose, Identity, and the Night Her Mother Sent Her Out for Milk The night Indra Nooyi found out she was going to be appointed CEO of PepsiCo, one of the largest companies on earth, she drove home to tell her family. Her mother stopped her at the door. Not to congratulate her. Not to celebrate. To ask her to go back out and get milk, because they had run...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Temple Grandin Different Thinking, Visual Minds, and the Person Who Understood Cattle Better Than Anyone Because She Thought Like One When Temple Grandin was two years old, she had no language. She was later diagnosed with autism at a time when the medical consensus was that children like her should be institutionalised. Her mother was told, by professionals, that Tem...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Ernest Shackleton Leadership in Crisis, Collective Survival, and the Man Who Never Lost a Single Person In August 1914, Ernest Shackleton sailed from London with twenty-seven men and a plan to cross Antarctica on foot, the last great unclaimed journey of the Heroic Age of exploration. The ship was called Endurance. The name would become, in retrospect, either grimly i...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Kelly Slater Longevity, Reinvention, and What It Actually Means to Still Be the Best at Fifty Kelly Slater won his first World Surf League championship in 1992. He was twenty years old. He won his most recent in 2011. He was thirty-nine. In between, he won nine more, eleven world titles in total, a number so far beyond any other surfer in history that the comparison i...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Jenny Lee Future Thinking, Calculated Risk, and the Courage to Bet on What Doesn't Exist Yet Jenny Lee's job is to look at something that does not yet exist and decide whether it should. She is one of the most influential venture capitalists in Asia, a managing partner at GGV Capital, named by Forbes to its Midas List of top technology investors multiple times...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Sherpa Tenzing Norgay Partnership, Identity, and What It Means to Be the Person Without Whom None of It Was Possible On 29 May 1953, two men stood on the summit of Everest. One was Edmund Hillary, a beekeeper from New Zealand. The other was Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa from the Himalaya. They were the first human beings in recorded history to stand there. The first questi...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Ernest Shackleton Leadership in Crisis, Collective Survival, and the Man Who Never Lost a Single Person In August 1914, Ernest Shackleton sailed from London with twenty-seven men and a plan to cross Antarctica on foot, the last great unclaimed journey of the Heroic Age of exploration. The ship was called Endurance. The name would become, in retrospect, either grimly i...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Janja Garnbret Focus, Flow, and What It Looks Like When Someone Is Simply Better Than the Rest of the World There is a moment in competition climbing when the route-setter's intention and the climber's ability meet, or don't. The wall is fixed. The holds are fixed. The time is fixed. There is nowhere to hide and nothing to negotiate. You either find the se...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Sir Clive Woodward Systems, Marginal Gains, and the Uncomfortable Truth That Talent Is Never Enough On 22 November 2003, Jonny Wilkinson dropped a goal with his weaker right foot in the final seconds of extra time and England won the Rugby World Cup. The moment has been replayed so many times that it has almost become mythological, a single act of individual brillianc...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Gordon Ramsay Standards, Accountability, and What It Actually Means to Care Enough to Get It Right Gordon Ramsay did not grow up in a kitchen. He grew up in chaos. His childhood in Stratford-upon-Avon was marked by poverty, instability, and a father whose alcoholism meant the family moved constantly and never quite landed anywhere safe. He was a promising footballer,...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Jake Humphrey High Performance, Genuine Curiosity, and the Radical Act of Actually Listening Jake Humphrey has sat across from some of the most accomplished people on the planet, world champions, Olympic gold medallists, CEOs, coaches, artists, and asked them how they did it. He has done this hundreds of times, across hundreds of hours of conversation, in one of the m...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Michael J. Fox Optimism, Uncertainty, and the Difference Between Accepting What Is and Surrendering to It In 1991, Michael J. Fox was thirty years old, at the height of his career, and his left hand wouldn't stop trembling. He ignored it for a while, the way people ignore things that would require them to change everything if they turned out to be serious. Then he...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Karen Reivich Resilience, Thinking Patterns, and the Voice in Your Head That Isn't Always Telling the Truth There is a conversation happening inside every student in your boarding house right now. You can't hear it. Neither can they, most of the time, not clearly, not consciously. But it is running continuously, underneath everything else: a commentary on what...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Alex Partridge Neurodiversity, Self-Knowledge, and Finding Out What Your Brain Is Actually Good At Alex Partridge was not the obvious candidate for Olympic rowing. He was the student who couldn't sit still. The one whose mind moved faster than the lesson, or in a completely different direction from it. The one for whom school, in its conventional form, was a place...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Sherlock Holmes Observation, Intellectual Honesty, and the Discipline of Actually Paying Attention Sherlock Holmes is introduced to Dr Watson in a laboratory at Barts Hospital. Watson has barely opened his mouth before Holmes tells him he has recently been in Afghanistan. No introduction, no explanation, no pleasantries. Just a conclusion, delivered with complete conf...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Bethany Hamilton Courage, Return, and the Decision to Get Back in the Water On 31 October 2003, Bethany Hamilton lost her left arm to a tiger shark off the coast of Kauai. She was thirteen years old. The attack lasted seconds. She paddled herself to shore, losing over sixty percent of her blood volume on the way. Twenty-six days later, she was back on a surfboard. Not...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Mae Jemison Imagination, Representation, and the Audacity to See Yourself in the Picture As a child in Chicago, Mae Jemison watched a Black woman stand on the bridge of a starship and understood, with the clarity that only children can access, that space was for her too. The woman was Uhura. The ship was the Enterprise. The programme was Star Trek. None of it was real...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Rosa Parks Moral Courage, Dignity, and the Power of a Decision That Had Already Been Made On the evening of 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks sat down on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and refused to give up her seat. What happened next changed America. What is less often told is everything that came before it. Rosa Parks was not tired that evening, not physically, not in th...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Katherine Johnson Intellectual Courage, Quiet Excellence, and the Audacity to Check the Maths Yourself In 1962, John Glenn refused to get into the rocket until Katherine Johnson had checked the numbers. NASA had just installed electronic computers to calculate the orbital trajectories for the Friendship 7 mission. Glenn didn't trust them. He asked, specifically, f...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Yuja Wang Mastery, Authenticity, and the Freedom That Discipline Actually Builds There is a moment in almost every Yuja Wang performance where the audience stops breathing. It is not just the speed, though the speed is extraordinary. It is the combination of absolute technical control and something that looks, impossibly, like abandon. Like a musician who has practise...

What a Boarder Can Learn from Amelia Earhart Curiosity, Self-Justification, and the Courage to Prove It to Yourself First In 1928, Amelia Earhart crossed the Atlantic by aeroplane and landed to a hero's welcome. Crowds, cameras, celebration. She was famous overnight. She hated it. She had been a passenger. The men had flown the whole way. She later described herself as having felt "like a...