7 Habits to Build A City Of Good
[Music]
in this age of selfie which is
technically i think
um entered the dictionary in 2013.
we have a lot of self-oriented things
now these days right we have
self-help we have self-care we have
self-medication
you know um there’s a lot of self um
but at the same time there’s a lot of uh
there’s a lot of pain actually
that’s out there too and when we think
about it like has all this self
focus actually made us happy
they say that the one predictor of
happiness is not
the size of your wallet size your house
how much stuff you have number of family
members or anything like that
the greatest predictor of happiness is
whether you have someone to call
when you really need help and when that
number
of people that don’t have someone to
call
in the society goes up that overall
level of happiness and that society goes
down
so in this age of the me
myself and i how do we become
more other centered not just
self-centered
how do we ask ourselves how can we be
someone that truly knows
another person and feel allow ourselves
to feel known by others too so i’d like
to start with an exercise
you have two options option one
is to look at someone next door to you
in the eyes with your soul
open
for 30 seconds option two
is lean over take a little selfie
okay we’re gonna try this exercise now
three two
one
and i want to see if you can show
kindness with your eyes
and just allow yourself to be you
i remember one time i did this and there
was a woman
who came up to me afterwards and
i noticed that she was crying and or she
had been crying
and i asked her i said gosh you know are
you okay and she said
you know i can’t remember the last time
somebody looked at me in the eye for a
minute
and so maybe just maybe
you have changed someone’s life today
too
by just being seen by being known
and by allowing yourself to be seen and
known
and the difficult thing actually is that
we live in a city that’s just known for
a lot of good things we have good food
we have good
shopping you know with good education we
have good housing
but we’re kind of a busy transactional
kind of place and you know
wherever you go you have this wall of
mobile phones you know we’re taught to
be
suspicious of strangers and actually not
kind to them
how do we stop for the one because the
hidden cost
of being transactional and and
and just absorbed in a city like ours is
that we actually become this sterile
soulless lifeless place
that only has bodies and places and
things for rent
how do we become this city of good i
mean ultimately
a city of goods made up of people people
like you and me
and that means the things that we choose
to do
the habits the practices and the norms
that we choose to have
make a huge difference and so i want to
share with you today
seven habits in the city of good
some of you may recall the joshua bell
experiment the washington post asked him
to stand in the subway and of course you
know
joshua bell has been called the virtuoso
violinist he’s the head of the
saint martins of the fields academy i
mean this man
plays to like huge
concert halls
and he went into the subway
and the a social experiment was there to
test
would anybody notice him would anybody
stop
would anybody maybe give him some money
and so they estimated maybe 10 might
stop
maybe four percent would appreciate the
quality and
150 maybe within an hour
well 27 out of the thousand odd people
that actually passed that day gave him
some money
out of that only seven stopped to listen
and 52.17 was collected
now what’s wrong with this picture how
is it that a man whose life
is celebrated and and who has received
so many
accolades is virtually ignored
how is it that we cannot even appreciate
that beauty so habit one
is notice beauty it is all around us
how do we stop for the one and
appreciate that one
so many years ago i actually um was
working on an
initiative to break the debt bondage
that
um foreign workers actually experience
when they come
to foreign to foreign places like
singapore and i interned in a hotel
and i experienced the other end of a
hotel which is
a really heavy duvets
cleaning up after people bedrooms
bathrooms toilets
and it was messy it was very messy
um and now i clean up after myself a
little bit more because i realized
that those places that i used are used
by other people
and cleaned by other people um actually
too
and i remember on my first day i walked
into the hallway
and there’s a service standard which
says if there’s someone about you know
12 feet in front of you look them in the
eye
and greet them so i tried something
look them in the eye and greet them
and that person walks straight by me
and completely ignored me never even
never even acknowledged my presence
now the fact of the matter actually is
my family owns that hotel and if i met
him in the lobby
or in a restaurant i think we would have
had a different interaction
and there is something fundamentally
wrong with that picture
that second habit is now about for me
respecting those places and respecting
people
it sounds so simple but being known
isn’t about being that rich and famous
person
it’s about that posture of the heart
that posture that we have towards one
another by recognizing that we are that
good and precious gift
and so is someone else
so i’m one of the worst culprits in the
universe
you know when it comes to pausing and
noticing things really because i’ve
been told i talk too fast i walk too
fast
i’m constantly multitasking but what i
try and do now actually on a daily basis
at least twice which is usually when i
you know sit down to eat is actually
stop
notice who’s around me and just give
thanks
and my role model actually for this is
my nana
and in five days she is turning 100.
she is amazing she is completely amazing
that was a 95 and that was a 99
year old picture of her she grew up poor
um but truly rich in love she raised
chickens when she was uh when she was
young
um but she was somebody who just really
lived her life um for others was very
active with war widows
um in los angeles uh where she where she
grew up
one day i asked her actually was the
birthday the morning of her 90th
birthday i said nana
what is the secret to being so
amazing and vivacious and i’ve asked her
this since so i know that it’s
consistent and true
and she said
i think i’m just a grateful person
and i thought wow and she said yeah you
know i get up in the morning and i just
say thanks
i’m i got up and then she said you know
what i’m really happy that grandpa could
just get up and
go to the bathroom by himself isn’t that
kind of ridiculous
like what’s the big deal but
actually having interacted with a lot of
older people and i’ve been having my
parents get older i realized that
getting up
and going to the bathroom by yourself is
not something you should take for
granted
so it is that habit of stopping and
giving thanks and truly even though i’m
not even half her age yet i want to be
half as good as her
when i am give thanks
regularly the good news is that there
are more people in this city
um that want to make it more lovable and
not just livable
and i’m glad that this is actually my
job
at nvpc and that’s where we have this
vision that singapore can be the city of
good
and we define that as where people come
together
to give their best not their scraps
you know but they’re best for others
and not just themselves
how do we come together and do together
what we cannot do alone
because change doesn’t just happen by
yourself
and what’s so important actually in this
process of change
is that we remember the stories that
make
up this city of good the stories of our
lives
now about three years ago we started
this this project to actually
tell a kind of people’s history of
singapore it wasn’t about the political
history or the economic history and
you’ve
heard a lot of that in this amazing
bicentennial year but it was actually
about the singaporeans
in our in our recent modern history who
looked out for other people
about hiv counselors who would hug
their patients in the 80s when
doctors and nurses were quitting their
jobs
it’s about policemen who would like look
out for youth at risk
and and and and be and befriend them
it’s about death row counselors
all of these stories are told by the
prophets of our time
the filmmakers and each of those films
gives you an opportunity to click
through and actually
learn more donate volunteer or share
your voice
to help support their cause
now that took us three years and 15
people
and a lot of time to actually uh create
but guess what
each of you also is a storyteller
that story tells every day what is
what is your mission when you
when you come online do you
build up and edify and encourage and
shout out and notice the beauty and give
thanks for others
that’s something that we can do every
day
in the city of good the bigger scale
around this too is how we engage
businesses
amazingly um it is it is actually
what we can use the tech for good
actually to create a massive change
last week um we actually announced to
a collaboration with a benefits
aggregator a benefits company
that was now going to donate um all the
unused benefits at the end of the year
actually to charities and give people
the opportunity to just say okay well i
didn’t use it
let’s let’s actually do something with
that
and that was actually right here just in
in singapore
on a bigger scale when wechat introduced
the giving tile
into their app actually they they
garnered over 3 billion unique donations
and over 1.4 billion yen
the biggest single day of donations
actually
in in china and taobao actually has over
a million
businesses online that are giving part
of what their proceeds are um
to actually charities out there too so
these platforms can be amazing
platforms for good and how does this all
happen
actually it happens because people
regular people actually
reach out and and get involved and stand
for something
now i want to tell you about kylie and
jeremy
i met them at this cafe i was at in um
in rochester minnesota way out there
i noticed that they had these little
hearts um on their
on their name tag i’m like kylie jeremy
you know and i asked them i said what
why are you what is that all about and
kylie said you know um
you know i i wear this i wear this uh
for my grandma and jeremy said well you
know
uh this is my weekend job you know my
day job is actually scheduling
um at the breast cancer screening clinic
and i said how is it that you you know
are you know bringing this into your
cafe at the moment said well you know we
just thought this was something
important so we asked our boss whether
we could do this
and you know then we ordered these
little stickers um which we now cover
the tops of coffee
coffee cups with you know actually too
and we use we use it as
a point of as a point of advocacy kylie
and jeremy are not
massive influencers they maybe have like
100 or something you know customers you
know or two
a day so if you have
a hundred customers a day reach 100
customers
if you have a thousand reach a thousand
if you have a million reach a million it
doesn’t really matter
it’s where you start and it’s what you
stand for another habit
is to stand for something and ultimately
i think it starts at home it starts with
you my mom had this
massive stroke and
and she almost died and they told us
well if she survives this coma she’s
probably going to turn out a vegetable
and and
it was very hard and and but you know
she she did survive and i remember that
next year we
my sister my mom and i decided well
actually my sister and i decided at the
time
that we were going to celebrate my mom
and our birthdays
by raising funds actually for an
organization
that was going to refurbish their
physiotherapy room
because that’s so important as part of
your rehabilitation
so we did that and we thought you know
what this is so much of a better way to
celebrate your birthday
um you know rather than like complaining
you have wrinkles or whether you have
more to love
you know or or whether you’re hosting
the right party
or whether the right people are coming
or whether your kid has a nice goody bag
to go home with you know
wow what if we just rethought this whole
idea of
of our of our of our birthdays too um
and this was a sign that we actually um
put up as our as our fundraiser kind of
like idea and it was a it was a sign
that we would
place at the bottom of my mom’s bed and
we would just have it there
so that if she ever kind of like opened
her eyes she would see it
and we would remind her actually that i
am an overcomer
and yes you are um
and so when we think about it truly the
city of good
is not always about the big things there
are the spectacular and the big things
but
it’s actually about a lot of the small
things it’s about
the small actions that we can take every
single day
because ultimately cities are not just
about buildings
and famous places or pastimes but cities
are about people
and it’s measured by the by the by the
amount of love
that we actually pour into a place the
stories
that we choose to tell the habits that
we keep
and the things that we decide to
practice
so in summary may i invite you all
to notice beauty to respect our places
and people to give thanks and pay it
forward
to share good stories
to stand for something and to start at
home
thank you
you