If there is one thing that we should have faith in, it is people or rather in the infinite potential of people to become better than what they are. There is an old saying about throwing open the door when opportunity knocks. It is a wise adage, but ultimately flawed in the sense that it presumes that one should sit and wait for opportunity to visit. Instead of doing that, one should venture forth and create opportunities. To make opportunities, you need vision and courage. To see what other’s don’t. To do what others dare not do.

 

Our cover story this issue is about a man who thought out of the box and chose to take the road less travelled by, and in doing so has found great success. It was definitely not easy though. When carving your own path or even taking one that’s never been traversed before, you need to have courage, you need to persevere, and most of all you need to believe in your course, even if no one else does. These are the values that have served him well and which he is inculcating in the youth through his university.

 

I see Tan Sri Lim Kok Wing as a kindred spirit because we both have had our fair share of doubters and detractors when we embarked upon our respective projects. I still remember, during the early days of PASSIONS, people were giving dire warnings about our future by saying, “Beatrice, PASSIONS is too wordy. Beatrice, the articles are too intellectual. Beatrice, women don’t want to read about such topics.”

 

We were the youthful upstarts looking to take on more established publications. We could have copied what others were doing but refused to do so, because we did not want to be anyone else’s clone. Instead, we developed our own style, we set our own standards, we rewrote the rules, we thought out of the box. To paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “And much, much more than that, we did it our way”. We innovated.

 

PASSIONS celebrates the supreme power of the individual. Whichever way you look at it, it is impossible to fully embrace innovativeness and creativity without embracing individualism. The individual is the most important person in any given situation, because it only takes one man to realign perspectives, to inspire others, to provoke thought, and to convince Atlas to shrug.