Inception

Over the past weekend I was at a Personal Mastery camp at Mines Wellness Hotel (at Mines Wonderland) for Khazanah scholars. It was nice to network with the other scholars (this batch consisted of those who had just finished 1st and 2nd years in university). The camp was so-so and deemed to teach us about mastering ourselves, our subconscious, understanding our personalities and personality type, how to handle people, control ourselves better, and so on. Games were also introduced to teach us concepts about conflict and cooperation, but I think they could have done a lot better on those games - the games I've studied for H3 economics back in Singapore are much more enlightening from the perspective of behavioral economics. To be fair though, not all the scholars are studying economics so not all of them can be expected to expect high-level games!

One of the highlights of the weekend event was a speech and interactive session by Mr Ahmad Shahizam, a law graduate who went into banking and who now works for Khazanah under the Principal Investments division (a restricted access floor of Khazanah's). He works closely with our Managing Director Tan Sri Azman Mokhtar as well. I had the chance to sit next to him (opportunistically, because I waited for him to sit down before I sat down!) and ask lots of questions. Turns out we are both fans of Nassim Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan (there is, by the way, an updated version of The Black Swan with a new chapter). He also recommends books for Tan Sri Azman once in a while and highlights certain chapters and sentences which he feels are important. I discussed the 2008 financial crisis, Islamic finance, and Khazanah's work-life balance with him. He actually sold Khazanah pretty well.

However... I must say the highlight of the weekend was the movie we watched: Inception. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page (of Juno), and Cillian Murphy (from Batman Begins), among others, and directed by Christopher Nolan (of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight vintage), it was like The Matrix and Call of Duty combined. It's kind of a philosophical movie because it explores dreams and the possibility of extracting information by entering other people's dreams. And then... there's something about a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. 4 levels of dreaming. Five minutes of real time would appear as an hour in the first dream, which feels like 10 hours in the next level, and so on, according to the movie. So our subconscious can purportedly explode while we're sleeping. If that's true in the real world.. we could learn things a lot faster if there were really a way to plant ideas in our minds while we're asleep. It's a newfangled sort of movie and something to make you think about reality and what it means to live. How do you know the difference between dreams and reality while you're dreaming? For me, it's probably the movie of the year.

And, now I'm back to work at KLCC!