Your dream will scare people who never chased theirs
Sunday musings: Building a life on your terms when your success exposes other people’s fear.
Most people will not support your dreams because your success forces them to confront their fear.
I learned this the hard way when I started my business because the people I thought would cheer were the first to laugh and call me crazy, yet these same people now ask for advice, ask for frameworks and ask how I built what I built, like the whole thing was inevitable rather than chosen one quiet morning at my dining table with nothing but a laptop, a neurodiverse toddler’s therapy schedule and a life I refused to shrink anymore.
When I came out as queer, gender-fluid and pansexual in Singapore, the stares came fast, the whispers came easy, and the support came slow.
I learned that people who fear their own truth will mock yours first because it is easier to dismiss someone brave than admit you are scared to live the same way, and that clarity followed me when I left corporate life, when I started Human Algorithm with zero safety net and when old colleagues said things like “You sure or not?” while ignoring the fact that their own ceilings were built from the same doubts they tried to hand to me.
Living authentically in Singapore means walking into bathrooms where I never know if people will stare, frown or try to chase me out. I still walk in anyway because shrinking for other people’s comfort is a debt you never finish paying.
That same lesson shaped my business because the people who did not believe in me were mirrors, showing me the limits they lived with and expected me to inherit.
When I was building my business, I heard everything from “Be realistic” to “Personal branding cannot feed a family”, and yet these were the same people who watched me cycle my daughter to school every morning, hit the gym at night, and write until my voice cut through the timeline, because consistency scares people who only commit when conditions are perfect.
They call you lucky when it works because admitting you worked for it would break their self-story.
I learned to stop asking people to believe in me because most are not rejecting your dream, they are protecting their worldview, like friends who once rolled their eyes at my content but now forward my posts to their teams, or relatives who said skirts and makeup would “ruin my reputation” but now introduce me as “the one doing well,” because people only understand your identity once it becomes undeniable.
They only understand your ambition once it becomes profitable.
Success is not about proving them wrong because that keeps you chained to their expectations, and my turning point came the day I stopped performing for approval, started telling the truth about my life, my past arrests, my daughter’s neurodiversity and my queerness, and built a one-person business where storytelling pays the therapy bills and authenticity sets the price, not the market’s anxiety.
Your dreams need believers, but they do not need believers at the start; they need momentum, clarity and the willingness to look unreasonable long enough for the results to speak for you.
I learned that when I hit my first $5K month, then my first $10K, then $15K, all from inbound leads, all from stories most people told me never to share because they were “too much,” “too personal,” “too risky,” but the truth is safe dreams die fast and dangerous dreams pay dividends.
Do not let other people’s limitations become your ceiling, because their fear is not your forecast and their doubt is not your data point, and if my life taught me anything, it is that the world shifts when you stop asking for permission to rise.
What belief did you have to unlearn to start building the life you want?
See you next Sunday
Early bird prices now available for Cohort 3 of the H.A.L.O. Masterclass
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Week 2: January 19, 2026
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Week 4: February 2, 2026
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