5 Life Lessons I Learned From My Badass 88-Year-Old Grandmother

A lifetime of wisdom, distilled into a 5-minute article

My grandmother is a badass.

At the age of 17, she was one of the first women in Singapore’s history to become a police officer.

Even more impressive was that she was pregnant with my oldest uncle while being used for undercover operations to bust prostitution rings and drug gangs.

She told me all of this in 2018 without even batting an eyelid. It seemed to her like this was a completely normal thing for a teenager to do.

At that age, I was employed to deep fry questionable quality chicken for the white-haired colonel for $7.50 an hour.

She was recognized for her service during Singapore’s 50th year of independence.

But even more than her life stories and accomplishments, my grandmother was a badass for the philosophy she choose to live her life by.

She may have imparted wisdom through her words, but she left an even bigger impression on me through her actions.

While she is now entering her twilight years, I’ll never forget the lessons she taught me.

#1 Do this while you can. Everything else can wait.

Every time I saw my grandmother, she always urges me to travel the world while I am young.

To her, everything else can wait.

Family, career, jobs. These are important. But are secondary to being able to travel.

She always stressed to me that traveling gave you experiences that can’t be bought.

She’s traveled the world herself. Breaking ground in Turkey, France and Australia and many other countries before her health prevented her from moving freely.

It is even more impressive when you think about how much more difficult it was to travel during her day. There were no Google Maps, planes weren’t as safe and racism was alive and thriving.

To my grandmother, my only job in my twenties and thirties was to explore the world and experience new things.

COVID-19 may have thrown a spanner in the works, but I am committed to traveling as much as possible, even if it is only within Australia.

I was fortunate enough to make it across the ocean to Singapore this year and I’ve got plans to travel to New Zealand and other parts of Australia throughout the year.

#2 Sleep is the most important thing to having a good day

“Goodmorning, how was your sleep?”

A common greeting I would get whenever I stayed at my grandmother’s house.

When I was younger, I always thought it was just a quirk. As I am older, I understand the importance of a goodnight of sleep.

She had never read Mathew Walker’s book Why We Sleep or even researched any science behind it.

She seemed to have an intuition that sleep was fundamental to my physical, mental and spiritual well-being.

#3 Find a good life partner

My grandmother had a successful 60-year marriage, cut short when my grandfather passed away at the age of 89 in 2020.

They were inseparable.

During her later years and when I was entering my late twenties, she would often repeat to me to “find a good girlfriend”.

She said this to me not to force me to get married and have children. She didn’t really seem fussed if I ever got married.

But she knew that the person you choose to spend and build your life with will be the most important decision you will ever make in your life.

Great relationships are created, not found. And creating a great relationship takes an investment in time and effort.

Yet it always astounds me how little thought people put into deciding who they will marry.

They spend more time watching a series on Netflix rather than reflecting on their own values and what they want to achieve in their life and who they want to spend it with.

#4 How you treat others is the most important thing

Unlike other Chinese-Singaporean grandparents, my grandmother was never fixated on her children or grandchildren being successful.

In Singapore, you have a choice of being a doctor, a lawyer or a failure.

I am exaggerating for effect, but the pressure on children to perform in school and have a high-status profession in Singapore is unrelenting.

My grandmother was far more concerned with how you treated the people around you and if you had a “good heart and character”.

No matter what you did, if you treated people like you how you wanted to be treated, you are successful in her eyes.

Even if you had all the riches in the world, if you treated people poorly and had a bad heart, you will be unsuccessful and incredibly lonely.

How often do we see enormously successful people being terrible bosses to work for? Or abusing their power by mistreating those who work for them?

#5 A hard life doesn’t always have to be difficult

Aside from myself, my grandmother is the funniest person I know.

She always has a smile on her face and cracks jokes whenever she can. Even well into her 80s, she was still sharp with a quick wit.

I can now see where I get my wicked sense of humor from.

If you didn’t know her, you would think she lived a relatively easy life without much adversity.

But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

My grandmother grew up in Singapore during a period of enormous uncertainty. It makes the COVID-19 lockdowns look like a walk in the park.

She went hungry every day during the British and Japanese occupation of Singapore as a child and young teenager.

She endured shelling and bombing during the war. Huddling close together with her family never really knowing if a bomb might hit their house.

She lost her parents and siblings at a very young age.

She had every reason to become bitter about the world and resentful of everything she had to sacrifice and endure.

But she didn’t.

She chooses to keep smiling, joking, and laughing with the people she loves the most. Even when numerous health issues sapped her energy. She was always so playful.

I learned from her that what you experienced in the past does not have to be repeated in the future.

You can change the trajectory of your life through the simple decisions you make every day.

Adversity reveals your character, as much as it creates it.

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