1. The metaphor of Kintsugi is powerful and visual. What was the moment in your own life when this philosophy stopped being an idea and became a lived truth for you?
There wasn’t a single thunderclap moment — it was more like a slow recognition. I started Redhill with one other person in a small office in Singapore, with very little capital and no safety net. In those early years there were points where I genuinely didn’t know if we’d make payroll the following month. I remember one particular stretch where we lost two anchor clients within weeks of each other, and I sat in that office after everyone had left thinking, “This might be over.”
But it wasn’t. We rebuilt the pipeline, we found new clients, and each time we came back from one of those near‑death experiences, the company was stronger — not in spite of the crack, but because we’d been forced to rethink everything about how we operated. The gold in the seam was the hard-won knowledge we would never have acquired if things had gone smoothly.
The philosophy became lived truth when I stopped dreading those fractures and started trusting that they were the mechanism through which real growth happens. That shift didn’t happen overnight. It took a decade of building, breaking, and rebuilding Redhill from a two-person startup into a 200-person platform across eight countries before I could look back and see the pattern clearly.
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2. Many readers may recognise themselves in the stories of failure and recovery, yet hesitate to begin their own rebuilding. What is the very first, practical step you believe someone can take when their life feels irreparably broken?
Stop trying to solve the whole thing at once. When everything feels shattered, the instinct is to look at the full wreckage and feel paralysed. The first practical step is radical honesty with yourself about where you actually are — not where you wish you were, not where you think you should be. Just an unflinching inventory of what’s broken and what’s still intact.
I’ve found that even in the worst professional crises, there are always a few things that still work — a relationship, a skill, a reputation in a niche area, a lesson you’ve internalised. Identify those. They’re your remaining pieces, and they’re what you’ll rebuild with.
Then do one small thing. Not the grand plan. One conversation. One email. One honest admission. When I was rebuilding after some of Redhill’s hardest periods, the first step was always a phone call — reaching out to someone I trusted and saying, “Here’s where I am. Here’s what I need.” That single act of breaking the silence was, every time, the start of the repair.
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3. This book encourages readers to slow down and rebuild with intention. How has adopting the Kintsugi mindset changed the way you now approach success, failure, and ambition in your own life?
It’s made me far less afraid of breaking things — including my own assumptions. Before, I used to treat failure as something to be avoided at almost any cost, which meant I played it safe more often than I should have. Now I understand that the willingness to break something open is often the prerequisite for building something better.
At Redhill, this has translated into a much more intentional approach to growth. We’re not chasing scale for its own sake. Every expansion — whether it’s a new country, a new service line, or a technology platform like Bugis.ai — is driven by a clear purpose and built with the lessons of past fractures woven into the design. We grow slower in some ways, but the growth is more durable.
On a personal level, it’s changed how I relate to ambition. I’m currently studying at Harvard Business School and pursuing a law degree at the University of Tasmania simultaneously. A few years ago, I might have done that purely out of competitive drive. Now I approach it differently — these aren’t about adding credentials, they’re about deliberately filling cracks in my own knowledge and becoming more complete. The ambition is still there, but it’s directed by intention rather than anxiety.
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4. If Kintsugi were to be read during a life transition — loss, career change, burnout, or identity shift — how do you hope it supports the reader in that fragile in-between space?
I hope it gives them permission to be in that space without rushing to escape it. We live in a culture that is deeply uncomfortable with liminality — the in-between. The pressure is always to “move on,” “bounce back,” “get over it.” But real transformation doesn’t happen on a timetable that’s convenient for other people.
The Kintsugi philosophy says: this broken period is not a detour from your life. It IS your life, and it’s one of the most important chapters. The lacquer needs time to set. The gold needs to be applied with care, not speed.
I’ve been through burnout. I’ve been through identity crises where I wasn’t sure if I was still the person who started Redhill or someone entirely different. Those transitions were excruciating, but only because I was fighting them. The moment I gave myself permission to sit in the discomfort and rebuild slowly, everything changed.
If someone picks up this book while they’re in that fragile space, I want them to feel two things: that they’re not alone, and that the brokenness they’re experiencing is not a flaw to be hidden — it’s the raw material for what comes next.
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5. If you had to sum up the Kintsugi mindset in one sentence for someone going through their worst day, what would you tell them?
The break is not the end of your story — it’s the moment your story becomes worth telling.
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6. Was there a moment in your life when breaking down became the beginning of something better?
Yes, and it wasn’t subtle. There was a period in Redhill’s history where we were growing quickly but in the wrong way — taking on work that didn’t align with who we were, stretching into markets before we were ready, saying yes to everything because revenue felt like validation. The fracture came when that model became unsustainable. We lost people, we lost clients, and I lost a fair amount of confidence in my own judgment.
That breakdown forced a complete rethink. We stripped the business back to its core, rebuilt our service model, invested in the people and capabilities that actually mattered, and made deliberate choices about where and how we wanted to grow. The company that emerged from that period — the one that was eventually recognised as a Financial Times High Growth Company four years running — was fundamentally stronger because we’d been forced to confront our weaknesses rather than paper over them.
On a personal level, that same period pushed me into deeper self-reflection. I started studying business psychology, began engaging more seriously with questions about leadership and ethics, and eventually pursued the Harvard OPM programme. None of that would have happened without the breakdown. The crisis created the conditions for a more thoughtful, more grounded version of both the company and myself.
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7. What’s the most misunderstood part of the “rebuild” journey that people don’t talk about enough?
The loneliness of it. People talk about resilience like it’s a heroic montage — you fall, you get up, music swells, you’re stronger. Nobody talks about the long middle, the months where you’re doing the work but nothing visible has changed yet. Where people around you have moved on and you’re still quietly gluing pieces together.
The other thing people don’t discuss is that rebuilding often means letting go of parts of yourself that you liked. Not everything from the old version gets to come along. Some relationships, some habits, some identities that felt central to who you were — they may not survive the reconstruction, and that’s a grief nobody prepares you for.
In my experience, the rebuild isn’t linear. It’s not a clean upward curve. There are days where you’re certain you’ve figured it out, followed by days where the new thing feels as fragile as the old thing that broke. The Kintsugi mindset doesn’t promise you a smooth process. It promises that the final product is more beautiful and more honest for having been broken. But getting there is harder and messier than most people are willing to admit.
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8. Rebuilding often requires support, yet many people try to heal alone. What role do community, mentors, or even strangers play in the Kintsugi journey you describe?
A critical role — and one that requires vulnerability, which is exactly what feels impossible when you’re broken. There’s a paradox at the heart of rebuilding: you need other people most precisely when you feel least worthy of their help.
In my own journey, mentors showed up at pivotal moments. Some of them were people I sought out deliberately — advisors and peers in the Harvard OPM network, senior figures in the communications industry who’d navigated their own crises. But some of the most transformative support came from unexpected places: a client who chose to stay when they had every reason to leave, a team member who said, “I believe in what we’re building even if right now it’s hard.”
Community matters because it provides two things you can’t generate alone: perspective and accountability. When you’re in the middle of a crisis, your vision narrows. You lose the ability to see the full picture. Other people — whether they’re close confidants or relative strangers who’ve been through something similar — can reflect back to you what you’ve lost sight of.
The Kintsugi philosophy isn’t a solo practice. The gold in the repair often comes from other people — their faith in you, their honesty, their willingness to sit with you in the broken space without rushing to fix it.
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9. What conversations do you hope this book sparks within families, workplaces, or communities that might not otherwise talk about failure and recovery?
I hope it gives people a language for talking about failure that isn’t rooted in shame. In most workplaces and many families, failure is still treated as something to be hidden, minimised, or quickly moved past. The result is that people carry their fractures in isolation, and organisations repeat the same mistakes because nobody feels safe enough to name them.
I’d love for a team to read this book and then have an honest conversation about what isn’t working — not as a blame exercise, but as a Kintsugi exercise. Where are we broken? What have we learned from the break? How do we repair this in a way that makes us stronger? At Redhill, when we’ve been able to have those conversations, they’ve been transformative.
For families, I hope the book opens up space for intergenerational conversations about struggle. So many of us have parents or grandparents who endured extraordinary hardships but never talked about them — because the culture told them suffering was private. If this book helps one family sit down and share their fractures with each other, and see those fractures as a source of strength rather than shame, it will have done its work.
In communities, particularly the ones I’m closest to — in Singapore, across the Pacific, in the Indian diaspora — I hope it contributes to a shift away from the toxic positivity that dominates so much of our public discourse around success. Not every setback is a “blessing in disguise.” Sometimes it’s just painful. But pain, properly honoured and repaired, can become something extraordinary.
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10. What part of the Kintsugi philosophy do you think is hardest for people to practise, even after they intellectually understand it?
Patience. Without question, patience.
Intellectually, almost everyone can accept that broken things can become beautiful. It’s a lovely idea. But the practice of it requires sitting with brokenness for much longer than any of us want to. It means resisting the urge to rush the repair, to slap some quick fix over the crack and call it done.
I see this in entrepreneurs all the time — myself included. We’re wired for action. When something breaks, we want to pivot immediately, launch the next thing, move forward. But Kintsugi isn’t about moving forward quickly. It’s about moving forward deliberately. And that means allowing the broken period to teach you what it needs to teach you before you start building again.
The second hardest thing is honesty about the break itself. Kintsugi doesn’t hide the crack — it highlights it in gold. That’s a radical act of transparency. Most people, even after they understand the philosophy, still want to minimise their fractures rather than display them. The instinct to present a polished, unbroken surface is deeply embedded, particularly in professional and public life. Learning to say, “This is where I broke, and this is what I built from the breaking” — that takes a kind of courage that understanding alone can’t provide. It has to be practised.
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