Openness to new experiences and regaining cultural capital.

I wanted to write something less hardcore for the blog today.

One of the side effects about reading about entrepreneurship is that you begin to start understanding that some personality traits make much better entrepreneurs. Successful entrepreneurs tend to be more conscientious, open to new experiences, non-neurotic, and extroverted with research actually taking into account actual business results.

Perhaps being open minded to new experiences may have monetary consequences.

For folks like myself who is knee deep into our 40s, we're mostly stuck in the past. Married folks and parents have musical tastes which are stuck in the 1990s and like bands like Radiohead, with Boomers pushed back even further to the era of probably the Beatles or Elvis. For the past two weeks I've been hanging at Wild Market food court and watched as a highly talented but hapless Millenial performer struggle with coming up with a tune for the folks who want "old people music". She eventually settled with Tracy Chapman's Fast Car which in my opinion, failed to make the request.

I don't think there's anyone should be proud of being stuck in the past. Even amongst geeks, there is somehow a generation gap between the folks who follow the latest anime storyline compared to those whose cultural capital is stuck to the 1980s. Cultural capital can be like money sometimes. If you use an old Banana note from the time of the Japanese Occupation, it's the same as being conversational about Evangelion and Macross when the world has moved on to anime One Piece or Attack on Titan. People won't conduct a cultural exchange with you if you just know the cultural artifacts of the 1980s.

Openness to new experiences can also be about brands.  

I discovered the Quechua brand when I started shopping at Decathlon. It definitely does not have the cachet as Nike or Adidas but it does have the virtue of costing me only about $15 for a pair of sandals. The price point was so cheap, I actually decided to ditch my brand loyalty to BATA.

There is a quick way to regain the cultural capital lost when you started a family or started having kids. It will not be easy and requires some effort.

One particular magazine I like that oozes with cultural capital is 1843, a lifestyle publication from the same folks who publish The Economist. What I do is that I take some time to engage with their cultural articles in spite of not having any affinity with it.

I choose music as my primary means of engagement because music relaxes me and I don't really have to turn all the songs I like into an intellectual exercise. You can choose to read some serious fiction or watch some movies.

This week I learnt of a talented new artist called St. Vincent. I even picked up information on an old chinese song called Da Hai by Zhang Yu Sheng which is recently seeing a resurgence due to the death of political dissident Liu Xiao Bo in China. Coincidentally a local artiste Chen Wei Lian has a fantasy cover on this song.