The Overachiever’s Guide is a monthly column dedicated to excellence and accomplishment in all aspects of life in Singapore. Whether it’s essential life skills or questionable life choices, we help you to stay ahead of the bell curve.
Previously, we gave you a guide to being a Proud Single. Now, with GE2025 memes upon us, here’s a guide to being just likeable enough so that you won’t be perceived as an out-of-touch elite.
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Top image: Mei Hui Lim / RICE file photo
Every General Election season, a strange metamorphosis takes place across the island. People in matching dry-fit polo tees begin wandering wet markets to shake hands with wet hands. High-flying civil servants suddenly discover the joys of hawker centre kopi and kaya toast in lieu of their usual Ya Kun Set A. Somewhere, in front of a bathroom mirror, someone is valiantly practising singing ‘Home’ in Hokkien.
The message is clear: I, the person thirsting for your vote, am one of you. I know ‘Purple Light’. I can bust out some silat. And yes, I am just as bad at karaoke as you are. Whether it’s mangling dialects or beatboxing like your life depended on it, the performance of human relatability has become as much a rite of passage as the walkabouts.
But relatability isn’t born overnight. Or could it?
Birth
Becoming a relatable politician is an endeavour that begins at conception. Pick a pedigree from a humble background. Best if your parents raised you and your 17 siblings in Jalan Kukoh through grit, resilience and the sheer power of filial love.
Despite their lack of education, money or birth control, they gave you the right values. From a young age, you learned the importance of helping others in an empathetic yet non-specific way. You witnessed firsthand the struggles of Singapore’s underprivileged citizens while studiously ignoring the structural problems causing those struggles.
As a result, you chose to devote your life to service, integrity and other non-threatening life goals. The scholarship board is suitably impressed by your rags-to-Raffles story and writes you a check for Cambridge.
The SAF is equally impressed. They send you off to OCS, where you are instilled (against the grain of your very humble personality) with leadership skills, which consist mostly of shouting at people until they comply and threatening them with late book-out when they don’t.
More importantly, you are instilled with that sense of noblesse superiority peculiar to the meritocratic elite—a belief that your blessings have been earned and nothing else, not even dumb luck, had anything to do with it.
Midlife
For most people, the middle years are the toughest because they struggle with job insecurity, cost of living, and career stagnation. For you, it will be the most predictable. Achievements will plop into your resume with the regularity of bowel movements after too much banana.
At university, you achieve academic greatness without absorbing Western perversions like liberalism or an individual perspective.
In the civil service, you climb the rungs by being demonstrably competent in each job shortly before you are promoted up the ladder at a dazzling speed which some call plot armour.
At the altar (you are heterosexual and kinda religious after all), you marry a partner who’s impressive enough to warrant a Mothership article. But not so impressive as to outshine you in the comments section.
At 32, you fly off to Harvard for a Master’s degree in ‘strategic public policy’, ‘international development’ or something that’s equally impressive-sounding but vague.
From here on, the die is cast. Your career is set. You are on the Managing Director-to-MP-to-Minister pipeline with a GCB on the horizon and an upper Bukit Timah Penthouse in the meantime.
Nothing can stop your rise to power. Not even a 7-digit private sector paycheck, which you will reject because your calling has always been to serve the people for a potentially bigger paycheck.
Election
Now, between the ages of 38 and 49, you face the greatest hurdle: getting elected to the office that has been your destiny since the RI Student Council Events Committee.
What policies should you pursue for the nation’s greater good? How do you endear yourself to your constituents with solid ideas you’ll see through to improve their welfare?
This is a trick question. You don’t.
Luckily for you, Singaporeans vote purely based on vibes because we lack the imagination for an alternative political-economic model or the nerve to try. Policy-making is also a privilege denied to nubile backbenchers like yourself, whose role is to clap loudly in Parliament for the people who do.
The real question you need to ask yourself is this: How do I become relatable and likeable enough so that I won’t be perceived as an out-of-touch elite who hasn’t set foot on the MRT since 2014?
Easy.
1 ) To cultivate an aura of authenticity, you need to set up a social media account and populate it with asinine photographs of yourself doing ‘relatable’ things in ‘heartland’ locations. Popular options include: Shaking hands with hawkers while clutching a plate of bee hoon; walking through wet markets; taking selfies with smiling constituents, and the ultimate box-checker: taking selfies with smiling constituents in the hawker centre while a Straits Times photographer takes a photo of you holding a plate of bee hoon.
2 ) Public speaking will also be a crucial skill. You must learn to speak up without speaking out; master the art of using impressive words but without communicating anything of substance (which might be later held against you). Fortunately, this isn’t too difficult in a country that only has a handful of bookstores. Begin with an anecdote from your humble background in a 1-room HDB flat, proceed to platitudes about a forward-looking nation, and garnish it generously with resilience, unity, and togetherness.
3 ) Signal. Signal competence with impressive statistics about the economy. Signal humility by bending down to shake hands with elderly people on PMDs. Signal social cohesion by putting on a Baju Kurung and making green-coloured IG posts1. Signal stability by following the script so closely as to offer no deviation from the political median, not even in the thread count of your party-approved polo tee. Signal signal signal until you get a portfolio, purchase your GCB, and retire 20 years later with a sizeable family office, and the GLC chairmanship of your choice. Bon appetit.
- 1. Cheongsam/Qipao, red-coloured if you’re a Malay/Indian/Others candidate ↩︎
