One Hit Wonder and the Pig’s Heart

 One of the most shocking moments of my youth came on 11 February 1990. This was the day Mike Tyson, who was officially the “badest man” on the planet at the time tasted defeat for the first time in his entire career.

Tyson, was ferocious. He was and remains the type of guy you really don’t want to meet in broad daylight let alone at night because, well, if you did anything that p***ed him off remotely you would probably end up on life support. It’s not an exaggeration to say that when he exploded onto television screens in February 1986, he made the sport of boxing explode along with it. Fights that lasted 90s seconds were not uncommon. It reached a stage where the results were more predictable than a Singapore General Election – we just wanted to see how long the other guy would last.

All that came to a crashing halt on that night in Tokyo when the 42-1 underdog scored a knockout win over someone the world regarded as unbeatable. This literally shocked the world. We were probably less shocked by the fall of the Soviet Union a year later than by this boxing defeat and that’s considering the fact that the Soviet Union was a superpower that had enough nukes to destroy the world.

James “Buster” Douglas shocked the world by beating the unbeatable. You would have imagined that the man who beat the unbeatable would have remained unbeatable for a while. That didn’t happen. He took the money, got fat and when he had to defend his title to Evander Holyfield, who was at the time a “blow up” cruiser weight making his way up the heavyweight ranks, he happily fell, collected even more money and disappeared from the public eye. I’ve read that he made a comeback but that didn’t last long and nobody really cared enough to give him another major payday.

https://www.thestar.com/sports/buster-douglas-loving-life-25-years-after-tyson-upset/article_31d40db6-b938-5b1a-85d6-aaa86b8fb776.html

 

 

 By contrast, Tyson actually made a comeback of sorts. He beat the living poo out of several people. Then went to prison and then came out and beat the poo out of even more people. He did get stopped by Evander Holyfield and Lenox Lewis and eventually retired but we still cared enough to pay to watch him. When he came out to fight Jake Paul, he was nearly 60 and whilst Jake Paul, aged 27 got the split decision, plenty of us thought it was rigged and even at “Grandpa” age, Jake couldn’t put him down.

Not everyone is cut out to be a superstar. Some of us are quite happy for a quiet “family” life and it’s good to see that the man who shocked the world is enjoying his quiet life.

However, the story of that fight and what happened provides a lesson. The moral is simple – success can become a problem and defeat can be very instructive. In his book “Undisputable Truth” Mike Tyson puts his defeat down to this – Buster Douglas was training all the way whilst he partied the night before the fight. Douglas lost his title for doing exactly the opposite of what he was doing when he won.

Let’s start with Mr. Tyson. He was at that point considered “unbeatable.” He had everything. Money was “insane” A 90 second fight was a ten million payday. Success in the ring fattened the bank account. It attracted an entourage that expected to be fed and that entourage wasn’t expecting cheap burger meals. Each 90 second destruction was step in establishing that he was indestructible – which meant that there was no need to train. He could party and still beat the other guy. Then he met Mr. Douglas and that changed overnight. After that defeat Mr. Tyson trained like he once did. He went to prison and continued to train. So, by the time he left prison, he was close to his devastating best. That defeat was a wakeup call.

For Mr. Douglas it was an ironically similar story. The man had hit rock bottom. His mum died 23-days earlier and as is often said, rock bottom is the ground is rock solid to head back up. Nobody gave him a chance and so he trained like he never did before and boxed intelligently. He gave his heart and won.

However, when he won, he sat on top of the world. He enjoyed the success and the easy money and by the time he faced the first challenge he was out of shape. Success had clearly taken the edge he had in the Tyson fight. So, you could say that the victory over Tyson was his undoing as much as it was his moment in history.

Success is not permanent. Too many people assume that reaching the top is the pinnacle. They forget that you actually have to stay at the top and that requires the same amount of work if not more that you put in on the way up.

Defeat is also not permanent, especially if you learn from it. Too many people break apart when they taste defeat and they never pick themselves up and slink away. Unfortunately, the path of any form of success will be filled with setbacks. People often quit when they’re on the verge of “making it” because they fell after a setback. 

 

Hiding Problems.

 Ever since I ended up with my current partner, I’ve become a fan of an online cartoon series called “Bubu and Dudu,” a bear and panda couple. Stories are usually around everyday themes in love and romance. I love them because they bring out the “cute” that I find so important to existence.

Anyway, the reason why I mentioned these two characters is because I recently saw a cartoon of them with their tummies talking about how they would avoid the things that would make them fat – things like scales and mirrors.

 

 

 While the cartoon is cute and funny, there’s a serious point – namely the fact that many of us, myself included, work on the premise of “if I don’t know it, it’s not a problem.”

I think of my current obsession with my fitness. As I look back at things, I realise that I was already warned about the possibility of ending up diabetic when I was in my 30s. Never looked at another blood test and continued to eat, booze and sleep badly until I needed to take a blood test to get alopurinol for gout and discovered that my blood sugars were way off and the idea of being sick and by extension broke in my later years suddenly became real. Hence, I’m talking non-stop about eating less carbs and moving more.

What is true of personal health is often also true of finances and business. After a decade in the insolvency business, I’ve run into more than a fair share of cases where there were warning signs that things were about to take a turn for the worse. I’ve actually heard the phrase “he signed blindly” more than once when it comes to people who run what is a seemingly successful business.

So, here’s the thing, one shouldn’t go out of his or her way to read depressing things. However, one should not work on the premise of ignorance being bliss. A problem only vanishes when its actually solved rather than when it is ignored. Hence, individuals should listen to their doctors when they’re told that they have an issue. Business leaders should actually listen to the accounts department when they’re told that certain bills are too high.

If you’re not happy with the way you look, the answer is, work on what you’re not happy about. Hire a personal trainer or stylist. Work on your body and dressing. That sends you on a path to looking better. You will not get better looking better by avoiding the mirror.   

Never Bluff

 

You got to hand it to Donald Trump for having a genius for grabbing attention. As the first full working week of 2026 begins, all of us are focused on the capture of Nicolas Maduro, the President of Venezuela by US Special forces over the weekend.

There’s no way of saying this but this was totally illegal and yet totally brilliant. Whatever is said of Mr. Maduro (by no means a candidate for sainthood), he was a sitting Head of State, who had not threatened any of his neighbours in particular. His main mistake was sitting on the world’s largest proven oil reserves and deciding to sell it to people he wanted to sell oil to. He was effectively kidnapped because he got on the wrong side of the USA and as far as I know, kidnapping is illegal in just about every jurisdiction of the planet.

At the same time, the move was brilliant. The US has now gotten rid of an ally of two of its largest rivals and now has its most meaningful chance to reducing the trade surplus with oil-hungry China by selling it Venezuela’s oil. From an operational perspective, Delta Force (which is modeled on the British SAS) did a brilliant job by capturing Mr. Maduro without a single casualty.

Questions remain. At the time of writing, Mr. Maduro’s vice-president is telling everyone that she’s now in charge, thus contradicting Mr. Trump’s claim that Venezuela is now run by the USA. Then there’s the point that capturing Mr. Maduro is easy, keeping Venezuela steady and reliable less so. If history is anything to go by, Mr. Trump may have opened up a can of worms by taking military action against another country – who is to say that Venezuela won’t end up like Iraq or Afghanistan, which costs the US treasury 20 trillion dollars (larger than the GDP of every country except the USA itself), countless of US lives and only to see the return of the people the initial invasion was supposed to remove.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/nicolas-maduro-captured-who-is-in-charge-of-venezuela-now-trump-says-us-will-run-the-country/articleshow/126330267.cms

 

 

Leaving aside all the possible outcomes, Mr. Trump could not resist “swinging his d***” around. Upon capturing Mr. Maduro, he went onto “threaten” and “warn” other world leaders like Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum to get their act together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNApC_O36AM

 

Leaving aside the legality or even the effectiveness of such threats, there was something noticeable. All the countries mentioned are in what the USA has traditionally felt was its own backyard and more importantly none of them have any capacity to hurt the USA in any form. The USA remains their main market and provider of military hardware and training.

As we talked about Mr. Maduro’s capture, there was another country that did something that should have made itself noticeable but thanks to Mr. Trump didn’t. This country is a “nasty” dictatorship that is now in its third generation and more importantly, it actually has nukes and shown the willingness to use those nukes. That country has happily sold weapons to terrorist groups, attacked America and its allies in cyberspace and via criminal activities like circulating forged currencies. This country has the capability to hurt South Korea and Japan (two US allies that actually create economic benefits for the USA) and whilst nobody doubts the USA could flatten this country, this little country does have the capability to inflict serious damage on parts of the USA before it gets destroyed.

Yet, despite the obvious threat to stability that this country possesses to America and her allies, nobody was even thinking of capturing its leader. If anything, Mr. Kim has been sitting comfortably in North Korea ever since Mr. Trump returned to the White House. As a Singaporean, it was fun to see how Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim went from “d*** swinging” to Mr. Kim becoming the longed-for Asian son that Mr. Trump wished for – and all happened in Singapore.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/north-korea-test-fires-hypersonic-missiles-kcna-says-2026-01-04/

 

 Why is it such that Mr. Trump and all of his predecessors have been happy to bomb and capture the likes of Saddam and Maduro, but when it comes to the Kim family generations of American presidents have all rushed to “negotiate.”

You could say that part of the reason why North Korea stays around is because it has a big brother in the shape of China. Only time China and the USA went to war was the Korean War – China simply didn’t want an American satellite at its door. However, with China modernizing its economy and filling up leadership vacuums, North Korea becomes something of an embarrassment.

So North Korea looks for an alternative emergency and that is nukes. The Kim family that runs North Korea has seen what happens to dictators that can’t fight back. Saddam got invaded because he “may have had weapons of mass destruction.” Maduro doesn’t have an army that can challenge the USA (nobody does). Noriega didn’t have weapons. Fidel Castro managed to give American training forces a bop on the nose during the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion and Castro ended up dying of ripe old age outlasting eight US presidents.

The lesson is not lost on the Kims of North Korea. International Law is meaningless if the world’s enforcer of such laws decides to go against you. The only way to prevent that is having the means of hurting back. Ironically, this is the very point that American gun control activist has used – small guys no matter how nasty need the means of fighting back should the government go rogue and trample on individual liberties. That point is not lost on the world’s nastiest dictators.