February 17, 2026: The First Day of the Fire Horse.
A founder’s reflection on cycles, structure, and motion.
Today marks the beginning of the Lunar New Year, and the beginning of the Fire Horse year
It also marks something quieter, but no less meaningful for me: RockPaperScissors is now two years and a few months old, and for the first time since it was born, it enters a year defined not by emergence, but by motion. Not preparation. Not formation.
Motion.
That feels significant. I’ve been thinking about motion for some time now — not just as speed, but as something constructed deliberately, frame by frame, like a scene mechanic designing transitions between worlds.
Because if I look back carefully, the life of RPS has unfolded not randomly, but rhythmically — almost as if it has been moving through a sequence of energies, each one shaping not just what we do, but how we exist.
Born in Stillness
RockPaperScissors came into the world in January 2024, just weeks before the Chinese New Year. Technically, it was born in the final days of the Rabbit year.
That matters more than I realised at the time.
The Rabbit is not a forceful creature. It does not announce itself. It does not conquer territory or demand attention. It survives — and thrives — through awareness. Sensitivity. Perception. Quiet intelligence. The ability to notice what others miss.
That was the environment into which RPS was born: a moment of observation before movement. A phase of listening before declaring.
Looking back, it makes sense.
In those early weeks, there was no grand launch energy. No explosive growth. No sense of dramatic arrival. There was only attention to ideas, to patterns, to possibility, to the changing nature of work, creativity, and intelligence in a world reshaped by technology.
My first client arrived like a whisper — a DM on Instagram from a friend I hadn’t spoken to in over a decade. That message became an eight-month AI project building a visual vocabulary and embedded datasets for image generation.
That is very Rabbit energy.
Learning to Exist in the Open — The Wood Dragon
I was born in 1964, also a Wood Dragon year.
In 2024, the Wood Dragon returned. Not symbolically, but precisely. The same elemental cycle. The same archetypal force. Sixty years completed.
That was the year RockPaperScissors entered its first full year of life.
I cannot help but notice the symmetry. One full cycle of living, learning, building, questioning — and when the Dragon returned, it did not mark my beginning. It marked the emergence of the work that had been forming across that entire cycle.
My first Wood Dragon gave me potential via my birth. The second gave that potential somewhere to live. That symmetry is hard to ignore.
The Dragon is the great initiator. It is expansion, visibility, ambition, declaration. Where the Rabbit observes, the Dragon announces.
The first full year of RPS unfolded under that sign — and it demanded something very specific: presence.
Ideas had to be expressed, not just formed. Work had to be shown, not just developed. Identity had to become visible.
There is something uncomfortable about Dragon energy if you are not used to occupying space. It pushes you outward. It asks what you are capable of becoming if you remove hesitation. And so the first year became a year of emergence — of voice, of articulation, of stepping into conversations that had previously been observed from the edges.
Rabbit had gathered awareness.
Dragon required declaration. This was the year I joined The Marketing Society, gave my first talk on the Epilogue Economy, and taught my first workshops. This was also a time when I began working with clients in Indonesia, Singapore, and the US.
Learning What to Keep — The Snake
The year that followed carried a very different rhythm. The Snake does not expand. It refines.
Snake energy is selective, strategic, and patient. It sheds what no longer fits. It tightens form. It converts possibility into structure. If the Dragon year asks, Who are you becoming? The Snake year asks, What must you become to endure?
This is a phase many organisations misunderstand. It does not always look dramatic from the outside. There is less spectacle. Less visible movement. But internally, it is one of the most consequential periods of development.
Decisions sharpen. Priorities narrow. Patterns become clear. Unnecessary things fall away. Identity stops being performative and becomes structural.
If the first year was about existing, the second year was about coherence — aligning thinking, capability, and direction into something that could hold weight over time.
In the Year of the Snake, something essential came to life. Years of thinking — about work, intelligence, creativity, and change — took form as my first book: To Question Is to Answer: How to Think Critically and Thrive in the Age of AI. The Snake does not expand outward. It concentrates inward. It distils. It sheds what is unnecessary and preserves what must endure. A book is exactly that kind of act. Not growth, but crystallisation. Not motion, but structure.
I became a founding board member of the IAA Singapore. I stepped into the role of co-chair of the Executive Advisory Board on AI. And I taught a workshop on thinking about AI as a Force Multiplier at a Google regional offsite for some of the sharpest people in the business.
Looking back, these were not separate events. They were expressions of the same movement — knowledge becoming structural. Ideas no longer simply lived in my work. They began to live in institutions, communities, and shared direction.
And perhaps that is why the timing now feels so precise. The Fire Horse will not begin with empty energy. It was set up with something ready to move. The ideas have form. The thinking has structure. The foundation exists.
The Snake does not rush. It prepares for precision. Now, momentum has something to carry forward.
Enter The Fire Horse
Today, that preparation ends.
The Horse represents movement — not tentative steps, but sustained momentum. Freedom. Directional energy. The willingness to cover distance. But this is not simply the year of the Horse.
This is the year of the Fire Horse.
Fire transforms. Fire accelerates. Fire makes motion visible. Where the Snake coils, the Fire Horse runs. And historically, symbolically, psychologically, the Fire Horse carries a very particular meaning: independence, force, decisiveness, energy that cannot remain contained.
This is not the energy of formation. It is the energy of propulsion. Which makes this moment feel less like a beginning… and more like ignition.
Why This Matters to Me
RockPaperScissors did not start by trying to move fast. It learned how to think first. Then it learned how to exist. Then it learned how to refine. Only now does it enter a phase where speed makes sense.
That sequence matters. Because motion without clarity is noise. Acceleration without structure is instability. Energy without direction is burnout. The Fire Horse is powerful — but only when something is ready to carry that power forward.
Looking back, I can see that the past two years were not slow. They were preparatory. They were gathering potential energy. The shaping of something that could eventually sustain momentum without losing itself. And now, the environment changes. This year does not ask what is possible.
It asks what will be done.
The Responsibility of Momentum
Momentum is often romanticised. It feels like progress, confidence, vitality. But momentum is also responsibility. Once movement begins at speed, direction matters more than ever.
You cannot drift at full gallop. You cannot hesitate in open flame.
The Fire Horse does not merely offer energy. It demands commitment — to path, to pace, to purpose. And perhaps that is what feels most significant about today, February 17, 2026 — the precise moment this energy enters the calendar.
It is not just the start of a new year. It is the moment preparation becomes visible as movement.
The moment thinking becomes force.
What Comes Next
I don’t know exactly where the Fire Horse will carry RockPaperScissors this year. No one ever truly knows where sustained motion leads once it begins.
But I do know this:
The company that entered the Rabbit year, learning to observe…
The company that stood up in the Dragon year to be seen…
The company that refined itself through the Snake year…
is not the same company that stands here today. It is more defined. More aligned. More certain of its direction. And perhaps most importantly, more capable of movement that is not reactive, but intentional.
The First Step of the Fire Horse
Every organisation has a timeline. Few have a rhythm.
Over the past two years, I have come to see RockPaperScissors not just as a business, but as something evolving through phases of awareness, expression, and refinement — each one necessary before the next could exist.
Today feels like a hinge point in that sequence. Not a celebration of speed for its own sake. Not a declaration of arrival. Something quieter, but more consequential. A recognition that motion is now appropriate. That energy has a direction to follow. That the work of becoming has reached the stage where movement is no longer preparation — it is expression.
The Fire Horse does not ask whether you are ready. It assumes readiness has already been earned. So today, on the first day of this new year, I am not asking what RockPaperScissors might become.
I am asking something else entirely: after learning how to think, after learning how to define itself, after learning what to keep and what to shed…
What does it mean to finally run? And where will that take me?
