Her story strengthens the case for giving young Singaporeans more room to discover what they are good at and like to do, before asking them to commit.
Faye Ng Yu Ci
In a Singapore secondary school choir, there once stood a future Asian Games champion. Nobody knew at that point, and neither did she.
Tiffany Teo picked up taekwondo at 17, muay thai at university and mixed martial arts (MMA) later still.
In an athlete’s sporting career, this is considered late. According to a 2023 survey of 2,838 elite athletes across 44 Olympic sports, most begin intensive training at 10. MMA fighters start training at about 16 and first compete at about 18.
Teo made her professional MMA debut in 2016, at 26, years later than most fighters first step into a ring.
In Nagoya, she won an MMA final that went into overtime, clinching Singapore’s first gold medal of the 2026 Asian Games.
Teo’s gold is a reminder that some of the best things in life cannot be foreseen.
A meandering story
Before signing with One Championship, Teo was a research assistant at A*STAR and a behavioural therapist. Imagine your daughter announcing she plans to swop the lab for a fighting cage.
Her story holds lessons for all of us and raises an uncomfortable question for a system built on choosing the right path early and committing to it: What if your passion finds you only later in life?
In Singapore, we ask 12-year-olds to take one of the most important exams of their lives, funnelling them into differentiated academic streams.
We ask 15-year-olds to declare whether they’re “science” or “humanities” inclined. And we ask 18-year-olds to choose their course of study and future career, with bonds of up to half a decade attached.
The instinct made sense in the past, when resources were scarce and opportunities were limited. Our education system was designed to supply a reliable pipeline of graduates to support Singapore’s economic growth. Decisions were driven chiefly by prudence and pragmatism.
Those virtues remain relevant, but in today’s economy, where geopolitics destabilise markets and supply chains, and AI has upended the knowledge economy, perhaps the way we think about education and career paths also has to change. Planning works better in a predictable world.
We're bad at predicting ourselves
Part of the problem is that we are poor judges of our own future selves.
In a study in Science, psychologists asked more than 19,000 people, aged 18 to 68, to look back at how much they had changed over the past decade and to predict how much they would change in the next decade.
At every age, people underestimated the change ahead of them. This was called the “end of history illusion”.
Another study compared English students, who specialise on entering university, with Scottish students, who specialise a year or two later. The English students had less time to discover what they were actually good at, and were more likely to switch career paths later in life, when the financial and personal stakes are higher.
Choosing sooner, in other words, did not help people to choose better.
Singapore asks its 18-year-olds to make that same early, expensive choice, and many are unconvinced they got it right.
A 2024 EY survey found that 39% of students here were unhappy or neutral about their choice of university. Perhaps what the evidence shows is the importance of discovering our own tastes and talents before committing to a path. It is hard to figure out what you are good at and what you like if you haven’t had the chance to try at least a few options.
Stepping off the beaten path
My own journey illustrates this. When I entered medical school, fresh out of junior college, I had an intense curiosity about the world, but little inkling about how it worked or the forces that shaped it.
By choosing medicine, I plunged straight into something that was highly specialised – a vertical that deepened the more I uncovered. I loved medicine and the humanity it contained, but also found myself wanting more than just the science in my textbooks.
With the privilege of the right mentors and opportunities, I found my interest in innovation and policy sideways, through a gap year in Boston at an AI medtech company and a consultancy with the World Health Organization.
I am not the only one who took an unconventional path, though what looks like chance from the outside is usually deliberate up close.
Lyn Lee trained and practised as a lawyer before founding Awfully Chocolate in 1998, after failing to find the chocolate cake she wanted and deciding to make it for herself.
Daniel Tan worked in business and completed an executive MBA at Chicago Booth. Rather than cash in the degree for a promotion, he chose a year of “slow travel”, against his family’s advice, to work out what he actually wanted before founding the social enterprise Food Playground.
Each such journey involved a moment of chance, followed by a deliberate choice to test something new before fully committing to it.
Discover, then commit
Researchers studying artists, film directors and scientists, in a study published in Nature Communications, found that career hot streaks tended to follow a period of exploration, then focused exploitation.
This echoes Teo’s story. She spent years exploring combat sports before zeroing in on MMA and training relentlessly. She was not afraid to enter late or start again; she found what she wanted, and then she committed to it fully.
Each move – from taekwondo to muay thai to MMA – brought her closer to where she needed to be.
Teo’s story is inspirational, but few of us are cut out to be MMA fighters. What we can borrow from her is the courage to go off the beaten path, and the discipline to decide, then commit.
But self-motivation gets a person only so far if the system around him or her judges unconventional pathways unfairly.
What could shift the needle
The trouble with a single-track system is not just that it gets people to commit too early, but also that a single stumble can cost a lot.
Sprinter Shanti Pereira, who became the first woman to win back-to-back Asian Games 200m golds at the 2026 Asian Games, lost her academic scholarship and her sporting scholarship in the same week in 2018, one for a missed grade, the other for a missed medal.
She had chosen early, and by every measure, correctly. Yet, the system left little margin for error.
To mitigate this, some of this structural shift is already under way.
Since 2024, full subject-based banding has replaced Singapore’s old streaming system, so a student’s academic path is no longer sealed off at 12.
Graduate-entry medicine at Duke-NUS takes in students with undergraduate degrees ranging from physics to anthropology. Under the SkillsFuture Mid-Career support package, Singaporeans aged 40 and above can retrain and pivot their careers with the state’s support.
These are steps in the right direction, but a mindset shift is needed even more.
It would help if people were given ways to test a path before they are bound to it: internships and attachments earlier in their studies, cross-registration of modules across faculties, gap-year or gap-semester schemes allowing experiences abroad.
It also means making a change of course cheaper, in both money and time: credits that transfer between courses, bonds that don’t lock people in for a decade and employers who don’t treat a career switch as a red flag on a resume.
None of this means undoing the planning ahead that Singapore excels in. It means building enough slack into the system, such that detours are not wrong decisions but simply life experiences.
Some plans are still worth making: a savings goal for a home, a training schedule for a race, a date to sit an exam.
But the things that end up mattering most rarely announce themselves in advance, and sometimes passion is found later than expected.
Teo did not plan her gold medal at Nagoya. She simply took the time to explore, and committed once she knew.
- The writer is a physician and poet. She writes about healthcare and social issues close to her heart.