Adam Khoo Doesn’t Have All The Answers Either

One more thing about fairy tales: they don’t leave a lot of room for nuance in the narratives they entrench. When real life gets elevated to myth—particularly one you’ve written yourself, even if the plot is grounded in fact—a lot gets left on the editorial cutting board.

This includes how a lot of people continue to think that Adam’s whole motivational schtick is one big scam.

Prior to the interview, I spoke with a couple of people who’d attended his camps several years ago, back when they were in secondary school, to get a sense of what went down. The picture I got wasn’t exactly flattering.

Shaun Tan, now 25, described being taught some study techniques: speed reading, mind maps, and mnemonics, that “were certainly useful if applied consistently, but at that point in time it looked a lot more like parlour tricks.”

He told me, “The teachers who came in all told a variation of the typical rags to riches story … presumably to inspire us that anything was possible. It was rather inspiring, I have to say, but ultimately it was just a nice story.”

The next scene he described could’ve come straight out of a cult.

“Then there was the infamous crying session. They turned off all the lights, told us to close our eyes and started to speak to us in a low, hushed tone. They told us to imagine going home one day only to realise that our parents were dead, and tried to make us feel like we were unfilial and ungrateful. I guess their end goal was to guilt-trip us into working hard in case their parlour tricks didn’t work.”

Shaun’s not alone in this. There’s an entire Reddit thread full of camp alums bemoaning their workshop experiences. Phrases like ‘shock tactics’, ‘emotional manipulation’, and ‘waste of time’ get bandied about a lot.

Needless to say, Adam doesn’t come out of this looking too good, so I nervously bite the bullet and ask him about it.

He tells me a bit about being put through similar tactics himself, back at the camp he attended in 1987. “The trainer was, like,what have you done with your life, how have you treated your parents, how have you treated yourself, and we were like, waaaaaah,”he says, mimicking the blubbering of his 13-year-old self.

“[But] I was one of those people who, after I cried, woke up. I said, I’m going to do something with my life. I had friends who cried, but who forgot about it. It’s one of those things where the crying part is you realising how you’ve let yourself down, and make new promises to yourself.”

“But the question is, do you keep your promises? A lot of that takes your own personal discipline. You get what I’m saying?”

He follows this up with a metaphor about how self-motivation is like bathing. He can give attendees all the soap and brushes and towels they want, but you can’t bathe once and stay clean of negativity for the rest of your life. You need to do it every single day.

To this end, the accusations of brainwashing and emotional manipulation don’t bother him at all. He tells me about an interview he gave many years ago, where he was asked if he was ‘brainwashing’ kids.

“I said, yes, I am! Because their brains are dirty from all the negativity.”

“If I have this model of the world that I can’t change everyone, I can’t make everyone happy, so why even try? I don’t think that’s a very useful model,” he says. “My model instead is—I can do my best to make a difference [in someone], and if they don’t change immediately, at least I’ve planted a seed in them. Maybe something else will come along later and they’ll be like, oh, yeah, I remember.”

I’m not completely convinced by this response. On the one hand, he has a point: you absolutely can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. Giving people tools does not guarantee they’ll make the effort to use them, and how could he credibly guarantee this anyway?

On the other hand, it also sounds like a convenient disclaimer. Granted, Adam describes several ‘success stories’ who have emerged from his camp—including the son of his ex-principal—and his websites are full of glowing testimonials. Equally, however, if that Reddit thread is anything to go by, there are a lot of ex-attendees out there who aren’t using, and have maybe never used, the tools his camp purported to impart. And if the onus is ultimately on participants to make the change in themselves, it doesn’t really matter what drives the change to begin with.