I went to a boarding school during my junior-high years. When I moved to a normal school for high school, it was like being released from a cage.

I didn’t want to study abroad. But there was no hotel school in Thailand so I went to the US.

I always plan ahead. I was making 10 dollars an hour at Burger King but there was no future there. So I quit and went to work at a hotel canteen for three dollars an hour.

There’s no point in getting a master’s degree if you don’t have work experience. I worked in a bunch of departments, from housekeeping to front desk. I never said no.

It’s experience that got me a good job when I got back to Thailand. I wasn’t even thirty when I started working in a management position at The Oriental.

You might earn a lot of money abroad, but there’s no place like home.

I used to work hard to be a step ahead of other hotels. But you’re not really competing with others. You’re competing with yourself.

I’m not embarassed about saying I used to mop floors or serve food in a canteen. It serves as an example of what people can achieve in their careers.

Kurt Wachtveitl [the previous GM of The Oriental] is my idol. Every morning, he would read the entire list of guests who were going to check in that day, even when there were 200 of them—their names, their complaints from their last visit—he read it all so that we knew what we had to handle each day.

You may have money to build a beautiful hotel. But hotels are made up of people, too. It is more complicated than it seems.

I suffered from sleep apnea. It can get dangerous if you stop breathing 15 times per hour but I was stopping 70 times. I needed operations to my tongue, throat and teeth.

But without this illness, I may have never realized I was working too hard.

I was depressed about being sick, about having to quit my job. I had worked at the Oriental for over a decade. But problems are part of life. We just need to face them.

You can’t predict what will happen. I never planned to write books or go on TV. I simply started to write about funny things in the hotel. It was released as a weekly column in Praew Magazine and later as a pocketbook, Rae Khao Ma Ja Pa Kaho Rong Raem, which became a best-seller. 7th Heaven approached me, they liked my ideas, and now I’m on TV.

People usually don’t know they are reading my columns about social gossip as I seldom use my real name. But I write only firsthand news, or news from reliable sources. A lot of gossip isn’t true.

I’m happy with my life—happier than before.