For a year the product was card sheet cut down to playing-card size, every word on it written out by hand.
Jones Liew funded that year out of his own training gigs, putting the fees from each booking back into the next round of research, with two friends helping him get the concept right. The first prototype took “a good one whole year.”
The deck became Emotions Run Wild, an emotional-intelligence card game that now runs through Jubilation International, the Singapore training and coaching company Liew founded and leads. Its own site lists it at $38, a game for anyone over twelve.
He had spent years inside corporate training before that, across events, finance and development work, and left for a reason he states without decoration. Too many programmes ran “very on the surface level”: the day people enjoy and then forget. He wanted the other kind, and priced the difference in a year of hand-cut cards.
The company’s first paying room proves the bar travelled. Renu had worked with him at a former employer, moved to a new company, remembered him, and hired him to run an emotional-intelligence session for a staff of about twenty-five. The first sale came from the memory of the work.
Asked when an emotion had cost him something real, he answered with a date.
“Back in 2014, that was an episode that I almost took my own life.” He describes a career that had stalled, money trouble, relationships coming apart, and his mental health going with them.
What stopped him, he says, was a whisper he attributes to Jesus, telling him to call for help. He sent an SOS message to Wendy, now his mentor and coach, and she took him out to dinner and gave him what he calls a listening ear.
That dinner sits upstream of everything he now builds, and he has turned it into procedure.
A trainer or coach should have their own trainer and coach.
“A trainer or coach should have their own trainer and coach.” He names five of the people who do that for him: Eric and Laurent, his business partners in another venture; Wendy; and two peers, Michelle and Albert. The threshold for reaching for any of them is the point where a challenge outruns what he can carry alone, and he treats the reaching as discipline rather than defeat.
The rule is rarer than it sounds in an industry built on developing other people.
He is exact about what he had to discard to build any of it. “The old belief was I was never meant for greatness. I am not good enough.”
What replaced it he states as a general law: “Everyone is designed for greatness. We just need to find the right way for our own light to shine.”
He is equally plain about why the product exists at all, and it is not a revenue line. He calls the deck an instruction: “fulfilling the orders or the instruction from God.” He leads with his theology rather than around it, which at least means the man in front of the room and the man doing the accounting are the same man.
Asked what nobody asks him about leadership that they should, he offered a question rather than a credential: “How can I put myself out of the way of others?”
Create leaders that can outshine you, that can outlast you, that can outperform you.
His answer is the whole practice in one line: “create leaders that can outshine you, that can outlast you, that can outperform you. In that way, then you know you have truly made a difference to another human being.”
It is the same test the dinner in 2014 set for Wendy, passed forward.1
Footnotes
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Liew gave this interview to CÈ’s AI interviewer on 28 July 2026, by voice. Quotes lightly normalised for print, wording untouched, transcripts on file. Jubilation International Pte Ltd is registered in Singapore, lists Liew as its leader, and describes its mission as creating and celebrating the wealth and joy of living. ↩