Dr. Muqhlis Malek

My name is Dr. Muqhlis Malek, and before I became a financial educator, I served as a medical doctor under Malaysia’s public healthcare system.

Medicine taught me how to save lives, but it also exposed me to the ugliest side of society that most people never see. The quiet, invisible poverty that eats people alive. Families collapsing under debt. Patients skipping treatment because they couldn’t afford to get hospitalized. And even my own colleagues, brilliant young doctors who will one day form the backbone of our nation’s healthcare system, living paycheck to paycheck, stuck in the same hamster wheel as everyone else.

These are some of the brightest minds in the country, yet they were leading life blindfolded. They could diagnose a disease in seconds, but couldn’t manage their own finances to save their own lives. Like many Malaysians, they lived with a false sense of comfort that “I’ll be fine, my salary comes in every month.” That mentality is exactly what keeps most people poor, and in an endless paycheck to paycheck loop.

And it’s not just doctors. It’s engineers, lawyers, accountants, teachers as well. Entire professions of people who are extremely literate, just not on finance. They know how to earn money, but not how to manage, protect, or grow it.

What separates the older generation from today’s youth is simple. The older generation was raised in scarcity, so even without financial literacy, they understood the urgency of saving and surviving. Today’s generation, especially those under 30, have mostly grown up in comfort, myself included. We’ve never faced real scarcity, so we don’t value money, nor do we understand it. Most would chase dopamine and instant gratification over financial discipline. And that’s exactly what traps them in the cycle of mediocrity.

That realization hit me hard. I’ve always been fascinated by money. How it moves, how it compounds, how it can either enslave you or liberate you depending on how well you understand it. Passive income has been a personal obsession since my fourth year of medical school. Long before I became a doctor, I was already experimenting with business.

During my years studying in Moscow, Russia, I started my first real venture, a small business connecting Chinese 1:18 scale model car factories to Russian collectors. It was a simple arbitrage play, but it became my first taste of entrepreneurship, and definitely not my last. Through that business, I built one of Malaysia’s most impressive and extensively curated 1:18 scale model car collections, The 328 Collective, at little to no cost. When I returned to Malaysia, I continued my entrepreneurial streak, this time helping foreign students from China and Hong Kong settle into local universities. The business ran well, but it taught me something far more valuable than income: money rewards clarity, consistency, and calculated risk, not luck.

With the profits I made, I built my own investment portfolio. Entirely self-funded, no parental support, no shortcuts. But like most beginners, I made my fair share of mistakes too. I started out chasing tips, looking for the next big thing, thinking investing was just about buying and selling. Over time, with guidance from a few sharp mentors and a lot of trial and error, I began to piece together a bigger truth.

Investing isn’t a game of luck. It’s a game of understanding. Most people lose because they only see one move on the chessboard and try to predict it, without realizing that there’s an entire macroeconomic system influencing that move. And this is why 90% of investors fail.

That’s when I started digging deeper into macroeconomics, monetary policy, Bitcoin, and global liquidity cycles. I realized that you can’t just “study markets.” You have to study the economy and the politics behind it. Everything is connected. Liquidity is the bloodstream of the financial world, and it moves based on government policy, inflation data, interest rates, and human sentiment.

So when someone tells me they “study an asset,” I always ask: do you study everything that affects the asset? Because inflation, bond yields, money creation and war will move those markets long before any chart does.

This level of clarity is what changed me. Not just as an investor, but as a person. It made me realize that financial literacy is the only form of freedom that still exists. And it gave me the courage to step back from medicine, finally. Not because I hated it as I was extremely passionate about my work and one of the top performers in my field, but because I saw the system for what it was.

Malaysia’s healthcare system is collapsing under its own weight. Our doctors are overworked, underpaid, and undervalued. We save lives daily, yet have no guarantee of placement, career progression, or fair compensation. The system isn’t designed to reward the hardest workers. In a blunt way, it’s designed to keep them tired, demotivated, and compliant, without ANY guarantee of a plausible future in their respective fields.

Once I saw that pattern, that the same financial manipulation infecting global markets also lives within our own institutions, I knew I couldn’t stay. I refused to live the rest of my life running in a zombie loop.

And that’s when, The Autonomy Project Academy was born.

Not to sell a dream, but to expose the truth. Behind everything.

Because I believe this very deeply:

Education is the foundation of every strong society. Once people understand money, they stop being controlled by it.

That’s why I do what I do, helping people reclaim their financial autonomy, one mind at a time.