Life in the fast lane: Leisure guru Ken Chu on why time is youth

On paper, Dr Ken Chu comes across as having an almost superhuman ability to control time. The chairman and CEO of Mission Hills Group completed university in two years, can play a round of golf in an hour and helped establish the world's largest golf club in just 10 years. In reality, Chu is an incredibly efficient multitasker who has no time to waste.

"I've always lived my life at a fast pace," says Chu, who along with his late father Dr David Chu has been named one of the "Most Powerful People in Golf" by Golf Inc magazine. The Hong Kong native finished his bachelor's degree in business administration at Canada's University of Western Ontario in two years by studying through the summer breaks.

"That was in the early 1990s, when my father decided to invest in the no-man's land on the boundary of Shenzhen city," Chu says. "At the time, people thought my father was crazy, that he was pouring money into the sea. I knew how much of an undertaking it was for him to take on this project alone, so that motivated me to expedite my studies."

Mission Hills is now one of the leaders of China's burgeoning sports and leisure industry with its 20-square-kilometre facility in the Pearl River Delta, a newly opened resort on Hainan Island, and various business and entertainment complexes in development.

"My father had a blueprint, he had a master plan," says Chu, whose father died of cancer in August last year at the age of 61. "My father wanted to do more than golf, but he just didn't have enough time. I'm changing 'more than golf' to 'golf and more'."