Let’s be honest: the peak of most people’s weekend altruism is tossing a dollar into a donation box or maybe, if we’re feeling particularly saintly, recycling a plastic bottle instead of throwing it in the general trash.

Then there are people like Herman Sing, a 48-year-old logistics director who looked at his internal organs and decided he was simply hoarding too much biological material.

Back in 2023, Herman decided that standard-issue volunteer work wasn’t spicy enough, so he casually sliced out 67 percent of his liver and handed it over to a complete stranger.

Because nothing screams “holiday season of giving” quite like gifting two-thirds of your vital digestive system to someone whose name you don’t even know.

As if major voluntary organ removal isn’t a high enough stakes game on its own, the universe decided to throw in a dramatic plot twist. The night before the operation, doctors called Herman to report a minor glitch: his cystic duct was shaped weirdly, meaning the surgical risks had just shot up significantly.

Any normal, self-preserving human being would have taken that as a loud and clear cosmic hint to sprint out of the hospital, buy a pint of ice cream, and rethink their life choices. Instead, Herman and his wife thought about the poor recipient waiting anxiously for a lifeline, shrugged off the danger, and basically said, “Let’s raw-dog this surgery anyway.”

Fast forward three years later, and Herman is totally fine, running an Asia-Pacific logistics empire, raising four kids, and managing a 100-member volunteer group, all while operating on a budget-sized regenerating liver. His sheer, unadulterated chad energy even peer-pressured a friend into donating part of their liver to a stranger. If that isn’t ultimate overachiever behavior, nothing is.

But Herman isn’t the only absolute legend walking among us redefining what it means to be a modern-day superhero. Let’s look at some other stellar acts of real-life samaritans who make us all look like lazy potatoes:

• The Brotherly Act of Organs: Back in 2019, Singapore witnessed a total first when brothers Lin Hanwei and Dilun both separately decided that donating organs to total strangers was a family-friendly activity. Forget matching Christmas sweaters; these guys matched altruism by carving out pieces of themselves to save anonymous lives. Talk about raising the bar at family dinners.
• The Pioneer of Giving: Years before Herman’s heroics, a man named Lim Kok Seng became Singapore’s very first anonymous living liver donor, handing a piece of his liver to a 16-year-old girl he had never laid eyes on. He woke up from surgery, checked if he was still alive, and probably asked where he could sign up to help next.
• The Accidental Everyday Heroes: Beyond the organ-harvesting champions, you have figures like Singapore’s countless regular blood and platelet donors—some of whom, like Herman himself, have rolled up their sleeves over 100 times. They sit in chairs for hours squeezing stress balls just so some stranger can survive a rainy day, proving that not all heroes wear capes—some just wear hospital gowns, carry an over-achieving attitude, and suffer from a severe allergy to minding their own business when people need help.

The Takeaway:

Herman and his fellow organ-donating comrades prove that there is never a “convenient” time to do good—life is chaotic, messy, and unpredictable. But while the rest of us are busy stressing over unread emails and deciding what to eat for lunch, these absolute legends are out here literally redesigning their anatomy to keep strangers alive. Respect.

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