So I updated my web page design and made it probably a bit more minimalistic. It now looks a tad bit more like Medium. And hopefully encourage me to write more articles there – the longer form ones. At least long by definition of a web article. This design might be a bit more mobile-friendly as well, which might suit the audience I’m now targeting: young millennial civil servants, professionals, entrepreneurs looking to create the future. The new theme I’m using is Seedlet; and it probably helps that it is updated to integrate the new WordPress block editor system.
I wanted to say something about how the world of digital products has changed the way we consume the latest product – in the sense that the product gets ‘updated’ across the board. For example, all WordPress.com users will have the block editor when it eventually gets rolled out. The problem is that we don’t technically have a choice even if we don’t really want it. This is both a good and bad thing.
For stuff we want, that solves our problems or improve our performance related to exactly we had bought that product for, it’s a plus. That way, you don’t have to increase your expenditure on it; and you’re probably just paying the same subscription fees. So the payment basically comes from you staying on the service, or getting more sticky with it.
For features or functions that we did not want, or prefer not to have, it’s like getting something we didn’t sign up for. Even if implicit in the consumption of the product at the beginning, we have already given the rights for the company/provider to force us to take on whatever they gives us later on. In some sense, digital product/service providers who are running a subscription business basically has a pretty strong local monopoly over you.
Just pointing that out. So that we can try to make sure they ‘don’t be evil’.
When I was young, and we play in the school playground, there will be fights around me; sometimes they involved me. And when asked why the fight started, the aggressive kid would say “he did this to me”. Then the other guy would say “accidentally” – and then the comeback from the aggressive kid, “no, he purposely one” (pardon the Singlish). So apparently, ‘accidentally’ is an excuse and ‘purposely’ is the retort to suggest intentionality of the perpetrator and hence justification for reaction.
So ‘purposely’ seems like one of the early English word we learnt as kids in Singapore – and whose meaning we know. But maybe, it was also used largely in a negative context and hence it seemed to me that we subsequently live our lives less ‘purposely’. Maybe, like the kid who ‘sparked’ the fight, we prefer to live ‘accidentally’, so that when bad things happens, no one can blame us. We can finger-point to our lack of intentionality, and just wriggle away.
Maybe, our culture has driven us to be more afraid of mistakes and failures, than our desire to discover our purpose. But the question, as we go through this slog in life is: are you working hard to avoid failures or working hard to achieve what you want?
So perhaps it’s time to teach your kids to say ‘No, I did that accidentally at first; but I did retaliate on purpose because this aggressive guy decided to start a fight. I’m sorry for being part of this mess’. Teach your children to own their mistakes and express their intentions. Stop them from hiding under ‘accidents’. And how do you start? By being purposeful and intentional yourself. Because, your children probably picked that cowardice up from you, purposely.
This article is being read and recorded for readers here to increase accessibility of my writings and also to prepare myself to start a podcast that is currently in the works. Note that the written article is not an exact transcript to the reading.
So 2020 was truly challenging for many economies. First we had a global pandemic which by itself, was really a healthcare crisis. It threatens to overwhelm the healthcare infrastructure of many countries including the most developed countries. The response of the government to proceed to lockdown mode, which created a bit of an economic crisis as the force shut-downs dampened demand severely, threatening a whole lot of jobs. So they then have to mount a secondary response to the impact of the primary response of lockdowns.
And that was unemployment benefits or at least wage subsidies to large employers to keep jobs and hence businesses breathing. The stimulus became the ventilator for the economy as Covid-19 continued to spread and impacted global supply chains, air travel, jeopardising much-needed tourism industry in many countries.
Being able to put together a giant budget to pump-prime the economy is an opportunity for putting down investments which would have much longer term positive impacts on the economy. For most developing economies which lack infrastructure, there’s a encouragement from the Multi-lateral Development Banks to explore an ‘infrastructure-led recovery’; especially to take advantage of the low-interest rate environments to take on more debt from the international markets.
Most of these points are probably theoretically true but in reality, to invest into large scale infrastructure takes time, political will, and support from population who will not see the benefits of the infrastructure until much later. The immediate job creation angle will be important and there has to be trust that the budget is not being overly strained. The ability to first obtain that supply of capital at low price, while sizing up demand for the infrastructure at a time of lockdowns, uncertain future is extremely challenging. When we lack the alignment of these key ingredients, projects don’t take off. Even when great ideas are there, the financing appears to be available and there is a compelling vision for the infrastructure. And I wonder if this is the reason for how the KL-SG HSR project came to end in a whimper.
Instead of thinking of infrastructure as a ‘means’ of recovery, we should abandon the whole notion of recovery. People die from covid, businesses shut down from the lockdowns. Economies reconfigure. And there really isn’t ‘recovery’ per se. We ought to confess that the original system of the economy that relies on sectors like tourism, aviation, or other face-to-face services have their inherent weaknesses; hence there’s a need for us to keep building up our resilience.
And often, resilience comes from creating slack in the economy, from increasing supply capacity, and making room to grow newer industries. Infrastructure is a good way to do that; especially infrastructure that allows more business activities. In a safe-distanced world, we may move away from trying to exploit agglomeration economies, so building strong connections and logistic networks will be important. The story for the infrastructure needs to be well-thought out and aligns to a greater vision of the district, region, country. Infrastructure need not be part of a recovery or growth. Singapore successfully made infrastructure development part of our story, part of our culture. We’ve build a story around infrastructure as part of livelihood that contributes to the community if the community is willing to contribute for it. Planting that in the consciousness of people is important.
Had a small gathering with just a handful of high school friends late last year (still in Phase 2 reopening in Singapore anyways) and the conversation drifted to social commentary about our generation of Singaporeans and how we step forward as a society. I talked about the idea of having inherited the narratives of our parents and the boomers, gaining that awakening that empowers us to write our own story instead.
One of them brought out the point that most of the Chinese migrants who came to Singapore and whose descendents now form the majority of the population here were ‘coolies’ or manual labourers who came to Singapore to seek out employment opportunities and a better life. The mindset really was to find a boss to serve, and gain a good life through that loyalty. Life was basic and more about survival than really thriving.
Generations later, the bar for living standards have gone up, and so have expectations of how much you achieve and how much you need to live on. But has that coolie mindset changed? Are we still just trying to follow directions to a better life? Are we thinking independently and by ourselves? Are we looking to continue to use resources at our disposal just for ourselves or to make the future a better place?
This article is being read and recorded for readers here to increase accessibility of my writings and also to prepare myself to start a podcast that is currently in the works. Note that the written article is not an exact transcript to the reading.
Audio Article: Coolies, Generations Later
Meanwhile, you might like to check out some really amazing recoloured photos of historical Singaporeans here. Get a sense of the hardship they went through and what life really means for them.
In 1950, the life expectancy of an average Singaporean (that is, someone living in Singapore, rather than having the nationality since the nation technically did not exist yet) was around 58 years. By 1965, it was at 67 years. So when my parents were born during that period, their parents, don’t expect to be able to grow old enough to care for all their grandchildren. Most of them would expect to retire around 55, or 60, and then spend less than 10 years in retirement before passing on. Should they die younger at around 50s, their children pretty much should be able to take care of themselves.
Today, the figure stands at 84 years. So not only can you have kids later. You can parent your kids for longer. Instead of training them for independence, you train them to hit the society’s metrics for success and support them with all the resources you have. Often, you use them as your further trophies in life and psychologically co-mingle their success with your own. This psychological dependence on the child’s relative performance vis-a-vis their peers reinforce their dependence on you. After all, to win your affection requires them to do better at violin classes and who else is going to drive them to the classes?
I wonder if anyone would study the cultural impact of having most of our lives lived with surviving parents. This means that the prevailing ideas, thought patterns of our parents actually might have greater influence on us than previous generations. The impact of the boomers’ mentality and mindset persists longer than most other generations, sustaining the franchises of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings. Yet our generation also face continued fast pace of change; and so we face greater tension than previous generations in terms of trying to manage the force of the resistance to change, and the onslaught of it.
So the irony is that while people are claiming that children no longer have much childhood – or that their childhood ended prematurely, I’d argue that childhoods are getting longer, we are creating more childlike adults who have not really gained independence, and parenthoods are getting longer than what is good for the children.
This article is being read and recorded for readers here to increase accessibility of my writings and also to prepare myself to start a podcast that is currently in the works. Note that the written article is not an exact transcript to the reading.
I’ve been posting on my Instagram account daily inspirational quotes. So I decided to challenge myself to blog daily as well. This would mean that my posts might no longer be as long, and I’d be focused on sharing interesting short snippets of ideas. Longer entries might end up going on to my Medium page before eventually being made available free on my blog.
A couple of months back I got slapped with a hefty “fine” from Citibank for paying my minuscule bill late. I did a little rant here, but tried to address some of the unsustainable issues underlying the business model. I subsequently wrote in to try and cancel the card, citing the episode as my key motivation and also highlighting that the company needs to learn to change their culture and focus on serving the customer rather than beating the competition.
The longer I work and live in the world of business, the more I find it absurd that we accept companies doing things to make a profit rather than the serve their customers. After all, shouldn’t profit be the by-product of a job well done?
In December 2020, just before the extraordinary year ended, I got slapped another charge – this time from my telco, M1. I overshot my mobile data quota by 500MB and was charged $12. I read on the bill in fine print that additional data above my plan are chargeable at $10 for 10GB. So I called them up and asked them how they calculated the surcharges on my bill. They said, the extra usage cost is $12/GB (or part-thereof) when I do not go into my app and purchase the 10GB bundle. So even though they could just charge me $10 for 10GB on my bill, they introduced that additional step so that if I don’t monitor my usage, they could charge me at $12/GB.
I told the call center operator to submit my feedback that it doesn’t make sense to try and profit from the customers’ mistakes and what they designed seemed like a deliberate attempt to trip me up. I would not dispute the charges but this experience certainly left a sour taste for me.
So businesses, think again. If serving your bottom line is number one, then you truly deserve to be bottom.
This article is being read and recorded for readers here to increase accessibility of my writings and also to prepare myself to start a podcast that is currently in the works. Note that the written article is not an exact transcript to the reading.
One of the things I’m going to focus on personally is working for the right rewards. And for me, it’s incredibly encouraging when my blog posts or articles generates discussions and new ideas. To me, that is making a difference in the thought process and growth of people around me and even those readers distant from me.
2021 represents a very interesting new step from me as I stepped out of my comfort zone even more to be more conscious about the most critical question facing millennials living in a world that the boomers have built: “Do I stand and watch the show saying ‘this is not my idea’, or do I go out there and create the future that I want to see?” I could play the game that the boomers created and continue perpetuating a culture I find myself in – it would be immensely rewarding in the traditional sense – there is proven sources of prestige, of some financial rewards, and pat on the back by those well-established within the system. But I could also start changing the culture, changing the game, and work for the reward of a better future for my generation when we are older, for a better world that I would want my kids to live in (if I ever have kids).
We need to start getting people to work for the right rewards. Often we care too much about just the outcome and we think that it doesn’t matter as long as we structure the sticks and carrots to nudge those people to the right behaviours. Over time, we might find diminishing marginal returns. And over time, we might be damaging the culture. Children who get paid reading loses the chance to learn to read for the pleasure and love of reading. Using monetary or other rewards for steps recorded in trackers encourage gaming of the system. Let’s stop using temporary fixes. Let’s try to create a culture that allows us to progress as a society, and not to encourage gaming of the system, or cause people to turn against one another – all for the wrong rewards.
As I continued with my coaching and guiding work, the conviction to help others and the sense of purpose behind that has grown. A regular reader of my writings will noticed that I often write about education as much as I pen commentary on the culture we live within. It is probably because our education forms a very significant influence in our lives and moulds a lot of our foundational thinking and approach to conducting ourselves in society and life. And all of these make their way into the challenges we encounter as we join the workforce – which is where my coaching practice comes into play.
The goal of my coaching work is ultimately to promote self-reliance. I’m not trying to coach you so that you can rely on me to deal with your problems whether it is with discovering your aspirations, charting a career or just securing a job. I run alongside you to cope with the challenges you face because ultimately, I hope that you are able to retune your internal compass to get it to point your direction again; and for you to develop that awareness and sensitivity towards yourself in order to move forward in all the situations in life. The ability to rely on oneself is going to be central to mental health and the well-being of our society as a whole over the next few decades.
Our parents or even grandparents lived through messy times. There was war, strife, riots, slums and disorganised markets. There was adversity and children mostly did not even complete schooling. In the ‘school of life’, the learnt and they grew, developing self-reliance. Today, our efforts to plan just about everything and desire to get things organised rather than allow kids to grow organically means occupying our children with structure sort of learning of all forms. In part, it is also because parents actually have more financial, mental and physical capacity to manage the children’s childhood and experience. As a consequence, we are indulging in our children, spending ever more resources to help them get a headstart in all forms of socially-recognised credentials, and also on new toys, tools and entertainment for them.
In part, as we see other parents do that for their children, we think we fall short if we do not. And when our children makes mistakes, we feel responsible. When we judge them to be inadequate, we blame ourselves. What is the easiest way then, to avoid all of these? That is to control our kids; control their time, ensure they are ‘kept occupied’ through all kinds of programmes, helicopter parenting, lining up all things in life for them. Doing your best for your children then becomes simply making them extensions of your aspirations, dreams and your life.
To a some extent, that was what quite a lot of us who are now in the early years of our career have been subjected to. And that is also what we are doing to our children. What happens thereafter is that children lose their self-reliance. They prefer to live under the direction of someone else. They learn the rules of the game, the authority that they need to comply with, the things they should do, to be elevated socially. Once they have to be truly on their own, they are lost. The consequence has huge social implications to our mental health and resilience.
Because we are so used to taking directions and hearing from the society, we become less sensitive to our inner motivations and compass, relying more on extrinsic motivations. I started my coaching practice to help young adults and youths build up that mental resilience and also to develop greater self-reliance. It helps to be more aware of how one’s internal narratives are shaping our motivation, and to develop the ability to rewrite these stories. That does mean life will get messier, more complex, ridden with what we normally think of as ‘uncertainty’. What we do not recognise is that sense of loss we feel – when we reach the career point we had been working for and realise it wasn’t what we thought it would be, or when things are turning out dramatically different from what you expected for the first couple of times in life – is exactly the reminder that the certainty we think we have had is often false.
For shorter muses, follow my instagram. And to gain further exclusive insights, subscribe to my mailing list.
So for over one and a half month, I’ve been doing a lot of posting on my Instagram page (@kevlowco – please follow if you have not yet done so) as I committed to do so daily in order to practice the discipline and consistency of posting relevant, useful, inspirational materials. It’s been a very interesting experience because there’s just a continuous stream of ideas that comes along as I plan for the materials to put up.
Quite frankly, the topics I hope to share about keeps on coming because there’s just so much ideas surrounding thinking about the purpose we want to imbue in our work, and the overall ideas surrounding motivation, mindsets, and handling of difficult situations or challenges. The curation of quotes however, was more of a challenge as I often have to check the original author/speaker’s background and also appreciate better the context.
That is especially important because of how much I came to learn of the manner by which Robert Frost’ poem have been misinterpreted or misconstrued. There are many articles online about it covering the entire poem but I’ll just go on to talk about the last stanza:
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Tworoads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one that dared me to try, And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost in The Road Not Taken
The common quote from the poem that talks about taking the road less traveled would be the last 3 lines in the stanza. But the truth is that nowhere in the poem did the road he ‘dared to try’ was one that was less taken (in fact in earlier stanzas he was rather ambiguous if at all that the conditions of the two roads was too much different, nor did he even suggest that they pointed to different destinations). The key context that perhaps was missed in people using the quote is the point that he said ‘I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence‘. He is imagining himself in the future, making this point with a sigh which could imply he has either regretted it or that he has suffered or wearied much through it. But he hasn’t lived through it yet – it could still be the well-worn road that was way too boring!
Either case, context is important and this message from Robert Frost is also a nuanced and subtle one that I would like to emphasize pertaining to the ‘wisdom of the world’. At the end of the day, it is up to us to write our own story and to interpret the outcomes of our actions – what intents they had been meant to serve in the first place and how does it look from the other end of the tunnel. Thanks for staying with my musing thus far. If there’s a message I want to leave with you, it would be for you to follow me on Instagram. Thank you!
This is going to first sound like a rant. But I need you to stay with me and read through this patiently. I’m in the process of getting over the fact that Citibank charged me over $100 worth in late fees and interest charges on a credit card bill of about $260. They declined my fee waiver request and when I called in to appeal, it was declined again.
My latest attempt to appeal further through the secure mail system once again resulted in my request being declined. While you may think I’m an angsty customer just looking to air this in public to shame the bank, I am more concerned that you, as a current or prospective customer, knows about the vicious cycle that banks and credit card companies are now getting themselves into.
Sign-up bonuses and customer acquisition costs
Just a quick look a Milelion’s credit card page shows you the active sign-up bonuses for ‘new-to-bank’ customers which have been getting more and more generous since 2-3 years ago. When I first got my credit cards more than 5 years ago, the competition for customer acquisition was just getting heated up and the best prizes they were giving out were just American Tourister luggages. Then came the one-off cashbacks on minimum spend within months of activating the credit card, grab vouchers thrown in on some. And then it grew bigger, freebies that became more costly: Apple Airpods, Nespresso machines, and even Airpod Pros. Often, these sign-up bonuses don’t even have minimum spend requirements. Just sign up by a certain date.
Assuming that with all the marketing efforts and tie-ups with various web platforms, the cost of customer acquisition comes down to $300 per customer. Let’s suppose further that the customers then goes on to spend about $500 a month for that year. Assuming a 2% fee charged to merchants, the credit card company earns only $120 over that entire year from you gross, not withstanding the other infrastructure costs and the administrative cost of billing you, etc. Even if you spend an average of $1000 a month, that is only $240, not enough to cover the cost of acquiring you as customer especially when first year annual fees are usually waived to lure you in (in any case, we all absolutely hate credit card annual fees).
Problem of having to cover acquisition costs
You can see how that is a problem, the credit card companies need to cover their cost, but also they are forced to acquire you in order to maintain their market share so that they can tell merchants they have a certain number of customer base and convince merchants to continue accepting credit cards. There are some network effect that helps maintain some degree of stickiness but competition from other e-payment methods is intense and being incumbents, the credit card companies have the most to lose from the new entrants.
So they have to recover more of their costs from you. How do they do that? They can hope you pay only the minimum payment and incur interest charges on the balance. The interest rates are as high as 28% on some bank credit cards so they can earn quite a fair amount from here if customers willingly borrow at such rip-off rates. Unfortunately, most customers are not so clueless and also have access to cheaper credit so credit card credit is not viable as a form of consumer credit for most people. Only those really out of options resort to “borrowing” on the credit card. Now, if majority of the credit card customers would pay their bills in full anyways, then how else can the companies generate more income to cover the costs?
Late fees. That’s a big way of generating income to cover cost. Basically be a payment punctuality Nazi and zap every single customer with late payment charge as long as they are just even hours late. Now you’ve got a huge pool of customers who are beholden to you and have to pay you the late fees. Then you can look at your customer acquisition cost and ask yourself, how much late fees do I need to collect in order to cover my costs? So having decided how much you need to “keep”, you can then feign magnanimity by allowing for fee waivers to those who call in to request. Of course, the biggest spenders whose acquisition fees have been more than covered by the merchant fees, they’ll be happy to waive the late fees and interest charges. The rest to missed their payments, but are low-spenders like me, become victims who will have to fork out to pay for and shoulder the customer acquisition costs.
This creates perverse scenarios like this where I now owe the credit card company $366 – where $106 consists of late fees and interest charges and only $260 was my actual spending. In a climate like this with Covid-19 still wrecking havoc in the economy, the banks are hardly doing their part.
So you, prospective customers, think twice before being drawn to that Airpods Pro. And the current customers who have got your Airpods Pro; you might end up having to pay for it anyways!
