A couple of days back whilst at friend’s (yet another teacher) place, I got asked, ‘If you were a parent, how would you like the education system to be?’ For those who know me for years, you’d think I’m an educator at heart, and also cut out to be a teacher. But more often than once, I have declared that I will never teach in the mainstream education system because there are too many things about it that I’m against. People would often tell me I should go and change it; but trust me, you don’t want to get me started. Yet with this license to day-dream, I gratefully seized it.

The first warning before I get started is that I think about systems as a collective whole so I don’t see our education system as separate from our economy, our culture and our identity. All of them work together and reinforce each other. This is why I often try to make a case for the idea that culture and education could be the cause of our productivity problems. And that brings me to the second warning that the system of my dreams will probably be ‘far-fetched’ in that what we’ve been doing in our schools is nowhere close to it. But if we can agree on a future society we are striving towards, then we can collectively make that a representation of our vision to strive toward.

Anyways during that short time I had with my friends, I shared only 3 main points which I’m going to pen here for the record. There are many more dimensions that I envision and I welcome Singaporeans from all walks of life to augment this vision and to build it out in greater details and to tweak it more. If you’re an official in the education system today, let me first encourage you not to think about the practical constraints or just dismiss these as ‘idealistic’ but to consider the difference any of these would make on to the students, on the future economy and society you’re trying to shape. Let the end goal rather than immediate challenges fill your mind and vision; because, as Watt Emerson once said:

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Abolish cohort-based education (or teach for mastery, not grades)

I start with the most radical one to weed out those readers who have no commitment towards discarding flawed premises. I think cohort-based system is helpful because it is where we find a little more of our social bearings, and perhaps from a cost and administrative point of view, using a cohort is just ‘easier’. But I call for it to be abolished because we should not be forced to promote students who are poorly prepared for the next level of education. In fact, a single student should be allowed to progress for subjects he/she is strong for and held back on subjects that he/she have not gain certain benchmark of mastery. Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy once described very well what is wrong with having that kind of system that focuses on tests one year after another rather than focusing on mastery.

Now of course, the focus is actually not on cohort but once we focus on getting students to gain mastery, then we have to break up the idea of a cohort and to stop comparing across students but against the benchmark of the standards they have to get to. If you think about it, the current system promotes a student scoring 51% together with one scoring 91% on Maths exams to the next grade and then teaching them as though they are no different, only to achieve the same gap end of the year, and the weaker student is discouraged. Compounding this over a period of over 10 years, a society that prizes head above hands or heart, and you seeding mental and emotional health problems of an entire group in the society.

It’s been 5 years since Salman delivered that short speech and it’s been viewed millions of times. And the fact is that we already have the tools and technology to achieve this sort of system. But because of sunk cost fallacy and the unwillingness to disrupt the current education infrastructure, we seem only capable of making incremental changes which will not be able to get us anywhere close.

Focus on core skills before content

At younger ages (up to 10), schools and teachers should be really focused on helping students acquire language, numeracy skills, and give them chance to explore these skills in various different contexts of life. So language needs to be more than just speech and words, but getting them to practice persuasion, comforting those in need, expressing themselves, displaying empathy and so on. Numeracy needs to be expressed in monetary transactions (such as purchasing decisions at a school canteen or bookstore), as well as in the calculation of reward points, even quiz scores or even getting them to form up into the right groups of players for different sports.

Of course, it is an easy win to teach science to these kids and then when they express superficial understanding of deep concepts, we are wow-ed and misled into thinking they already got their fundamentals sorted out. This is because by the time we (during our time) learnt those scientific knowledge ourselves, we were already more advanced in our mastery of other fundamentals. The truth is that they’d have none of the core skills, nor the genuine understanding to take them to the next level in life. Better to forgo content which they can acquire later by themselves than to give them an illusion of being ‘intelligent’, even risking them having oversized egos.

Our younger brains are better suited to pick up skills and learn new ways to learn, rather than to be somehow acquiring dense amount of information and trivia. Skills for knowledge acquisition is more important than knowledge acquisition itself at this stage.

Involving the entire society in education

Currently, parents are not taking enough ownership of their children’s education; more often than not, they can practically outsource all of education to schools. This was never the intention and parents who are reading this, should recognise their role in partnership with schools and teachers to bring up their children. Not only that, the entire society is in a partnership to bring up the next generation. The fact that our young is largely educated in a taxpayer-supported system is part of that; but more than that, companies, industries should start playing a role in terms of adopting schools and being connected with them in terms of sharing with students about the company, about the role they play in the market, and the economy, as well as to provide students with some experience with work, or to catch more of a glimpse of the ‘grown-up world’.

Parents will need to work with schools especially when students are younger; by moving focus away on content, the load on parents trying to understand what is covered in school shifts towards appreciating the intentions of what the students are being taught, hence allowing them to easily try and reinforce it at home. By shifting content-heaviness towards a point when the student is more mature, they can handle the learning independently and be less reliant on adult guidance for content.

I know there’s already a lot of pressure on our educators and I’m going as far as to try and suggest that they should be responsible to help reshape the economy of the future. Perhaps the government really needs to divert some of the quick-fix kind of approach such as providing business incentives and grants towards supporting an education system that really contributes to the economy. It is no use incentivising businesses to hire Singaporeans if the education system is unable to prepare a labour force deserving of those jobs. Of course, the system cannot predict what specific sectors will be in vogue or the skills demanded. But as you can see from my vision, the skills I speak of is not programming, or STEM, or arts. There are foundational matters like core skills in language (communications), emotional intelligence (empathy), numeracy and above all, knowledge acquisition, that the education system must build up within students – these will prepare them for just about any market they graduate into.

And if job creation is really important, why not encourage entrepreneurship right from schools through a focus on asking the right questions rather than finding the right answers? During the earlier days of our nation building, we really needed our workforce to be plugged into the industries and so we just basically ‘trained’ rather than ‘educated’. Whilst we now have the ‘luxury’ to get away from this ‘training’ kind of approach, we ought to.

In today’s work life, too much thought goes into how to do the work rather than the culture and enabling environment that surrounds the work. There are countless anecdotes about people at their deathbed would not wish they had more days to work; or stories of the employee who passed away and the company was just busy trying to find someone to replace him/her, whilst complaining about the hassle and delays caused by his/her death. All of these tries to discourage people from pouring out way too much of themselves into work even as our society as a whole is actually increasingly consumed by work.

What I don’t understand is that for almost all of our work in life, there are ways of making it more fun, conducive to put effort into, and to stress us positively. Yet we don’t do that, nor explore ways of doing that. Good culture that enables rather than disable is a luxury, people say. And they see it being at odds with generating value and profit, as though precious resources are either committed to employee well-being or shareholder returns. This is just lack of imagination and the inability to think dynamically and across time.

For some reason, a 2015 article from INSEAD appeared on 2 separate of my social media platform news feed, shared by different people and with different commentary. It was about the fall of Nokia; and yet as I was reading through it, I am struck by how applicable those lessons are today. And how important it is that we invest into reworking our culture.

I shuddered at several parts of the article that describes behaviours no different from what I’ve observed in large, important institutions and business organisations that I’ve had experience with. Allow me to quote 3 portions of the article that really stood out for me:

Although they realised that Nokia needed a better operating system for its phones to match Apple’s iOS, they knew it would take several years to develop, but were afraid to publicly acknowledge the inferiority of Symbian, their operating system at the time, for fear of appearing defeatist to external investors, suppliers, and customers and thus losing them quickly. “It takes years to make a new operating system. That’s why we had to keep the faith with Symbian,” said one top manager. Nobody wanted to be the bearer of bad news. 

Hiding bad news is a result of the lack of an open communicative culture resulting from poor responses to ‘bad news’. It will be reinforced by a sense of helplessness about the communication; either by the belief that management will not believe it, or will not respond to it. Such erosion of trust does not bode well.

Fearing the reactions of top managers, middle managers remained silent or provided optimistic, filtered information. One middle manager told us “the information did not flow upwards. Top management was directly lied to…I remember examples when you had a chart and the supervisor told you to move the data points to the right [to give a better impression]. Then your supervisor went to present it to the higher-level executives.

Encouraging miscommunication, whether intentional or not, will only lead to organisational decline. This is especially if the flow of information about reality or truth is obscured, and top management makes decision on the basis of such flawed or misconstrued information. This is the issue when there’s too much emotion caught up in reporting. Reporting should ideally be unemotional, clinical and rational.

[T]op managers also applied pressure for faster performance in personnel selection. They later admitted to us that they favoured new blood who displayed a “can do” attitude.

This led middle managers to over-promise and under-deliver. One middle manager told us that “you can get resources by promising something earlier, or promising a lot. It’s sales work.” This was made worse by the lack of technical competence among top managers, which influenced how they could assess technological limitations during goal setting.

Misalignment of incentives that drives unhelpful behaviours throughout the organisation. So to that extent, being able to create a culture that implicitly rewards honest behaviours through praise and recognition; punishing or frowning upon over-promising, and inaccurate reporting, sows the seeds for success of an organisation. There will naturally be a tension between behaviours which promotes the interest of the organisation and the need to ‘perform’ at an individual level. The ability of the organisation culture to protect behaviours that promotes the sustainability and long-term interest of the organisation is so vitally important.

Yet in most of today’s organisation, we have not invested sufficient thought into the culture; focusing instead to utilise our resources to drive work performance, measured mostly by short-term metrics. A good place to start is really by reworking the prevailing narrative, especially rewiring the mindset obsessed with linear, unidimensional growth. Caring for the mental health and well-being of employees at the level of supporting them to deconflict those tensions mentioned above will go a long way.

For those who are subscribed to my mailing list, you might already know that for some time, I’ve been planning to have an instagram account to post bite-size materials of the longer form articles I write. There is really a lot of wisdom to distill from many places and I had envision the instagram to be really about curating the best materials and thoughts to share with my audience.

Being one of the more senior millennial, I had to enlist the help of my young cousin to provide ‘expert advice’ and also to help me with the graphics that I wanted to put up in my instagram. My posts will be oriented around some of the mindsets and thinking around identifying life goals, and how it connects with career choices, and the steps to get there. Almost coming to a week on since the launch, I thought to share it here on my website so you can follow and benefit from it!

And here it is.

I half-jokingly left the last Ikigai question to your own imagination but I have deeper thoughts to share with you in this additional article I would like to add on to the Ikigai series. Ultimately, the question on what the you’d be paid for, will bring up a point about how much is enough for you. This is the deeper question that the Ikigai framework should be harking at. Just as ‘What the world needs?’ makes you think more deeply about your purpose, the ‘What you can be paid for?’ implicitly makes you consider the lifestyle you want.

And today, in this world of plenty, where you even have the option to consider how you may live a more purposeful life rather than just go with the flow, shows that you actually know there’s a minimum lifestyle you can quite easily satisfy and secure. The point is to understand how much is enough for yourself. You might then think you want to fulfill your potential and not be mediocre or just allow your income to stagnate or to be complacent. I agree; but I think fulfilment of one’s potential doesn’t always come in the form of earning a higher income – you can also be compensated through a sense of meaning and satisfaction from the success of your clients.

Anyways, the key question here is about the selection of lifestyles; how much more enjoyment are you actually working for when you are trying to get more income for a more lavish lifestyle? And how much pain are you going through to hit that spot? So one way to consider finding possibilities in this category is to work backwards from the lifestyle you want. You may have an option that gives you more time to pursue other interests, or one that gives you more resources to live life more lavishly – you’ll have to weigh which one you gravitate towards.

This is an additional article to the multi-part series of writing on Ikigai. The cover article explains why I’m writing all of these. Read part two, three, four, and five. Download the worksheet here.

Congratulations on reaching this fourth and last question on the Ikigai framework! Lest you think that this article would be about salaries and all kinds of different jobs and remuneration, it isn’t. I just have one word of advice on this:

Don’t be lazy. Go do your own research.

Kevin Low, 2020

Go through the worksheet that you’ve filled in. What worksheet? I developed a simple worksheet for you to fill up and the first 3 questions would have allowed you to identify activities/jobs/roles that satisfies all 3 of those other elements. Now you can identify those areas where you can actually get paid for, and fill them into this section of the worksheet! As for the exact remuneration, you’ll really have to do your own research because there are a lot of local variations on the remuneration for different jobs and everyone has access to different opportunities as well. This is where you have to pull your weight and do more work.

The reason I’ve put the lists on the sides of the venn diagram is to allow you to try listing possibilities in each categories first and then find common ones which you can fit into parts of the venn diagram that is overlapping. You may not find you are filling every single portion of the diagram and that’s completely fine. Because you will then be able to get into the ‘troubleshooting’ mode of identifying what are the gaps in terms of reaching the sweeter spot. Mapping out those possibilities also gives you a sense of which direction you need to shift your focus in life: have you been too obsessed with making money? Or bankrupting yourself with your passion? Or losing your soul in trying to fit your strength with getting paid?

But more importantly, you can prioritise your energies with this. You can consider new combination of activities that unlock a sweeter spot. Or you can pick up a hobby to plug the gap. And if there’s a hobby that plays to a little of your strength and in due course you could be paid for it; you might use this to encourage yourself to make it more of a jobby (get paid for it!) rather than just a hobby.

This is the the actual final part of the multi-part series of writing on Ikigai. The cover article explains why I’m writing this. Read part two, three and four. But this will not be the last time I’m writing on Ikigai; we will explore how this framework helps with many other aspects of life as well!

Having done more introspection, we now need to go beyond and consider the external circumstances. Asking a big question like this can be intimidating; not least because the needs of the world cannot quite be exhaustively listed down by an individual, nor be dealt with in that way.

But I think we should start by understanding the draw of this question. It is actually about a sense of purpose. In other words, there might be things that the world needs but it does not reasonate with you. You might think certain needs are more pressing than others though not everyone agrees with you. For example, climate change issues vs local unemployment problems. Both needs to be dealt with and you might happen to find that one ignites energy in you while the other discourages you, or simply awakens the desire to ignore it. So here are the 3 steps when it comes to trying to answer this question.

Start with the Big
One may think about starting with looking at your neighbourhood to identify what the world needs so that it is more actionable but that is the last step. You have to start with the bigger issues at hand, whether it is mental health stigmatisation, climate change, ageing population and so on. By finding out a bigger domain or issue that reasonates with you, you create the space which you can flexibly pivot around as you try to balance other factors.

Listen to the purpose
Then having identified the big ‘need’ that the world have, listen to the purpose underlying the need. For example, SpaceX was created because Elon Musk thinks humanity needs a Plan(et) B and he wants us to be able to colonise Mars. But at the heart of it, the sense of purpose is for the continuation of humanity and mankind. Having a sense of the underlying purpose allows you to continue to justify that ‘need’. It answers the nagging ‘why’ that may loom even as you are focused on analysing the problem you are trying to solve.

Narrow down to the Small
This is the right time then to try and narrow down to the small. From the big issue of climate change, you need to start thinking about local action for example; what can you start with in the more immediate surroundings. It could be doing more recycling to reduce consumption (say, working for a recycling company), it could be trying to help people reduce their carbon footprint from commuting (say, working for a video conferencing company) and so on. The motivation and the values of the organisations you join may not always reasonate with the ‘need’ and ‘purpose’ you have identified but as long as you can make that connection, you’re good.

Try to distill all of these into specific work roles or potential work positions and list them down properly under the ‘What the world needs?’ header in your own personal worksheet (Download the worksheet here).

This is the fourth part of a multi-part series of writing on Ikigai. The cover article explains why I’m writing this. Read part two and three. Surprise coming up in the next part. Stay tuned.

Identifying what you love is really about deep introspection and asking the right questions. So often, we are in love with the idea of being someone, being in a certain position that we are caught up in our minds with the moments of triumph and victory without recognising those moments of pains. Finding out what you love is as much about appreciating the sweetness of the victory as being able to withstand the bitterness of loss.

Picture the Sweetness
Whether it is victory in the courtroom, or basking in the limelight for the achievements in the field of your choosing, first consider the sweetness when you have reached the pinnacle. (Reality will be more anti-climatic than that; but you won’t believe it as I say this.) Consider all the aspects of the work/job/activity that you really like and enjoy, and let it motivate you and swing you into action right at this moment. So for those who have nothing that comes to mind readily, consider what you are already doing or repeat this exercise over a few of your candidates.

Consider the Bitterness
Gather information about the downside of the aforementioned work/job/activity. You have to do this objectively and not turn any blindeye to red flags that comes to your attention. You could observe the bitterness through friends, contacts, your own presence within the workplace (yes, you could do a ‘site visit’). Then put yourself in these worst moments of the activity, and consider how you’d feel, and ponder deeply into the implications of the worst case. Objectively assess how you’d cope with the worse case and come up with a rough action plan.

Brewing your coffee
What you love is more about dealing with and learning to love the daily grind and that means being able to deal with the bitterness more than the sweet. This is because that is going to set you apart more than being in love with the sweetness. And ultimately, the question is whether you are able to galvanise the sweet to help you to withstand the bitterness. After all, the true test of whether you can love a person is really when the person is in his/her worst self and you can still continue to love.

Try to distill all of these into specific work roles or potential work positions and list them down properly under the ‘What do you love?’ header in your own personal worksheet (Download the worksheet here).

This is the third part of a multi-part series of writing on Ikigai. The cover article explains why I’m writing this. Read the second part here.

The beauty of the Ikigai system is that it tries to isolate the various different factors that drives you for something that you do. We tend to struggle with choice of what we want to do because there are different drivers and we are weighing across them. Today I’m just going to focus on identifying what one is good at.

Ask Others
We often find it difficult to come up with what we are personally good at because we belittle those things. They seem so easy to us and effortless perhaps or comes too naturally to us for us to think much of it. Ask your spouse, parents and close friends what they think you’re good at. It could be a skill, an area of management, an aspect of leadership

Observe Others
Consider the kind of work you’re always allocated in a team in your current workplace. Or the work that you’ll naturally and happily take up when the responsibilities are not laid out too clearly. It should not be due to a sense of obligation but out of your natural strengths.

Self-reflection
Dive into your memories from childhood; what were you praised for? Any areas of skills or domains of work? Pay attention to those areas where you might have inadvertently invested time and effort developing because you happen to have found yourself relatively strong in it. For example, you might have been happy to do more Maths problems because you tend to score well in them – it might or might not be that you enjoyed working on them.

Try to distill all of these into specific work roles or potential work positions and list them down properly under the ‘What are you good at?’ header in your own personal worksheet (Download the worksheet here).

This is the second part of a multi-part series of writing on Ikigai. The cover article explains why I’m writing this.

I’ve been looking at the Ikigai framework for a while to draw out questions for coaching or mentorship purposes and that has been wonderful. For some unknown reason we were never trained or taught to think this way and it is only when we are ‘adulting’ that we are starting to consider this.

I had wanted to write about it but never really got down to, until now. This infographic on ikigai does more than showing the different domains but also that ‘feeling’ which one seem to have when somehow lingering close to the sweet spot but not quite there yet. I think since young we’ve been nudged to ‘satisfice‘, and consequently we seem to think that hitting all those pieces is not quite possible. Instead of actually thinking of it as about ‘careers’, one can just consider how those 4 questions that governs the 4 different spheres as a powerful way of thinking about how one should devote time, effort and resources in life (links to articles added in retrospect):

• What you are good at?
• What you love?
• What the world needs?
• What you can be paid for? [What do you need to be paid?]

But how do we answer these questions? I shall in the next couple of days, explore each of those topics and try to consider how to break them down into different pieces for you to dwell on and discover for yourself. The purpose of this series is more to try and answer those questions for yourself than how to apply those answers to your own life; but hopefully, being more equipped to answer these guiding questions will push you to think through more how they are able to come together in your life to enhance it.

This is the cover article of multi-part series of writing on Ikigai. I have not decided how many parts it is going to be. But do download the worksheet and work alongside this series.