Category Archives: Anecdotes

I was listening to the first part of Barry Nalebuff’s interview on ‘People I mostly admire’ and it turned out to be pretty cool and insightful, particularly that very rapid sharing of his thinking that developed Honest Tea. It reflect how important simple ideas were when taken seriously and scaled up. And it also helped to demonstrate how an economics (and strategy) professor use his intellect to take calculated risks in entrepreneurship.

He was probably oversimplifying but considering Honest Tea as a product that basically makes use of three simple economic principles:

• Diminishing marginal returns/benefits (on sugar or the taste of sweetness)
• Principle of maximising the value of the content of a fixed cost container in order to maximise the overall value of the bottled drink
• Navigating trade-offs on the marginal utility curve: Convincing people to trade off the lower sugar for the fact that the drink had lower calories

That is pretty brilliant as a way of thinking about a market and a product; those ideas are simple and yet profound precisely because the world had not evolved solutions around a combination of these ideas prior to Honest Tea.

I highly recommend you give the podcast a listen.

For new readers, you might not have realised that I have a coaching practice. I call it career coaching but it could well have been performance coaching, or work coaching, or whatever you might call it. I’m now working with an coach to help me with English for business but I’m essentially being coached to align my messages more with my communication objectives. At the heart of coaching, is the ability to help our clients identify and crystalize their objectives, and then focus their attention and resources on meeting them.

Meeting our objectives often require us to take a series of actions or adopt certain behaviours to maximize the chances of the outcomes we desire. We may not be too sure ourselves and so we hedge our bets; we prefer not trying than to try and fail. Coaches help to reduce incidence of that thought by helping us reframe and focus our attention on the work that needs to be done rather than fretting over the outcome that we cannot control directly.

So it is on my career coaching practice; I work with you to identify and crystallise your career objectives and then work out what actions or behaviours are necessary to get there. We then try to focus on developing those behaviours and undertake the actions that maximises the chances of you getting there. Even when you might think it could be a waste of time, or if you’re afraid the investment of effort would not pay off. It’s not about the immediate returns on your investment, but recognising that investment in yourself is a case where the returns come through from yourself rather than from the job you find. In fact the job or role you eventually take on, is merely a means by which you contribute your value to this world.

When I was studying in London and the States, I always thought that working and earning an income in those countries beat being in Singapore and earning the low salaries that starting graduates were given. In fact, I was paid so much in my gross salary during my internship at a bank in London that on market exchange rate basis, I only got back to that same level of monthly salary in the 5th year of my scholarship bond. Even if my salary was stagnant for 6 years at the bank and I was paid like an intern, I would have earned more.

But would I have been able to earn more in terms of disposable income? How about disposable income minus the critical expenditures like rent and the premium for food that I didn’t have to pay in Singapore? How about the high level of taxes in those countries? Now, people may say that after doing the Math, they realised that as a percentage of the total income, the cost works out to be roughly the same, and so you save the same percentage of your income.

Yet that is not exactly the same. The same percentage of a higher income at market exchange rates implies that you do have a higher amount of absolute savings. And this is where it starts to matter because capital markets are largely global and the pricing is consistent across the world. This means that if you’re able to amass a higher absolute amount of savings at market exchange, you have greater purchasing power for public securities and other financial products. The advantage of being able to enjoy lower costs of living does not outstrip the disadvantage of a lower absolute savings.

Thomas Curran researches elements of psychological impact of our society’s perfectionism. While we tend to admire people who are perfectionists and pushing themselves up higher and higher standards. In his interview with Adam Grant in the WorkLife Podcast, he talks about the deficit thinking of us being inadequate is consuming us and damaging us.

In his talk at TED MED in 2018, he criticized the dangers of performance metrics which pushes people to do better but also foster that sense of inadequacy that characterises so many of out high potential youths today.

I think this problem plagues the Singapore society especially; the creation of insecurity, amplification of imperfection and continual emphasis on appearing perfect. Our search for mental wellness must address this obsession with perfectionism that we as a society has been nurturing, or it is doomed to fail.

My latest break away from work lasted about 2.5 weeks. It was a time of disconnecting almost completely with work. I think the whole cycle of disengaging, disconnecting deliberately and then re-engaging is a natural cycle of things. And the rhythm that our biology needs.

The cycle of waking up and sleeping, the seasons, the waves of busyness and then lull. These are patterns etched in nature, patterns we should be honouring.

There is no question that when you’re driving in the opposite lane from the design of traffic that you’d eventually end up in an accident. But unfortunately we are not clear about how we should be honouring our bodies and our minds. Consider what is stopping us from taking a genuine break, one that is not accompanied by anxiety or guilt or the compulsion to be “productive”.

Interestingly, it was around this time a year ago when I wrote about opportunity costs and my mind recently dwelt on this topic again while reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work. He talks about the opportunity cost of distraction, and of course, social media. He reminds all of us to think about the true cost of spending time and attention on social media.

Simply speaking, there is two. First is of course the time spent that could otherwise be used on more productive things. ‘Keeping in touch’ with thousands is known to be not just technically but cognitively impossible. So interactions on social media can at best be very shallow even if there’s rich engagement with a select few whom you are already interacting beyond the confines of the internet. So these online interactions are probably not adding that much to your relationships and the time can be better spent cementing the relationships within the family especially those living in close quarters.

The second opportunity cost is a little more subtle. And it has to do with the fact that social media trains our attention span to become even shorter and creates lots of little dopamine hits which really fools our system and cause us to lose the capacity for ‘deep work’ – the kind that requires more intense concentration and a persistent expenditure of intellectual and cognitive resources in order to achieve results.

I think these are incredibly valuable food for thought.