Category Archives: Careers

Over the past 2 years, due perhaps to the pandemic, and also maybe stage-of-life, a lot of my friends who have been working overseas are relocating back. Most of them either have already married and are starting families or are getting married. It’s great to back home and looking to contribute to the society back here.

Yet it isn’t easy to settle back in Singapore after spending a lot of time overseas. I’ve personally gone through it myself and I’ve also found it strange why having had a prolonged overseas experience always makes us feel a bit like a stranger in our own land.

For one I think when you live in a foreign land for a long time, you’d have been relieved of the social expectations from family and friends you grew up with. Sure there is some degree of social comparison with maybe university mates but that’s all. When you’re back in Singapore, you feel the weight of expectations on your shoulders again. Weekly meals at parents? Or worst, staying with parents and having to update them wherever I go.

To a large extent though, the expectations are from ourselves, our understanding of the context we grew up in, and expectations of how we should behave. That burden is greater in our home country. Perhaps what we ought to do is to lay bare these stories in our head and decide if we want to keep them.

Living, working intentionally is important. But being intentional is not necessarily about having a plan and executing it. It is about mindfully making choices and seeing the results unfold without being caught up with the outcomes you’ve been expecting.

One of the difficulty with human’s mastery over nature and ability to manipulate the environment is that we fail to grasp how little control we really have.

If life could be somewhat on autopilot, would you prefer that? Do you enjoy the process of living life or is it only particular outcomes, achievements and moments you relish with most of the process better off discarded?

Is it not the variations, the serendipity and the surprises that makes life more of life? Life is precisely beautiful because we are not robots, not automatons running programmes and having things run in a predictable course.

From a single dimension, with all that complexity in life, efficiency and productivity is sacrificed. But from the perspective of the entire system, it is enriched. God made the world with its multiplicity, colours and complexity so we may appreciate it for all its richness rather than to boil it down to a single measure.

Does change in the world put more pressure on you to review the status quo and push forward with change plans? Or does it cause you to give up entirely because “nothing you do matters”? What is the story you tell yourself about change, status quo and your agency?

Our old carbon-based economy is interlocked and we all need to rewrite our story around that and envision a different reality for our future. But because things are moving so quickly, one can either feel incredible pressure to change, to communicate something, or to think that others will do the job, I’ll just do the same. What we don’t realise is that the change we see, and feel are just a result of hedonic adaptation that causes us to miss out so much that is still in status quo.

Without a change story, it is hard for us to process and digest change. We get overwhelmed by it, and we shut it out deliberately to preserve our sanity. Old-school companies want to stay in their old ways and continue “business as usual”.

Communicating something, trying to tag on the new green buzzwords and “join the conversation” prematurely without thinking about the change story is going to cause trouble. You might end up getting lost instead, in the twilight zone between the comforts of status quo and leadership of change.

So take time, resources, capacity to consider what is the change story.

Humans are poor at thinking probabilistically and this is mostly because reality tends to be a collection or a series of outcomes. Things happen and it seems like things are one or none. There’s no ‘chance of’ rain because it either rains or it doesn’t. So it would seem that probability is an abstraction, something that exists only in the minds of people.

So it might make sense to think about a range of outcomes instead. When we consider our goals and our visions of the future, it’ll be useful to think in terms of scenarios and to actually be rigorous in thinking about them. It is useful to consider if you want to be a manager, what are the conditions to fulfill it, how it would look like in terms of your family life, your friendships and relationships. If we think of our goals in the isolated way in a single dimension, we will never be able to grasp its implication in other dimensions of life.

By thinking of scenarios in a more complete manner where you look at the various goals and the claim on your resources, you can better think appreciate the “chances” of realising some of your vision. Because quite likely, they can be mutually incompatible.

I pondered about what innovation means to us practically and psychologically. And the implications for individuals stepping out into the world is huge. We have been trained by the education system to keep getting better along the same dimensions or at least along the pathways that are given to us. But that is the sort of incremental improvement that is not really innovation.

Innovative individuals probably won’t be efficient or “the best” by measures that are already established. But they can create and invent new ways, new measures to approach the same problem. We can improve along existing out outcomes we care about by working on different areas, using a system engineering approach. Or we can decide that we want to target a different outcome instead, having exhausted the gains in the dimensions we previously worked on.

Take fuel economy of a car for example; traditionally, the internal combustion engine have enjoyed incremental improvements through better design of combustion chamber, the way the torque is produced and the design of the axes etc. But when it comes to electric cars, the electric motors tend to be already quite efficient so fuel economy improvements are achieved through making the car body with lighter materials and reducing the weight of the batteries, improving the battery capacity and ability to hold charge, or to discharge more efficiently and so on.

On the other hand, road safety has been traditionally improved through encouraging safer driving, being stringent about what happens in the cars (no texting, putting on seatbelts), as well as road design, traffic signs, etc. Most of these gains are exhausted already. But we know it can be remarkably improved through widespread coordination of autonomous driving systems. The difficulty is for us to finetune the technology and get authorities to eventually allow the adoption.

But all of these points to the fact that being better involves being different. It can start with exploring the fringes of status quo and picking something that resonates with you to work on.

Do you think a sense of satisfaction in all you do is a right or a privilege? Do you expect to receive satisfaction or do you seek to find it? At work if you only expect to feel satisfied but not try to find it, you’ll be bitter against the boss, your colleagues and clients. In relationships, the same attitude can drain the joy out of simple moments.

Time to realise that finding satisfaction is our own responsibility. And the good news is that it can be found in the simplest places and things. It is about working out the story in our head for what we do, and being aware of our hedonic adaptation. What we found exhilarating probably won’t be the same after 5 times of doing it.

Thinking of reasons for your dissatisfaction may not be as useful as recognising satisfaction is something to be hunted down and found. It requires a high degree of introspection. And it is not up to someone else to give it to you!

Responsibility without authority burns people out. Nurses who care for patients but have little means of controlling the pain and comfort of those they care for will be drained. Likewise the social worker who tries to help those disenfranchised but gets flooded with paper work and a mammoth system to navigate. And the public servant who is sent to “help” members of the public, or small businesses, but are given few tools that really can be used to benefit those truly in need.

We all burn out when we feel and are made to feel responsible for things which we do not have control over. In many sense, corporates confronting sustainability targets can feel that way. They’ve been consuming energy from the grid and traditional sources of power they don’t realise they have the authority or control even when they feel responsible for carbon footprint. They will have to start looking to take control of the way they produce the products, and consume the energy, as well as be more conscious about who they work with across the supply chain.

The decarbonisation movement isn’t just about mimicry or words put out in the public, it is a reflection of taking leadership over what a firm has been doing to be able to provide things of value. Because as the economy is pivoting, if you are just trying to make a living by being a copycat, it’s only going to keep getting harder. Taking responsibility for sustainability is kind, but taking control is effective.