Category Archives: Life

When I read about the stories Adrian Tan shared with Lianhe Zaobao recently, I was almost moved to tears – perhaps also due to the awareness that he lost his mum to cancer earlier and is currently fighting cancer himself. I resonated with his experience when I first went to Chinese High myself. My parents didn’t have to pull any strings to get me there but they did do their part in emphasizing the importance of a good education (though not so much the results), and encouraged me to explore my intellectual interests.

Like how ACS changed the life of Adrian, Chinese High changed my life too. I didn’t feel too competitive in school but I never felt like I was an outsider despite the fact that the students who got to the school were mostly from Nanyang Primary while I was from an unknown neighbourhood school. I made friends, I participated in activities with the rest in school. I didn’t do any better or worse than my classmates. I didn’t have additional tuition or music instrument classes compared to my classmates, but it’s okay. I got into an Arts programme in school and spent so much time in the arts studio slogging away on my arts project. I developed my confidence, awareness of the world, politics, sensitivity to culture, work ethic.

For me, education was indeed a leveller. And though I missed out on further opportunities that a more privileged background would have afforded me, I’m really grateful. It was being in Chinese High and around people who had huge ambitions and big aspirations to change the world that drove me to aspire the same. And that was also what granted me access to scholarship applications, one of which eventually landed me in LSE and NYU.

Yet I’m not sure if Singaporeans today had that same access as me if they were from my background. I’m concerned there are greater disparities between the performance of students from better backgrounds compared to those who don’t. This is a reflection of greater and more intense reinvestment of the privileged family in securing educational advantages for their progeny. It is only natural; but the society will really have to try and even out the playing field more.

Or the cubby hole. Or lockers. Whatever.

As humans, status roles and desire for affiliation drives a lot of our behaviour. These are the two fundamental drivers that typically underlie Seth Godin’s thinking and ideas about humans and most phenomena in the market and societies. Both of those ideas involves some categorization of grouping of some kind. A taxonomy if you may. Within our minds at least.

Status roles are driven by some ideas of dimensions, some basis by which to compare. How much more money, talents, capabilities, or recognition. The values that matters, they are in a bucket. The values that don’t are in another and hardly even thought about. You’re putting attributes into pigeonholes of different labels and kinds.

Affiliation is once again about groupings. Wanting to be in one bucket rather than another. Only this time, you’re putting people and yourself into pigeonholes. You actually want to be occupying a hole.

What if we can no longer compare. And when everything is just moving around rather than being in neat, tidy drawers? What happens when things or people tries to defy the pigeonhole? Does it cause anxiety? Or creates peace?

Why would we rely on companies’ goodwill and marketing desires to drive environmental, social and governance goals? Why don’t we as a society go out the push these agenda upon them? After all, we did the same with labour laws, we also regulate the release of harmful substance into the air or water bodies. There are more draconian and extensive rules around. The financial markets might look like they will survive climate change. But not human lives. Especially not the ones whose livelihood and critical infrastructure depends on stable environment.

There is a huge crack in the system and it is going to cause a great deal of pain if we try to fix it. This pain is in terms of profits; but we know it is also going to cause a greater deal of pain, agony and anguish to many lives, and a future that is ahead of us. Yet for some reason, we are willing to safeguard profits at the expense of a future. We think the profit can buy us safeguards – what form, I’m not exactly sure about.

A green economy requires external intervention and it is not going to come about naturally. Sure, it will be quite difficult to gain societal consensus around these issues and things. Most of the population may not be well-aware of the issues at hand enough to actually support some of these reforms or policy changes. Others whose profits and livelihood are impacted may question the wisdom of these. Public education and creating awareness is just as important – we’ve done that with hand-washing and encouraging public hygiene, we have moved people from kampongs (villages) into high-rise public housing in a single generation, and we have turned Singapore from Third World to First in just about 25-30 years.

We can make this transition to a green economy.

You can’t solve a problem you aren’t willing to have.

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

I know of a workplace a person close to me work at. They are essentially supposed to perform innovation and the staff are trained in design thinking. And yet the struggles of the staff there are unthinkable.

They spend some time hunting around for problem statements. And I think one of the biggest challenge is that they spend more time choosing the problems to solve rather than trying to deeply characterise them. As a result, they had a cohort of staff spending a lot of time and resources on problems which eventually appeared to be unsolvable. That then led on to the management trying to steer the team towards scoping down problems to smaller, manageable types.

What started out as a culture that was supposed to be more candid, fun and open became full of tension and sensitivity. People were afraid to voice real problems; and elephants started to appear in rooms, chats, and zooms. Issues were being skirted around. Indeed, if one is unwilling to have a particular problem, one will never be able to solve it.

I was visiting a part of Singapore where there was a new MRT station but a small population of residents around that station. I expressed that it was such a waste of taxpayer’s money to build a station there when hardly anyone lived there and yet the cost of the station is borne by the population. On the other hand, there were amenities which were not built in more densely populated locations in Singapore where it would be needed and served way more people.

Then it dawned on me that if you have the transport node in place, the value of the land surrounding it would rise and any further developments in the area would be more valuable. The government being the main land owner around the new MRT station in this sleepy village would eventually benefit from the land sales. So in some sense, it was ‘investing’ in the taxpayer’s money for the future.

But to a certain extent, this argument mean that there’s probably no point building or serving the places where you’re originally extracting taxes from because those taxpayers would be the ones benefiting disproportionately from the developments rather than the government. I wonder how this calculus works. Public finance is actually such a fascinating topic worth more public awareness and public education on.

I think it’s such a pity that when budget of the government is presented, the things that catches people’s attention is mostly about what sort of handout or welfare benefits are coming along and for who. There’s insufficient attention placed on how much is spent on what infrastructure, where they are going to be, who they are going to serve and why. The common man should know, and should be questioning these.

A few days back I wrote about my observations in Primark. There are simply products that needs to roll off shelves as soon as they are put on it for the business to work well and stay successful. And pricing contributes significantly to that.

Near my place, there’s always been a hot food stall that sells affordable hot breakfast food (for those who knows, it’s an economic bee hoon stall); they are incredibly successful with long queues every morning and they usually sell out right before or during lunch time. They start as early as 5.30am, and queues start forming from 6-6.30am. Unfortunately, some time late last year, they sold their business to another larger food company that runs multiple food stalls in neighbourhood coffeeshops. I heard it was because one of the proprietors fell sick.

In any case, after the company took over the business, they retained some of the previous partners but raised prices after renovating the stall. The food were not different but then because queues stopped forming, the food items were left on the display longer. As a result, they were less tasty, which reduced demand further.

Just by raising the price, the stall suffered a double whammy, the original model of selling made-in-time hot food broke down. The hot food stall became a mediocre stall in the coffeeshop. There are just some models of business that requires low prices; this is good for both the proprietor and the target pool of customers. When one considers raising prices, one must recognise that the pricing is part of the overall business model.

When I consult with businesses about various different new trends or emerging technologies in energy transition, there’s always the inevitable question of costs and when they will come down. For greener fuels in particular, there’s always the cost comparison against the usual fossil fuels. At the same time, for green electricity, there’s always the comparison against the grid.

I’d remind them that we have to be prepared that despite the learning curves and technological improvements, the cost may not come down sufficiently. In other words cost of the new greener technology may not be able to match the current cost of the traditional, more carbon-intensive technology.

But yet they might reach parity for other reasons. First, carbon price through taxes or emissions trading can raise the cost of the more traditional technology. Second, as players start switching towards the greener technology, there may be a reduction in scale economies for the traditional technology that also increases its costs. Finally, the producer of the legacy technology may also diversify their business towards the greener technology in face of public pressure which would make it costlier for those who need to find replacements for legacy components or parts.

Or there may be other problems and external issues that upset the current economics. The best example is the energy crisis around the world now with shortage of natural gas. It is almost artificially created but not any less real. And people are scrambling in fact to develop more solar capacity; and also faced with rising costs because of global supply chain bottlenecks.

Surprising but energy transition is being accelerated by rising prices.

It was interesting to frame an asteroid collision with earth as an analogy for climate change crisis in Don’t look up; but it is apparently a real potential disaster in itself and people at NASA are working on ways to deal with such crisis.

One of the points I learnt from the article is how it was actually difficult to realise there were pieces of rocks being hurled at us because of blindspots. And this mean we can discover them too late, probably in way shorter time frames than what was conceived in the movie.

And of course, if we are willing to spend that investment and work on defending earth from asteroids, let us also work out how to finance all that we need to do to defend earth from climate change as much as possible.

Real courage is being afraid but doing it anyways.

Oprah Winfrey

So there is really no such thing as really feeling brave; if anything it’s probably feeling some anxiety, and the tension of having to somehow suppress that and take action. And courage isn’t always about the big things or taking big actions. It can be just saying no. Or overcoming some internal resistance to take a small action.

But isn’t taking courage at odds with seeking security? Our desire to conquer nature in part stems from the desire to seek security. And so are the tendencies natural to us such as the desire for association, or even seeking some degree of security in social status. Where then would courage come from? How does it start? How does it form or take root? And how does it translate into action?

Courage probably isn’t exactly ever independent of the action taken that allows us to ascribe courage to someone. Courage is probably not something mustered within us as we describe in language. It exists not as a quantity but perhaps more as a description of the combination of action and circumstances. The thoughts and abilities to lead to courage then involves a story that we tell ourselves, one that takes down the desire for security, that disputes that instinct to be ‘safe’. A story that actually gives us something greater we yearn for in taking action.

There are shortcuts when outcomes and objectives are not properly articulated. Shortcuts can represent exploiting loopholes in terms of scoping the objectives. But they can also represent taking advantage of gaps in an establish system. Or perhaps, they are just a more direct path that is not yet obvious to the majority.

What comes to mind for you when you consider a shortcut? Is it about skipping steps? Or being able to achieve perfection on the first attempt? Or are you thinking about loopholes and how they are exploited? If a shortcut was offered to you, would you ask what’s the caveat? Or would you just jump at it?

So what are we trying to achieve when we even consider taking a shortcut? The shortcut is called that because it allows you to use less time, resources, energies to arrive at what you think is your goal, your objective. That can mean your original plan was sub-optimal, or that you’ve missed out something. Often the shortcut means some kind of savings. Or perhaps some kind of invisible (/deferred) costs? What is the catch? Is it really worth it?