Category Archives: Life

By the age of fourteen, having discovered Wikipedia after living for slightly less than a decade on a diet of several different encyclopedias, I decided that I should want to be a polymath. My life will have to be split into various stages where I undertake different studies and specialties, with the goal of advancing my knowledge and understanding of all kinds of different fields – mainly in science and mathematics.

Yet at the same time, I was deeply involved in the arts; having practised Chinese Calligraphy, dabbled with western paintings, digital graphic design, animation and film. I also read various literature and philosophy extensively and had an interest developed in history by the age of sixteen. It was clear I needed to be a polymath and nothing less because there was so much to learn and I wanted to cram all of it into whatever short life I have.

The ability to study economics at LSE was an important step when I was planning my college education. In fact, my college admissions essay was about my fascination with Newtonian Physics juxtaposed with my interest in the arts and philosophy – the compulsion to choose a course for my university degree drove me to economics. Not because it made the most money (no it didn’t, at least not during my time), but because it seemed to me that economics sat in the Nexus of arts and science, being called a social science.

The thing is that once I embarked on economics, a career in the business of infrastructure and energy, another force took hold and the practicalities of having to develop skills that generated decent income occupied my attention. So instead of being a polymath, I became more of a trivia nerd who can rattle off random general knowledge about a whole bunch of topics across different disciplines.

My recent reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seem to have reawakened this dream of being a polymath. Perhaps it would be worth devoting more of myself towards a new path.

Pioneering work is messy and not as glamorous as one might have thought. The first Prime Minister of independent Singapore Lee Kuan Yew was personally extremely concerned with the cleaning up of Singapore River because there was such a stench surrounding it that he personally supervised some of the clean-up. The clean-up later extended to other water bodies which eventually provided some degree of water catchment even in urban areas, securing more water supply for our island nation.

Yet caring about the dirty stuff, and doing the things that may not have been popular nor attractive was absolutely critical to pioneering work. Devoting oneself singularly to some vision of the future and bashing ahead without being entangled by the nitty gritty concerns of the smaller goals along the way is what makes one pioneering. In the passage to reaching the lofty goals, there would be a wake of destruction. Managing that destruction can be part of pioneering work but often it is left to someone else.

Typically it is long after the lofty goals have been achieved that we can sit down and try to clear up the destruction, or compensate those who have really suffered along the way. Such reorganisation of the society and markets comes by after a system perpetuated over decades accumulate lots of errors and they threaten to undermine the system itself. The Singapore River delivered a great deal of prosperity to Singapore and was providing opportunities to a great number of people, families and small businesses. It takes courage, vision and faith in an alternate reality to disrupt those activities and try to transform the Singapore River to what it is today.

The question is as we celebrate our 57th year of nationhood, are we prepared to recognise the areas where we truly need to rework and transform, then bite the bullet to do it?

Sometimes I almost feel that getting into a job role means you can never quite just operate within your own practice and trust it to deliver results. There is always a need to reference what was done before, to look at reference successes and to replicate them. The most capable employees tend to be the ones who seem to be on that kind of trail, being able to replicate successes or to scale that up.

Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, tend to appear as though they succeed because they dared to try something new or to solve problems in different way, or to simply see things that others did not see and captured that opportunity.

It is not so easy to be an entrepreneur within a job role. After all, there is probably a good reason one is choosing to be an employee instead. And that relates in part to the mediocrity that organisations lead people towards by trying to standardize, optimise, and make human management efficient. Because of salary bands, bonus pools and other industry standard management tools, people are nudged into conforming to some kind of common denominator.

So the first step as an individual contributor is to step out of that conforming, and to develop a practice you can trust in, regardless of what the organisation tries to conform others to. And if you do not succeed in that within the organisation, step out and prove your practice works. Entrepreneurship is often more about courage and self-discovery it seems – more than wealth and success.

A recent conversation with a Private Equity investor mentioned that there is a dearth of strong human capital in Indonesia. And her experience seemed to be that there were many people who worked a couple of months for Gojek or Tokopedia, or other brand name startups were going around expecting high salaries. They learnt to speak and use words that were common amongst the high power startups but provided little value or capabilities to their prospective employers.

It made me think about how often we develop real capabilities rather than learn to imitate ability. When I first joined the workforce and talked about topics on water treatment or subsequently about power generation, I was walking largely on thin ice and was just passing on knowledge I picked up from the internet or just speaking to one or two others in the industry. Within six months, I began being conversant even through I had little idea what I was talking about. I felt more like I was part of the industry but not quite sure what I gained were real understanding or knowledge. Or just the skills to mimic.

Maybe most of us developed this way. But I think we can forget that we need to move from feigning knowledge to having real knowledge. After all, while it is true that in schools, you only need to know what to do in exams to get the right grades, in order to solve real world problems, you do actually have to really understand the actual concepts and dig deep. Our modern complex world with its market systems, bureaucracy and layers of working relationships sometimes allows us to ride on others’ capabilities to deal with problems, but eventually we can’t go by without fundamentals. So please don’t count on imitation.

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.

But of course, without the top you can’t have any sides. It’s the top that defines the sides.

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

I’ve been reading Robert Pirsig. His writings are deep and he did live a fascinating life as well not to mention all that he has had to suffer for his intellectual and philosophical genius. He truly thought deep into ideas and extended them in ways I have not seen many modern man do. And it takes some kind of mind, lifestyle and disposition to do that.

I think he offered by far the most compelling argument for life not being about winning competitions and reaching goals; and recognizing that the process to the goals stand out as even more significant than reaching the goals themselves. This significance gives life its meaning and depth.

We all intuitively kind of know that. Which is why no matter how satisfying reaching some sort of goal we had previously set for ourselves can be, we know it doesn’t last. We may know it only when we experienced it or we may know it before hand. Yet it was hard not to just choose to reach the goal, because it seemed to be what was making life worth living. Pirsig on the other hand, saw that most of us are so caught up with those goals that we lose sight of the process to get there and how valuable that process is. And how much each step of the way player is really what makes up our lives in and of themselves – significant events with their own merits.

Corporate environments and bureaucracies breed mediocrity. Because they need to be fair, create standardisations, benchmarks that compresses people into narrow dimensions by which they are assessed. It is part of the industrial complex to commoditise things and so they do the same to people, calling them a resource. Something to be mined, to be consumed and used up.

But it can be good news for those truly mediocre. You can hide behind those standardisation, those benchmarks and do the minimum, just below the firing line. And you get by. Yet for most of us, there is a tension in playing this part. We feel like frauds who will be found out one day; we think about justifying our salaries – and it usually seem to involve doing more mediocre stuff. Like complying to processes, passing along the paperwork, routing information to the right people.

Over time, the tension entrenches resentment, and people leave. Only the shamelessly mediocre stays. And by that compounding effect, the organisation gradually sinks into mediocrity. They are saved perhaps only by their mission and vision statement, by being able to continually attract the capable and milking them before they become jaded.

So are you shamelessly mediocre or shamefully mediocre? Perhaps it is time to work to create the future you want to live in. To do work that makes a difference rather than just make a living.

I always wondered why Occam’s Razor was named such. With the name of the thinker or philosopher, I understand, but why ‘razor’? It bothered me but not enough for me to check the explanation for that. The wikipedia explanation I checked was:

“In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate (“shave off”) unlikely explanations for a phenomenon, or avoid unnecessary actions.”

That’s pretty interesting but I think it is important to recognise the nature of such conceptual ‘knives’ more significantly. We all weld some kind of knives in our minds and these are what allows us to make statements like ‘There are two kinds of people in this world’. These conceptual knives allows us to use various concepts, which can be abstract ideas, to slice the world up. Of course not the physical world, but the one that is reconstructed in our minds. Almost like a twin of the world but not quite (notion of a ‘digital twin’ is a useful analogy for this).

And by applying the knives to the world, we are able to develop ideas farther and dissect matters far more than we can do if we just physically try to cut things up or separate things. When we make decisions, apply filters, screen things, select goods and services, choose people to hang out or events to attend, we are welding our mental knives.

In the physical realm, we ought to be careful whenever we are holding some kind of knives. Especially sharp ones; and it is usually the sharp knife that performs its function best. But along with its function, it can also have potential to cause harm. The same can be said for our mental knives. So are you welding it carefully?

Adam Smith is often credited to have ‘founded’ economics as a discipline – he was a moral philosopher himself and discovered working principles of division labour and trade as a mechanism for the delivery of goods and services to people. And the efficiency of the ‘market’ became an important part of his explanation for the wealth of nations. Whilst the market is an important component of the foundation of the discipline, economics is much more than that.

At the heart of economics is the power of incentives, even small ones when amplified many times over across different sectors, activities, markets. They get stitched up across the world and underlies the global economy. But that’s not necessarily the biggest deal. Because the collective incentive power delivered both good and bad, and while we understood a lot of the good, there’s still a lot of opportunities to articulate the bad and try to introduce mechanisms or ways to deal with them.

The mechanisms can leverage on the power of incentives, not necessarily in the form of markets. Subsidies and taxes are powerful incentives or disincentives. How and where to get the resources to fund public initiative is the matter of public economics which is not entirely about the market. We need to understand better the way other non-market elements amplify the power of markets – and this is the world of institutional economics.

Today, the financial markets and financial economics is in vogue because of the sheer amount of money and wealth in it. But if we start seeing economics as a discipline not for the money but for making lives better, we ought to look elsewhere, and far beyond the markets.

We often look at market-driven outcomes and claim that is what the market wants and we are all good. That can be case with obscene inequalities, or when some stupid useless cute looking product goes viral. Or even when we emit carbon dioxide through our industrial process and transformation of energy forms in our economy.

When we allow the market mechanism to reign, we ought to be clear what we are trying to achieve in the first place. We know the market achieves efficient allocation, but based on what? Should our lives be just about taking action to satisfy the demand and utility of mankind?

Perhaps we have forgotten there is a greater system out there that our economy interacts with, the lives of people, the beliefs we hold, the discoveries we are trying to make, the environments that we live in. Does it really make sense to be just feeding the market whatever we think it wants? There are already things we determined markets are off-limits; and we have alternative models for them – can’t we be more open about exploring non-market models?

I had two friends, across different industries, operating in different markets share similar stories about their recent experience with the recruitment process of different companies. In both cases, they were applying to a particular vacancy or were introduced to it by someone inside. They had been given clear indications of their interest in the role but the company decided to put them up for selection for another role instead without being entirely upfront that those other roles were significantly different and not going to meet their salary requirements.

They went through multiple rounds with the companies and took time to prepare for each rounds. When they eventually were given offers or clearer indication of what the job they were interviewing for actually entailed, they immediately tried to withdraw their application or stop the process. It was as though the HR who took in their information, salary requirements and interest in the roles were turning a deaf ear to the requirement.

There was no reason for that kind of bait-and-switch tactic. One of the hiring manager actually took time to try and convince my friend to take on a lower level job, even offering for him to drop by for an unpaid “two-day apprenticeship”. None of these makes any kind of sense for these friends of mine. The failure of HR in Asia is really atrocious and I deeply welcome the tighter labour markets as a means for companies to embrace automation and to learn to respect people.