Category Archives: Life

Having spent more than the first years of my career deeply involved in infrastructure investments and looking at infrastructure developments in the emerging markets, I was incredibly moved by this video on the living bridges of Meghalaya on this BBC programme.

When I think about the type of investments made by private sector or by government into infrastructure meant to benefit communities and how these infrastructures were built and maintained, we leverage a lot on the power of markets, especially financial incentives, and various instruments. After all, IFC and World Bank had for a long time thought about maximising finance for development. Yet there are so many other instruments that various cultures have evolved which we miss out in our zeal to develop.

Coaxing nature to direct its relentlessness towards growth that benefit humans is perhaps one really important area that we as modern humans have not really adopted as a sort of proven innovation to develop ourselves. And I think the idea of nature-based solutions should be wrapping its mind around these sort of examples and innovations already present in the world right now.

It’s almost been two full years since I started this website with my own domain name. Of course, it doesn’t look like it because this blog contains stuff I wrote as far back as 2009 (when I was nearing the end of my National Service); but most of those content were imported from my previous website. On my blog there is ultimately 3 sets of posts; the ones that were from 2009-2014, when I ran ERPZ.net, and then 2015-2020 when I had my own personal wordpress blog.

Then, about 6 months after I registered the domain, I started writing daily from 3 January 2021. It’s been more than a year now and it has been amazing how I’ve been able to keep up with this habit. Writing keeps me thinking and helps me to think clearly than if I had only held my thoughts up in my mind. This site have also been storing up resources I’ve created for my coaching practice.

So I’m glad to say that I’ll be renewing the domain and carrying on with this work.

I’ve encountered many different kinds of clients who approach us to perform market studies. There are those who are more conservative and looking at studying the success of others, so they can replicate the success. They are not necessarily trying to outdo the incumbents, just recognising that the market is growing and they can get a slice of the pie.

There are others who are looking at markets that does not yet exists; areas where others believe doesn’t work, either due to lack of regulatory structure, some previous beliefs about costs. They will say ‘don’t tell me about it being impossible, I want to understand why it hasn’t work, and what is not working’. We would try and understand what are the missing pieces, what is within the control of the market players, what else needs to happen for the market to take off, for it to work.

In the areas of infrastructure and energy, people tend to look towards the government. So when there’s lack of regulation, they might think it’ll be a no-go. But market leaders think differently, they are looking not at the competition, but the problems at hand: what stands in the way of the market working? It is not about shortcuts through imitation, nor finding ‘success stories’; it is about solving problems and sorting out the fundamentals.

Are you thinking like a market leader? What is setting you apart?

So I’m rather interested in the Stuart Kirk saga not just by virtue of my job, my sense of mission and my interests but also because of another insight about the situation in financial industry through that presentation.

It reflects that the finance industry is still considerably dettached from the struggle on climate change. And regulations will have to bite them harder, or the pricing of externalities, and so on. The disclosure and reporting required by authorities is precisely one of the ways that allows the finance industry to influence climate outcomes; but I guess Stuart Kirk was actually deliberately being ironic about it.

If you go through this presentation closely, you’ll notice to some extent that he is actually mocking the traditional frameworks of analysis and approaches towards trying to convince investors to lend a hand to do something about climate by talking about the potential losses. Well, the sheer uncertainty around the climate impact (eg. various impacts cancelling each other out) will of course encourage skepticism, but that’s honestly missing the point.

The point is that finance has a role in shaping our future, one that involves a combination of climate change mitigation and also adaptation, and if we don’t start measuring these attributes and the impact of our financial decisions on these attributes, we are at risk – not financially but physically. A single war may not destroy the global economy, but it can destroy a single economy, and many lives. To measure and look at our lives through just the financial markets is a grave mistake.

My colleague alerted me to this recent judgment in Singapore of a man accused of drug trafficking. It made me think and wonder quite how we conceptualise, construct and then attribute culpability.

In many sense, our laws tries its best to identify evidence disinguishing intention from the outcome when it comes to crimes. This is why there is a difference between murder and manslaughter. So there is some kind of penalty both in terms of intent and outcome; and they compound.

Now the point is that intention is hard to tell; if a person fails to achieve an outcome, it is not always easy to be able to demonstrate his intentions. On the other hand, it can be hard to think that an outcome wasn’t driven by some kind of intent. And there is the intent that is long-developed and the one that emerges on the fly. They are all different.

So to what extent do we take responsibility? When we consume electricity from the grid, are we responsible for the emissions that were produced in generating the power? What if we tried to switch to green electricity but the solar panels aren’t generating so we are consuming from the grid? Who should be responsible of making sure supply chains are free of corruption and exploitation? Is the ability to shoulder responsibility based on financial capacity? Knowledge? Or other resources?

At the end of the day, if we managed to reduce our carbon footprint to zero as individuals and yet our fellow man continues to emit and eventually climate changes and affects all of us, are we being held culpable for a crime we didn’t commit and an outcome we did not intend?

In Christianity, the whole idea of differentiating meekness from weakness is a very big theme because meekness is a very important attribute of Jesus Christ and his followers. He taught in Matthew 5, “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”

For me, this distinction that is often overlooked by everyone outside the context of Christianity except perhaps for a few linguist and people particular about the precision of their use of language. So meekness continues to be confused with the personality of being somewhat timid, soft-spoken, and lack of covert expression.

As Christians, we recognise meekness actually takes a lot more strength and power than being someone who is strong and mighty. Because meekness involves withholding of strength. The restraint that is exercised, silently behind the will of a person requires a lot more than the raw might in expression of anger or hatred. Think about another picture: Is it easier for you to pick up a tiny piece of ant and move it to another place or simply to crush it?

When you recognise that meekness is actually great strength, it unlocks a lot of clarity in what you want to cultivate in your character and personality as you grow. At the same time, it changes radically what kind of behaviour you respect and value in the context of work and relationships.

Have you ever decided you would have the Roast Chicken on the menu but then changed your mind and chose the Rump steak plus an extra side when you realised that someone else is picking the tab on your meal? Or chose a larger capacity iPhone than the one you had originally picked after discovering your company has this $200 subsidy on mobile phones that you could tap into? Wait, what if it was your Mum who offered to buy you the phone?

So we do realise that our choices are affected by who is paying. Naturally, because we try to balance our own cost and benefits. So to a large extent, the economists are right about utility, and thereby trying to derive demand from there. But it also means that all the purchases around gift-giving actually is not allocative efficient. At the same time, it is often also not efficient for companies to spend on behalf of employees for certain benefits (though it is for other benefits such as insurance).

Beyond the thought about efficiency, is the point about what you’re actually consuming and whether it is good for you. If Amazon pays Google for the search you are performing, should you be concerned about your consumption behaviours being influenced? Are you not the one paying for the search somehow in other ways? Are they intentional? Are they efficient or beneficial to you as an individual?

There are many cliches about being like water, filling the container you are in, according to its shape, being able to shape landscapes without pushing hard against, flowing along the path of least resistance. Except they are largely true about the attributes of water. The question is what does it look like for us to be ‘like water’.

Personally, I’d say it’s cognitive flexibility, the ability to basically change gears when reality calls for it. And it is not just about the speed you are travelling, but also how you’re travelling, the mode of transport, the exact vehicle you are in, the people you’re riding with. The ability to embrace reality so radically that it is not a sigh of resignation but as if welcoming an unexpected guest with some measure of exuberance.

Our expectations and ability to anticipate works incredibly well when we are often put in life-threatening environments – they save us from harm and keeps us alive. And they also work well in a stable world where routine reigns, and the same scenarios or circumstances recur. That’s why the best assumption to make while forecasting (if you don’t know better) is that things will stay pretty much the same. The struggle is when reality shifts, and you’re up against reality. When things don’t work out as you expected. How quick are you to drop your expectations and go with the flow?

The modern world demands that you get better at that. Not just superficially. Not the fake smile and polite pretensions when the unexpected guest turns up. But actually enjoying this new company, and being unburdened by the plans previously made.

What do you think creates value? What is the difference between short term and long term value? Is value what makes us thrive or does thriving define what value represents? What our economy does in the present way of measuring output and product as value, is that it takes natural resources, labour, and capital to combine them and create value – mostly to people, sometimes to animals, plants and on rare occasions, to the environment.

At the end of the day, the system incentivises us to somewhat sacrifice the planet to feed and satisfy ourselves. The climate change as an impending catastrophe is just a type of warning sign for how we have structured our economy and to get us to think about how to rewire it. Pricing carbon is just a means of incorporating some kind of costs into our consideration. And there are many other taxes and tools we need to consider.

Our goal at the end of the day is to really cut back on harmful practices and ways of satisfying ourselves that is systematically taking out more than what we put back into the environment (including the rate by which nature is able to recover itself). Are we getting there yet? Probably it’ll be some kind of harmonic cycle, as with nature and systems that works along thresholds. But what I know is that our definition of what exactly is value, and what gives value, will be a key to getting there.

Recently my laptop broke down. It was a Macbook Pro I’ve been using for close to seven and a half years. But for some reason, it just stopped working and got into some crazy restarting loop which didn’t even allow me to start MacOS Recovery. I might get it fixed some time but I didn’t have sufficient bandwidth to wait at a Genius Bar or the ability to wait for the laptop to come back before I work again (on my own stuff, not my job at Enea).

So I quickly made up my mind that I’ll get a new laptop but something second-hand. Probably lightly used so that I can stretch more life out of the laptop. And I did, through Carousell; the options and choices were more limited than having to choose at an Apple Store but most of these options like ‘Space Grey’ or ‘Rose Gold’ doesn’t matter to me at all. The specs that matters such as harddisk space and RAM were all clear and I could just find something that would suffice.

The effort then is focused on finding a reasonable price, and that the laptop is lightly used (as somewhat defined by the charge cycles that the battery has been through). I managed to find the laptop quickly and agree on a quick deal with the seller. I thought it was a win-win since the seller didn’t actually need the computer anymore and I needed one that I can work with, without being necessarily the newest, latest product.

On a separate note, I always wonder what ‘pre-loved’ was implying. That the product had been loved before? Or it has yet been loved? These new marketing gimmicky terms are confusing.