Category Archives: Life

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.

I am sometimes guilty of trying to be efficient all the time. Yet things will always take time to be better. In fact, sometimes the goal of efficiency undermines being able to do something effectively because we are stingy about the time or resources that we have to spend – in service of efficiency.

Yet when I put on my artist hat, I cease to consider efficiency. Sure, there may be deadlines for my painting or Chinese calligraphy works but there is no need to rush through the creative process. Putting some time constraints can improve the works but more often than not, the hurried mood is counterproductive.

Same with cultivating and building relationships. Or growing, gardening, bearing fruits. These things all take time. Question is, are you taking the time? Or just trying to move on to the next thing.

You need to say something but you couldn’t. The body begins to feel the tension of those words and thoughts stuck in you mouth. At first they were words unexpressed, then they become thoughts suppressed. And finally when they are pushed out of your consciousness, they just stay in your body as the tension. This tension stresses your system and if sufficiently severe, causes pain.

So that is how your body spoke on your behalf. Are you ignoring any pain? What was the body speaking, perhaps on your behalf?

I’ve been writing random thoughts about HR for a long time now. The traditional HR was about stewardship of company policy, complying with labour laws; and we all know it is broken, in need of change. Recently, I considered a few building blocks; on the labour side, desire to work is changing quite a bit. And then there’s an alternative way of thinking about our work identities in the form of projects rather than employers and roles.

On the supply side, I think it is important to note that the traditional HR is actually absolutely unnecessary. Long ago, I’ve noticed how Octopus Energy did away with their HR function and the truth is that people can organise themselves pretty well without too much fuss. Do we really need to standardise some of these things? Like working hours, like dress code, etc.? Aren’t these relics of the factory age? If you’re able to hire for a combination of capabilities and fit, why would you still need to constrain your people?

From my experience, the capabilities and progressiveness of the HR can really make a difference in terms of how strong your staff can be in terms of delivering on the objectives of your organisation. For most part, the policies of a company can undermine the work of staff severely; and often during these times, we lose sight of what those policies were for to begin with. HR 2.0 should be combating that urge to introduce more constraints whenever there are abuses. In fact, the hiring decisions are really what needs to be improved when these things happen.

How many of you admire and aspire to be in your boss’ place? For most in this generation, that no longer is something that happens; we don’t really want our boss’ jobs, their responsibilities or their challenges. The idea is to find one’s own path to walk on. The shift in labour markets and the corporate world away from lifelong employment and traditional corporate careers will continue to shift. I foresee that within the next decade, corporate structures will continue to break down further such that work becomes increasingly like freelance type arrangements.

Rather than having departments, managers and traditional ways of splitting up firms, the corporate environment becomes a mini marketplace in itself where the employees goes around looking for others with the right set of skills and experience to take on projects together. This is especially the case for more creative and innovative industries.

The value of working for a company then is no longer the corporate or career ladders to climb. Companies can no longer pay someone low in exchange for the promise of nurturing them towards their potential; they will simply have to pay for the work they require. This is because the labour force is no longer interested in scaling in an organisation; rather, it is about contributing in the manner that suits them, in the interest of the organisation, with a fair value and wage being paid to them.

I was back on reservist and had an interesting short conversation with one of the new friends I made there in camp. We were talking about the lack of seasons in Singapore and how that affected our sense of time. He talked about how when he was abroad, people were making plans according to seasons; taking a summer break, going skiing during the winter, visiting certain gardens in spring and so on. And in most cases, it was so stark for us to miss our catch-ups with family and friends when seasons were passing that we are extremely aware of the time that has past.

For example, as winter passes, there’s no way we can go skiing anymore until long later; so we know there are those natural deadlines for life. But in Singapore, the deadlines for work looms so much larger than other seasonal deadlines. For festivals or occasions, they are just that, and feels almost completely arbitrary with no clear sense of seasonal context. Christmas is at the end of the year but there are no snow, no coldness, no need for fireplaces or more lights to spruce up the place whilst the sun set earlier.

I found this a better way of understanding why the passage of time seem to pass so differently in Singapore than when I was overseas. It is easier for me to recall what I was doing towards the end of summer in 2012 (while I was in UK) than what happened in August of 2018. Seasons do really make so much of a different in our experience of life that we should perhaps learn to differentiate the subtle aspects of weather patterns in Singapore and get a better sense of appreciation for the passage of time we experience.

I previously mentioned about this matrix introduced by a boss I used to work under. I’ve produced graphical representation of it. And I think this is an extremely elegant way of understanding the difference between strategy and tactics. You can be misguided by your abilities in one dimension and fooled into thinking that is the most important but both are as important.

Though in today’s world, people are biased towards paying more for people who are able to think strategically, it is likely because getting strategy wrong just puts you in such a mediocre position. On the other hand, if your tactics are mediocre while strategy is great, there might be some slim chance of doing fine.

Either way, the purpose of this post is once again to remind ourselves that strategy and tactics are both required and it’s important when we think about our careers, and job-seeking, that we not only try to beef up our CV, write nice cover letters and apply all kinds of tactics you can find online. But perhaps more importantly, you need to think through the strategy of the job fit and the role you actually want to do.

The framework I’ve developed for approaching this has been made free in my ebook; and please do head over to my coaching hub for more resources.