Category Archives: Life

I was on a scholarship from a Singapore government agency known as International Enterprise Singapore (IE Singapore) which has since been merged into Enterprise Singapore. The scholarship allowed me to attend my dream school, The London School of Economics, taking the dream course which I managed to get into, BSc Economics. It was almost poetry that the one who inspired this dream of mine is Dr Goh Keng Swee, the economic architect of Singapore.

He was one of our forefathers who had the idea of using scholarships to train our brightest minds and keeping them within government. And I shared his dream of crafting the economic strategies for Singapore, for our next century of growth and prosperity. So I was convinced the scholarship bond was no big deal for me; I would be happy to serve in an economic agency and in public service. After all, my objective for studying economics, and understanding the causes of things, was to serve in the government of my country!

Of course, serving in the government is a rather vague notion for someone fresh out of Junior College or two years of full time National Service. Influencing policy, interacting with brilliant civil servants and ministers would no doubt be a great experience for a fresh graduate.

What I underestimated was how difficult it was for me when I did not share the same conviction for ideas and actions that were translated into policies. It was really hard for me to continue my work when I did not appreciate the intellectual foundations they were build upon. I admit that policy decisions weren’t the easiest or most straight-forward things, and there would be trade-offs.

I eventually realised that after investing in people to have a great education and experience, the preference for the organisation or bureaucracy was still for you to be a cog, to be outstanding in ways you’re expected to. Being a good student was about sitting still, raising your hands before you speak, doing your homework, getting good grades. It wasn’t about thinking differently, challenging authority, breaking things. I like to joke that Philip Yeo broke enough things that most loopholes were mended after that.

It took me long to realise it because I had the chance to spend most of my scholarship bond serving in areas I was interested in, doing things I really believed in. That alignment is so important but not to be taken for granted. I count myself fortunate; but that would not be the case for everyone.

Today, I’d encourage students to consider only scholarships without bonds. Not because there are issues with these organisations but at the age of 18 or 20, unless your family is unable to afford a university education or to send you on exchange, those opportunities that a scholarship can afford you is probably not worth the weight of this missing option to just resign.

If you want to study overseas and your family can afford it, by all means. If your family cannot afford it, studying locally in Singapore is just as good if not better especially when there’s the option to go on exchange. And if you cannot afford the exchange, find work overseas, go on work holidays, hustle.

I’ve been thinking about being a human a lot. And wondering about our energy levels and supply as we go through each day, engage in different activities. What does it mean to live sustainably as a human. We have our ebbs and flows, just like wind energy and the sun. But they are sustainable; the sun will keep shining somehow and the wind will blow. They would come and they would go; you don’t know when or how much exactly, but roughly, we know.

Maybe we humans are built for that level of precision; it is perhaps unrealistic for us to try and compete with the robots, to be more productive, to be more efficient. We do perhaps because these attributes are more measurable. Why not we consider how we can be more creative, more imaginative? It’s probably not even comparable from one to another; not to suggest we can measure these. That multi-dimensional, unmeasurable attribute of real things in the world, in nature, is from God.

But maybe sometimes, we can be that biofuel, to be firing when there is a need for electricity, rather than just be generating power intermittently like the sun and the wind. Even though considered as a renewable, biofuels technically requires much more process, a highly interconnected circular economy system to capture and utilise the feedstock. So in order to fire with that regularity, we must still respect some kind of rhythm, some pattern of energy use.

What does your education teach you about cars? Usually nothing much. I never did the road safety course which are supposed to be conducted in every Singaporean school. I do not remember what happened but it is likely I was unwell the day my class went for the course. What I do remember is that there were people on bicycles, people who were pedestrians and then people driving little cars. Those driving the little cars were seen as the privileged ones.

I often hear that with a car, one feels free – perhaps that one can just drive anywhere. For me, I don’t like to drive and so the real value of a car to me, is that it’s basically a huge mobile cabinet or storage that I can bring around with me. I can put different attire in it and be able to change out more easily without having to lug a huge bag with me. And of course, this mobile storage actually can carry me with it.

But what are we really doing to the world as we indulge in the ‘freedom’ of driving around and moving a mobile cabinet around an urban space? We are holding a lot of urban possibilities hostage, while also causing pollution, emitting more carbon into the atmosphere, sustaining yet more businesses that are digging oil out of the ground. It is shameful, to say the least.

So what should we do about private transportation over short distance? I have some ideas, which can be implemented together in some cases:

• Charge people for driving within urban areas – charge them on a per km basis and with slight decreasing marginal costs.
• Don’t allow people to own cars, operate car rentals that work as part of the public transport network.
• Reduce and even eliminate the need for buildings to provide parking while putting a cap on parking charges.

Close more roads on weekends, allow weekend street markets to bloom.

The modern yes man is not the one who only says yes to the boss. He is the one who is saying yes to everyone but himself and his family. And at the end of the day, he burns out. We all are always craving for something additional, something incremental and new that we forget in doing so, we forgo the default that we have worked so hard to have in the past.

We worked hard to support, care, pursue the ones with love but work itself tend to overwhelm and get prioritised above those we care for. And of course we are telling ourselves the story that working is the way we love and care. That is the danger of boiling down our lives and identity down to a single parameter, be it money, career progression, a job title, or what we can own.

My faith has long warned me against that. God has blessed us with so much but we often end up focusing on distilling all that blessing down to a single parameter like money, and focusing on what we are missing, and thinking we haven’t had enough. It certainly doesn’t prevent me from falling back into the trap though. And I guess this post is here to remind myself.

After slightly more than a year of writing daily on my blog, I’ve started working on refining, rewriting and updating my ideas in the same or longer format. These articles will be posted weekly on my Medium page. It’s been a joy sharing my ideas and I’ll be doing more periodic consolidation and eventually publishing them into a book if things work out as I hope.

Meanwhile, for those who are sitting on the fence about writing, blogging, publishing, I highly encourage you try things out yourself.

I recall distinctly when I was in school that I get impressed when the working adults tells me their job has no typical days or that no two days are the same. Having been working for close to ten years, I have not seen a job where every day is the same. In fact, for most jobs in the world today, the repetitive elements have been automated. It is no longer impressive that no two days are the same.

In fact, it can be a source of incredible stress; and while work is becoming more the source of purpose and meaning, it is becoming less therapeutic. The satisfaction from seeing things you put together into a final product can be therapeutic. Just think about all the videos you doom-scrolled through Instagram showing you craftsman carving a beautiful vase, or churning out perfectly printed cloths, or products. While we are now busy creating impact, it is no longer clear what is the concrete end-result we are gunning for anymore.

And despite the deep meaning one can connect their work and role with, it is the sense of helplessness, and lack of control that eventually burns one out. In that sense, the greater the sense of meaning in the way you are contributing to the world, the more likely you’ll find it difficult to truly sustain the motivation. Because those problems won’t be solved by you alone. It will take so much more, and even all of you, and you’d find the world no where closer to that great goal you’re after.

Who are we really? As Singapore. Are we a people; do we have a single or multiple different heritage? How does our history and personal stories weave into the social identity? Do we have some kind of common identity? And do we hold on to it? How do we want to evolve? Is it up to us or to be defined by the government? How are we collectively deciding what is important to us and how to maintain these priorities?

The more I think about ourselves as a society that is growing, that is developing itself; the more I realise that we cannot get out of a paradox about our identity. It will perpetuate and we must really be conscious about allowing this paradox to work for our good rather than our bad.

We will never be able to appeal to everyone as a city. They country does not have a sub-urb or hinterland for people to retire into, or a proper place to ‘get-away’ in a meaningful manner. Maybe there is potential, and it needs to be better developed (resort at Pulau Semakau, anyone?); but for now I begin to realise that the more successful it is as an international city, the more challenges we will face as a nation. We might just try to be a regional capital that brings young people, talents and smart money to be mixed, to be exploited to generate value for the world. As we work hard to attract certain groups of people to make our city vibrant and better connected to the rest of the world, there will be people whom we end up excluding somehow. And these may be locals, they may be people in our society we want to care for and care about.

The policy capacity, the thinking around caring for young ones, for elderly, to create pockets of uncompetitiveness for them to be able to survive, thrive and to be dynamic in the long term is going to be limited. We risk optimising only for the short-term when we think only about immediate economic consequences to things. Even though we have good machinery across dimension; and we might have overcome some of the financial resource constraints our forefathers had when trying to create a system to serve all the different objectives, today we’re suffering from the lack of political attention, and policy bandwidth to manage more complex concepts around our identity and what it really means for our growth to be truly inclusive.

I bemoaned the need for public intellectuals; and perhaps this is an uncontroversial topic to start pondering over.

For the market to adopt a new technology, it is not about telling the masses how good the new technology is or to try and make it work for everyone. The majority of the market when bend themselves in order to fit the technology once it is proven to work and attractive to them. Understanding the Gartner hype cycle is important. So products that are revolutionary cannot be built for the average joe. Understanding the innovators and the early adopters in the marketplace, working to enrol and recruit them is important.

So innovation will tend to play around the fringes and look unthreatening to the status quo. They have to; because the status quo is about the fear of novelty and the innovation must pretend it is very niche and only has small ambitions; or that it is nothing new, solving an old problem in just a tad bit different way which may appeal to some, but not all. But it is precisely this ‘not everyone’ approach that eventually gets you the buy-in of some, who matters.

So if you’re just starting out, don’t try to please everyone; know your audience and work on that. I’m not just referring to businesses but even employees, people who are working on their careers. Finding that sense of purpose in your work and finding people who align with your values is going to bring you some edge even early in your career.

Can there be such thing as a tradition of innovation? Are traditions inherently some kind of constraint to innovation? What really constitutes innovation; is it just about change? If it’s about improvements, along what dimension is the improvement being made in?

Corporates and big organisations have resources to make change happen. But they are also have the reputation of being uninnovative. The fact is that they are actually good at making improvements along the dimensions they already measure: response times to customers, reliability of products, and even reducing costs. These are all some kind of improvement but we may not think of them as innovation. In fact, improving along those metrics are simply part of the tradition.

What we see as innovation isn’t just change. It is something more along the lines of picking up a new dimension in which we want to progress along. It’s the confession that our traditions might have been serving something that was great but it’s perhaps no longer that important. And there’s something else worth progressing along.

As societies evolve, I think the question we are asking ourselves when confronted with whether we want to accept this or that change is to think about what is important to us at this point of time. And what are the dimensions we really want to progress along.

My colleagues at Enea Consulting and I had a lunch time conversation about urban planning, car-lite rhetoric and who the plan should be serving. One of us was very anti-cars and thought of all the implications around urban planning, environmental impacts – he considers private cars a cancer of urban development.

So for him personally, he found it unfair that pedestrians are told to look out for cars on the road (written at the crossing in stencils) and saw this as a manifestation of the car-centric culture that exist. On the other hand, I thought this was largely because the negative consequences on a pedestrian in a traffic accident is so assymmetrically dire for the pedestrian compared to a driver hence the need to remind them.

The society is not that biased to car owners given they are subjected to huge penalties and there are lots of opportunities for them to suffer financially should they fail to comply. Pedestrians don’t face the same sort of legal risks. Yet the subject of who the urban planning should be serving is still present. Given that a quarter of our city is covered with roads, it’s hard to see our urban planning is not partisan towards drivers or at least car owners.

One can of course be a conspiracy theorist and claim that there’s an overall bias on this since legislators, top leaders of our society are probably majority car owners themselves (whether they are driving themselves or not), the orientation of planning will give more eminence to car ownership. Those on two-wheelers, including bicycles can feel like they are treated as second-class citizens on the road. It may not be deliberate but this can be a powerful force. Likewise, the fact car ownership is sometimes a general aspiration of the society means the middle class who are not yet car owners can prefer that the state leave the privilege where they are so they can enjoy it when they get to that stage.

I think at the heart of matters is, who is our urban planning seeking to serve. And through all the balancing and struggles, whom have they ended up serving?