Category Archives: Life

Which ladder are you scaling right now? Do you feel anxious about making progress? Or not making progress? For every decision we are making, and pieces we are advancing, sometimes it pays to question our own motives and ask which ladder we are trying to climb. What sort of progress we are actually looking for?

Of course, one can boil everything down to status roles in every interaction. All the tensions we face are about considering what sort of actions we take would help us move up status roles or at least avoid going down. We are asserting our current position or climbing up. In that sense, the question of which ladder, is perhaps a more powerful metaphorical tool.

So are you being a better employee, or husband, or friend? Which domain of status do you care about? How do you juggle all of them?

2021 probably would never have been able to meet the expectations that was put upon it by 2020. Yet by most counts, it’s been a good year. The world received vaccines, and many different types – most of which were effective towards a few variants of the virus. Air travel turned in a muted form. Economies were slowly coming back though many sectors remains somewhat stuck.

The world will greet 2022 with cautious optimism, les hyped-up expectations as they had in 2021. The resignation tsunami will gradually spread to every more industries, sectors and countries. And the new generation will come to discover it is more important to be authors of their own stories than be in the stranglehold of the old stories.

The future will perhaps see material goods, and money with a little less respect than in the recent generations. And the world will shift its attention towards more collective action problems as we struggle towards more actions to deal with climate change.

In the beginning of 2021, I determined to write a blog entry every single day on this blog and started on 3 January. Thankfully, I’ve been able to keep up through the year despite the challenges and crazy schedules. It has been a real joy sharing ideas daily, particularly around themes that resonate with readers.

Specifically, I’ve been very passionate about uncovering the perils of work, future of work, and the challenges that our education system face in juggling the needs of the world and being human. This is the main reason I started my coaching practice (and also more resources here). It is interesting that ultimately, a blog is a public-facing platform but at the end of the day, the work on the blog is not done so much for people out there to read; more often, it is for myself. It is a chance for me to practice putting the ideas out, to clear my thoughts, and to recognise when they are cloudy.

So the question that comes is whether I’d continue with doing that in the new year. Honestly, I’ve gain so much from this practice that I definitely intend to continue the commitment, and to build it into a proper habit for the rest of my life.

As the year 2021 approach and end, I’m pondering over how the year started with such huge expectations about life turning normal and people travelling around the world again. It happened to a certain extent, but 2021 definitely did not turn out the way most people expected it to.

Yet there’s so much we should hold in gratitude, and to appreciate. The whole world managed to get a significant proportion of people vaccinated this year. This is quite remarkable though in the developed countries where vaccination is widely available, there’s been movement against it as well. Those who chose consciously not to be vaccinated, to be at risk of being infected, suffering the full blown consequences without an immune response that can support the body, and also infecting others.

While global air travel isn’t really back yet, there’s still a higher degree of travel being done this year compared to last year. And that is something worth being thankful for. The downside perhaps is that carbon emission levels this year have gone back to 2019 levels despite the decline in 2020. This is a bit more mixed in terms of whether it is something to be happy about.

The economy overall is still uncertain and the periodic frenzies in the stock market for technology stocks, more speculation of cryptocurrencies reflecting the amount of liquidity the Fed has put into the global economy. But for all that we’ve survived and been given, by our customers, our families and our government, I’m thankful. Let’s really learn to give thanks for what we have and manage the escalation of our expectations.

Jack Welch ‘pioneered’ the ‘Vitality Curve’ model which basically ranked employees along a bell curve, with the top 20% rewarded, next 70% retained and the bottom 10% fired. Many companies basically practice some degree of this and though it was done more overtly in the 1980s than now, it persists. Maybe they won’t fire the bottom 10% but somehow they get ‘managed out’ and count towards natural attrition somehow.

The thing is that this idea of using the bell curve to judge people and then have some kind of consequence applied to them isn’t pioneered by Jack Welch or General Electric. It’s been something that the education system has been doing to people, through major exams, national exams, all sorts of standardised testing. One could even say they apply those principles with even more rigour and vigour.

I’ve written a while back to question why we are trying to judge people for a single set of attributes or talent (in this case academic subjects) instead of helping them discover what they are good at and helping them shine? Instead of trying to classify people into buckets of Grade A, B, C; why don’t we classify them into different sets of skills instead? Instead of letting people choose subjects, why don’t let them choose how they want to contribute to the world? And then we can work out the subjects, the skills needed from there.

If we want to make things better by making better things, then we got to start dreaming. Of the better things.

What are businesses ultimately for? The profits of the shareholders? The jobs of the staff? The families of the staff? The customers whom it is selling products to? Economics tells us that by pursuing profits of the shareholders for the firm, everything else works out beautifully. We trusted that to some extent for a really long time but soon realised that there were too many externalities.

Regulations stacked on to deal with them; but then soon it was clear that regulators often have an interest to keep businesses running as well. There was some short-sightedness in trying to keep their jobs. It’s the same with a government who sees that keeping businesses running sustains the economy and activities which will keep the society in order. And that profit-making enterprise has been elevated to the top of the economic hierarchy.

What if we could all be working for impact, for the environment, for livelihoods not measured in profits, for our future and future generations? Won’t that be something worth building? B-corps, non-profits, social enterprises would be a start; but we need to help businesses evolve to serve the society for the next stage of our development.

Your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results.

James Clear, Atomic Habits

Until we realise that it takes changing our own systems, processes and habits in order to change our results, we will continue doing the same old things, sometimes trying harder, to get different results. We might realise it can be challenging to figure out when we have to try harder and when we have to try something different. And then again, what does it means to be different?

Sometimes, trying something else need not be so different after all. When one is ‘bad’ at a subject, it doesn’t have to be changing your focus to a different subject. For example in my case, I spent my first 15 years being bad in English language. What changed was that instead of reading more fiction and trying to memorise vocabulary. For me, the beauty of English language became apparent to me when I saw how you could construct sentences to cogently make a point. To argue for what you believe in.

It will take a lot of effort to think about what is it that you can do differently in order to change your outcome. And sometimes, tweaking your system isn’t about an overhaul. It is a tweak. Those tweaks can really improve things.

One of the largest challenge that the bureaucracy face when it comes to managing staff is dealing with burn-out, and creating the right motivations. There’s always this presumption that staff would be motivated to serve the public, and to uphold their role, to deal with emotional distress by themselves. Managers who rose from being excellent individual contributors can do better with supporting their staff and teams during this pandemic and mental health crisis.

Part of it involves making genuine connections with their staff. For the longest time, I’ve seen how bosses’ solution to employees’ burn-out was to ‘keep calm and carry on’. I don’t think stoicism is categorically wrong but it doesn’t fully account for our psychological make-up. Public-serving work involves a lot of emotional labour; and to a large extent, the inability to help employees steward their emotional resources is really poor management. By being more than just a boss, but also a friend, a coach and a counsellor to a staff, managers are actually managing the actual resources that is required to carry out the work that public service entails.

We tend to think that public resources are just tax-payers’ money and public infrastructures. If we want to really be good stewards of public resources, it should be about taking good care of the emotional and mental health of our public servants. Are our permanent secretaries, statutory board CEOs really taking care of our people? Or are we just busy trying to make numbers that ‘serve the public’?

I wrote about the basis of competition in schools. What about in business? Is it price? There are many prices associated with a specific business: the price of their shares, the price of their products, the price they pay their staff, and the price they pay their suppliers, and so on. What is the price that we should take reference from?

Or are those a distraction like the way grades are distraction from learning? Because what is a business for? To make a profit? Hardly. Profits are incentives; and incentives tend not to be an end in themselves but a means to an end for a system. So what is the end that we want to achieve as a society to allow businesses to continue perpetuating? Probably to continue producing and delivering goods and services that people need; that makes the society ‘better’, and raise standards of living.

So why are businesses talking so much about the prices? Are these prices linked to the end goals of the businesses? What are the end goals they have in mind?

As we step deeper into the future of work, one with lots of knowledge-working, sitting in front of a computer, with a pandemic out there and remote work, there’s going to be less boundaries between work and other segments of life. The ‘always on’ mode will be tightening around us and eventually suffocating us.

The ability to truly disconnect and disengage from work is so important that our bodies would otherwise rebel by shutting us down, both physically and mentally. And that’s why we not only need to think about the amount of time we need to finish a piece of work, but also the amount of rest we will need in-between the work, and after that.

We should be scheduling the rest into our calendars, and that should not be something negotiable. Even if we think it is. Our culture still needs quite a bit of work to get there.