Category Archives: Life

I was having coffee with this friend, who like me, studied abroad both in the US and UK talking about how this whole education industry has become so mercenary and price inflation just crazy. And honestly, most of the things they are teaching students are really not used in most of our jobs though it is probably just the thinking and problem-solving skills they cultivate in the process that matters.

Today of course there’s this huge industry that helps to train workers after they graduate in all kinds of skills that are required for them to be corporate cogs; from financial modelling, to giving presentations, business writing and so on. I find it fascinating that one have to shell out more money in order to be trained in these areas after having already spent somewhere around a quarter of a million in an undergraduate degree. Where did learning on the job go? Why do companies expect fresh graduates to immediately be able to plug themselves into the work? How can that even be possible?

Alright, maybe the training industry is there to help people pivot into new types of jobs and so on without having to go in from entry level. But honestly, the best way to learn is really to get on a project, network and meet people who can potentially guide you. Of course you can pay for a coach to support that learning journey; but the quality of these various services are hard to evaluate. You need to rely on good word-of-mouth, and be committed to learn yourself. If you expect to be spoon-feed and that a certificate from these courses would magically qualify you for new things, you’ll have to start changing your mind.

How many new ideas did you come up with over the past week? Or are you now obsessing over whether they were new ideas? How many of those new ideas did you actually share with the world?

I wrote about how we kind of self-censor because of the story we tell ourselves about our ideas. It is equally important to recognise that having an idea, sharing them is just not sufficient. Finding the resources to develop conviction, to allow those ideas to derive million other ideas that you are willing to try, test and implement is so important.

Yet, whilst at a theoretical level we know that this is so important for the human race, for our society, we are not so keen on creating an economy and society that does just that. At certain level, we want people to just accept answers as they are, to follow the rules and to not stir up trouble. But having ideas, and being contrarian, accommodating them needs to be part of a culture that welcomes that sharing, and allows for the continuous innovation.

What do you think about a world where we use our phones for half a decade or so? A world where people could earn enough to feed themselves and a whole family if they had sold just about 20 vacuum cleaners a year doing door-to-door sales. And those vacuum cleaners could probably last those buyers a generation. It was a world where bankers would not be able to afford houses that much bigger than someone who was a hawker.

It was also a world where money lost value faster; and goods less so. So we would treasure things that were bought and sold for money, perhaps more so than the money. We undervalue durability, and we overvalue change in our world today when we constantly want to chase the next shiny object.

Sustainability starts with awareness and consciousness. But it also requires us to recognise how the culture we have today perpetuate that. It came from the stories we inherit during a time of want. My parents didn’t like the idea of ‘second-hand’ and thought it as something of a last resort when one cannot afford. But today, we need to rewrite that story to be about sustainability and waste reduction. I’d rather many of my things be more durable, lasting, but we also need a culture that supports that. Because lasting stuff becoming waste, is not going to end well.

I recall it used to be when I had some stupid idea about things and I told the adults (this was when I was young) and the response was usually that if it was so easy, it would have been done already. Or that the problem would have been solved. Now what follows is usually not so inspiring as it was intended to be; but I was always encouraged to work hard, learn things, and then try to work on the solution to the problem I care about. That was the good upbringing I had.

But the question is whether we are stuck with the story that if something was so great, someone else would have been able to make it work. Unfortunately, that story is often very much in our head. Important ideas that wins you a Nobel prize often needs to be quite new but they are usually no longer that revolutionary by the time Nobel prize announce the winners. You see, the significant part isn’t about winning the Nobel prize; it’s about changing the world. And changing the world isn’t always about new ideas. They are more often about applying ideas, perhaps existing ones, in new areas, or to even just be able to execute or implement those ideas.

Ideas and improvement in technologies build upon one another. It is the development of satellite technology that allows GPS to exist, and the proliferation of small sensors, GPS receiver hardware that allows the benefit of that satellite to be democratised. Subsequently, it was the development of maps, good quality overlays and mapping of entire cities, that allowed software to properly leverage on the GPS information for navigation. And of course, the business model of ride-hailing apps and food-delivery apps are built upon these innovations. Sequencing of implementation matters; and good ideas are not made bad by circumstances and will require its own time and space to be a great hit. So no, we cannot pretend that great solutions would have already been adopted, and that problems would have been solved if it was ‘that easy’. Our role is to work hard to make the solving of problems ‘ that easy’ by first dealing with prior problems at hand.

You know the objective setting exercise that we do each time we start a project, when we enter a new role and so on? Are you setting benchmarks for success or drawing the line where you define your failures? I think too often, we are thinking more about how failure looks like more than how success looks to be. Or we have such a narrowly defined success that we classify most situations as failures.

I talked about it in the context of regrets before. Our imaginations are so rich that we can be so specific about our alternative lives we forget to live the life that we are given. We fail to enjoy our lives because we are too busy trying to enjoy the life that we think we should be living. It’s the same with our work, and how we want it to turn out – we are so specific about what success means that we think of everything else as failure.

What if we envision just failure – the specific way things fail that you can’t do anything about that is completely counter to what you are achieving. And then we say, that’s it, everything else is success; and that in all other scenarios, you’d be able to make good of it, and at least pick up something that will benefit you somehow.

Then you can start defining where you and your team wants to get to – that range of outcomes where you can be a bit more complacent (isn’t that what you’ve been really after, rather than just what people term ‘success’), and that range of outcomes that would mean there’s more work plans to develop, more reporting and accountability to do. Remember, failure is restricted to that one case you imagined. Everything else is just… life.

Placebos are real; they have an actual impact on us. First described somehow by John Haygarth, it really demonstrates the power of the human mind and its impact on us. They reflect that the story we tell ourselves about things we do and experience is really important in determining our sense of well-being and subsequent actions. These actions can then continue to perpetuate our circumstances and the cycle continues.

And then the question is whether we are consuming placebos. We might not be conscious of it, but things like an Hermes handbag, or a gym membership that we don’t really use but just keep, are all placebos. They are there to make us think we are rich, or fit without really doing anything about our wealth or health. The list continues with magazine subscriptions, club memberships, and many of what people would call ‘trappings’.

So yes, placebos are real and all of us are using them in case you don’t yet realise. But the key here is to notice what they are doing to us. I’m assuming we are using these placebos because they do have a positive impact on us, and they work through the stories that we tell ourselves. What if we are addicted to our placebos? We need to ask ourselves to be conscious about the costs of these placebos – the financial, environmental and mental costs of these. And whether there are cheaper placebos as substitutes.

And in case you’re wondering, the Prata (instead of Prada) bag that was churned out in a random factory is also a placebo – at least for another group of people. So yea, there are alternatives when our placebos are costing us too much

Our company policy means that you are ineligible for the bonus if you tender your resignation at this point. From the management point of view, it is to discourage resignation at this point of time, or to retain the staff for another month. Question is, what was the bonus for in the first place? Is it to reward you for the work you have done, or the work you are about to do? And what does talent retention really mean? That your people do not resign? Or that you’re developing them, deploying them in the right places befitting of their intellectual capacity, interest, and challenging them?

We’ve all encountered broken systems. They’re systems that are perpetuated because someone decides to follow rules and policies in a legalistic manner, forgetting what they were for in the first place. When we fail to honour and uphold the spirit of a law, but instead, just the letter of the law, systems are likely broken.

Those are points when we need to question who our systems are serving, and whether we designed them to work in the way they are working. Increasingly, there’s polarisation in politics and the world – and we come face to face with the point that some of these ‘brokenness’ is actually systems working as they are intended: to perpetuate the power of those who are already leading/ruling, to define merit in a way that legitimises further those who wield power, and to preserve the structure in place in society, in name of harmony and stability. Such thoughts can be dangerous but they are a culmination of leaders who refuse to admit mistakes, who do not take responsibility for their mistakes and the brokenness of systems that they have set in place.

I wrote a while back that ‘Doing your best‘ is really an attitude. And I mentioned in that post that I never quite knew what my best was. Perhaps I know it when I tried; but we aren’t really sure if we did because there seem to be always something more we can do. And our minds are such that if we did put in the effort and already did our best but obtained an outcome less than our aspiration, we start questioning ourselves.

At the heart of every fear lurking around is our sense of inadequacy and being ‘not enough’. It is important to recognise why and how you have fallen short when you do. Because having done your best, in those specific circumstances and resources which you have can yield different results when doing your best in a different set of circumstances.

For example, you could have scored a 75 instead of 70 if you had not missed out reading a particular chapter in the textbook. But you could have gotten 85 if you had money to pay for a few more hours of tuition with Mr Wong. So yes you could have done more, you could have done things differently – the key here is that every outcome contains an opportunity for you. It is an opportunity to know more about the world and how it works. To know more about how your actions, circumstances, resources and even thought patterns interacts with the world. So use it wisely rather than get back into the cycle of fear and anxiety around your inadequacy.

Been working on a project on emissions targeting. Or at least tangentially related. It’s been an eye-opener for me as I come to see how important it is to reduce the carbon intensity of electricity generation. Reducing scope 2 emissions for lots of different industries makes a really significant contribution as it turns out.

Yet at the same time, it got me thinking about those corporates that are targeting to go net-zero by 2030, or 2040, or 2050 for that matter. In each cases, they give themselves a little, or a lot of room to eventually hit their targets. But we need to realise that each year you delay reduction, you’re pumping out more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that actually stays there. In fact it stays there longer because we are simultaneously doing so much to reduce the planet’s capacity to absorb the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

This is unlike our other kinds of goals involving gaining mastery for example. You can give yourself more time to master something; and the consequence is at most that you are still not that good for a few more years. Or you could choose to take a gap year so you will graduate only later (which probably reduce your income by that one year). The consequence of the carbon dioxide thrown out into the air because you were lax with your target-setting can mean we no longer can keep temperature change within 2 deg Celsius – which by the way, will result in increased number of catastrophic weather events.

Intentionally or not, we are creating a future for ourselves and our offsprings. Unfortunately, it is not one that most of us would like to live in.

What makes the value of a tree? The quality, quantity of timber it produces? That’s probably just the value of the dead tree. How about the live tree? The value of soil quality it maintains, the prevention of soil erosion? The value of the biodiversity it creates?

How about the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions? And oh by the way, each tree absorbs only 21 kg per year when it is fully grown. And it is estimated over a 100-year lifespan, it will absorb a tonne of carbon dioxide (because when it is young, it absorbs way less and it takes time to grow). And how much are we pricing/taxing a tonne of carbon dioxide in Singapore? $5 a tonne. That’s US$3.70 today. Yes, so we are saying, that a tree, living for 100 years, taking in carbon dioxide for us, and helping to ‘offset’ our emissions, is going to only contribute US$3.70 reduction to the industry’s tax dollars. No wonder we prefer to pay that than to plant a tree.

Not forgetting the value of the shade of the tree, the fruits it provides, but of course it also offsets the ongoing costs of irrigation, and maintenance of the tree. So the Singapore Green Plan claims that planting 1 million trees between 2020 to 2030 would allow us to absorb another 78,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. It is not clear if that statement is a per-year absorption or over the 10 year period. But yes, if it’s per year, it’s possible that because we manage to plant some insanely amazing carbon-absorbing tree that is immediately fully-growth, they can take in 78kg of carbon dioxide per year on average. Or if it’s over the 10-year period, then it’s only 7.8kg per tree per year, which is probably closer to the truth.

And yes, in case you’re wondering what this post is about; it really is about the fact that we are not taxing carbon dioxide enough to get anyone to do anything about it in Singapore. It’s clearly also about trees. Key message here is we need to grow more trees, and tax carbon more heavily.