Category Archives: Life

I had a good question posed to me today. Someone asked me what happens if I encounter new information or learnt new things that made me rethink some of my stance that I’ve written about before. Well, just because I’ve made a stance before doesn’t mean I can’t change it. After all, when convinced that I’m wrong, the only way to go is to change my mind – isn’t it?

What is so bad about being wrong? Perhaps the psychological trauma is too much? It might hurt too much of our pride? Doesn’t seem to be the case when we stop liking the toy we like when we grow up; or we fall in love with another brand of chocolate instead? So what is wrong with changing your mind when you’re changing your preferences all the time? What is the fear driving it? How are the ideas in your mind shaping your identity?

So think through what is the cost of changing your mind? Is it an internal costs? Is it a cost to your reputation? How can this mind-change be reframed into something positive. Something around the story of growth and personal development?

This is a post full of questions with no answers. In line with my belief that questions are more important than answers, I’m cultivating the ability to ask good questions and get us all thinking.

Are you the sort of people who read the operating manual of a device or machine before touching and working on it? Or do you figure out along the way? Or you treat the manual as a guide you go to only when something goes wrong? How important do you think are the intentions of the creator?

Do you also have an operating manual in your head about how the world works? Or how others should behave, respond to you, and achieve good things? Question is which one of us really expects our operating manuals to be followed by anyone at all, especially when no one has really read the manuals and you have not yet written it? How often do we actively convey our expectations to others? Do we mostly expect others to read our minds? Have we practiced articulating and communicating expectations?

When I was a kid, I consumed lots of self-help books. Mostly in the self-help section of bookstores, sometimes in the library – I certainly helped myself very much through acquiring most of these knowledge for free. One of the biggest things I learnt was that leadership is not about being in the front, asking people to do things, and bossing others around. It is to build relationships and influence with people; and others would naturally look towards you.

Of course, that is the hard part of things for most people. But then there’s also the additional challenge of actually knowing where to go when people look to you for directions. Now that’s where the second part of ‘being influenced’ comes from. It’s good to be an independent thinker but a leader cannot be thinking about everything from ground up and developing every solution by himself. He ought to draw upon the strengths of the team. He needs to know also whom he can approach in order to seek good advice on the way forward on a variety of matters.

This model of leadership places a leader not as a driving force but the conduit. The leader steers but he don’t have to be the fuel, the force nor the front guy.

I wrote about misaligned incentives, but the more specific situation I was describing is the principal-agent problem that is so rife these days. It might have to do with marketing, and influence. More attention is paid to what people say than how people are actually paid. As an economist, I think it is still important to see what is the incentive structure behind people’s actions. Of course, the incentives involves other elements such as sales targets, the kinds of conversation and culture an organisation is having.

As we think about how the new industrialism is going to be weighing even more heavily on production from capital, the value that labour brings will likely be oriented towards selling. This is challenging to me because it has an impact on the distribution of rents and gains towards those with capital, and those with ability to sell. And organisations will have to think of how to incentivise and help their people sell more. This naturally seem to pit the people against the interest of their customers at least in the short term. Reputation and longer-term sustainability needs to be added into the equation.

Insurance policies needs to be designed well, with the best interests of the customers in mind in order to ensure the reputation of the organisation remains good and keep customers flowing. But customer experience at the point of commitment cannot be determinant on the decisions or such products. To me, the sales agent is providing a service and the only way his interest can be aligned to the customer is when he is paid a fixed fee by the customer to provide that service.

I had people I’m coaching ask me why they should put their hobbies or interest in their CV – how is it relevant? To be fair it probably doesn’t matter what you say there though it does show your personality. And to be a bit more candid, your prospective employer probably has a better view of your real hobbies by following or checking your social media account than reading your CV.

Either way, I think your interest and hobbies section shows a bit more of your personal side and your personality. And it allows you to stand out, to be a person rather than just a cog, to allow others to take an interest in you as a human and not just a worker. In fact, if your hobby is swimming, go ahead and state your favourite stroke; if you’re interested in classical music, mention your favourite classic piece; if you enjoy DJ-ing, list down your ideal 5-track mixtape. Go all the way, show you care, and not just have a hobby listed because everyone has it there.

The way you approach your hobby bears a hint on how you might want to approach work; there should be moments of light-heartedness, enjoyment, amidst the seriousness. Your identity and personality will also leave a mark in the work that you do, just as your hobby will contain that mark.

I had a chat with a friend who turned into a financial planner (which of course has become a bit of a new title for what we used to call ‘insurance agents’). I realised soon based on what he described of the industry, that insurance, much like property, has the feature of growing naturally alongside a growing economy.

And insurance agents, like property agents/brokers, have the advantage of earning their income through commissions which are linked to the underlying transaction value. In the case of insurance agents, it is the premiums. And of course, premiums are functions of insured sum, and everywhere we know, financial protection is often calculated on the basis of income capacity (rather than in expenses). This means a growing economy and rising incomes will raise the financial protection needed, and raise the premium payments, thereby naturally uplifting the commissions of insurance agents in absolute sum even though there might not be a change in the value of the service rendered.

More significantly, I’ve always been against the way the incentives are structured in this industry. Sales commissions on the basis of insurance sales is simply an unsustainable way of incentivisation and there’s fundamental misalignment of interest between the agents and the customers. I’m still a champion for Do-It-Yourself when it comes to financial planning. While I do think you can free up your mind-space on financial planning by going to a financial planner, I’d rather go to a fee-based financial planner rather than someone whose incentives are based on sales/product commissions. Especially not one who is subjected to sales targets.

I wrote about scaling laksa in Millennials’ Narrative, and then I reminded us that we need to consider what we are scaling and are we really doing ourselves and others a service when we try to scale things. Infrastructure is one thing that originally appeared to be the sort of things that benefit from scaling. After all, they are more cost effective when distributed across more people. And they are a good way to distribute wealth.

But is bigger necessarily better? What sort of utilisation levels are we expecting, and how can we be sure that the trends in demand for the piece of utilisation will continue? What sort of income, positive externality and wealth will it create?

Today, infrastructure is too often about politics more than economics and we are worse off because of that. When we don’t properly size projects before working on them; when we focus overly on a piece of infrastructure than the overall system of infrastructure. Thinking long term about the maintenance, the lifecycle of the asset is important. How many governments are thinking through that enough?

Those who have followed my blog, my mentees and coaching clients would know I’m an educator at heart. And I had some really dated education products still listed for purchase. Now, I’ve just completed a really jam-packed intense 9-day email course design which I’m doing a bit of a soft launch here on my site. This is the first of my coaching products after getting really good feedback on the ebook which lays an important foundation for the materials I teach in this email course.

It is PSLE season during the pandemic year again – and the kind of response just shows that we once again failed to change the culture. MOE tried to change the stakes with the new system, but they need to target the culture that needs changing; the culture around what it means to win, and what it means to be ‘good’.

What is good for a kid has become whatever gets the kid good grades rather than what gives the kid a good challenge and enables them to deal with adversity. This is why we have people crying over spilled milk even when they are in their 40s. A better approach to parenting would be to encourage the child and say, you’ve tried your best and I’m proud of you braving through this. In the first place, the crying of the kid and the pressure she felt is a reflection of the kind of expectations she sense from the parent. And having the parent exhibit this sort of ’empathy’ by crying alongside reinforces to the child that throwing a tantrum at undesired outcomes is the right thing to do.

That was a missed opportunity to teach a kid how to bounce back, how to be brave, and to encourage rather than to assign fault (to someone else). I really liked the recommendations and thoughts from the counsellors towards the end of the article. Whatever pain a child feels from a difficult exam, is not an affliction from the school or MOE, but from the parents and the expectations that is placed upon the child. It is only right for SEAB not to comment. They don’t have to answer to anyone for the level of difficult of an examination.

Karl Marx once argued that all value comes from human labour and that capital owners should not be allowed to profit from their ownership of capital. Perhaps that was a time when labour is often needed to operate capital, to work the land in order for capital to be ‘productive’. To that extent, it is probably right that labour always had a disadvantage in bargaining against capital because capital is often more concentrated in the hands of certain owners. Or that the dictates of capital can easily be reassigned and concentrated to maximise bargaining power.

This is much harder with labour, and that’s why there were periods in history where labour unions were important. And there are still many societies today, especially in Europe that ensures significant participation of unions in industrial decisions and even policy-making.

The truth is, we’ve been using human labour as a way to distribute economic gains to the broader masses. And it has worked as far as the economy transits towards being more and more knowledge-based as equipment got better and capital starts being able to produce goods and services without as much labour inputs. Yet we might be moving to a point where there’s insufficient jobs for everyone, including knowledge-based ones, as capital come to be able to produce goods and services for our economies independently without labour. And yes, I’m thinking about more automation, more data-driven operations that only require periodic human interventions, and so on.

We must start considering how to distribute capital and wealth better; and to allow the strata of the society commonly contributing to ‘labour’ side of the economic equation to start owning capital and learning how to use the capital to generate the returns sufficient for them to continue surviving without utilising their labour as much. Or that labour can be channeled towards greater social needs such as caring for the old and young; some of these which may have to be funded more and more on the taxes on capital and wealth.