Category Archives: Life

I discovered a lipogrammatic novel named “Ella Minnow Pea”, which I found really fascinating. It really started with me googling ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ because I was reminded of this sentence that contained all letters of the English alphabet – a ‘pangram’.

A Lipogram is a bit of an opposite of a pangram – it is a sentence that is constrained to be formed without the use of at least 1 letter. The novel basically plays on this and progressively has letters dropped out of the English alphabet as part of the story line and thus becomes increasingly constrained, hard to read but brings out the point in the story.

More generally, the concept here is about telling stories under certain constrained conditions. Not just constrain of having to write in words; but also that of the perspective of the people in place, not an all-knowing narrator. Being someone who’s always been really fascinated by manner in which stories are told, this is interesting. And this is the same reason The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon; and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes were such beautiful books for me.

As we learn to tell and write our stories, it is important to be able to recognise the constraints ourselves and the readers are subject to and to be able to bring that key message across.

Writing concisely is not easy; and short posts or pieces bringing out complex ideas are challenging to write. On a recent Akimbo podcast episode, Seth Godin shared that getting people to fill in the ______ allows them to learn much better. Because most of the learning takes place when they make the neural connections and not because they can recall some particular knowledge.

As a teacher, that means more efforts in structuring the materials. I recall how when I was in A Levels, our economics lecture notes had blanks in them for students to fill so that they’d pay attention. The unfortunate thing was that whilst the lecture notes were being photocopied in the printing room, the lecturer was changing his/her slides to reword certain things so eventually the students got so confused during the lecture what exactly to fill in those blanks.

When I went to college at LSE, I had a professor whose lecture notes was almost literally just blank (save for axes of graphs, which we have to fill in) and his lecture powerpoint was nothing but just a plain series of graphs. Coupled with his above average speed of talking and the fact his lectures were unrecorded, his lectures were really intense mental and kinesthetic (albeit just the eyes, and fingers) exercises.

We often forget that a conducive learning environment is not one that is effortless; it is one that facilitates activity on part of the learner. It is one that creates tension to force learners to bridge that gap created between what they already know with what they are about to learn or acquire. We can choose to test them that which they acquired (the ‘what’) on the process of resolving the tension (the ‘how-to’) which is harder. The challenge that confronts us is how do we avoid teaching to the test. And to remind ourselves that the test is really just an imperfect way in which we try to measure the progress of learning. How do we trade off the short-term good grades against the longer term learning and development of a kid?

I just finished writing a short book which I’m going to publish as an ebook for free! It covers some fundamentals about looking for a job and/or career which I take my clients through either during our discovery session or first coaching session. Many have found these concepts really helpful in providing clarity and a clean framework to map and put all their thoughts and plans in.

So why do I make it free for all? Because I really enjoy creating that clarity for people. And that is also why I developed my coaching practice. Yet that is something best suited to be tailored to individuals; it requires me to apply my thinking on challenges and issues specifically. Being able to share these more universal concepts allows my clients to sharpen their diagnosis of challenges and frees me to work on deeper issues.

But more importantly, I started my coaching practice to equip the young professionals for life in the future. A future that we want to create, where we overcome challenges. Especially the ones unintentionally created by the previous generations in their striving for a better life.

So watch this site for the launch.

Every moment, every day, even when you are dozing, or half-asleep making your breakfast thinking about how you’re going to be productive, nature is working, and producing. We don’t think much about it, we don’t realise how much work gets done by nature itself – yet when we harness the work, the energy from nature, we credit it to ourselves. Worst still, we frequently undermine nature’s self-corrective work that keeps things in balance.

Gretchen Daily’s work thus fascinates me to no end. It combines 2 of my deep intellectual passions: sustainability, and economics. We need to stop thinking of creating ‘safe havens’ for nature the way we think about gardens by our home. We need to learn to live in the forest, to integrate so many more elements of nature into our economy and integrate them. I thought the philosophy of permaculture is interesting and a potentially important component to a vision of such an economy.

Like I mentioned before, it is not a single material like plastics, or crude oil, or cotton tote bags for that matter that is damaging the earth. It is the mass production and consumption of it beyond what we actually really need for our purposes. It is the wastefulness, supported by a market economy and capitalistic society that places value on things that goes through the cycle of the economy rather than the cycle of the ecosystem. Our ecosystems are circular by nature; but our economy are unidirectional at least until we put more effort into making them circular.

I’ve been carrying around my cotton tote bags – these ‘reusable’ bags are actually worst off for the planet than our disposable plastic bags. Other than the small plastic bags used for foodstuff, I pretty much never ever use plastic bags only once; minimisation of single-use plastic is very important first step to our habits as consumers to reduce the environmental impact of plastics. The trouble with substituting them with cotton tote bags and many other reusable materials is that those products have worse environmental footprint than plastics.

To ensure you justify the environmental impact of these nasty stuff, you need to use the tote bag daily for 54 years. Or something like 20,000 times; which they probably would be able to withstand. The irony is that one of the reason we started using plastics and other sort of polymer material is that cotton is water-intensive to produce and really doesn’t decompose that easily. We basically forgot the original intentions or benefits of plastics in a zeal to just try and eliminate them.

So yes we should ban plastics and perhaps it is really our mismanagement of plastic waste and prolific use of it that is the problem. Just as cotton tote in and of itself is probably not such a big problem until you realise you have about 20 different designs, patterns and colours at home (which probably is a number close to what I found in my home). It is just the mass production, the senseless exploitation of scale economies to the detriment of the planet that is at fault.

Do you hate your work? Do you feel challenged in the way you don’t like to be at work? What sort of tension are you feeling? Why do you have a sense you want to leave your job? What are the moments that makes you uncomfortable?

These challenges are probably good times to take stock and examine life priorities. As I mentioned before about appraisals, life do not always progress in the manner that our career or organisations desires for us to move. And that alignment between our lives and our current role or job may not always be good. The fit doesn’t have to be perfect but if there’s sufficient strain and tension, it is important to take the opportunity to understand why and use that insight to find your next role.

Is it about the values of the organisation? Or the kind of people the organisation is selecting to work with you? Is it the sense of impact your work has for you? We too often try to make value judgment on these things when it is often really just about how these things fit with one’s priorities at a certain stage of life. Perhaps you joined at a point of life where you were more willing to trade your personal time for learning opportunities but now you no longer so you need to shift to a role that demands less time and yet leverages on what you have already built up? Ponder over these – generate greater self awareness.

Economists have long discovered that trust is an important input to economic development. And institutions in the economy can promote or degrade trust in the society so the institutions that destroys trust ultimately can destroy long run value even if it creates some short term ones.

Focusing on the institutions that promotes and activate trust as a social capital opens our eyes to the various means in which trust is built. On one hand there are institutions that have trust created based on openness and allow broad participation. Then there are institutions that build trust through exclusiveness, tight security around who can do what.

In general, as western ideas permeate, the former is preferred more than the latter. But we ought to recognise there will still have to be gatekeepers, curators to help maintain quality of interactions, and uphold the rules. While a secretive benign dictatorship may not be so pleasant, anarchy is not a viable alternative. The idea of authority and hierarchy is logically part of creating order though it can be abused.

There has to eventually be a balance between maintaining gatekeeping and authority functions against closing it up so much there’s too much exclusivity. The issue with capitalism and markets is that we know they have a tendency towards unequal distribution, even when we equalise opportunity. So even in an open system, there can be accumulation of power and eventually abuse.

Educating the masses and getting people to appreciate the power of reason is not enough to ensure open systems will always maintain trust. More checks and balances to be considered.

There’s a large part of our online media and even traditional media celebrating achievements of youths. The other ideas of ‘strawberry generation’ and the apathy of youths have recently been fading away as the world situation made things more difficult for the millennial generation. It’s important that we recognise the youths who are making a difference and shaping the future that we all want to live in.

One of the challenge with blarring about our 40 below 40 or 30 below 30, and other lists consisting of well-accomplished youths is that we create this sense of despair in other youths. We end up discouraging the ones who have tried and failed or achieved less at the same age. This further reinforces ageism – discrimination of older workers.

We need to think of better ways to celebrate our youths while encouraging others to move forward and continue shaping the future that we all care about. Our youths recognises that we are all one people and there is no inter-generational warfare going on. But they should also see that there is no hurry for those who had more obstacles in life to go through. Life is not that short, pacing things out helps.

When I was in school, I was lulled into a sense that we spend first 15-20 years of our lives just doing non-stop learning and cramming all the things we have to know about the world to prepare us for it. And then we just go out there and probably regurgitate or apply all that we learn non-stop for another 40 years or so before we retire. And then we can rest and enjoy the fruits of our labour.

So it got confusing when adults have to go to schools too; and they have to learn new things. Well, it was understandable, that the world is changing and some things in school became obsolete or superseded by new things we had to learn. So people in the workforce had to be retrained. But at the same time, there were skills required in work that wasn’t taught in school as well so it was 2-way: (1) School was not exactly catching up with what is needed for the 40 years or labour; and (2) Work wasn’t really sure what they wanted from their people because it kept changing.

If we are going to be continuously learning through life anyways then what should we really be preparing ourselves for in school? In the first 20-years? We should probably be focusing on how to learn; and being good at it so that during the period where our labour is needed, we can pick up on things and apply them quickly. But often learning requires doing, and instead of having schools create imaginary work for students to do, why not channel them to do real work and solve real problems?

For now, schools have been trying to do that but it is usually difficult for organisations designed to deliver mass education to do these things. So if you’re in college, or even before, I suggest you to try looking for work, different jobs, part time jobs. But make sure they are useful; and to draw relevant, suitable employers, you need to craft your own story about what you are exploring, and what you want to do.

Email Course – Building your story for your career

I’m working on an email course that is just about that; it is designed mainly for first-job seekers who are looking to dive into a career. But it is also relevant for undergraduate students trying to find their bearings in the job market, testing out job hunting, and polishing up those skills. Stay tuned for more updates.

At some point most of us realise that performance grading on a bell curve would mean we just try to be ‘above average’ unlike the times when in school we could have grade inflation and hence more people could get A. And of course there is less room than in school to dispute your score – especially in Asian societies. When we were all in school, we were sort of forcefully pitted against our classmates in various different things ranging from exam results, to fitness and so on. There’s a sense of that relative performance is quite important; but I think the key is considering relative performance of what.

For our co-curricular activities, we don’t face such anxiety. If we are not in a uniform group, we opt out of the comparison of our ability to do drills. When we are not in a music group then we cannot be compared against our peers on our skills on the musical instruments. But for most basic subjects, we cannot avoid the comparison and we will be graded, and probably ranked. But once we step into the workforce, we realised that all the different dimensions are being considered and lumped together into a single grade. That is vague and hard to work on. It’s difficult to aim for any grades because you’re definitely pitted against your colleagues or peers in all the different mysterious ways you can’t even begin to work on them.

Therefore you cannot aim to be above average. You cannot aim at relative performances even if you know that’s what matters and probably how the bosses make these performance reviews. You’ll need to find absolute metrics to work on; to focus on sales calls you make rather than sales you achieve, to measure and quantify your useful inputs and have the outputs/outcomes as an afterthought. And you must not create anxiety for yourself when the outcomes don’t work, but maintain the curious mind searching for relevant and suitable inputs to work on to drive the output.