Category Archives: Life

Centuries of cultivating the culture of consumerism and sale of mass manufactured products means the concept of individual property ownership has spread through the world. When something is bought or sold, it is seen as being with the new ‘owners’ and ‘ownership’ should come with an implicit bundle of rights including the ability to repair something should it come to its demise or just partial dysfunction. Yet companies, in a bid to continue selling their products as the penetration of their products reach saturation point in the market introduced the concept of planned obsolescence.

And of course, that’s wastage. Deliberate wastage for the sake of commercialism; though of course, shorter lifecycles of products may mean greater innovation. Because every innovation needs adoption to provide the resources for it to sustain. The momentum of the Right to Repair is thus going meet more resistance across time even as it is gaining more following.

The main reason for the current momentum is that consumers are no longer keeping up with the ability to keep upgrading. There are people left behind in the upgrading frenzy – limited by either digital/tech literacy or financial capacity to upgrade. But that may change when these bottlenecks are solved, either through getting back oomph in our economy or having more attractive and intuitive products easy for demographics who were previously excluded.

So enshrining the principle of the right to repair into the legal system and setting it as a context/backdrop for companies to compete and innovate is important. It is important for the environment, for the values around environmental stewardship and waste reduction. And above all, it helps to at least address the power imbalance between consumers and producers. At least for a while to come.

Like it or not, mistakes are feedback. And they are feedback to you, and everyone else. The issue or point of content is what the feedback is about: you or your action? The circumstance or the people involved?

It just so happened that the manner by which human civilisations evolved and developed allowed us to gain more control and mastery over things in the world. And because of this agency, we tend to start attributing more things to humans, and to ourselves. We expect ourselves to be automatons, humans, perfect, rational and full of empathy all at the same time. That itself brings about a whole host of mental health issues but for today let’s just think about mistakes.

When we allow mistakes to tell us more about people, about us, than our actions, circumstances, we stop learning. We think we’re learning about people, and about ourselves when it is an opportunity to refine our approach towards things. We become emotional and allow our minds to go into drama mode and search for excuses rather than solutions.

So how do we want to get over that. First, be aware of what mistakes are saying to you. All mistakes, not just your own or that of others. Then consider directing your attention towards the circumstances and actions – looking at how they contribute to the mistakes. Consider the action to change in response to the situation. Start making a difference to your personal learning and how you influence the learning of those around you.

Professional services have somehow been left this weird legacy of putting a price on our time and then having to estimate the amount of time it takes for us to do something in order to price a task. There are, of course fast ways and slow ways of doing things and it seemed that you can trade off efficiency with being cheap – ie. you can end up pricing some work the same way either because you are efficient/smart but expensive, or that you’re inefficient but cheap.

This leaves us all relatively miserable because when we start out, we need to spend a lot of time working in order to survive and we might not be able to make the time investments to get better or more efficient when we are just barely making it to survive.

Then, when we do eventually get better, our rates might be high so we may not be able to do so many different interesting things because the customers will start to self-select. Of course, it’s good to continually work with good, demanding customers who push you reasonably to achieve more and better.

Is our time really all that cheap or quantifiable only by money though? We can all be sure it is worth much more than that. Maybe there’s a better way to do these things.

Every business is trying to effect a change. It could be just switching products, changing behaviours, and if these all gathers sufficient momentum, it can lead to a change in culture.

Thought this way, the tasks is phenomenal even as it is exciting and interesting. How do you do such a big thing? Isn’t it intimidating to be challenging the status quo, to get people on another side of the proverbial fence? Where do you even start?

That’s the important question. Where do you start? You need to start and you need to try and pry. It is not the ideas themselves you cling on to; but the change you’re trying to effect. And that’s why technologies can be powerful and even effective but selling to customers is more about overcoming the fear of something new, of providing a journey of change.

Start with thinking about the journey that you or the people you’re targeting can make the change. Don’t start with the product or the technology. Tweak your offerings and services to edit the journey, not the other way around. And change, would be on its way.

I was brought up with a dose of “if that was such a great idea, someone would have done it…” and so we are taught to bury our heads, work hard along the paths well trodden.

The strange thing is that we think any deviations are supposed shortcuts. That people who might have gone down a less trodden path might have sacrificed something important – maybe their morals, or they have had to work harder, or they had to – God forbid – take risks.

Why can’t the someone be you? If it’s an idea dealing with an issue you care about, why don’t be the one doing it. And then pivot when challenges come, take the feedback you deserve and work on it. Until you get it to work. And it works because you did the work. Not because you left it to that someone else.

Why do you write everyday? I often get asked. And I’d reply, I just have something to say.

An abundance of ideas doesn’t come from just sitting there. It doesn’t even come when you’re doing things. You actually go into the recesses of your mind and reflect upon things to come up with ideas. They may be good, or bad. But ideas comes from the effort to ideate for sure. The surest way to get good ideas is to have many ideas and then fish out the bad ones.

How do you fish them out? You got to test them ultimately. And testing them means taking some risks. It could be small; like looking stupid. Or it could cost you a fortune. You have to decide on the risks to take to fish out the bad ideas.

The alternative is to just be the guy with no ideas – just because you think the risk and effort to get good ideas isn’t worth it. Or because you think ideas are magical things people are blessed with. They are not.

Imagine if you do everything right and then reach your goals, and everything is just as what you think it’d be.

Where will be the cat? What about the cockroach that’s been lurking around without your knowledge? Which part of your desk would your mug be on when you receive that trophy or certificate? Where would your parents be seated in that auditorium?

Wait how are all those questions relevant? They are there to show you that you can’t imagine everything. And you won’t know what are the actions that would really contribute to certain outcomes. In fact if the outcomes are the only reason we perform anything, we can’t move an inch – because we won’t know what’d happen because of that.

The narratives driven by outcomes can be taxing, vexing and ultimately toxic. Because you might get there and it wouldn’t be what you imagined.

I’m not sure if people recall this set of sticky notes. I kept this one from many years ago in one of the blog entries I wrote. And watching Soul (the movie) reminded me in part of these. That we’re so busy living in the past and future, that we think our purpose is in the future, or the past. That our spark is the one thing our life is for, so much we forget everything else in our life.

The recognition that being “in the zone” can be also about being a “lost soul” because of our obsessions can disconnect us from life. It’s being too caught up with something.

And we can interpret making the most of today as subjugating it to the future or trying to relive the past. But the spark, the personality we have, the ideals we might have had a glimpse of, are all not the purpose. The sense of purpose sometimes is not found to be lived out; but is found out in the living.

Does it always make sense to use a takeaway container or bring your own bag? Is it always sensible to replace every coal-fired power plant (which can sometimes last 50 years) with tonnes of solar panels which often only last 15-20 years. Are we producing too many reusable plastic cups and plastic bottles in a bid to reduce disposable ones?

Sometimes, using the ‘find and replace’ function in Microsoft Word and Excel can be costly. Likewise, if we often can’t just achieve sustainability with the standardised approach – finding that one substitute for each of the polluting, environmentally-unfriendly thing, and then replacing the unfriendly version.

It will take in-depth studies, more careful considerations, to find the right areas to invest, the loose brick to remove so that the old structures powering unsustainable practices would fall. All that is often worth it; to achieve long run sustainability.

What are your defaults in life? What do you fall back on?

Google announced (at least for the US) that they will show you the greenest rather than the fastest route when you search for directions on Google Maps. That’s powerful; and that’s also the method that companies including banks which are switching to ‘paperless’ statements are doing to their customers. First they made it an opt-in to have paper statements (ie. by default, you get electronic statements), and then they might even put a fee on paper statements down the road.

Maybe if we are not cutting plastic bags yet, we could make it default for shops not to give bags. Just pass the customer a product after check-out. Let the customer ask for bags. If they don’t ask, they don’t get the bags. Don’t let your staff ask if they need; let the customer know politely if they want bags, they need to ask. Use signs to tell them that.

Defaulting to the green option rather than the most convenient option works and is important. Make ‘bring your own containers’ default for takeaway by always asking customers if they have their own containers, then reminding them there’s a fee for the takeaway containers.

Change the defaults, save the planet.