Category Archives: Life

So today is the 202th consecutive day I’m posting on this site. Since the beginning of 2021, I’ve been posting on my blog every single day. I was inspired by Seth Godin and probably quote him more often than anyone else in my writing. Many of the themes that I dwell on has some of his ideas as undertones.

Why did I pick this day to reflect about this? No real reason other than the fact that it’s been more than half of the year – something I couldn’t imagine when I started out. Or maybe, it’s because I just finished The Practice. And Seth is right that if you commit to show up consistently and demonstrate to yourself you can, it’s more about just putting one feet ahead of another and going on and on. More often than not, you build readership drip by drip rather than expect a post to go viral. And I’m not here to create viral content.

More important that I continue to echo the themes of sustainability, of creating a future, and working out the story that we’re going to tell ourselves to build the world we want to live in. So what keeps me writing? I’ve something to say, and I believe in that abundance of ideas that Seth keeps on going back to. And if you believe in that too, feel free to drop me a note to share your thoughts, sign up to my mailing list, or follow my instagram, or just this blog.

I had no idea that ‘snafu’ was an acronym until today as I write but I did see it quite a bit in writing. I never looked up the dictionary for its meaning but from its usage, I reckon it meant some kind of screw-up or mess. As I looked it up, my interpretation isn’t too far; it meant a chaotic mess or confused state.

What is interesting is the original ‘meaning’ of that acronym used in the Second World War. It meant ‘Status Normal: All Fouled Up’ (yes the F word was something different but I’m just not going to write it here). The US Marine Corps used it to indicate that something is fouled up, but completely within expectation.

So does fouling up seem foul to you? Or do you always expect everything to be going right, rosy all the way? As reality certainly seem otherwise, it often makes sense not only to evaluate your experiences against past observations and to fine-tune your expectations according to facts. In fact, updating expectations are just as important as formulating them. Above all, dealing with ‘snafus’ are probably more useful than just knowing how to b*tch about them.

NUS Business School professor predicts a resignation tsunami and while I’m not sure if the society is prime for such an act of “rebellion” against traditional employment, I’m very sure there’s a mental health crisis driving this.

The pressures of the sandwiched generation, the rising cost of education of kids, the broken promises of how a degree can translate into “good jobs” and the shattered illusions of what a “good job” really entails. All of these conspire to run down an entire generation of Singaporeans wearied by crisis after crisis (GFC, the aftermath, Covid, lockdowns).

To keep calm and carry on, to maintain a stiff upper lip, may amount to Boxer’s response to just about everything in Animal Farm. If this generation is just seeing drifting from job to job in search of the ideal job as the approach to solving their mental health and happiness challenge, that’ll be losing this opportunity for change.

The alternative is to rewrite the narrative we inherited from the boomers, to develop a vision for the future we want to create rather than passively receive what is prescribed. Or worst, to game the system and perpetuate the status quo.

I wonder how a successful pessimist would be like. Would he be gloating his failure to foresee his success? Or to delight in the fact success has its serious pitfalls which needs to be managed delicately. What exactly would be a pessimistic response to success? It could be just denial, or the recognition that successes doesn’t teach us anything that helps us improve while actually failure does (though an optimist is more likely to see that).

There’s so much contradiction within being a pessimist when it comes to living life. Do you celebrate the downside of things you have foreseen and prepared for? Or do you celebrate the bullets you dodged? Or success? And what is it about success you celebrate? The transient nature of it? What drives him/her? What does he/she really want out of life?

He (or she) probably doesn’t exist. So choosing to be skeptical about things and paying careful attention, doing due diligence and all is important. But to consistently play the pessimist is simply not the pathway towards attaining success.

We were having a meal and then she said that I made a statement, which I don’t recall making. So first I denied having made that statement; and when she insisted, I tried to explain my perspective on the topic and what I really meant (assuming I had really said those words). She wasn’t interested in all that because to her, I was already being defensive and was twisting things in order to be ‘right’. She kept quiet.

So I stepped back and remind myself there was no point doubling down on mistakes, not to mention trying to clear up something as convoluted as the above. I asked myself if I entertained the possibility I was ‘wrong’, if I had to change my course, would I? Is there a point in trying hard to be right? What test am I sitting for here?

In life, it’s really important to be right in terms of making good judgments. But for most part, you don’t make things right through arguments, or your words, you do them with your deeds. So when you discover some truth, double-down on it. And how about mistakes? Take action to move forward from them; if you have to rectify, go for it, if you should be leaving it alone in order to go forward, then do so! Just please don’t double-down on it.

Cost reductions for solar panels have been phenomenal over just the past half a decade. The world took quite some time to master the manufacturing and use of this technology; and slightly less time to roll it out and deploy all over the world. Subsidies are being withdrawn and feed-in tariffs have been falling for solar power as solar energy reaches cost levels close to grid parity. Now we move on to thinking about the cost of solar intermittency and mitigating the cost that it afflicts to the grid and users.

I don’t think the economics of solar energy will work without the initial subsidies or at least the progress will take longer. The coordination impact of government direction, incentive policies and commitment towards clean energy helped us draw intelligent, passionate people into the industry, and concentrate the efforts it take in order to get the economics through.

There are still many different areas of the reality where scale economics can operate and help new domains succeed. But the difficulty they have is to line up the stars for that. The principle for selecting those areas to push for lies outside economics – for example, climate change, a better environment for the next generation, or to just improve animal welfare.

Even as we understand the economics of things we ought to recognise a lot of resource allocation decisions can lie beyond the realm of economics because we don’t have perfect information and knowledge across time.

Do you take advice from everyone? Or anyone?

How about criticism?

Why? Should they be treated differently? Determine whose views you care about, and on what.

In my day job as a consultant, we often are asked how the markets will move, whether governments are likely to regulate one thing or another, push for more renewables or not. We also do some long term forecasting of trends, and their impacts on the business operations of large companies. Truth is, we don’t know and we won’t. But we will use information and data available to make intelligent guesses in order to help clients make decision, and move forward.

So the point is really about the actions we take upon making the intelligent guesses and inferences about the world. And when met with resistance, or realising that there are errors, refining our approach and moving forward nevertheless.

“Prediction depends on events outside your control. Creation depends on events within your control.  Don’t guess about the future. Shape it.”

James Clear

I often remind my coaching clients about their agency in the future; and it must feature in the stories that we tell ourselves. Not so that we will be so caught up with an outcome we are gunning for, but so that we are conscious the choices we make are not only to be for our own individual lives, but for the world and culture we reside in.

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.