Category Archives: Life

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.

We can make appraisals better. Less personal, less likely to be emotionally charged. It should not be about you, it should be about the role, the responsibilities assigned. The reframing will help us approach it more objectively and use it more wisely.

Appraisals should be about identifying fit for a role/responsibility package that comes with the job. It works both ways. When hiring, the bosses or supervisors do not have perfect foresight what the role and work will entail and so they might be shooting blindly in the way they write the job description or qualify the candidate. Likewise, when applying for the role, one can’t quite really know if the job is what he or she expected it to be like.

The appraisal should be done quarterly or half-yearly, focused on looking at the contents of the job role and package of responsibility, then discussing the fit, and direction it should move. If the role is too big, responsibility too heavy, then there might be a need to reduce the load and role. People grow, they step into new stages of life, and they deserve to be in roles that match those needs. Let’s stop restricting ourselves to that unidirectional notion of ‘career progression’ and force everyone to climb the ladder a workplace lays down.

Yes my blog have existed for quite some time and I’ve imported quite a fair bit of writings I did from previous websites I ran (eg. ERPZ.net) on this blog so there’s a fair bit of content you can look back to. But this domain, and the website in its current form has only been running for 1 year!

And this website really started because I launched my coaching practice, and decided that I want to help the people around me learn to write their own stories. This site is also a personal endeavour to keep myself engaged with writing, to share my ideas, with the world. And since the beginning of 2021, it’s been great. I’ve been writing every single day, sharing random thoughts and ideas but all converging towards the idea of creating a future that we want to be part of.

The thing is that we can only either create something for ourselves, that we want, or to create something to serve someone else. Like Seth Godin mentioned in The Practice, you can choose to do one or another but if you try to do both, you’re basically forcing everyone to like what you like. I don’t pretend that the future I’m trying to create is one that everyone will like; but I do welcome all on this journey with me, for yourself, to care about the future, to care about serving others and our future selves enough. That humankind can even have a future, and to move forward.