Category Archives: Life

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 Subsidies are being withdrawn and feed-in tariffs have been falling for solar power as solar energy reaches cost levels close to grid parity.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.

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.