For those who are subscribed to my mailing list, you might already know that for some time, I’ve been planning to have an instagram account to post bite-size materials of the longer form articles I write. There is really a lot of wisdom to distill from many places and I had envision the instagram to be really about curating the best materials and thoughts to share with my audience.
Being one of the more senior millennial, I had to enlist the help of my young cousin to provide ‘expert advice’ and also to help me with the graphics that I wanted to put up in my instagram. My posts will be oriented around some of the mindsets and thinking around identifying life goals, and how it connects with career choices, and the steps to get there. Almost coming to a week on since the launch, I thought to share it here on my website so you can follow and benefit from it!
I half-jokingly left the last Ikigai question to your own imagination but I have deeper thoughts to share with you in this additional article I would like to add on to the Ikigai series. Ultimately, the question on what the you’d be paid for, will bring up a point about how much is enough for you. This is the deeper question that the Ikigai framework should be harking at. Just as ‘What the world needs?’ makes you think more deeply about your purpose, the ‘What you can be paid for?’ implicitly makes you consider the lifestyle you want.
And today, in this world of plenty, where you even have the option to consider how you may live a more purposeful life rather than just go with the flow, shows that you actually know there’s a minimum lifestyle you can quite easily satisfy and secure. The point is to understand how much is enough for yourself. You might then think you want to fulfill your potential and not be mediocre or just allow your income to stagnate or to be complacent. I agree; but I think fulfilment of one’s potential doesn’t always come in the form of earning a higher income – you can also be compensated through a sense of meaning and satisfaction from the success of your clients.
Anyways, the key question here is about the selection of lifestyles; how much more enjoyment are you actually working for when you are trying to get more income for a more lavish lifestyle? And how much pain are you going through to hit that spot? So one way to consider finding possibilities in this category is to work backwards from the lifestyle you want. You may have an option that gives you more time to pursue other interests, or one that gives you more resources to live life more lavishly – you’ll have to weigh which one you gravitate towards.
This is an additional article to the multi-part series of writing on Ikigai. The cover article explains why I’m writing all of these.Read part two, three, four, and five. Download the worksheet here.
Congratulations on reaching this fourth and last question on the Ikigai framework! Lest you think that this article would be about salaries and all kinds of different jobs and remuneration, it isn’t. I just have one word of advice on this:
Don’t be lazy. Go do your own research.
Kevin Low, 2020
Go through the worksheet that you’ve filled in. What worksheet? I developed a simple worksheet for you to fill up and the first 3 questions would have allowed you to identify activities/jobs/roles that satisfies all 3 of those other elements. Now you can identify those areas where you can actually get paid for, and fill them into this section of the worksheet! As for the exact remuneration, you’ll really have to do your own research because there are a lot of local variations on the remuneration for different jobs and everyone has access to different opportunities as well. This is where you have to pull your weight and do more work.
The reason I’ve put the lists on the sides of the venn diagram is to allow you to try listing possibilities in each categories first and then find common ones which you can fit into parts of the venn diagram that is overlapping. You may not find you are filling every single portion of the diagram and that’s completely fine. Because you will then be able to get into the ‘troubleshooting’ mode of identifying what are the gaps in terms of reaching the sweeter spot. Mapping out those possibilities also gives you a sense of which direction you need to shift your focus in life: have you been too obsessed with making money? Or bankrupting yourself with your passion? Or losing your soul in trying to fit your strength with getting paid?
But more importantly, you can prioritise your energies with this. You can consider new combination of activities that unlock a sweeter spot. Or you can pick up a hobby to plug the gap. And if there’s a hobby that plays to a little of your strength and in due course you could be paid for it; you might use this to encourage yourself to make it more of a jobby (get paid for it!) rather than just a hobby.
This is the the actual final part of the multi-part series of writing on Ikigai. The cover article explains why I’m writing this.Read part two, three and four. But this will not be the last time I’m writing on Ikigai; we will explore how this framework helps with many other aspects of life as well!
Having done more introspection, we now need to go beyond and consider the external circumstances. Asking a big question like this can be intimidating; not least because the needs of the world cannot quite be exhaustively listed down by an individual, nor be dealt with in that way.
But I think we should start by understanding the draw of this question. It is actually about a sense of purpose. In other words, there might be things that the world needs but it does not reasonate with you. You might think certain needs are more pressing than others though not everyone agrees with you. For example, climate change issues vs local unemployment problems. Both needs to be dealt with and you might happen to find that one ignites energy in you while the other discourages you, or simply awakens the desire to ignore it. So here are the 3 steps when it comes to trying to answer this question.
Start with the Big One may think about starting with looking at your neighbourhood to identify what the world needs so that it is more actionable but that is the last step. You have to start with the bigger issues at hand, whether it is mental health stigmatisation, climate change, ageing population and so on. By finding out a bigger domain or issue that reasonates with you, you create the space which you can flexibly pivot around as you try to balance other factors.
Listen to the purpose Then having identified the big ‘need’ that the world have, listen to the purpose underlying the need. For example, SpaceX was created because Elon Musk thinks humanity needs a Plan(et) B and he wants us to be able to colonise Mars. But at the heart of it, the sense of purpose is for the continuation of humanity and mankind. Having a sense of the underlying purpose allows you to continue to justify that ‘need’. It answers the nagging ‘why’ that may loom even as you are focused on analysing the problem you are trying to solve.
Narrow down to the Small This is the right time then to try and narrow down to the small. From the big issue of climate change, you need to start thinking about local action for example; what can you start with in the more immediate surroundings. It could be doing more recycling to reduce consumption (say, working for a recycling company), it could be trying to help people reduce their carbon footprint from commuting (say, working for a video conferencing company) and so on. The motivation and the values of the organisations you join may not always reasonate with the ‘need’ and ‘purpose’ you have identified but as long as you can make that connection, you’re good.
Try to distill all of these into specific work roles or potential work positions and list them down properly under the ‘What the world needs?’ header in your own personal worksheet (Download the worksheet here).
This is the fourth part of a multi-part series of writing on Ikigai. The cover article explains why I’m writing this.Read part two and three. Surprise coming up in the next part. Stay tuned.
Identifying what you love is really about deep introspection and asking the right questions. So often, we are in love with the idea of being someone, being in a certain position that we are caught up in our minds with the moments of triumph and victory without recognising those moments of pains. Finding out what you love is as much about appreciating the sweetness of the victory as being able to withstand the bitterness of loss.
Picture the Sweetness Whether it is victory in the courtroom, or basking in the limelight for the achievements in the field of your choosing, first consider the sweetness when you have reached the pinnacle. (Reality will be more anti-climatic than that; but you won’t believe it as I say this.) Consider all the aspects of the work/job/activity that you really like and enjoy, and let it motivate you and swing you into action right at this moment. So for those who have nothing that comes to mind readily, consider what you are already doing or repeat this exercise over a few of your candidates.
Consider the Bitterness Gather information about the downside of the aforementioned work/job/activity. You have to do this objectively and not turn any blindeye to red flags that comes to your attention. You could observe the bitterness through friends, contacts, your own presence within the workplace (yes, you could do a ‘site visit’). Then put yourself in these worst moments of the activity, and consider how you’d feel, and ponder deeply into the implications of the worst case. Objectively assess how you’d cope with the worse case and come up with a rough action plan.
Brewing your coffee What you love is more about dealing with and learning to love the daily grind and that means being able to deal with the bitterness more than the sweet. This is because that is going to set you apart more than being in love with the sweetness. And ultimately, the question is whether you are able to galvanise the sweet to help you to withstand the bitterness. After all, the true test of whether you can love a person is really when the person is in his/her worst self and you can still continue to love.
Try to distill all of these into specific work roles or potential work positions and list them down properly under the ‘What do you love?’ header in your own personal worksheet (Download the worksheet here).
This is the third part of a multi-part series of writing on Ikigai. The cover article explains why I’m writing this. Read the second part here.
The beauty of the Ikigai system is that it tries to isolate the various different factors that drives you for something that you do. We tend to struggle with choice of what we want to do because there are different drivers and we are weighing across them. Today I’m just going to focus on identifying what one is good at.
Ask Others We often find it difficult to come up with what we are personally good at because we belittle those things. They seem so easy to us and effortless perhaps or comes too naturally to us for us to think much of it. Ask your spouse, parents and close friends what they think you’re good at. It could be a skill, an area of management, an aspect of leadership
Observe Others Consider the kind of work you’re always allocated in a team in your current workplace. Or the work that you’ll naturally and happily take up when the responsibilities are not laid out too clearly. It should not be due to a sense of obligation but out of your natural strengths.
Self-reflection Dive into your memories from childhood; what were you praised for? Any areas of skills or domains of work? Pay attention to those areas where you might have inadvertently invested time and effort developing because you happen to have found yourself relatively strong in it. For example, you might have been happy to do more Maths problems because you tend to score well in them – it might or might not be that you enjoyed working on them.
Try to distill all of these into specific work roles or potential work positions and list them down properly under the ‘What are you good at?’ header in your own personal worksheet (Download the worksheet here).
This is the second part of a multi-part series of writing on Ikigai. The cover article explains why I’m writing this.
I’ve been looking at the Ikigai framework for a while to draw out questions for coaching or mentorship purposes and that has been wonderful. For some unknown reason we were never trained or taught to think this way and it is only when we are ‘adulting’ that we are starting to consider this.
One of the best infographics on Ikigai I’ve seen
I had wanted to write about it but never really got down to, until now. This infographic on ikigai does more than showing the different domains but also that ‘feeling’ which one seem to have when somehow lingering close to the sweet spot but not quite there yet. I think since young we’ve been nudged to ‘satisfice‘, and consequently we seem to think that hitting all those pieces is not quite possible. Instead of actually thinking of it as about ‘careers’, one can just consider how those 4 questions that governs the 4 different spheres as a powerful way of thinking about how one should devote time, effort and resources in life (links to articles added in retrospect):
But how do we answer these questions? I shall in the next couple of days, explore each of those topics and try to consider how to break them down into different pieces for you to dwell on and discover for yourself. The purpose of this series is more to try and answer those questions for yourself than how to apply those answers to your own life; but hopefully, being more equipped to answer these guiding questions will push you to think through more how they are able to come together in your life to enhance it.
This is the cover article of multi-part series of writing on Ikigai.I have not decided how many parts it is going to be.But do download the worksheet and work alongside this series.
Rice Media’s Ivan takes on what he calls The Boomer’s Mentality on ‘Hard Work’ in Singapore was a refreshing characterisation of the workplace issues faced by the millennials of this island state. I previously wrote about how the boomers taking ‘motivation’ for granted is a big problem for the younger ones. And I shared mostly about the factors that were driving the kind of narrative that we have for our lives and future in Singapore; the fact that our forefathers were driven by a vision of the future that consisted of lifestyle-deltas they could aspire towards but for Singaporeans today, to coax them into adopting that sort of aspiration would almost be demeaning to them. A new sense of purpose must be imbued in them – and it’s not longer about winning the race to be the top <fill in the blank> hub.
And while we did top the Smart City ranking for the second year running, it’s not about chasing league tables. We need to remind ourselves that indicators are by products that are correlated with desired outcomes but not outcomes we are gunning in and of themselves. Our forefathers did not set out to outrank other cities in ‘Smart City ranking’ – they had simple goals of improve water supply, sanitation, access to electricity, greater convenience in banking, access to government services, payments and so on. The question is, what are our simple goals now? What should the millennials aspire to, for their nation if not for themselves? How are we going to improve over the great achievements that our forefathers have scored for us and the successive generations?
I think we are running into what Clayton Christensen calls the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’ if we are joining big firms, following our forefathers’ models of management and “innovation”, and walking the proven path. In fact, our newer generation of leaders are faced with this challenge. If we have the pressure of being mocked for taking actions that are not ‘needle-moving’, then we risk forgoing potentially disruptive actions with significant impacts that have yet to to be ‘proven’. And this, is where I think millennials will start to play an increasingly important role.
Our role is not to inherit the burden of a legacy or be benchmarked against our forefathers in our level of ‘hunger’ or ‘hard-working-ness’. In fact, I once saw Angela Duckworth post this quote when she was promoting a particular episode of ‘No Stupid questions‘:
“Are you working hard to achieve your goals or are you working hard to avoid failure?”
Boom. Mind-blown. The latter point does describe me sometimes in my workplace! And that reveals to me that finding the right motivation and the right sense of purpose is so important. As each successive generation inherits the legacy of the previous, wildly-successful generation, a bit of their ‘working hard’ inevitably become just a matter of trying ‘not to be <fill in this blank>’ rather than ‘to be something’. Because we may have perfectly managed to capture their systems, processes and all manner of operating procedures but their intents, purpose, motivations are often lost with them. We need to find our own versions, and we have to craft our own story.
For me, it means being more selective about the purposes by which you devote your mental and physical resources and talents; and no longer subscribing to the traditional views of what constitutes merit. Perhaps we need to start creating our own industries domestically that creates the kinds of jobs that we want rather than to wait out for the government to draw the MNC investments, or for their direction on what is the next big thing. Maybe it doesn’t matter that the initial product we built is not global or doesn’t scale. How many decades did it take before Laksa was packaged and exported as a product and enjoyed by the west? Did it diminish the economic opportunity or our ability to capture its value? Get informed of our greater economic challenges, and opportunities and craft our lives around it so that we contribute to the narrative of our future rather than being just a passive recipients of circumstances.
The sense of ‘entitlement’ is sometimes a manifestation of high standards millennials have come to expect of others – turn it into a positive by applying that to oneself and to learn to be able to serve others with the standards you expect of others. Use your creativity, exposure to huge amounts of connections in the online world and digital-savviness to create and participate in new things. And I think our narrative is about dethroning the mindset of an ever-growing economic pie, or the anxiety associated with lack of economic growth. Our narrative should be about creating a more helpful, united society that shares with one another, that learnt to shed the neoclassical economic burden, to be a better version of Singaporeans than our forefathers have been, having forged ahead largely for themselves and their family in mind. Now we want to have more of our community in mind, more of even our environment and nature in mind.
We also want to rethink the role of the government; after all, they have actually accomplished quite a fair bit of what they’ve been trying to do by way of improving the livelihoods of general populace. Maybe they can shed some bureaucracy and release more talents into the economy to invigorate it with greater entrepreneurism? Beyond risk-sharing and incentivising entrepreneurship, maybe there’s some rewriting of the social compact where the extreme inequality generated by risks in the marketplace is being mitigated by risk-sharing across cohorts of entrepreneurs? This could be just about successful entrepreneurs hiring the ones who may not have done so well (a la Andrew Yang).
I think more importantly, we want to confess the failings of meritocracy even as we trumpet its successes. And we want to be more conscious as a generation to deal with the negative consequences of ‘meritocracy’ especially the psychological ones. As we de-stigmatise psychological and mental issues, we also want to recognise that building up mental strength of the society overall is as important as building up the physical fitness of the populace.
So let us build not just a smart city of the future; but one that is secure, and confident, not about chasing league tables, KPIs, or GDP, but about genuine well-being of our people. Walk the unproven path, because we need to disrupt ourselves to move on to our next S-curve as a society.
This is part two of a 2-part series on the narrative and motivations of a millennial’s life. The earlier part establishes the importance of such a narrative. Please read part one here.
What motivates you at your job? What gets you out of bed every weekday and makes you pounce on the challenges in the workplace, gets you to talk to people who may be unpleasant and gives you strength to overcome late nights? What are you working for?
I’m thinking of asking these questions to my bosses the next time I meet them 1-1; or at least just to pick their brains on this questions because it is not so often that as staff, we get to that level of what really makes the boss tick. It is mostly inferred through actions, but getting an explicit answer may help to get them thinking. The reason is that for most of the millennials today, we are sometimes disgruntled by perhaps our bosses’ expectations that we’ll be naturally motivated to do the work that we are supposed to do.
To be fair, I started writing this article a bit longer ago than when Delane Lim put up his facebook post. Beyond the foreign-local debate, I think there’s something about the narrative for young Singaporeans that have changed quite a bit. And this is important in determining motivation; and I’d also criticise how much that expectation of motivation from younger generations of Singaporeans is really self-defeating. I will probably write a little bit more on the narrative that younger generations of Singaporeans live through in the future but this will likely be my seminal piece about it.
Having gone from Third World to First within two generations, we have had for a really long time, this great sense of optimism about the future and being able to obtain the fruits of our labour. Frankly, our forefathers who were in their twenties and thirties during the time when our nation got its independence, life wasn’t expected to transform radically, nor necessarily better. They didn’t live in a wretched existence, and of course there was some degree of inequality; but the society was not only much more equal, other kinds of differences (speaking different language, or dialects, being in different clans, or being of different races) were more stark than differences between classes. Because people tasted some fruits of their labour, even if it was just a bit of it, in the form of more materials, more comfortable living, more convenient lives, there was clear motivation in trying to achieve the lifestyle-deltas.
Consumer credit was scarce, which meant that the only way to access the lifestyle-deltas was to work hard, and hence there’s that ‘hunger’ to move forward, and to forge ahead. Collectively as a society, the government, our institution had a good sense of the investments needed: in terms of education, in terms of infrastructure. The wage improvements were substantial when you move from A Levels to a Diploma, not to mention a Degree – in the days when only less than 5% of the working population actually had degrees. The narrative was that working hard, being hungry pays off for real. The improvements in terms of social systems that provided housing, retirement savings, education for one’s children and so on, provides the predictability that takes off some of the salarymen’s stress and allow them to concentrate on climbing that corporate ladder, bring the dough home and please their families.
That narrative maintained its clout for 2 generations, and it was natural because the kind of improvements were somewhat similar and consistent. Of course, the second generation inherited some kind of social hierarchy from the first generation but then in an industrialising economy, low-skills are still important and the wage gap wasn’t as significant at a time when the labour force of populous economies of India and China was released to compete in the global economy. Then when the third generation came in, there was increasing pressure from global competition but Singapore occupied a good position in the skills ladder of the world at that time and would also have one of the best educated workforce, as had been planned by the government right from the start. But optimism may have shrunk as we knew that we inevitably have to move towards a genuine knowledge-based economy. Yet our management philosophy and social structures were still largely industrial; it was critical that this generation started changing their thinking about motivations of workers and the future of work, but they didn’t because they might have felt like they held up their side of the bargain with the preceding generation so things should not be any different with the succeeding ones. In any case, they continue to enjoy rises in living standards, buoyed by wider availability of credit and various schemes to keep pockets of cost of living under control.
Alas, the narrative for millennials took a sharp change as the lifestyle-deltas were no longer that apparent through ‘hunger’. One thing for sure is that consumer credit means now you’re not working for something you don’t yet have so that you’ll find yourself with the day when you enjoy the sweet fruits of your labour. You are probably working for something whose sweetness have long worn off while the bitterness of its instalments or interest payments still kept you working. It makes for a completely different dynamic and narrative about life.
Just think about the motivation of a 30 year old man in 1970s who just got his first public rental flat with a young family. He knows he have to keep up the rental payments so there’s shelter for his family and he works hard, also trying to set aside funds for the future education of the child, and even maybe eventually to buy over the rental flat from the government one day. The ratio of House prices to the Annual Median Gross Household Income was definitely much lower then as well.
Today, if you turned 30 and just bought a resale flat in a more upscale area to move in with your spouse; chances are that you were able to avoid only on the basis of double income, and you’re paying your mortgage through CPF, which you don’t see much of but you realised you’ll need to hold on to your job to keep the payments going. You might not have kids yet and you could quite easily afford good food and other luxuries through our globalised economy and e-commerce. You are already living the life! What kind of lifestyle-delta are you expecting by working hard at your job? In fact, the additional hours you put in is decreasing the quality of your life, you’d reason. And you like job stability, because life is good now – it is acceptable to say the least, with little prospect of improvement. After all, what are you trying to afford with more money?
And so yes, what do the boomers expect as motivation from the millennials. It will have to go beyond material; and the sense of purpose cannot be assumed – it can only be imbued.
This is part one of a 2-part series on the narrative and motivations of a millennial’s life. Part two should be coming up next.
I’m starting an initiative to coach and guide young talents who have a passion for infrastructure to get into the sector. And I’ve already been writing quite a lot more on topics surrounding infrastructure, trying to make the subject and topic a little more accessible to the laymen. By that, I mean to become equipped with the jargons, latest developments and knowledge tidbits about the industry so that they can be fluent enough to gain access to employment opportunities. Of course, they ought to develop that vision of their involvement in the sector as well.
Infrastructure have never been quite an attractive area of work though a lot of the more prestigious areas do overlap with infrastructure. For example, M&A lawyers and bankers have been involved with infrastructure assets for decades. And project financiers have been around for a long time though probably overshadowed by the investment banking side of the house. Yet infrastructure presents opportunities to a whole host of work and learning opportunities for multiple disciplines. It is an area that is tangible, involves practical impacts, requires multi-disciplinary problem solving and thinking, connects finance, business, engineering, accounting, digital and operations capabilities. And to a large extent, demand for infrastructure don’t go away that easily, though it is often subject to political winds of the market.
It is not just the opportunities within the sector that encourages me to reach out to the younger ones but the fact that the sector needs fresh hands and minds. Infrastructure of the future is not that of the past. Despite having a rather established model within the developed world, the newly emerging economies are faced with economies, population and growth rates vastly different from the western experience. This means that even if the same hardware (ie. a bridge or a road) is needed, we need to look at it in new ways – whether it is to develop, finance, or to operate it. We need all the hands and minds of fresh young talents to rewrite the orthodoxy of infrastructure in this changing world.
Already, there had been new developments; the kind of risk capital entering these assets are changing, and the approach to de-risking now involves even more parties. But existing generation of infrastructure experts needs to pass on their know-how, accumulated through decades of experience to help the emerging markets not make the same mistakes or to reinvent something else rather than what has been established previously. Past experience is not irrelevant even in a new and disrupted world. A new generation of infrastructure professionals will be needed to incorporate these past learnings into the new wave of infrastructure that is supporting our new industrial revolution.
The earlier waves of infrastructure booms were driven by demand and necessity. The industrial revolution in the 1800s brought about a new structure of the economy and required high densities and agglomeration of population. This can only be supported by more infrastructure. Subsequently after the world wars, infrastructure was needed in the economic rebuilding, incidentally helping to get the western economies out of Great Depression. And this laid the foundation for the subsequent period of moderation and boom. It is unfortunate that the developed world then to start looking at infrastructure projects more through the lens of Keynesian fiscal stimulus than for the supply-side impacts that it generates. In Asia today, infrastructure continue to be driven by necessity and their demand derived from demand for many other modern products and services. For example, digital products require greater connectivity; the ability for cross-border e-commerce means more physical connectivity infrastructure for logistics to flow.
This sense of purposes will drive me to continue with my writing, my interactions with those aspiring to enter this sector, and also to learn more and develop myself in my work so as to help equip others. Thank you for giving me this chance to share my passion.
By way of starting out, if you’re reading this and interested, sign up to my mailing list first. I’ll probably get going with emails in the month of September.
