Category Archives: Life

So it has finally happened. I have been contemplating for a while whether to add my views on topics related to adulting: mortgages, finance, careers and all that jazz. I’ve been working on the series on infrastructure which honestly have been my niche. I want to be able to help young talents find their interests in areas of the new economy that is not just the usual data analytics, digital stuff.

Singapore is definitely in need of IT talents, in the digital space – there are many niche areas that offer lots of opportunities including kdb+ developers (finance-related, pays really well – I’ve got a friend in there), distributed ledgers (read: the technology powering cryptocurrencies which have tonnes of many other applications), cybersecurity and cloud computing. Wait a minute, almost all those I listed there have good and strong applications in finance which will pay well. But there are other areas as well; including full stack development (which essentially is web-development, ranging from web apps, portals for various industry use), graphic user interface designs, machine-learning (which involves a whole host of different niche areas that you can get into). The list goes on.

But infrastructure space has its opportunities too! The industry is seriously in need of people who are into finance but dealing with longer term capital deployment, appreciative of risks factors, not captured through understanding financial statements but translating them from real world elements. It requires a lot of technical skills involving engineering, design, and also the ability to manage projects, optimise operations. The usual soft skills in typical general management and middle management, or sales environment is necessary in business development for infrastructure because information tends to be lacking and one needs all the social skills one can muster to obtain information from people and through observation. Being a good analyst or Business Development Assistant/Support for an infrastructure developer would build up the skills for that.

What a detour from the original topic of this piece! Actually, I had wanted to talk about savings versus insurance and how we need to consider them separately. What I really want to leave with you in this article, is this: “Savings makes for poor protection/insurance, and protection/insurance makes for poor savings” So please don’t mix up the 2 despite what the life insurance industry in Singapore hopes for you to. This is not about the whole life versus term life debate but I may allocate some time to write a piece on that. But this is about savings which in some sense is ‘self-insurance’ versus getting insurance.

The layman have problems understanding insurance because you’re buying something you cannot see. The agent may tell you it’s buying a peace of mind and then start sharing hypothetical scenarios that disturbs that peace so that the insurance he’s trying to sell you seem to be worth so much more. Other times, we say insurance is protection; and the reason is that it helps ‘protect’ you from certain financial downsides when an adverse event occurs. So health insurance doesn’t protect you from ill health but it can provide a payout that protects you from the financial downside of an illness. Usually the protection won’t be full – either because there’s some co-payment element or that you did not get full coverage. That is fine, and it is normal. So what happens is that the remainder of the financial hit have to be borne by you. What do you use to cover that? Most probably savings.

So what happens when you don’t have the insurance at all? You will have to cover them with your savings (or borrowings if you lack sufficient savings). Now what are savings for? You parents may tell you, there’s different kinds: there’s the type for your education, or for your marriage, for your house, car, and one for… rainy days. That rainy day portion, is in some sense, your self-insurance. The more events where you have insurance cover for, the smaller your rainy day fund can be to tide you through most of life’s events. If you keep the rainy day fund small, and lack insurance, then of course you will have to drain down the savings for your car, house, etc when bad things hit.

And if you buy too much insurance, obviously, you may decide you don’t need to keep a rainy day fund. But quite likely, if that occurs, you might have bought too much insurance and the premium payment eats into the potential savings you can have, whether it’s for your dream wedding or dream house. So to a certain extent, your savings and protection draws from the same financial resources, but behaves slightly differently. Savings should ideally be targeted, directed at some goals, and with a reasonable amount for contingency.

Protection should and must be procured to prevent extremely adverse downside risks (Total permanent disability, critical illnesses, etc.) The time horizon of coverage needs to be determined; life and health insurances becomes increasingly expensive with age; and term life has a time limit. It’s true that many things have to be nailed down at the point of contracting and there’s little room for flexibility after that but the good news is you don’t have to commit big all at once. You could start small, with something affordable and then build up subsequently when spending power is higher.

In the market now, there are insurance products that includes saving components (such as endowment) or investment component (investment-linked products). My 2 cents is to get away from them. Reason is that protection is a poor way to save, and savings is a poor way to protect. And of course, don’t even think of insurance as investment. It isn’t. Insurance is an expense – it is something to prevent you from suffering extreme downside. Just as you buy elbow guards and knee guards for use when you are roller-blading, especially when you first start out. The roller blades may be considered an investment to pick up a new skill which would be useful, but those elbow guards and knee guards, they are there to protect you from hurting yourself too much. The analogy goes further: it doesn’t prevent injury completely, it just helps buffer you from the extreme downside. No one thinks they are investing in knee guards. But buying those guards sure allows you to have more confidence to roller-blade.

It used to be that the only reason you should get into an endowment product is when you have no discipline to save, and you need someone to take that money off your hands at fixed frequently to put it aside from you so you’ll eventually have a lump sum. But today, that’s not even a reason because you could use a regular savings plan with one of the banks that regularly invests a fixed sum of your choosing into an index fund or a blue chip. This provides a better return and has lower costs involved than getting an endowment. It gives you the flexibility of liquidating if you really need the money urgently (albeit with potential downside due to market timing) but has no fixed time horizon so you can keep growing your money if you have no need for the lump sum even when a certain time horizon is up. There are of course more sophisticated robo-advisors and all to help you do the same at a lower risk level than investing in a market fund. All of these serves as better instruments for savings than endowment.

Thanks so much for reading all the way to this point. It can be a really bland subject and I have no infographics for you. Hope to be able to improve this over time!

Today we got to bring Dada to a pet cafe for lunch. It was a busy day at the pet cafe and there were lots of dogs around, just 1 cat who stayed inside its transparent enclosure. We were sitting in our corner at first but then a couple with a dachshund sat beside us, subsequently left and another with a maltese sat there. Many other things happened, such as people passing, trying to walk over him – yes, he was blocking the way slightly – and another terrier came walking about the cafe, even trying to go around chairs marking (thank God it was wearing some diapers) but then it also decided to poo on the floor, maybe 2 metres in front of Dada (the owner promptly cleaned it up).

The whole time we were at the cafe, Dada was just calmly lying there after having finished his bowl of boiled minced salmon. Only twice he got up with the intention of approaching a sheltie’s bowl but he was peacefully resting in the cafe despite all the noise, aggressive barking. Just look at him in this video I took:

The video is so boring you’d think nothing is happening but turn the sound on and you realised what a stressful environment the pet cafe actually was! Yet Dada was just peaceful and calmly resting! Lest you think he is deaf (perhaps a little), he just got a shock when I dropped an empty plastic water bottle on the ground from the table despite back-facing me and also, the sound of the bottle falling was not as loud as one of those sudden barking.

It dawned on me how great it would be if we all in life learnt to be like Dada, able to silence the barks of other dogs, choosing to behave independently rather than being caught up in the frenzy of others of his own kind. Amidst these times of uncertainty, gloom and incessant ‘barking’ from others, let us learn to be able to choose our response. Intentionally or not, Dada was applying Victor Frankl’s findings, albeit it was better applied to humans.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Victor Emil Frankl

This dog have been quite a blessing through the Circuit Breaker period and whilst not the most affectionate (my wife would have preferred one with more energy), it’s really been the best dog for me (yes, I prefer old and boring). We are still learning a lot from him, having been a stray who has gone through so much (check out his instagram link to read his story).

I’m not sure about you but when I was young, I always wanted to grow up more quickly, to have more independence, to be able to decide things for myself rather than have the adults call the shots. And even when I am grown-up, I never quite regretted, as intimidating as the big decisions of life might be, I wasn’t too worried about ‘adulting’. I’m not sure if I’m last of my kind amongst the millennials – whom I don’t naturally identify with though by most definitions, I seem to fall into that generation.

The thing about being in the education system, following the mainstream, you’re like going downriver, the currents keep pushing your boat and you’re just trying to catch up with sights and sounds of both shores before they pass you by. And we all go through the various milestones almost naturally. From toddler to young child, you learn to see, hear, smell, taste, feel, then walk, talk, dance (albeit badly, in my case), relate to others. And then there’s school, subjects, outdoor activities, friends, rivalry; there’s science, arts, religion, politics, economics. And huge aspects and domains of life just opens up to you when just a while ago they seemed to all just fall into a single category: ‘things the adults would talk about’. There’s then the adulting stuff: jobs, finance, mortgage, marriage, careers, etc.

I realised though, I was a bit more deliberate about picking up the ‘adulting’ stuff and that it didn’t just come by as naturally as other things did. When my subjects went from ‘Science’ to ‘Physics’, ‘Chemistry’, ‘Biology’, it seemed natural and like a progress just flows. But to be honest, there was much more effort to go from ‘saving my pocket money’ to ‘managing personal finance’ or jumping further into things like mortgage, insurance, taxes. On one hand I think our education system made knowledge acquisition easy (though as kids we might think it was almost a chore to learn things); but on the other hand, it also didn’t prepare us for the non-linearity of the real world (this is a topic I intend to revisit again some day). That means that whilst we were in school, things had more clear-cut ‘right answers’; and we were more focused on learning answers than on learning the questions to ask.

When we were in school, the teacher throws up a series of questions, and we figure out the answers as we interrogate the body of knowledge we’re given to master. Teachers, study materials, and resources around us will be put together to help us answer those questions. We learn to engage those materials to answer the questions. But in life, we need to identify the questions and figure out what we’re trying to solve. This is because of the greater dimensionality involved in life, and the interplay of more factors (ie. no more ‘Ceteris Paribus’). More than half the battle is won by asking the right questions.

To take an example from insurance, we ask the questions like: ‘What is the best insurance policy? How much do I need to cover myself for? How does the coverage of this policy compare to another?’ Those are good questions, but they only deal with solving the superficial question of ‘which insurance policy should I get?’. There are other problems present – for example, isn’t the insurance agent just going to try and push me to select something that earns him the most, and which I’d most likely buy? Won’t he obscure any information? I realised it is more important to see the problem as ‘how do I get my agent to really work for me?’, bearing in mind that beyond optimising within your choice set, you’ve to solve a principal-agency problem as well. You need to flip the choice around and ask ‘how do I get the agent to sell me an insurance policy that works best for me and not himself?’

Examples of such questions I’d ask are: ‘How are your commissions aligned to my premium payments? How much of the money I’m paying goes into distribution costs? What are the mechanisms for the insurance company to return funds to the insured when the claims fall short of what you provisioned for?’ This is because, within the choice set you’re offered, there will always be a nudge towards some option that benefits the party offering you; getting the best deal is not always about just choosing between the options but questioning the choice set itself. Nevermind if your agent doesn’t know the answer to those questions, it challenges them to recognise conflicts of interest and to tread carefully, elicit greater empathy. In any case, if he tries to hand-wave these questions away, you should start doubting his sincerity about helping you.

I have had to be more deliberate about growing up now that I’m grown-up because the system doesn’t help me with knowledge acquisition anymore. In fact, the economy has a myriad of incentive misalignments that encourage parties to obscure information from one another, generate false ‘knowledge’ to influence people. Realise now we’ve passed the river delta and reached the sea; the flow of the river is no longer pushing you along, now you have to adjust your sail and watch your surroundings. Where you want to sail towards is up to you. But sail you must, or you’ll be stagnant. Or you’ll be just going the way of drift wood, get beached or shipwrecked.

Age itself may imply more experience, but the worse thing that can happen is that age passes you by and you failed to grow. We ought to be more deliberate about our growth, deepening our thinking about what problems and challenges we are really trying to solve in our lives.

Without being too conscious of it, the 3-month period of working from home has fostered a period of greater reflection. Rather than the melancholy that people might tend to have experienced during this exceptional period, I seem to have experienced a break which I had been needing for years now. Perhaps it is my introversion finally having space to express itself, and I finally have more space to ideate and think about things that the world needs which I can contribute to. For the longest time, this side of me seem to have disappeared and life seems always about execution, manifesting activities.

It is also a period when I have much more time to think about Ikigai which is a concept I’ve come across rather long ago but failed to spend more time thinking through. The ideal confluence of ‘What I love’, ‘What I’m good at’, ‘What the world needs’ and ‘What I can get paid for’ seems almost elusive on first glance. But I think we’ve been so conditioned, so influenced by the society, the Singapore-education’s linear approach that we’ve created some false dichotomies and choices in life, seeding our own misery.

This is the reason we conduct surveys that forces people into a corner; but this recent woohaah also led to some good reflection. I recall the times when I gave up on initial hopes of getting into the arts (I dabbled with graphic design, film-making, animations during high school), thinking I wasn’t good enough at it even though I kind of enjoyed it. At the back of my mind however, I did feel that if I go down that path, I’d be a letdown to my parents even though they never forced me into one area or another. And the reason is that I shared the common view that an artist won’t be able to make money.

I’ve certainly gotten myself into a profession at the moment, doing something I’m relatively good at and can get paid for it. The fact that I love economics and my work is tangentially related to that helps. And for the longest time I did genuinely have that sense of mission, and that I’m making a difference. But gradually, service at church helped to fill that bit on the sense of mission, which perhaps made me less insistent on doing ‘meaningful work’ in my day job. Life can really ‘slip’ in this way when we just try to go with the flow. Or perhaps when the waves of circumstances leaves you without a choice of the direction by which to go.

I’m definitely going to be more deliberate and mindful in considering the concept of Ikigai. And may the Lord open doors towards more meaningful work that I’d find more passion in.

Teaching, by and large, have shifted increasingly from schools to farther afield. So those aspiring to teach; bear in mind that leaving education sector, or not being a ‘teacher’ altogether, might be a good choice.

I had always enjoyed teaching, and have a deep passion for education – which is why I tend to have so many commentary ultimately honing in on education reforms, changes in perspectives that would help to alleviate issues and challenges I observe in the society at large. I have a lot of interactions with teachers primarily because most of my friends became teachers, and having been married to one, new friendships with more teachers inadvertently forms a permanent part of my life.

Yet through these interactions, it is often the daily problem solving that occupies them and hardly any thoughts about dealing with larger issues in society through education, or their role in teaching. In fact, for teachers today, teaching is relegated to a very small part of their actual jobs – with admin, pastoral care, managing projects – and not forgetting marking – taking a lot more time.

“Real teaching” has gone on to tuition centers, enrichment and supplementary classes perhaps. Learning has also changed because many would say that what they learnt in school doesn’t apply much in their work or most of the rest of their lives! Though the academic qualifications they gained count towards something.

Because I love teaching, I realised that my work interactions, be it dealing with bosses, peers or juniors, I incorporate a lot of ‘teaching’ in them. Some would say it’s communications, which probably forms a more general part of the equation; but for most part, as the economy becomes increasingly knowledge-based and knowledge-intensive, teaching skills at work actually matters a lot. The ability to transfer and share knowledge meaningfully matters – whether tacit or explicit knowledge. And this applies not just downwards to juniors and peers but also to your superiors. A large part of this sharing, involves engagement to the extent of teaching.

In fact, sales, is generally teaching. And conceiving it as teaching helps me recognise better how to prepare a pitch, because what I am trying to do is no longer just merely trying to convince and persuade, but to do so through encouraging understanding. In so doing, I also clarify my own thoughts and don’t come across as trying to baffle the audience. This trustworthiness is an important reputation a salesperson ought to gain to be able to deliver consistently.

And over time, you learn to recognise the ‘good students’ from the bad, invest your time wisely to teach and gain rapport with the good students, try to reform the bad ones, and you’d realise, you’re a teacher after all! Whether in consulting, business development, sales, as an operations manager working within a facility – industrial, commercial, even residential – you can be the teacher you might have thought you had wanted to be.

My Dad, who had wanted to be a teacher when he was 16, was rejected for being too young. During those days, people did start working early but he was told to get more qualifications. He eventually went on to be a clerk in public service, shifting around until he became part of the tax department. That anchored him within the tax sector which he stayed within for the next 30 over years. He never became a teacher. But in many sense, within the family, in our interactions, he has always been one.

Singapore’s economy is going into a period of much less optimism and this of course is something that we are not alone in when we look at the global economy. As much as we’d like to think we are insulated from some of the headwinds or that we can mute some challenging effects with expansionary budget, the fact that we are an open economy remains.

The idea of a small export-oriented economy succeeding in the world and that being the right strategy finds itself more in the global context that the economy is in, rather than the inherent structure or nature of the economy. Of course, Singapore put in place policies that allows us to execute on the ‘small, open economy’ idea well, and we reaped its success but let us not kid ourselves with that inward looking view that our policies by themselves stands up well (as though they are inherently good and not made optimal due to circumstances).

I’ve been a champion of using closer study of history (some older pieces includes this and this) to appreciate and understand the global context by which an economy succeeds or fails. And as the world enters a phase of increasing trade tensions, nationalism, indulge in the folly of closing their economies, we too, need to rethink our ideologies associated with being able to compete, and consider how far we are going with our so-called advantages and whether we need to invest more deeply into them. Our traditional metrics of competitiveness, of targeting growth might need to change and this is a window of opportunity to shift people’s attention to some new ways of looking into diagnosing the growth of our economy and fruits of our labour.

For a start, considering the structure of the economy in terms of demographics and how income, wealth and government’s revenue structure from various socio-economic groups in the country will matter. Next, looking at our connections with the rest of the world in the form of Foreign Direct Investments, Direct Investments Abroad, net Direct Investment Abroad, Imports, Exports and scrutinising the network of our Double Taxation Agreements and Free Trade Agreements will help. Finally, we can consider vibrance of community life of our citizens – be it civil society, or religious activities’ involvements.

When we were younger, our parents gauged our growth based on physical parameters like weight, height; then when we grew a little older, they looked at our behaviours, and the intelligence we exhibit. As we enter teenage and adulthood, our growth became more based on social parameters and maturity. While in some sense, those attributes manifest themselves imperfectly through grades, salary, job positions, etc, we need to acknowledge that as one grows, we ought to look at different and new parameters that indicates genuine growth.

Likewise, in an economy, if we are still stuck with looking at GDP and having policy or resources responding to that, then it would be rather immature. Yet at the same time, we ought to realise that those figures/quantities that represents the concepts behind them, are often flawed and we ought not take them too seriously to the extent of assigning them 100% weightage in reflecting the reality of matters. Finally, the global context we reside in must inform our actions and allocation of resources, investment into different areas. A man do not grow inherently or inwardly, he grows because external circumstances forces it to – if we often just think about insulating ourselves, then we may even insulate ourselves from the need to grow.

Clinical psychologist Sara-Ann wrote a recent piece on CNA about young people burning out in life and work (especially work); it relates somewhat tangentially to my not-so-recent musings on prestige careers. Strangely, she decides to spend more of her piece empowering the individual, listing 5 points that the individual can do to combat burn out. Nevertheless, she tucked in the piece a very important statement we should delve more deeply into, as a society:

[T]he onus is on organisations to recognise the importance of workplace health and build workplace cultures conducive to their employees’ physical and mental health.

There is a need to put this responsibility back to organisations; and one of the difficulty of doing this, is perhaps the misconceived notion which Sara-Ann herself perpetuated by saying:

Indeed, organisations should tread cautiously and strive to achieve a balance between increasing productivity and deleteriously endorsing a hustle culture.

This is ultimately an issue of balancing short-term and long-term priorities for any organisations. To me, the only perspective worth taking is still the long-term perspective and anything that is used to deal with short-term issues must not detract from the long-term perspective. The lack of worker engagement, endorsement of hustle culture, always asking for ‘more’ (which might involve cutting corners to create capacity to deal with more) as oppose to ‘better’ (which could involve questioning practices, eliminating inefficient or unnecessary ones, so as to create capacity to do more important things), reflects an organisation that has lost sight of the long-term perspective.

I think organisations, leaders, need to assist individuals on all of the 5 points that Sara-Ann pointed out in her commentary.

1. Structures and leadership in place must be able to catch the warning signs of burnt out individuals – especially good-performing ones
2. At risks of being paternalistic, organisations need to ensure basic needs of staff are fulfilled – work can never be the expense of physical and even (genuine, not perceived) psychological needs.
3. Companies and organisations must develop credos that emphasize clear sets of priorities and actively help staff resolve conflicts between these priorities so that each individual have a good sense of how to order their work to achieve the most for the organisation
4. Workplace health promotion and social activities can sometimes end up being additional obligations – take active steps to ensure that downtime for workers are genuine downtimes and encourage participation gently. Provide staff with time and space for down-time.
5. Create routines for engagements that are genuine, unpretentious and safe for staff to express their views, engage in meaningful debates on things that matters to them at work. Too often, ground views are suppressed in favour of management views, politics ignored or taken as given; respecting employees, down to the lowest level, is the

A recent book I’ve been reading, Enlightened Capitalists by James O’Toole talks about many leaders and companies who have sought to do all that, and more. Whether the small size and open nature of the Singapore economy allows for that sort of practices is another story. Too often, these companies are considered sui generis but given Singapore being also a bit of a sui generis itself – I wonder, if we could choose to take this lead in this part of the world to make a difference to the way our own country continues to develop, and the manner the region would grow.

If we are to do so, then our extreme meritocracy which Sara-Ann described would be the first place to start working on. In fact, Clifton Mark penned a piece earlier this year in Fast Company, which suggests that not only is the notion of meritocracy an illusionary ideal, believing in it actually do you little good. And that, is probably how our poor 26-year-old Dave in Sara-Ann’s commentary came to be where he is. To address this conundrum relating to what could well be one of our national ideals (another one, probably less mentioned now and peddled around only when necessary, is pragmatism), would be a great challenge.

The only means would be to identify other values to supplant this so-called ideal. It has to be compelling both in psychology, philosophy and also sustainable in its economics. And to that end, I think the virtues of care, and making sure that we can sustain caring, can be a good starting point to see what we can crystallise eventually. Just as people had thought that treating people as resources for a company rather than as the soul of the company (courtesy of Sara-Ann who used that description) made economic sense; we can rewrite this orthodoxy through learning from companies highlighted in James’ book: Johnson & Johnson, ACIPCO, Levi Strauss & Co, Lewis Partnership, etc.

Been reading quite a bit of writing on this topic primarily because I’ve been speaking to many young people about jobs and careers.

A friend shared this link to a Medium article. He was suggesting that in the context of Singapore, there is this happening and added to the list of the careers would be the sort that is promised to “government scholars”.

Singapore is unique in the sheer number of government-sponsored students in the foreign universities perhaps in proportion to our population. And myself being a beneficiary (though my friend would think, “victim”), I’d say that it has definitely help to develop a rich pool of human resource and talents. Yet as any MNC trying to move into Singapore would attest, talent for those sectors listed in the article is actually hard to come by, primarily because they are hoarded by government.

Through that article, I also found out about Andrew Yang’s book which I started reading. The beginning chapters which share largely about the motivations of high-achieving students aligns well with the true story of “elites” in Singapore. Not just the academic heros but those with lots of co-curricular achievements and even volunteering experiences.

Probably something worthwhile for Singapore government is to consider how to foster more risk-taking communities and to support talents to build things. And also to continue opening its talent pool up to be accessed by the industry- it can be shortening of bonds or just simply doing away with scholarships altogether, creating new forms or institutions that provides education in a manner that works closely with the industry and is primarily led by the industries which generate real value.

The infrastructure industry represents such a place where business focuses on value-generation for long term developments that enable economic growth, and creates new employment opportunities in the emerging economies. Yet risk-capital and human-capital is clearly under-allocated because the world has become increasingly short-term in its thinking and the influx of short-term (to the sense of instantaneous) data is worsening our myopia.

We need talents for these areas of human development. And we lack them partly as a result of the same myopia; lots of talents have poured into technology leading to that same momentum feeding itself. By virtue of its long term character, infrastructure development will find it hard to compete for both talents and resources. There will have to be a sea-change in culture and a shift in our attention towards the common future the world needs to head towards.

The greater the resolution of the big data, the poorer our vision of the big picture.

This is a bit of a seminal piece dealing with draps and bits of ideas mashed together. Hope I find time to think through and put up a few more coherent pieces soon!