Spectrum of intelligence

I was having a conversation with a middle aged man. He was in his late forties and having been a salaryman all his life, he was happy and satisfied with his work. He thought about some of those who went farther and higher in the organisation and said ‘they were really good’. I interpreted that to mean ‘they had what it takes’. I responded to say, ‘it’s also a lifestyle choice’.

The society has its way of determing what constitutes merit. And it’s often a mad rush in those dimensions in order to prove you’re up to par. Whether it is certificates, points, grades, licenses, we are all sucked into some of these common denominators of comparison. We want to find out the rules of the game everyone is playing and then play to win it. And be ‘really good’ – and if others win, we consider them ‘really good’, implying also that they are ‘better than us’ (though only in that single, narrow dimension).

The greatest gift as a parent that you can give to a child is to show them – that despite the education syste, despite what the society and people around you keep trying to tell you about studying hard, getting good grades, gaining CCA points, being able to rattle off lists of achievements, that there is a spectrum of different intelligence. And you may be intelligent in some form, others may be intelligent in other forms. There is no single overall type of intelligence. In a PR firm, intelligent may be about EQ, language skills; whereas in academia, intelligent may be about intellectual rigour. The context matter and of course in the context of school, there is certain definition of merit but that is not the definitive kind of merit in life.

The next great gift to your child is to encourage them to get out of basing solely on the paper chase, and find a domain of intelligence that allows them to flex their potential more than any others. Cultivate and develop that, and keep at it even as they try to meet the basic standards on other areas. Then they will come to appreciate others’ as ‘really good in such-and-such’, ‘better than me in so-and-so’.

Regulating influence

Man are social animals and so it is natural that with the pandemic out there, social media is going to have a greater hold of us than before. The unique feature about social media is that fringe group can find more strength in numbers because distance is no longer a barrier. And with some kind of perceived veil over our identities (as an online digital avatar rather than our real physical self), our voice may be a bit more expressive.

That can be used positively or negatively; we can decide to amplify positive or negative voices each time we share, and every time when we post. We may try to punch above our weight in terms of voice by exaggeration or taking a more extreme stance than we actually do just as a tactical way of counterbalancing the voices. But it is our choice whether to do so.

Now that we have that awareness of how we come across, we are better positioned to think about how we are being influence. Thinking through more clearly about our stance on different things helps us give pause to what we are reading and consuming and consider whether we are relying too much on similar viewpoints and others who are in agreement with us. Social media algorithms have their patterns of keeping us hooked to them because they show us things that agrees with us. But what about those opposing views that are available out there which social media is not showing you? Does the algorithm make them less valid?

We have to start regulating our influences and also our influence, especially online. And make your contribution a positive one.

Disruptions and pain

What is a transition? It is shifting from one state to another and it entails change. So configurations and structures will have to change in order for that shift of state to occur – or those reconfigurations and structural-shifts are simply the transition itself. Over the past decades, there are some transitions that we kind of take for granted are necessary and we just allow them to happen even though they wreck a lot of havoc but most people may think nothing much of them. Then there are the transitions we haven’t fully agreed with in part because we think there are ways to stay in the same state, or that we are simply so vested in the current state that the new state feels ‘inhabitable’ to us.

Now I invite all of us to rethink those instances where we are resisting change because of that. Because of the thought that the new state is ‘inhabitable’ or is it?

Now the Energy Transition is going to be a major such shift in the world over the next decade or so. And the pace will accelerate – well, it must – in order to achieve the carbon-reduction targets that we have committed to at the Paris Climate Agreement. The world will have to radically change the way we produce food, consume products, move people and goods around. That will entail pain because activities which are geographically-bound previously may open up to more competition, communities and local economies created by the old ways of doing things may be destroyed.

We are going to find ourselves aligning with the resistance on some fronts at least; because we might think the new world on the other side of the energy transition is inhospitable for our habits, our lifestyles, at least for quite some time. But we have to think, whether our prevailing system, habits and practises themselves can eventually make earth, our one and only home planet, more inhabitable instead of the alternative on the ill-fated trajectory we are on.

Having Guts

Suffice to say most “talented” Singaporeans who did well in school would play it safe and choose the traditionally popular jobs that pays decently at the start and have clear trajectory in career development. They would switch from being grade-maximisers to be career-maximisers. They would continue to hunger for recognition from a system, to have the right boxes checked off, to get the right set of papers.

Do we have the guts to send a message that contradicts the idea that school prepares you for life? The mainstream education is great for preparing you to be in civil service, to make friends and solve intellectual problems together, but it is not building the skills you need for actual success in the marketplace. So it becomes terribly important that you do not optimise for grades; but rather, you optimise for life skills. Actually, to segregate “life skills” from school is already a big warning sign. The desire to measure and find common denominators to compare students against each other is natural. As a student, it is important to run from these.

For example, what does school teach you and train you about taking risks? Do you have the guts to decline a scholarship so you could pursue what you want rather than what they ask you to? Do you have the guts to take on unconventional subject knowing full well you don’t have the support of your teachers in mainstream education?

And that is not foolhardy recklessness; it is about trying to create something new. To take the risk for the country because we need all the people to pursue the different paths needed to show their fellow countrymen alternative ways of succeeding, to release new ideas and challenge what we take for granted. Only then we can be assured of continued success and breakthroughs as a country.

On Suffering

Regular readers would have discovered the rescued stray dog my wife and I adopted passed on last week. I’ve had friends who suffered greater loss of loved ones over the past month. And of course, there’s been quite a lot of bloodshed in the US stock markets as well and there are others mourning different kind of loss.

Before I came to faith in Christ, I actually had more problems with love than suffering. Life seemed to contain lots of suffering – and it can seem arbitrary when we just survey them randomly. So what was strange was that one could love – because it seemed even more meaningless than suffering if there wasn’t a God, or if we just spontaneously emerged in the world without purpose or intent. Love was more a mystery to me.

But as I came to understood love through what was demonstrated by God in Christ, I begin to see perhaps suffering was more a challenge. Faithful Christians suffered, perhaps more than others. And through the bible, whether it was the old or new testament, people who believed in God suffered – often greatly. Yet if one pays close attention, it is often through suffering that we ourselves experience the greatest growth, and we develop more depth in suffering. I’m not saying we should encourage or create suffering but I think we have to learn to see how God’s goodness and His perfect will allows for suffering. And there is meaning in it – yes, even with the misery, the angst, the grief, the pain.

Having gone through all that, the question is, how do you respond? Do you turn bitter against or do you turn to God?

Octopus Manager

I’ve previously wrote about my thoughts in HR (here too) as well as some stories about my brushes with them. I had never thought about eradicating them entirely though – but Greg Jackson from Octopus Energy actually did that, for his 1,200-strong company. I thought that’s beyond remarkable, and once I read the story, it made perfect sense to me.

Greg’s point about how HR and IT departments can infantilise the employees and end up drowning creativity in bureaucracy and process is almost definitely true. It doesn’t mean it is easy to manage a company without these functions though. He has placed that onus on the manager, which can be quite challenging. Though in today’s highly automated world, there are a lot of the traditional HR functions that is actually already automated or outsourced.

Unfortunately, in a bureaucracy, even when things are not automated, it can seem as though the human touch has been long lost. An anecdote to this is a true story I’d like to retell: an employee who was usually allowed to make transport claims when going from his home to client meetings outside the office had to first drop off his ailing dog at a friend’s place so that the dog would not be left alone at home. However, because the friend’s place was a detour from the meeting location, he paid out of his own pocket for transport from his own home to the friend’s place, then got a cab to the client’s place. When he tried to make a transport claim from the friend’s place, his claim was rejected because the origin location of the trip wasn’t his home address. Even when he appealed to HR on the nature of the situation, the staff (read: humans) were not able to make an exception even when his line manager was supportive.

I think the value here is really in empowerment of the employees and getting the management to do the emotional labour of managing remuneration, incentives, training needed for employees rather than leave it to some specialised department. The way I think about the future of HR is that it is no longer an administrative function but that of empowerment and improving productivity through watching out for mental health. And if that is all incorporated into management, it might actually give management the needed boost and reason to continue existing.

Shutting down debates

When I was 15, I wanted to go on an exchange to China – I think it was in Ningbo or somewhere East China. It was an experience of a lifetime, or so I thought during that time. I had 3 other schoolmates selected for the programme and they were going ahead. I needed my parents’ approval to go ahead. It’d be only 3 weeks, and I’ll learn so much, make new friends and differentiate myself from my classmates who were all really elite students.

I brought up various benefits of going on the programme, but my parents countered citing safety issues. I talked about assurances from the school, and staying within the campus where the Chinese students stayed too. I mentioned how another of my schoolmate (who was my classmates when we were 12) would be going. They somehow found out and then told me he was okay because he had an uncle who lived in China. At that point I didn’t know but my parents already made the decision to exercise their power not to allow me to go for the exchange. To them, there was no point discussing further because they just wanted to close the case and move on.

Honestly, it wasn’t a nice feeling and I did feel rather bitter about it. I think it was because I felt I wasn’t engaged as an adult. They weren’t honest with me in sharing all that they had concerns with, which they were unable to mitigate and hence needed me to give up the opportunity. It was a lost opportunity for them to reinforce certain values they wanted to see in me before they were willing to let me have more autonomy or support my choices.

When I was reading up the recent coverage on the budget debates, especially the ones on the budget responsibility office (or whatever it is called, because I don’t get confused just because of different names) suggestion from the WP, it reminded me of the time my parents were shutting down the debate. There was no genuine response but just condescension and sarcasm from the cabinet. Perhaps the cabinet ministers felt like parents who knew what’s best and it was so obvious there was no need to waste time explaining further. But I think the opposition MPs this time did come across as the genuine schoolboy I was. He sincerely had a point that he believes in which he wants to make, and is giving the parent an opportunity to engage maturely.

It was a lost opportunity for the government of the day to demonstrate they continue to care and value fiscal prudence rather than just paying lip service to the fact our forefathers sacrificed to build the reserves we have. I think the cabinet ought to remember that the opposition MPs also represents the people (and in the case of the last election, I would say the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament is leading MPs representing a non-trivial 38.8% of the voters or whoever did not vote for the government of the day). And when answering to concerns of the people, the government can be more respectful and engage in more meaningful discussions.

Doing your best

My parents never faulted me for doing badly in school; whether I was top in class or last in class, they always said – as long as you’re doing your best. The problem was, I don’t usually know what my best really is. There isn’t really a proper benchmark. Competing with yourself, doing better and better in each of the next test is also not easy to achieve because the topics tested keeps on changing. Or if you’re gunning to be better in class ranking for each upcoming test, then it is also just a relative exercise.

Doing your best is really more of an attitude, that you have not spared any effort, you’ve not done things you regretted looking back. And looking back means not necessarily knowing the end result but then taking the same course of actions anyways. It’s another thing to say, having known the results, you regret doing such and such (that kind of regret is merely constructing an alternate universe and then attempting to live in it).

So what does it mean to have not done your best? Honestly, only you know. It could be pockets of skiving that you could have been bettering yourself. It could be actions you kept thinking you’d take and then you didn’t despite being fully capable of doing so and with no other obstacles in the way. But above all, it could be anything. The point is, what are you going to do from now? So what if you didn’t do your best just now? It no longer matters; what you do henceforth matters more.

In allowing me to put pressure on myself, and selecting my own success metrics, my parents liberated me but also gave me ownership of my own goals and targets. That is perhaps them doing their best at parenting.

Cut Plastic Bags

CNA had a great commentary piece about the tension between plastic use and modern life in Singapore. And yes, I agree with the conclusion that getting plastics out of most of our daily life is going to be pretty transformative. But honestly, we’ve done that before.

The reasons why older HDB flats have chutes in the individual flats is because in the kampong (ie. village) days, people used to just toss their waste out of their windows on to the streets or outside their houses. And if they had done that in high-rise public housing, that would have been unthinkable. So our flats built even as recent as 30 years ago still have chutes right beside the kitchen window for convenient waste disposal.

Then, when people expressed hygiene concerns about having a chute within the house, it made sense to have just one on each level for all the apartments to dispose their waste. All of these are issues of availability, not price signals. Someone somehow, using appropriate design-thinking measures, made the change and people have to adapt. This is what regulation is really about – they are issues of design rather than economics; because incentives are there to create outcomes we want and hope for. Yes, I’m trained as an economist, but no, discovering the marginal cost equal marginal benefit point is not really the goal of a society in long run.

And that’s why I advocate just dealing with the issue of availability of plastic bags – ban them progressively for different purposes, starting with some of the easier places like fashion shops (most of whom already use paper bags), then gadget shops, IT stores, followed by provision shops, convenience stores, then supermarket checkouts (not in terms of food packaging) and so on. Allow food to continue to be served in plastic bags for hygiene purposes but encourage bio-degradable substitutes. We can do this over a period of time – say, 1 year. And that’s good enough; prolonging it just makes it harder, and more painful. People are smart enough to find substitutes, and figure out other solutions. It’s not like they are not available – they just need some shoving to be adopted.

Diets, Food and Identity

Recently, I had a nice CNY dinner at Whole Earth that was specialised in ‘plant-based cooking’ which of course is there to appeal to those with ‘plant-based diets’. Really pretty good food and I’m really glad we got to go to the place – and it really did happen only because there were a couple of vegetarians within that group I was having dinner with. And this sort of diversity is great, it brings about new ideas, and causes us to think about things we take for granted. Being challenged even in terms of one’s identity is a useful way to grow.

Yet it can be difficult; when asked why we are on one diet rather than another; we might give a response that evangelises the diet, or one that tries to provide excuses for your personal idiosyncrasies. And when people test the boundaries of those diets (‘isn’t alcohol vegetarian?’ or ‘why do some vegetarians eat garlic and onions while you don’t?’), you might get uncomfortable about it. And you might not even have a ready defence or clear idea because you didn’t really think about it when you signed up to the diet. I think these are times when we can be more genuine, to say we’re still figuring these out, but that there are good reasons that you committed to the diet, and hence you’ll figure out why.

What would be an inappropriate response is to ask ‘why are you on that diet of yours then?’ as a response to the uneasiness or the discomfort of being challenged. Or to offer a more personal counter-challenge veiled in intellectualism: “what is the role of your diet in your life then?” Often we don’t even think much about our diets – the masses of us who just are brought up to eat certain things and in certain way! But with the changes that our global economy needs, we had better start questioning and thinking.