Kevin Low

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?”

Angela Duckworth (here)

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.

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).