Kevin Low

I was a teaching assistant in New York University for a year with the College of Arts and Science, teaching mainly economics to undergraduates. And there is a certain annoyance I get when students raise their hands (or even ask me during office hours) to ask “Will this be on the test?” in response to something I was teaching. It was hard to place a finger on the discomfort I felt; after all, isn’t it good that the students are concerned about their grades? Won’t it be worse if students didn’t bother at all?

I think that tension I felt was one where someone seems to be trying to cheat on the game. And inviting me to be an accomplice. But what is the game? What are we trying to honour here?

For a teacher who thought that the game was to get the students to perform in the tests, to get brilliant grades so they can please their parents, impress their peers and get the certificate eventually, I think there should be no tension. But for me, I think the real game was different. It was one where students get inspired to learn, where they recognise the value of acquiring knowledge and developing the skills through their engagement and participation in class. And this is important because we are preparing for them to be self-reliant, to be able to navigate and thrive in the world after they graduate. And we know that the grades, the certificates and exams are all but signals attempting to reverberate the precious truths about your capacity, capability, of who you are. But no matter what, these signals are never accurate, and worst, they can be dishonest, they can be gamed.

When we become teachers who think that grades are the game, when we try to lift up the grades of the students rather than lifting up their capabilities, we are being dishonest to the world. And we are also being dishonest to ourselves, about the state of preparedness the student have to take on the world. It is like being lenient to the driving test candidate during the test and shirking responsibility for the accidents he/she caused subsequently by his/her bad driving.

I’m trying to undo the damage our systems and culture have created in the new generation of young adults, and young professionals. Find out how I’m working on this. And join the community I’m trying to create.

I’ve been thinking about the imposter syndrome. We all have it. We all think and even continue to think we are imposters of some kind. The question posed in our undisciplined moments of thinking is ‘am I good enough to be here?’ We want to somehow be chosen by someone else, something else beyond us that gives us the validation, who will say ‘you’re good enough’; and we prefer to think that humility is when we play the devil’s advocate to their recognition and find excuses where we are not. And we mistake imposter syndrome for some sort of extreme humility.

But really, who did we think is a imposter? What kind of person is he? And how are we really comparing to him rather than comparing to the ‘others in the group’.

You can pretend to care, but you can’t pretend to show up.

George L. Bell

I think an imposter is one who pretends to care about the work; but who doesn’t show up for the work that he’s supposed to do. He’s the one who claims to be making sacrifices for the work but if he does turn up, he is unprepared and shows no commitment.

The non-imposter, or if I may call, ‘the professional’, is the one who cares about the work, shows up for the work, makes sacrifice to prepare for his/her delivery and continues to show up regardless of what the critics says or what his/her performance may be for that one moment, or the few instances. He is not an imposter because he shows up again and again for the work that he is supposed to do.

So instead of sitting around letting your mind dwell on how you might not be good enough, why don’t you discipline your thinking into considering how you can be, or how you already are, the professional. What is the next thing you’re going to do to prepare yourself, to show up for the work, to commit to the work?

You blew into the straw and bubbles emerge from the other end which is placed within a solution – what we commonly call ‘limewater’ (essentially a diluted aqueous solution of calcium hydroxide). And some powdery substance seem to appear in the solution, making it rather cloudy. Your teacher says the right description is ‘chalky’ and if you say it’s ‘cloudy’, you’ll get half the score and if you write ‘milky’ as the answer for a question asking you what happens when you blow into limewater, you’ll score zero.

And so it seemed not that important that you know what happened – at least within the context of education, which is such a waste. What exactly happened was that the carbon dioxide from your breath reacted with the calcium hydroxide and that produces calcium carbonate. But since calcium carbonate is insoluble, it floats around in powder form. And that brings us to the question, what if we described the solution as turning ‘powdery’ or what if we wrote that we will observe “a powdery substance emerging within the solution”. Your teacher might say, “Don’t try to test the system”. And so there you have it, the system rewards you for compliance, for getting the “understanding of knowledge”, in the right way. In fact, you are penalised for not following the way, for trying something new, for “testing the system”.

Fast forward so many more years when we graduate; having compounded such incidents several years and mastered the art of ‘compliance’, we enter the workforce and we wait around for instructions. We are rewarded for doing the things the boss wants us to do, we are given tasks that we have to do ourselves or ask those under us to do. And we keep on learning how to read the bosses’ mind and figuring out how he wants things done.

A compliant society works well when it is clear what is the solution to problems and when there are paths that are ‘right’ without a doubt. Now what if we make progress and suddenly chipping in is about pulling our own weight, doing our part, making our contribution, without being told how. There will bound to be a point when we need to figure out how we can contribute, by observing, by being present with issues, problems, challenges, and then giving our best shot at it. The issue with an education system that focuses on compliance and not contribution is that we train humans who wait around for instructions. Who wouldn’t ‘try’ new things; who wants to know simply ‘what is the normal way or the right way of doing something’.

But what if, making the society better is about contribution, more than compliance? Who would envision that better society?

So we have to choose what we want in life; what if we chose wrongly? What if things we choose turned out to be not as great as we expected? Do we still want to take ownership of that choice?

But if the choice I make is just a product of my upbringing, of what the society encourages me to do, then it’s someone else’s fault. And I’m happy to take that choice that my family and the society kind of gradually box me into. Then I don’t have to take ownership, I can blame someone else for the life I’m living. Because that’s not my fault.

I wrote previously about tanking in school, where we decide to ‘opt out of effort’ in school because we are creating psychological distance with our failures, running away from the responsibility of the performance of the moment. In life, we sometimes ‘give up’ our real choice and decide to follow the script of the society because we are really afraid of taking ownership of the full consequences of that choice. We are running from that responsibility of the potential performance. We prefer ‘fake knowns’ rather than ‘unknowns’. And when I say ‘fake knowns’, I’m referring to the sense of prestige, the glamour that you perceive in certain jobs or roles that the society is nudging you towards. I’m referring to the happiness you think you’ll get in making the money you’ll make from a high-paying job.

All that is fine. Because, maybe you really don’t know what you want and so money is a placeholder for all that. At least, money can buy most things. The question is, when you make money the placeholder for all that you want in your life, do the behaviours you adopt, the habits you form, the work you do everyday, bring you closer or further from the person you want to be? Are you really getting closer to what you might want?

I have written about productivity pretty extensively in the past (here and here). And one of the emerging themes that have been featured in my writing is that we are not exactly measuring and trying to target the right areas for our society. Allow me to rewrite the story: it’s not that we are measuring the wrong things but that we have already exhausted the improvements in productivity that can be gained from the ‘hard stuff’ and that we really have to start looking at the ‘softer’ stuff.

And I’d like to expand on the idea that culture is an input to productivity; and this is through the impact that social connection have on people, on the way they think, work and play. More importantly, in the knowledge-based economy, it has a huge impact on the way people come up with ideas.

Companies don’t have ideas; only people do. And what motivates people are the bonds and loyalty and trust they develop between each other. What matters is the mortar, not just the bricks. 

Margaret Heffernan

But ideas seem to be such a non-concrete output and is refined over time that we find it hard to properly quantify. That does not mean we should not try. Often we know that speaking to one another spark ideas; and that is because the social connection motivates and stimulates us.

In fact, organisations probably need to be good at ideas-management more than people-management because people should generally be able to manage themselves as long as they have that social glue that pulls them together. When everyone matters, the group as a whole delivers more; because that social capital ‘compounds’ powerfully.

Here is the full TED talk that Margaret Heffernan gave in 2015, with the opening story of the Super Chicken experiment that I referred to in the previous blog post.

In 1990s, Dr William Muir from Purdue University did an experiment with Chickens. You can read more of the details here but suffice to say, he compared 2 groups of 9 chickens – one of which he bred 6 successive generation of the chickens which produced the highest quantity of eggs, and the other being just regular chickens left to reproduce for 6 generations. The 2 chickens were held in 2 separate groups and left alone.

In the second group at the end of the experiment, the chickens were plump, healthy and producing more eggs than they were at the start of the experiment. Yet in the first group, only 3 out of the 9 initial chickens were left alive. The rest were apparently pecked to death by their fellow ‘super chickens’.

So beyond thinking about the level we are getting our people to be striving at, we ought to be considering the adverse impact on our organisations and societies for breeding ‘elites’ who are drunk on the Kool-aid that competition is good for the society. Because what happened with the chickens was that the most productive chickens merely got their success through suppressing the productivity of the rest. In other words, the win-win nature of competition can quickly be exhausted and zero-sum starts to reign.

Then, it comes to our personal choice, to choose to be competing chickens, or the ones who foster a safe, segregated community of cooperators who grow together and have energy channeled towards developing and growing one another rather than just oneself. At the same time, do we also choose to tell ourselves the story of competition being the way to get better outcomes collectively, or to agree to a more nuanced picture of our reality?

Fun fact: Chickens probably have a long history in academic research and goes beyond biology. My economics masters research was also somewhat related to chickens in that we used the prices of broiler chickens to examine the extent of price convergence in the EU following the adoption of Euros.

In professional Tennis, there is a phenomena where players who are behind, especially when playing with a player they expect to be not as good, start to perform so poorly it seems as though they gave up. The technical term is ‘tanking’ – and this is an offence in professional tennis that can be penalised. Now it is commonly believed that the reason for that is because they want to ‘save face’. You’re going to ask, how is it that you save face by giving up and not putting in the effort?

Well, it is the psychological distance we gain from our true self; to suggest to ourselves: “I’m a better player than my opponent is but this time I didn’t win because I didn’t try to beat him. If I did, he won’t win”. So there’s some perverse psychological twist in there. And once that internal dialogue is articulated, it isn’t so hard to relate to the phenomena. Of course, it is difficult for competition judges/officials to tell what is the internal dialogue in players and hence the offense is rarely called out.

Now in school we see this played out again and again. A child who is intelligent fails to perform well in the quizzes and tests then decides he hates the subject. The kid who refuse to study or put in the effort to do well for specific tests even as he’s fully capable of remembering the facts from his favourite entries in the encyclopedia. All these indicates that the psyche as we approach a tests or a competition matters – and it matters in a specific way. We need to strike that balance of caring enough for the winning to put in our best but not to have our identity so caught up with performance that a single failure wrecks our interest and motivation to push further entirely.

And that is a warning to a system that increasingly puts more and more stakes into formal metrics and testing, that tries to label people using these tests and then use that label for just about everything. A system where one point or a few moments in your life somewhat seem to define much more of your life. Until we acknowledge this is doing a disservice to the mental health of our populace (not just students but also parents and educators), we are going to think these things are necessary ills. No, they are not necessary.

When I was a Corporal with the army in National Service, I was reading during admin time. Doing a lot of reading whilst others were playing their Play Station Portable or other mobile devices. I consumed quite a fair bit of John C Maxwell’s books on leadership and one of the greatest lessons that I’ve learnt from them about leadership is that ‘Leadership is influence’ – and that was the single most powerful lesson that help to reshape what I think about leadership and how I learnt to conduct myself even as a ‘mere Corporal’ in army.

Appreciating that leadership is about influence helped me to see that it is not so much about your rank or appointment but the way you are able to get people to listen to your ideas and views, including your superiors. It takes building up your credentials, taking ownership of your role in the mission and gaining the trust of your fellow colleagues. It made me recognise that making change do not come through necessary from mere conforming so you can rise up the ranks and use your authority to make a difference.

In fact, it usually doesn’t work this way. If you’ve risen in any organisation through conforming to the usual norms and practices, then you are unlikely to be able to change much, given that you’ve built the reputation as an operator, as an implementor of instructions. This is particularly challenging for middle management who have to manage their subordinates while delivering on some of the things that the boss above him wants. Your ability to influence or to lead upwards and downwards is vital to your agency. Otherwise, you’re a mere pipe or funnel for information and instructions.

So lead up, lead down, lead sideways – through your personality, your connection with others and drive the change you want to see. To the extent your circle of influence allows you.

I was listening to Daniel Ek, Founder and CEO of Spotify speak in an interview with Tim Ferriss. And one of the themes he touched on about the difference in the competitive environments in Europe vis-a-vis America struck me. For a society that gives more ‘security’ for basic survival such as Sweden, there is more people exploring music careers and they might be on welfare for a few years and there isn’t much stigma in that. Meanwhile, when the state only does minimal in terms of provision of a minimal level of living standards, there’s a lot of striving at the lower strata of the society just to put bread on the table.

I think too often, we tout the advantage of competition without looking more deeply into the construct and consequences of competition. It certainly deserves more attention because a large part of competition is created by our societal systems, policy mechanisms. And in part, it is a policy whether we want most of our society to be striving at the level of survival, constantly worried about bread and butter issues; or to be striving at higher levels, where they are able to contribute at the level of innovation and creativity.

With creativity and ideas, I think volume is necessary and quantity is also somewhat correlated with quality. The ability to generate ideas and test them as a society is so important. As Singapore genuinely transit into more and more of a knowledge-based economy, and with pressure coming from ‘inequality’, I think we should be rewriting the narrative around so-called ‘welfare’.

We have been using quite a fair bit of resources to support entrepreneurs and corporations and treating them as engines of growth because they create jobs. But wouldn’t it work the same to suggest that if we are able to support a group of people – who would already be striving so hard to improve their lives – to be able to have a little more of their bases covered. That way, they would be able to strive at a higher level, to apply their creativity, and to perhaps kick off ventures that also become engines of growth?

Our obsession with jobs came at a time when the masses were not super educated and didn’t have much qualifications. And we created jobs as the populace own means of creating jobs would tend towards low-wage kind of roles. But generations have followed, education levels have risen – there should be more means of job creation by the local population, and we have seen that. Instead of having people compete for limited jobs, and striving like the way they’ve been striving for survival, why don’t we create room for individuals to strive at a higher level – to be the one creating jobs, new experiences and the future?

There’s this ‘movement’ of sorts amongst the younger ones of us towards ‘authenticity’ and it is unfortunately rather poorly defined and gives rise to a whole bunch of misconception. It is clearer what they are railing against: self-censorship, political correctness, and maybe too a lesser extent, some ‘professional behaviours’ that are just empty-showmanship in disguise (such as ‘face time’ at work and all kinds of tactics to demonstrate work and take credit).

But not all professional behaviours are bad; and not all authentic behaviours are necessarily good. I think we have to acknowledge that it is an act of generosity for us to give others our positivity. And this generosity might not be ‘authentic’ in the strictest sense of the word. It would be authentic perhaps for a receptionist who had a quarrel with her boyfriend the night before to put on a sulky face and refuse to greet visitors but that would be unprofessional.

So before thinking about authenticity, we should think about what the work we’re trying to do really is. Because it can be professional and valuable to be authentic as well – a creative who is serving his client may think his client’s views are not going to be good for the objectives he is serving, and point that out sensitively, and then suggest for the client to seek out someone else if they’re not going to take on his idea. His focus is the work he is going to produce, not just about pleasing the client.

Of course, if the work is pleasing the client, where perhaps there is no right or wrong way but that the work is about serving the client; then one might have to be more generous about being positive and continuing to be able to deliver what the client would like to have. And very often the work we do calls for us to suspend that kind of extreme ‘authenticity’ to be able to do the work. A dentist who had a bad day with a spoilt toast and over-brewed coffee for breakfast should not be shouting at his patient who had a great avocado parma-ham sandwich and got some avocado and ham fibres stuck in some gaps between teeth.

As some of the old lines that boomers have drawn for ‘professionalism’ begin to fade away and the market shifts towards somewhat casual interactions even in work settings, we will begin to see more varieties within the workplaces. That option to choose is great and we have to value that diversity, rather than just to call out places that may not necessarily align with your ideals.