What is the right scale?

Some impacts are hard to scale spatially, or geographically, or culturally. But they can be persistent, and in time, they scale well. For example, if you’re a teacher of a classroom of 40, you might impact at the most 40 lives. And that is not easy to scale, because enlarging the class does not necessarily mean more lives are impacted though the education system might want to think that way.

I once asked talked about scaling Laksa (a Singaporean dish) in an article about the narratives of millennials. I wondered if it matters that we created products which didn’t scale at least during the moment they were created. If we create products only to ride waves of growth, than majority of the products and service offerings in the world would not exists. It is often seeking to serve a particular audience that an offering comes into play and then gradually finds either more audience or more application in order to scale.

So what is the right scale for the impact that we make, or the offering we’re trying to put out in the world? It is exactly the scale that keeps things going, that keeps you doing what you want to do. If you’re happy to keep doing supporting under-privileged kids one by one, go for it; make sure it pays you enough to keep you going as well. And it is the same for a business, you just need the smallest viable audience (a concept that is popularised by Seth Godin).

Sustainability is the right benchmark, not just for the environment, but also the scale of what we do.

Do we really want to work all our life?

A friend who has a workaholic boss became really offended when my friend waxed lyrical about not wanting to work all the time and preferring to have more time with family should his life end abruptly. The boss countered “do you think I really want to work all the time?” This is probably a good question for most workaholics to ask themselves, myself included.

Work has become more than just pure toil and pains of labour. It has become fun, more aligned with passion, with a veil of impact and meaning attached to it, and a lot friendlier (ie. Restful) to the human physique. Perhaps more importantly, our expectations on what we can consume through our wages from labour has risen spectacularly. So work becomes even more central in our lives. And in most cases, we come to see it as so central it is such an integral part of our identities.

So it is strange that we still get offended when it is made explicit that we have allowed work to become so much of us. Maybe because something inside us realise that is true. That in the short term, while we may be enjoying the dopamine hits of problem-solving in work and earning a great income; in the long run, that is not what we are made for. We are made to be more than our worker selves.

And perhaps for some of us, it’s time to discover ‘what else’.

Direction of effort

In which direction should one direct his or her efforts? Would it be in the direction of goals? Or the direction of one’s preference and interests? I’ve come to discover more and more than following one’s interests and one’s goals are different and we can set ourselves and our outcomes on very different paths when we pursue one or the other.

Being aware of what journey we are on becomes important when we look at what we are trying to get from it. Often, when pursuing a journey towards goals like career, money and recognition, we forget that we signed up to something that sacrifices our interest and passion, then we get upset about not getting those. Meanwhile people who might find themselves trying to follow their interest complaining about lack of income or opportunities.

We can’t have the best of both worlds no matter how many examples we find in the world to hold up. And we don’t always fully understand the sacrifices and pains involved until we eventually reach that level. When we direct our efforts we must be reminded which path we’re moving along; that determines what the path yields.

Great works

Do you create great art by thinking, designing and conceptualising until you eventually have a great piece of work to execute? Or do you execute along the way and figure out how it will look then it becomes great randomly without your control or preparation?

Or does making something great involve continuously trying to make something that serves your interest, purpose and the audience you are developing? Is it the trying that makes works great? Rather than the work itself?

I think as we accumulate experiences, life and mistakes in our lives, they inevitably make their way into our works. If we don’t keep trying and working through struggles and mistakes, the chance of a great work emerging will certainly remain close to nil.

Choice as talent

I took some time on Christmas eve listening to the latest podcast episode of People I Mostly Admire and it was a lovely conversation between Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. Over the past few years I’ve really enjoyed the podcast on Freakonomics radio and it’s impressive the amount of quality educational content that has come out of it.

One of the interesting ideas introduced in this episode was raised by Dubner on how one’s choice could be one’s talent. It turns out to be something incredibly important, especially in the Asian context where there’s a highly competitive environment and one could be surrounded by lots of highly talented people. I have in fact talked about how talents cannot possibly be born, but rather, the market recognises some kind of value for it which encourages and incentivise effort that enhances it. For most of us, we could perhaps fare really well by recognising that our choices can propel us in life. Thinking through our strengths and then making the choices to push ourselves into roles where we can leverage our talents works for more people than we realise.

The approach isn’t so much about sticking it through than to define some kind of exploration phase, development phase and pivoting phases where one identifies sets of strength and abilities, then consider the roles, value-creation, and gradually make them work within the context or community they operate within. Each step involves choices. And continually making choices, even if they might be wrong, is the way to move forward, to improve and to keep on pushing towards a point worth going.

Valuing time

As one grows older, one comes to value time more. It’s maybe the busier lifestyle from the commitments accumulated over a longer life, or perhaps becoming more cognisant that time is running out somehow. Time is an interesting object interwined with ones’ life and ability so much that when we consider how we can value it, the whole concept of valuation falls apart pretty quickly.

One person’s time is different from the other depending on how the time is used and what sort of talent underlies the time of that person in question. The opportunity cost of time is also really subjective and hard to determine; because the actual point in time and the place or context determine the alternatives possible.

Is productivity and trying to not “waste” time by trying to produce more output really about valuing time more? Or is it a greater mark of respect for the time we have when we actually use it for much-needed leisure? Is time only well spent when it generates economic fruits?

These questions are important because our society and the pressure of our culture around us constantly presses a particular view on these things upon us. We can be more conscious about how we can better value and approach our time and the way we spend it.

Imagining futures

Do you imagine a future you want to be in? Then what do you do? Do you take steps towards it?

Or do you imagine a future you don’t want to be in; and then try to take steps to prevent it?

The second approach means you have to be driven by fear. It’s more tiring than being motivated by possibilities. So it’s important to take your pick how you want to envision futures and move towards it.

Demand response to the future

The market system likes to pretend the consumer is king and producers are just responding to market demand. It is usually an excuse to avoid the responsibility of building a better future. The market system constantly tries to get ahead by shaping demand, through advertising and influencers. The whole system of exchange of influence and money takes place within the market context and that’s enough to refute the claim that consumers reign sovereign.

And that means consumers needs to be more conscious of what stories they are taking in. And more than being passive receivers of goods and services, consumers have more chance than ever to shape them. Demand is usually decentralised but it can respond to so many things beyond price signals. The problem with our economic view of the market is that we only try to capture market power in the form of price-setting and ability to substitute (even this is not so well considered despite the crazy mathematical gymnastics required).

Sustainability cannot depend on corporates championing causes and trying to come up with new products and services. Consumers need to and can respond by requesting to reuse their bottles, avoiding products with too much packaging, reducing gifting of everyday items with expensive packaging.

The easiest criteria to default towards is convenience and costs but we can also think in terms of alignment of values and cost to the future. If we are able to adapt our demand to these dimensions, we can co-create a future we want to be part of.

Market for talents

Are talents born? How would you know a baby is going to be a star violinist, or a top notch computer programmer? How would these kids first be incentivised to try things out to begin with? It’s more likely that there’s a market for the particular talent which the kid was exposed to and hence got started, and found himself or herself being able to do it well and hence the resources around him/her was attracted to support the development.

The market for talent is vital to encourage and develop talents. It is the presence of the market that allows people to aspire towards being a ‘successful X’ – be it a musician, or a chef, or mathematician. Kids don’t just wake up one day, look at a long path into the forest and say they want to work towards being a cross country runner.

Singapore have been able to nurture and attract talents essentially by drawing proven talents from elsewhere into the market and then celebrating them. The value of doing this can be powerful if resources are poured into directing the nurture of local talents concurrently. Careful thinking about this market and its design is important so that structures can be put in place to ensure this is a virtuous circle. Those identified as talents should be able to support others who are trying to develop themselves. Pay-it-forward type of mentorship should be encouraged.

And those who have benefited personally and individually can pool resources to nurture the next generation. It’s akin to successful lawyers or bankers giving back to their alma mater to start scholarships that support new lawyers and bankers.

Economics that enables change

When Leon Walras set out to made economics a science, he sought to describe the workings of the market using mathematics and even captured the mechanics of its dynamism – the notion that the system is just trying to head towards equilibrium. But the problem with real markets is that the prices never clears the market. Equilibrium is never reached.

If the Walrasian equilibria were reached, there’d be no goods on the shelves of any shops. All the goods would already immediate be in the hands of those who are willing and able to pay for it. And no one would really have the opportunity to master any jobs or pick up any skills reliably because they’ll always be switching jobs and jumping back and forth different production curves in order to optimise the market. Time was a missing ingredient in those equations of economics.

So the equilibria-seeking economics was useful as a way to describe and think about markets to some extent. But for the problems we are dealing with today, we need a new set of economics and approaches that enables us to move the world forward. This is already available as part of development economics and the new institutional economics – we’ve had decades of experiences thinking about laws, competition, market organisations and design in order to guide ourselves all towards the outcomes that can improve the world. It’s probably time for the basic foundations of economics to be about incentives and behaviours rather than demand and supply.