Philosophy of engagement

After the thoughts around instant messaging, I’ve been thinking of a philosophy of engagement to define the types of correspondents I want to get involved in – at work or in personal life. We should leave some room for serendipity and surprising conversations.

  • We should stop replying to “lazy messages” where people initiate some kind of meeting without mentioning available timeslots or options.
  • We should probably not respond to emoji-based feedback/comments/likes.
  • Where messages sent are without context or clear communications, the onus should be on the sender to clarify. The receiver could ignore messages until clarification is made.

Now the biggest burden of the instant messages is that once you received the messages it feels as though the ball is in your court and replying relieves you of the tension so that it is out of your court. Developing these protocols for engagement effectively takes that tension away under certain conditions. If we just focus on the communications required at hand, we can develop and internalise these protocols to help us deal with further anxieties induced by instant messaging.

Prepare to fail

Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.

Seth Godin

There is this sense that the world is about to fall apart with major crises (war, pandemic, climate change), and smaller ones that might creep up on us. It all sounds much like “The Emergency” in the Mysterious Benedict Society; where they characterised this sense that “there’s no one at the wheel”.

We are all bombarded by the negativity and sensational materials in the news typically designed to arouse us. And since it is easier to arouse us with fear and anxiety, that is what they do in order to keep us paying attention. The problem with attention becoming a currency in the modern economy is that a large part of the workforce have their attention taken away from more productive pursuits towards the superficial and trivial.

Do we want to continue to behave like this and allow our anxieties to indeed manifest as failures in reality? Or do we want to leverage that anxiety to drive us forward, away from freezing, towards a common goal of a future that we all want to be in?

Mysterious Benedict

I rarely talk about stuff on the media because I typically don’t consume so much entertainment through the mainstream media. It has become incredibly splittered though. Thanks to Netflix, Disney Plus and other streaming services that are all now starting to create their own content and populating their own channels.

So I was watching The Mysterious Benedict Society which at first appeared like a show with quirky characters, turned out to be extremely delightful and well executed aesthetically. The thought that went into the script and the manner the mysteries unfolded step by step was brilliant.

What is interesting is that so much of it of course covered very universal themes of truth, friendship, what intelligence meant and philosophy around independence. Children books and stories always tend to have such amazingly deep and yet simple truths it’s a waste that not more adults read them.

Some similar titles I’d suggest would be The Phantom Tollbooth, and A Wrinkle in Time.

Deep thoughts on instaneity

Having recently finished Cal Newport’s Deep Work and went on a short vacation completely disconnected from the Internet or any sort of instant messaging, I realised how much anxiety these things are giving me.

Especially instant messages. Emails are challenging too. I think we really have to challenge the implicit social contract we seem to be signing ourselves up to. Questions to ask ourselves:

  • Do we have to respond to everyone?
  • Must we respond instantly? Or must we comply with the timeline of the sender?
  • Can we not set autoreply when we are actually at work and performing deep work?

Often the trivial stuff are the ones that compose of 80% of your mailbox and can be ignored (because someone else would be happy to take them up to feel productive); we ought to reserve our attention to the 20% that are the ones we should be handling.

Easy to say that; we have to create a system to manage all that expectation and have the competence to develop the right reputation so that we put most of the work upfront on the sender.

Pleasure or purpose

What do you think drives you more? The desire for pleasure or for purpose. I think it takes both and to some extent they are substitutable. Yet I cannot help but see pleasure as the lesser cousin. In some sense, we are made for purpose while pleasure is made for us. And so when we live simply for a life of pleasure and purpose eludes us, we can be terribly empty.

Ultimately, we need both. Pleasure can help alleviate some pain along the way of purpose but when it ursurp the place of purpose in our lives, we are lost.

The Public Servant

Who is a public servant? More than 1 year since I left public service, I’m still enamoured with the concept of being a public servant. The idea of being able to do things that are altruistic, for the good of a nation, to serve the people for a regular paycheck sounds like a great idea.

What are our thinking around a good public servant? One who cares for the country, who works for the interest of the society, and deftly navigates the competing objectives of public policy to deliver outcomes. What are the values he or she should uphold? Surely honesty? Surely to do his or her work without “fear or favour”? But what does all of these mean practically?

Who are we really looking for to serve in the public sector besides having good grades and a good mind? Are we nurturing and promoting the public sector according to those values? Or is it usually easier to look at the ability to perform administrative tasks well? This can be incredibly difficult to tell. Who would you like it to be?

Opportunity cost II

Interestingly, it was around this time a year ago when I wrote about opportunity costs and my mind recently dwelt on this topic again while reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work. He talks about the opportunity cost of distraction, and of course, social media. He reminds all of us to think about the true cost of spending time and attention on social media.

Simply speaking, there is two. First is of course the time spent that could otherwise be used on more productive things. ‘Keeping in touch’ with thousands is known to be not just technically but cognitively impossible. So interactions on social media can at best be very shallow even if there’s rich engagement with a select few whom you are already interacting beyond the confines of the internet. So these online interactions are probably not adding that much to your relationships and the time can be better spent cementing the relationships within the family especially those living in close quarters.

The second opportunity cost is a little more subtle. And it has to do with the fact that social media trains our attention span to become even shorter and creates lots of little dopamine hits which really fools our system and cause us to lose the capacity for ‘deep work’ – the kind that requires more intense concentration and a persistent expenditure of intellectual and cognitive resources in order to achieve results.

I think these are incredibly valuable food for thought.

A fable

A factory made cookies. Of different colors and different designs at one of the early stage process. And they had many different cookie cutters, ingredients to make those cookies, cut and bake them. Once they were done and dried, they were then pushed to the next stage where all that cookie-cutting, baking and drying was going to contribute.

The next stage was when several different machines smashed these cookies repeatedly until they were just cookie crumbs. Not entirely pulverised. But small crumbs. With little bits of colors setting the crumbs apart that identifies their previous configuration. But the designs were gone, and shapes were no longer meaningful.

In yet another stage, the crumbs were mixed with some kind of oil, and stirred until everything was a thick paste. Now the mixture was a mishmash of colors that it lost any previous identity. The pasty mixture, like a speculoos spread is then thinly spread out on a surface, and left to dry.

That was the end of the factory production line. That was deemed the highest contribution of the cookies so painstakingly prepared in the beginning and whose little personalities and identities cultivated and distinguished.

Being organised

I was recently absent from work for a prolonged period of time and disconnected from it. I do however continue to post daily on this website because I’ve pre-written my blog posts and would like to continue sharing my ideas. But the period of disconnection made me think about the days back when we were younger and cellphones (mobile phones or mobiles as they are called these days) were uncommon.

We left our homes with no means of reaching our parents other than the public phone booths. And it was okay when we were uncontactable for hours or even days. Because we planned ahead, informed our family and friends (at least those who matter), and there we go.

Today, doing so would be unusual; and people we love can get seriously anxious or worried when we are not contactable. Even if we tell them we are away on vacation, or just out to run an errand. And there’s the discomfort if we don’t bring our phones out.

It dawned on me that being more organised, reliable, and predictable would be able to quell such worries and prevent these unnecessary anxieties. How do we build a reputation for that sort of organisation and reliability?

Clarity and the hustle

When people practice hard selling techniques and FOMO-marketing, are they getting more than their fair share of clients? By focusing on FOMO elements and putting pressure on the client (limited time for this pricing), the client is unable to get clarity on the real purchase decision, which boils down only to:

  • Do I need the product or service?
  • Is the need coming from within or out?

The problem with hustling and pressure selling is that clients do eventually wake up and realise he or she paid for something that he or she didn’t need and probably did not want in long run either. There was never any alignment between the client and the sales person.

Gaining clarity is important in every of such purchase decision so insulating yourself from the high pressure, from the rush, and the emotions is important. By reaching for clarity, you bust the hustle and create space. To breathe and to decide.

Likewise, is the society, the family, communities and expectations from outside hustling you?