Many people were ‘stuck’ in their jobs before the pandemic. Where are you still here? Because you are worried you can’t come back after leaving? But why do you want to come back? Because it is an iron rice bowl? What is the story you’re telling yourself about your relationship with your job if you’re thinking about the iron rice bowl story? Why do you need an unbreakable rice bowl if you don’t know how to grow and make rice for yourself?
The story of an ‘iron rice bowl’ starts with the notion of commoditised labour; that you are replaceable and that you’re a cog. Anywhere and everywhere. And when you get some kind of job with lots of benefits and it is hard for you to get fired, then that security is worth your being a cog. And so you’d conform, comply and keep the machinery going. It is not because you are irreplaceable but because the machinery is designed to keep you around, even if you’re just in a bag of spare parts, you’re still making a living.
As Seth Godin would ask, ‘why make a living when you can make a difference’. You can choose a different story about work, a story on being a linchpin; on never getting fired. It matters because if worrying about job security should not be in the domain of one who cares to make a difference, and is able to contribute a positive value.
In psychology, and behavioural economics, we describe the endowment effect. It is the idea that “mine is better” to the extent one would only part with something at a higher price than what one would be willing to pay for it.
Yet the endowment effect is not that strong when what you own is something that comes to you only later. You kind of discount it. And if it is far out enough you discount it even more. So we get into all kinds of trade involving our future income, our future time, our future life. And then as we live out these commitments, we bear the burdens of them, and we end up living a life that is based on our past desires and wants. But yet if we try to wriggle out of them or unwind them, we create even more commitments through the consequences those unwinding have on our future selves.
Do you want to continue that life? If not, then focus on living in the present, steward your commitments well, and take a long term view to weight your time in the future as much as you treasure your time right now.
When I started my career at IE Singapore, I worked in a team that deals with companies in the ‘Environmental Solutions’ space. We were broadly looking at companies that deals with 3 big broad topics: Power, Water and Waste. They interact with one another in the environment but companies tend to focus on some aspects of the trio which leads them to be classified one way or another.
In terms of the maturity of these different markets, they are vastly different. Power tends to be a national, regional sort of market where electrons literally zip around at the speed of light. Water moves around in pipes at far slower speed, water networks are expensive to build and maintain so they operate at a more local level. Waste is an even more local market since they cannot be easily conveyed around through pipes. Product logistics plays a big role in the reach of a market.
And so do product uniformity. Electricity takes on a single form, whether it is consumed by households or industries. Maybe the industries require high voltages but that can be dealt with more easily. Water is a bit tricky as water quality requirements differ even within households; potable water versus water for flushing. And with industries, some require ultrapure water, others just distilled water, and the wastewater produced are also of different quality so treatment is different. Waste takes even more forms.
Demand structures are also different. Energy generally enjoy network effects. And some kind of feedback loop. The introduction of electricity can bring about more productivity which buys more electrical equipment and encourage higher electricity demand.
I once stepped into a market in Ghana Central region and saw a vendor selling a charcoal iron beside the Philips electric irons. I found it strange why they would be peddling such a primitive gadget when the modern version is available. I subsequently realised that there were significant number of villages and households which were not electrified and of course they would ask for the charcoal iron. Yet the electrical iron is superior in terms of weight, convenience, and productivity. It was something to aspire towards. So when people around you use more electricity and bring in products that use more, it can encourage you to adopt them too.
Water does not have such demand loops. There is only this much water each person can use. And new devices are designed generally to use less water than the older versions of them. Beyond certain per-person consumption, it’s almost pure wastage. Water is a more fundamental need than power so it keeps us alive rather than give us much more productivity.
Waste is of course far behind in both the supply and demand structures. Understanding these bottlenecks in markets help us appreciate why certain technologies can solve some problems and not others. Why some business models work better in some markets.
Over the past 2 years, due perhaps to the pandemic, and also maybe stage-of-life, a lot of my friends who have been working overseas are relocating back. Most of them either have already married and are starting families or are getting married. It’s great to back home and looking to contribute to the society back here.
Yet it isn’t easy to settle back in Singapore after spending a lot of time overseas. I’ve personally gone through it myself and I’ve also found it strange why having had a prolonged overseas experience always makes us feel a bit like a stranger in our own land.
For one I think when you live in a foreign land for a long time, you’d have been relieved of the social expectations from family and friends you grew up with. Sure there is some degree of social comparison with maybe university mates but that’s all. When you’re back in Singapore, you feel the weight of expectations on your shoulders again. Weekly meals at parents? Or worst, staying with parents and having to update them wherever I go.
To a large extent though, the expectations are from ourselves, our understanding of the context we grew up in, and expectations of how we should behave. That burden is greater in our home country. Perhaps what we ought to do is to lay bare these stories in our head and decide if we want to keep them.
Seth Godin asks great questions and it’s amazing how what he went through in life helped him make daily observations that is worth pondering over. I’ve referred to him and his blog frequently. There’s little doubt he has been a great inspiration to me. So I’m just planting another of his questions here ‘What is school for?’ with this TEDx talk he did quite a while back.
Capitalism evolves with the culture but it also shapes the culture. And there are market forces upon our culture that we cannot ignore. This is why an approach towards blindly de-regulating everything is not just ridiculous but unacceptable.
During the early stages of capitalism, there are many proprietors and many labourers; capital being scarce and labour being more abundant. What is interesting is that the diminishing marginal return on labour sets in quicker than capital so capital keeps gaining more. And that gives capital more bargaining power and hence retain a good share of the income. This is helpful because the concentration of capital in the initial phase helps allows the scale of investment that brings about the large scale development. The government’s ability to tax these gains also help to allow for massive investment in public infrastructure and education, enabling the new class of knowledge worker, unlocking a new phase of capitalism.
We need to decide if the concentration of capital is still important and good for the society from a corporate perspective. I’d say in some industries and spheres, maybe. But in others, it’s probably not so great because increasing the bargaining power of these industries against their customer base or labour base is not going to help with the social objective of improving the society.
And this is not just about the media giants appealing to one political faction over another in order to gain dominance over a set of audience but to the detriment of the society as it fuels divisions. It’s also brands that are trying to appeal to other divides across different spectrum that humans find themselves distributed across. For capitalism, dividing people can be profitable, sometimes more than uniting them. Luxury goods being the best example of that – making things ‘exclusive’, which essentially spells ‘division-as-a-business model’.
As I grow up, I begin to see more and more of the role that risk-taking hard in determining the success of people beyond being smart, sociable. And sometimes I wonder what risk tolerance really is. Or if we had seen it wrongly. Maybe it wasn’t about tolerating risks. Maybe taking risk was more about scratching an itch and there was this other resistance in us that helps to buffer that itch, and amp up the fear in us to prevent us from taking the risks.
In that image, taking risks itself can bring a reward to our minds, a certain catharsis to the hope that have been living in us. But we have to go through barriers, that are also within us in order to take the action. So then, if we try and be rational, we ask ‘Are the risks worth the while?’ So we look at the extrinsic rewards and see if it stacks up. That itself, will not allow us to get over the emotional, psychological barriers in place. We would say to ourselves, “Maybe I am wrong”. But the difference is whether that comes from the spirit of humility or doubt.
A spirit of humility lowers ourselves and reminds us that we don’t know everything, as much as we may seem to do many things confidently. Those confidence are built upon faith. When we sit on a chair, we have faith it holds our weight. When we refer to our previous experiences for comfort, we have faith in the order of nature or the universe that there’s some consistency in what we experience. And with that spirit, “Maybe I’m wrong” drives us to say, “that’s why we have to try it and find out”.
A spirit of doubt puts ourselves on the pedestal, it makes us think more highly of ourselves than we are. There’s this secret hidden self, saying ‘actually I know better, and things are going to get real bad’. Contrary to what we think about self-doubt, it is a form of arrogance in the status quo, an assumption that inaction has no consequences. And our doubts are actually dictating a specific expectation of the future that is not grounded. With that spirit, “Maybe I’m wrong” drives the conclusion, “so I should not do it”
Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s worth thinking through these.
Time to take your bonus and leave soon? It’s the great resignation playing out, and what is the story you’re telling yourself about your identity, your work and what this transition means for you? How does the departure interact with your history and experience? And how does this transition connect with your sense of purpose? Why is resigning a way for you to move forward?
For me, it was an opportunity to explore a different space. Not in terms of topics, or network, but context, perspective. But perhaps more importantly, my departure from public service felt like truly the first first time I wield the pen to my own story. I thought I was always living someone else’s story, that of the model Singaporean.
I was the one who didn’t behave that well but not too badly either as a student. What happened was I made it into a good school. I won’t lie: it made a difference. I wasn’t the teacher’s pet but didn’t give the teacher enough trouble that they were happy to spend time with me, invest in me and help me work things out. I wasn’t ever the top student but each time I was able to get into a better class, school or environment with my grades, I took the chance to push myself, often staying within top 10 or 20 but never first or second. I wasn’t in the most important CCAs nor represented the school in anything worthwhile – I briefly got selected for Chemistry Olympiad training but did not make the cut to be part of the school team.
By most counts I was a normal Singaporean; I didn’t become an officer in National Service or clock any spectacular achievement. But I managed to get a scholarship and that made me feel special. At least for a while. I met my wife whilst in college, proposed and got married well before 30. Probably where I fall short was buying a resale flat rather than BTO. It seemed a little like a foolish thing – we had to fork out more and got a house with less time on the lease. But we were happy, it suit our needs and values.
I went to work in a nice government agency and did what I was told to; performed well enough to be recognised in many ways. But it always felt like there was some transaction lurking behind: ‘do this and you will get that’; ‘meet this benchmark and enjoy that’. It was the same when thinking about housing, navigating the life in Singapore. We pretty just get nudged along in life. By the sticks and carrots, stars and dots.
So you can see why leaving that job, looking to establish oneself based on one’s own capabilities, and actually putting oneself in the marketplace is part of writing my own story. It was, to a large extent, a big part of taking ownership of how I wanted to chart my path ahead, and consider how I want to contribute to the world.
Part of the reason I wrote about my scholarship bond is because the results for A Levels in Singapore is coming out this upcoming week. And lots of students would be overjoyed as well as disappointed, readying themselves for the new challenge and new phase of life. Being conscious about the story we tell ourselves about the A Level results is important.
It is important because that is the story we take with us to college, to social circles. The Singapore-Cambridge exam results appears to be so important that it is captured alongside all other details about your personal life including your full name, driving license, marriage certificate, within your Singpass app. That is how permanent it can be as part of our identity. Even when my A Levels was almost half of my lifetime ago, it comes back to remind me if I had been a good or mediocre student.
For some the story can be painful: it could be about how a parent passed on and affected examination preparation. Or the first time one suffers a nervous breakdown in an examination hall and had to seek psychiatric letter to appeal the exam results. For others, it could be extreme joy, as the subjects which they’ve been scoring E, S or U up to prelim actually turned up with an ‘A’. Never mind how that happened – perhaps the prelim exam papers were set artificially hard in order to create that psychological urgency; or that marking to match the rubric during prelims failed to set the precocious genius apart from the rebel.
What is the story behind your A level results? What do you tell yourself about them? Does your story make you work harder subsequently, or does it discourage you? At the end of the day, the story becomes part of your life, which is infinitely more important than the grades. Because the grades becomes artefacts; pieces of evidence that your story was true, and it was what took hold of you. And the story is what causes me to hold up those imperfect grades in my Singpass app and take pride in what I’ve been able to go through.
I was on a scholarship from a Singapore government agency known as International Enterprise Singapore (IE Singapore) which has since been merged into Enterprise Singapore. The scholarship allowed me to attend my dream school, The London School of Economics, taking the dream course which I managed to get into, BSc Economics. It was almost poetry that the one who inspired this dream of mine is Dr Goh Keng Swee, the economic architect of Singapore.
He was one of our forefathers who had the idea of using scholarships to train our brightest minds and keeping them within government. And I shared his dream of crafting the economic strategies for Singapore, for our next century of growth and prosperity. So I was convinced the scholarship bond was no big deal for me; I would be happy to serve in an economic agency and in public service. After all, my objective for studying economics, and understanding the causes of things, was to serve in the government of my country!
Of course, serving in the government is a rather vague notion for someone fresh out of Junior College or two years of full time National Service. Influencing policy, interacting with brilliant civil servants and ministers would no doubt be a great experience for a fresh graduate.
What I underestimated was how difficult it was for me when I did not share the same conviction for ideas and actions that were translated into policies. It was really hard for me to continue my work when I did not appreciate the intellectual foundations they were build upon. I admit that policy decisions weren’t the easiest or most straight-forward things, and there would be trade-offs.
I eventually realised that after investing in people to have a great education and experience, the preference for the organisation or bureaucracy was still for you to be a cog, to be outstanding in ways you’re expected to. Being a good student was about sitting still, raising your hands before you speak, doing your homework, getting good grades. It wasn’t about thinking differently, challenging authority, breaking things. I like to joke that Philip Yeo broke enough things that most loopholes were mended after that.
It took me long to realise it because I had the chance to spend most of my scholarship bond serving in areas I was interested in, doing things I really believed in. That alignment is so important but not to be taken for granted. I count myself fortunate; but that would not be the case for everyone.
Today, I’d encourage students to consider only scholarships without bonds. Not because there are issues with these organisations but at the age of 18 or 20, unless your family is unable to afford a university education or to send you on exchange, those opportunities that a scholarship can afford you is probably not worth the weight of this missing option to just resign.
If you want to study overseas and your family can afford it, by all means. If your family cannot afford it, studying locally in Singapore is just as good if not better especially when there’s the option to go on exchange. And if you cannot afford the exchange, find work overseas, go on work holidays, hustle.
