Do you live life or does life live you? People think of this general notion of the various milestones and pathways in the passage of living as “life” and “live that out”. We would take ownership of a life that was prescribed for us, constructed by others, expected by society. And we put upon ourselves more and more constraints. I’m not talking about actual commitments, just perceived ones.
Steve Job shared his perspective of this in a 1994 interview that was recorded and I think it sums up perfectly why it is important to rewrite our stories. Not just as an individual, but also as a generation.
After slightly more than a year of writing daily on my blog, I’ve started working on refining, rewriting and updating my ideas in the same or longer format. These articles will be posted weekly on my Medium page. It’s been a joy sharing my ideas and I’ll be doing more periodic consolidation and eventually publishing them into a book if things work out as I hope.
Meanwhile, for those who are sitting on the fence about writing, blogging, publishing, I highly encourage you try things out yourself.
Humans are poor at thinking probabilistically and this is mostly because reality tends to be a collection or a series of outcomes. Things happen and it seems like things are one or none. There’s no ‘chance of’ rain because it either rains or it doesn’t. So it would seem that probability is an abstraction, something that exists only in the minds of people.
So it might make sense to think about a range of outcomes instead. When we consider our goals and our visions of the future, it’ll be useful to think in terms of scenarios and to actually be rigorous in thinking about them. It is useful to consider if you want to be a manager, what are the conditions to fulfill it, how it would look like in terms of your family life, your friendships and relationships. If we think of our goals in the isolated way in a single dimension, we will never be able to grasp its implication in other dimensions of life.
By thinking of scenarios in a more complete manner where you look at the various goals and the claim on your resources, you can better think appreciate the “chances” of realising some of your vision. Because quite likely, they can be mutually incompatible.
I struggle with Meta’s value creation model; it takes people’s attention, passing it to those who value it, and makes off with the money in return. They then mine for more attention, more screen time, more private data to get more value. This sounds compelling but if their interest remains diametrically opposed to the large user base they boast of, it’s doomed to fail at some point.
Why not focus on long term value that is sustainable, aligning their own interest with the users’ interests. Collecting a fee from companies to provide identity verification services based on user data without handing over private data. Or collecting subscription fees to help users protect their private information and allow it to be securedly shared with treasured connections?
There are ways for Meta to reinvent itself to be a giant worthy of its position amongst the tech firm. Just exploring the metaverse isn’t going to be enough.
I recall distinctly when I was in school that I get impressed when the working adults tells me their job has no typical days or that no two days are the same. Having been working for close to ten years, I have not seen a job where every day is the same. In fact, for most jobs in the world today, the repetitive elements have been automated. It is no longer impressive that no two days are the same.
In fact, it can be a source of incredible stress; and while work is becoming more the source of purpose and meaning, it is becoming less therapeutic. The satisfaction from seeing things you put together into a final product can be therapeutic. Just think about all the videos you doom-scrolled through Instagram showing you craftsman carving a beautiful vase, or churning out perfectly printed cloths, or products. While we are now busy creating impact, it is no longer clear what is the concrete end-result we are gunning for anymore.
And despite the deep meaning one can connect their work and role with, it is the sense of helplessness, and lack of control that eventually burns one out. In that sense, the greater the sense of meaning in the way you are contributing to the world, the more likely you’ll find it difficult to truly sustain the motivation. Because those problems won’t be solved by you alone. It will take so much more, and even all of you, and you’d find the world no where closer to that great goal you’re after.
I pondered about what innovation means to us practically and psychologically. And the implications for individuals stepping out into the world is huge. We have been trained by the education system to keep getting better along the same dimensions or at least along the pathways that are given to us. But that is the sort of incremental improvement that is not really innovation.
Innovative individuals probably won’t be efficient or “the best” by measures that are already established. But they can create and invent new ways, new measures to approach the same problem. We can improve along existing out outcomes we care about by working on different areas, using a system engineering approach. Or we can decide that we want to target a different outcome instead, having exhausted the gains in the dimensions we previously worked on.
Take fuel economy of a car for example; traditionally, the internal combustion engine have enjoyed incremental improvements through better design of combustion chamber, the way the torque is produced and the design of the axes etc. But when it comes to electric cars, the electric motors tend to be already quite efficient so fuel economy improvements are achieved through making the car body with lighter materials and reducing the weight of the batteries, improving the battery capacity and ability to hold charge, or to discharge more efficiently and so on.
On the other hand, road safety has been traditionally improved through encouraging safer driving, being stringent about what happens in the cars (no texting, putting on seatbelts), as well as road design, traffic signs, etc. Most of these gains are exhausted already. But we know it can be remarkably improved through widespread coordination of autonomous driving systems. The difficulty is for us to finetune the technology and get authorities to eventually allow the adoption.
But all of these points to the fact that being better involves being different. It can start with exploring the fringes of status quo and picking something that resonates with you to work on.
Who are we really? As Singapore. Are we a people; do we have a single or multiple different heritage? How does our history and personal stories weave into the social identity? Do we have some kind of common identity? And do we hold on to it? How do we want to evolve? Is it up to us or to be defined by the government? How are we collectively deciding what is important to us and how to maintain these priorities?
The more I think about ourselves as a society that is growing, that is developing itself; the more I realise that we cannot get out of a paradox about our identity. It will perpetuate and we must really be conscious about allowing this paradox to work for our good rather than our bad.
We will never be able to appeal to everyone as a city. They country does not have a sub-urb or hinterland for people to retire into, or a proper place to ‘get-away’ in a meaningful manner. Maybe there is potential, and it needs to be better developed (resort at Pulau Semakau, anyone?); but for now I begin to realise that the more successful it is as an international city, the more challenges we will face as a nation. We might just try to be a regional capital that brings young people, talents and smart money to be mixed, to be exploited to generate value for the world. As we work hard to attract certain groups of people to make our city vibrant and better connected to the rest of the world, there will be people whom we end up excluding somehow. And these may be locals, they may be people in our society we want to care for and care about.
The policy capacity, the thinking around caring for young ones, for elderly, to create pockets of uncompetitiveness for them to be able to survive, thrive and to be dynamic in the long term is going to be limited. We risk optimising only for the short-term when we think only about immediate economic consequences to things. Even though we have good machinery across dimension; and we might have overcome some of the financial resource constraints our forefathers had when trying to create a system to serve all the different objectives, today we’re suffering from the lack of political attention, and policy bandwidth to manage more complex concepts around our identity and what it really means for our growth to be truly inclusive.
I bemoaned the need for public intellectuals; and perhaps this is an uncontroversial topic to start pondering over.
For the market to adopt a new technology, it is not about telling the masses how good the new technology is or to try and make it work for everyone. The majority of the market when bend themselves in order to fit the technology once it is proven to work and attractive to them. Understanding the Gartner hype cycle is important. So products that are revolutionary cannot be built for the average joe. Understanding the innovators and the early adopters in the marketplace, working to enrol and recruit them is important.
So innovation will tend to play around the fringes and look unthreatening to the status quo. They have to; because the status quo is about the fear of novelty and the innovation must pretend it is very niche and only has small ambitions; or that it is nothing new, solving an old problem in just a tad bit different way which may appeal to some, but not all. But it is precisely this ‘not everyone’ approach that eventually gets you the buy-in of some, who matters.
So if you’re just starting out, don’t try to please everyone; know your audience and work on that. I’m not just referring to businesses but even employees, people who are working on their careers. Finding that sense of purpose in your work and finding people who align with your values is going to bring you some edge even early in your career.
Can there be such thing as a tradition of innovation? Are traditions inherently some kind of constraint to innovation? What really constitutes innovation; is it just about change? If it’s about improvements, along what dimension is the improvement being made in?
Corporates and big organisations have resources to make change happen. But they are also have the reputation of being uninnovative. The fact is that they are actually good at making improvements along the dimensions they already measure: response times to customers, reliability of products, and even reducing costs. These are all some kind of improvement but we may not think of them as innovation. In fact, improving along those metrics are simply part of the tradition.
What we see as innovation isn’t just change. It is something more along the lines of picking up a new dimension in which we want to progress along. It’s the confession that our traditions might have been serving something that was great but it’s perhaps no longer that important. And there’s something else worth progressing along.
As societies evolve, I think the question we are asking ourselves when confronted with whether we want to accept this or that change is to think about what is important to us at this point of time. And what are the dimensions we really want to progress along.
My colleagues at Enea Consulting and I had a lunch time conversation about urban planning, car-lite rhetoric and who the plan should be serving. One of us was very anti-cars and thought of all the implications around urban planning, environmental impacts – he considers private cars a cancer of urban development.
So for him personally, he found it unfair that pedestrians are told to look out for cars on the road (written at the crossing in stencils) and saw this as a manifestation of the car-centric culture that exist. On the other hand, I thought this was largely because the negative consequences on a pedestrian in a traffic accident is so assymmetrically dire for the pedestrian compared to a driver hence the need to remind them.
The society is not that biased to car owners given they are subjected to huge penalties and there are lots of opportunities for them to suffer financially should they fail to comply. Pedestrians don’t face the same sort of legal risks. Yet the subject of who the urban planning should be serving is still present. Given that a quarter of our city is covered with roads, it’s hard to see our urban planning is not partisan towards drivers or at least car owners.
One can of course be a conspiracy theorist and claim that there’s an overall bias on this since legislators, top leaders of our society are probably majority car owners themselves (whether they are driving themselves or not), the orientation of planning will give more eminence to car ownership. Those on two-wheelers, including bicycles can feel like they are treated as second-class citizens on the road. It may not be deliberate but this can be a powerful force. Likewise, the fact car ownership is sometimes a general aspiration of the society means the middle class who are not yet car owners can prefer that the state leave the privilege where they are so they can enjoy it when they get to that stage.
I think at the heart of matters is, who is our urban planning seeking to serve. And through all the balancing and struggles, whom have they ended up serving?
