No two days are the same

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.

Why better can be different

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.

Identities & inclusivity

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.

Playing around the fringes

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.

Innovation & traditions

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.

Urban planning service

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?

Getting or finding satisfaction

Do you think a sense of satisfaction in all you do is a right or a privilege? Do you expect to receive satisfaction or do you seek to find it? At work if you only expect to feel satisfied but not try to find it, you’ll be bitter against the boss, your colleagues and clients. In relationships, the same attitude can drain the joy out of simple moments.

Time to realise that finding satisfaction is our own responsibility. And the good news is that it can be found in the simplest places and things. It is about working out the story in our head for what we do, and being aware of our hedonic adaptation. What we found exhilarating probably won’t be the same after 5 times of doing it.

Thinking of reasons for your dissatisfaction may not be as useful as recognising satisfaction is something to be hunted down and found. It requires a high degree of introspection. And it is not up to someone else to give it to you!

Burning out from responsibility

Responsibility without authority burns people out. Nurses who care for patients but have little means of controlling the pain and comfort of those they care for will be drained. Likewise the social worker who tries to help those disenfranchised but gets flooded with paper work and a mammoth system to navigate. And the public servant who is sent to “help” members of the public, or small businesses, but are given few tools that really can be used to benefit those truly in need.

We all burn out when we feel and are made to feel responsible for things which we do not have control over. In many sense, corporates confronting sustainability targets can feel that way. They’ve been consuming energy from the grid and traditional sources of power they don’t realise they have the authority or control even when they feel responsible for carbon footprint. They will have to start looking to take control of the way they produce the products, and consume the energy, as well as be more conscious about who they work with across the supply chain.

The decarbonisation movement isn’t just about mimicry or words put out in the public, it is a reflection of taking leadership over what a firm has been doing to be able to provide things of value. Because as the economy is pivoting, if you are just trying to make a living by being a copycat, it’s only going to keep getting harder. Taking responsibility for sustainability is kind, but taking control is effective.

Thinking about money

We are not all self-sufficient. We rely on our butchers for meat, bakers for bread, and blacksmiths for bronze. Okay maybe not so much the last point. But we need things others produce and create. And our own creations? We can’t survive on them alone. But there are others who want what we produce? Don’t they?

And so we create promises; if you produce this for me, I’ll produce this for that guy who wants this stuff and he’s gonna produce for another girl who wants this other stuff, who’s good at producing yet another thing which actually you sought after. So now you take my promise and your needs are as good as fulfilled when you produce for me. Money is that promise; it is the promise of value for our labour, the promise of fulfilment of our needs.

Then as humans, we realised if you can promise that whole cycle of bartering executed with money, then you can promise a barter with the future self, or future wants, etc. So from the promise of inter-spatial movement of products and services, we move to the promise of inter-temporal movements. This creates a new dynamic because promises age as time passes. Time will tell the quality of the promise; and that will manifest in terms of the value of that promise as time passes. Alas, born the concept of interest.

And because at any point of time, there is going to be lots of overpromises, failure to fulfill them; the system has to make good of it. So when there is overpromising, the value of promise also falls over time. That is where inflation came from. Money in itself has really no value; but the legal tender provides a tool by which government enacts and extracts taxation. This is important because it keeps an economy demanding the instrument as opposed to just using another, more established currency. Taxation as a form of revenue is ultimately more effective to keep the money system from destabilising; compared to just using seignorage as a means of revenue.

Which brings me to an interesting conversation with a friend about Bitcoin. He thinks that using excess energy such as those which would be wasted through flaring, venting of gaseous fuels, or from curtailment events of intermittent renewable energy can be used to mine bitcoins. That way, the energy otherwise wasted is converted to a form of value. It is used to do some kind of work in the bitcoin network, facilitating transactions, securing it.

I am not sure how practical this is but the idea is appealing on the count that we are actually creating a new value stream rather than have mining capture and squander existing energy resources. If bitcoin mining becomes such a “flexible” load in the energy system, it’ll prove incredible value in highly practical ways.

It’s gonna suck

We can’t think our way or optimise our way to full excellence. And that’s why it is important to put things out there. So you can gather feedback, so that you can build an audience. It won’t be for everyone so find your audience. You can’t have an audience if you’re hiding your work. But that first piece of work, it’s going to suck. What you then need are people who care about the same work you do, who would be generous with constructive feedback, generous with offering themselves.

Great products, artists, companies and brands are not overnight hits. They build their reputation, cultivate their audience bit by bit; and it takes time to create something that sustains. Most of the musical hits don’t last past the year they get on billboards and growing fast overnight isn’t that much to be proud of if it collapses just as fast.

Ultimately, putting the work out, gathering more data, going back to the work is the best system we have ever known to truly practice creativity and generate hits. Though not before shipping lots of work that suck.