Kevin Low

Too much distractions, too many pieces of work, spreading oneself thin. The most successful people succeed because they were dedicating their energies on one thing, that they want to win at. Athletes don’t go for ‘quick wins’; self-respecting scientists don’t try to ‘quick-publish’. Instead, they find their system to practice, to be able to strengthen and gain mastery, to discover and process those discoveries.

Each day, maybe it’s great to start the day deciding what is the objective you want to take on, to deal with. And stick to it; and to keep saying no to other things. A runner don’t go and play football for one season and go back to running every now and then. Even if he loves playing football, he has to keep saying no. A scientist don’t order sodium hydroxide for one experiment and then suddenly decide to use it to clean his lab instead.

You are a professional too. So set up your practice and run your system – to deliver on your objectives. One objective at a time, and deliver each of them.

In case you have not yet realise, plant-based meat are often less healthy than real meat. They promised you they didn’t hurt animals to make it, and that it’s plant-based, but they did not say it is healthier. Ultimately, these products are targeting meat-eaters who probably don’t have very healthy diets to begin with. Though maybe the extra sodium and saturated fats are going to make things worst.

And that brings me to the question of how companies are positioning themselves to the future workers. You might be reducing the environmental impact of food on the planet but by causing more obesity amongst non-meat eaters, is that really making that much of a positive contribution to the world?

Likewise, the money-making oil and gas companies can continue to be ‘champions’ of climate change solutions, pour parts of their profits into researching carbon capture technology, and talking about recycling plastics while extracting more fossil fuels and producing tonnes more virgin plastics, flooding the market.

Well people still have to eat, and consume energy, so where is the balance? There will always be people working for the dough; and so you get those whom you hire for their labour rather than their work.

When you are finding sponsors for an event, you want to make sure that the reputation of the sponsors are good so that your event is not tainted by bad press. At the same time, you don’t want to be hounded by NGOs or enemies of your sponsors. Of course, more importantly, you want to make sure the values of your sponsors are aligned to your event’s values. So if you’re running some kind of sustainability conference, it is important that you don’t have a bunch of sponsors who are just there to do greenwashing.

This alignment of values extends itself to education sponsorships, especially the ones where you eventually are bonded to the organisation sponsoring you. You have to perform due diligence into their governance and processes, especially in terms of HR practices and talent management. Talent management is not just about paying the market rates, giving good bonuses and performance incentives.

True talent management is allowing employees to contribute with their talents, to be providing value through their opinions and not their obedience. The best companies are never short of manpower to support their work because they make the employees’ work their work. So if you’re considering a scholarship, especially a sponsorship that comes with a bond, please do your due diligence and don’t just think it’s free money.

We’ve confused the dynamic about our labour and work. For avoidance of doubt, I consider labour the input and the work an output of the labour. What happens in-between of course is a matter of all the experience, expertise, intellectual, emotional management that goes into translating the labour into work.

So would you rather be paid for your labour, or for your work? Will they be the same? Think about whether you’re really hoping to exchange your labour or your work for a salary. Because if it’s your labour, quite likely, there’s a lot more people competing with you to get paid for that labour. But if you’re hoping to get paid for the work, then you need to make sure you’re producing the work for someone, not just everyone. Because not everyone will pay you for it. And you don’t need everyone to pay you for it.

So yes you can be paid for your labour: showing up, following orders and getting outcomes which you probably don’t care about. But if you do care about the future, about outcomes, then you quite likely would not care that much about the orders from your bosses. Unless they are genuinely best practices. And yes if you’re going to prefer getting paid for your work, then you’d have to find an employer that wants that work; or you are better off working for yourself and serving the client instead, the one who can see what you see, and care about what you care about.

Sometimes you attend a course, meet the requirements just to get the certificate, not to learn anything genuinely. It could be that you already knew everything the course had to teach and the certificate was a physical label required to prove that; or you could be just more interested in showing others you are something rather than truly being that.

This sense that you fork out the cash, check the boxes and then gain what you were showing up for is certainly appealing. And the economy is always selling you on the dream and ability to do that. Over many cycles, the connection between the certification and the underlying thing it indicates disappears. And we are left with confused signals – more generally known as noise; and confused people.

The same thing happens to the markets. There are financial metrics, performance indicators and other forms of signals which were like certificates that companies had to prove their worth. There are lots of forms to file, financial reports, investor communications. But soon the companies become more interested in the proof of worth than their real worth. So valuations go crazy, price signals become more like noise and a lot of metrics become worthless.

As investors, we are feeding the frenzy when we want to be those course participants who throw their money, show up and expect that magic happens to ensure they are properly equipped with whatever the course claims to be able to teach or make them out to be. We want to check the boxes of the investments and then earn our returns and be done with it.

When the culture is moving us to a place we don’t want to go, let’s choose not to subscribe to it. Especially when we can envision a different future, a better one.

People think that finding a job that aligns with your values is perhaps a luxury. Maybe but I think when you are no longer struggling with survival, and can afford some emergency money to tide over some time of unemployment, plus young, it is quite likely that alignment of personal values and that of the organisation is incredibly important.

Generations ago, work is just work and we are able to express our values through the things we volunteer for, the work we do in our community, at home, amongst friends. The problem today is that work is demanding more and more of us.

So we would definitely need to demand more from work – especially in terms of quality of treatment to employees as humans, as people who care about a cause and not just a corporate or a boss.

Majority of the knowledge I picked up about the world, didn’t come from school. Majority of the times, it is more important to ask the right questions than to get the right answers. Majority of the CEOs, became CEOs by finding their own company and not working their way up a corporate ladder.

Most of the stories about the world we learnt in our schools, in our days growing up are wrong. And it depends on how you spend the rest of your life trying to prove it right or just learning the bigger story out there. No one has any ill intention telling you all these wrong stories you picked up. There’s just so much more than we need to learn and do before we can be conclusive about anything.

So telling ourselves stories and making theories about the world is useful, only if we learn to be able to take it up and put it down whenever we need to.

One of the key lessons I share with those I coach is that when we were younger and developed our aspirations, we thought of them in the form of how those careers or work aligns or blends with our identities. So there’s a belief that the studious ones can be librarians, the ones who are physically fit can be soldiers, the ones who loves to solve physical, mechanical problems can be engineers and so on. There are these generalisations and they continue to be perpetuated by things like Skills Framework by Skillsfuture.

It is not my intention to say that they are not useful; but we need to see them for what they can do and not expect the sky from tools such as these. The truth is that employers will have a job/work they need people to perform and that is the primary problem they need to solve. But they will develop their own image of the ideal candidate or perfect profile for the job role – this is a derived problem. The truth is they really just need the person who can perform the job without messing up the rest of their organisation. So fitting the ‘ideal profile’ can be seen as a secondary problem.

Too many candidates and organisations look to recruitment as about solving the secondary problem – about finding a match. Yet what they did not realise is, what if the ideal profile they have in mind isn’t actually able to do the job they need get done? As a candidate, it is more important to find out what is in the work, what it entails, what kind of problems it is going to solve and so on. It is more important to solve the primary problem rather than the secondary one.

So don’t just read job descriptions or listings. Talk to people in the company, and ask good questions to the hiring manager during interviews. You’ll need that more than anything else. Make sure you are not just a good fit; but you’re able to deal with what’s in the work.