Kevin Low

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.

We’ve been binge-watching Money Heist recently and completed all 5 seasons on Netflix. I’m not a TV person and I really do not recommend having a TV at all; so this season was really a bit of a blip in my personal history.

The appeal of a PR-savy bank robbers who knows how to manipulate the authorities, appreciate their internal politics, was there for me. Especially when intellect is combined with courage to take extremely risky but calculated bets. Despite the wildly ridiculous premise, the insane blunders that they made during times of distress and how the luck element really played a part in things ‘working out’, it was really good entertainment.

The feature of this drama series is really how people get drawn into the characters portrayed in the show and the kind of empathy that was established in the viewers of the robbers ‘plight’. What made it possible to root for the bad guys is the point that they appeared to value life a lot more than the ‘good guys’ (authorities, military, police, etc.). In what was portrayed as ‘the system’, it was something that utilised all resources and means to establish order and control as opposed to valuing lives and society. Public service and order continually used to justify the apparent evil means.

All in all, that’s still a pretty cheap anti-establishment narrative that of course has its enduring appeal particularly in the western world where individualism reigns culturally.

Which ladder are you scaling right now? Do you feel anxious about making progress? Or not making progress? For every decision we are making, and pieces we are advancing, sometimes it pays to question our own motives and ask which ladder we are trying to climb. What sort of progress we are actually looking for?

Of course, one can boil everything down to status roles in every interaction. All the tensions we face are about considering what sort of actions we take would help us move up status roles or at least avoid going down. We are asserting our current position or climbing up. In that sense, the question of which ladder, is perhaps a more powerful metaphorical tool.

So are you being a better employee, or husband, or friend? Which domain of status do you care about? How do you juggle all of them?

2021 probably would never have been able to meet the expectations that was put upon it by 2020. Yet by most counts, it’s been a good year. The world received vaccines, and many different types – most of which were effective towards a few variants of the virus. Air travel turned in a muted form. Economies were slowly coming back though many sectors remains somewhat stuck.

The world will greet 2022 with cautious optimism, les hyped-up expectations as they had in 2021. The resignation tsunami will gradually spread to every more industries, sectors and countries. And the new generation will come to discover it is more important to be authors of their own stories than be in the stranglehold of the old stories.

The future will perhaps see material goods, and money with a little less respect than in the recent generations. And the world will shift its attention towards more collective action problems as we struggle towards more actions to deal with climate change.

In the beginning of 2021, I determined to write a blog entry every single day on this blog and started on 3 January. Thankfully, I’ve been able to keep up through the year despite the challenges and crazy schedules. It has been a real joy sharing ideas daily, particularly around themes that resonate with readers.

Specifically, I’ve been very passionate about uncovering the perils of work, future of work, and the challenges that our education system face in juggling the needs of the world and being human. This is the main reason I started my coaching practice (and also more resources here). It is interesting that ultimately, a blog is a public-facing platform but at the end of the day, the work on the blog is not done so much for people out there to read; more often, it is for myself. It is a chance for me to practice putting the ideas out, to clear my thoughts, and to recognise when they are cloudy.

So the question that comes is whether I’d continue with doing that in the new year. Honestly, I’ve gain so much from this practice that I definitely intend to continue the commitment, and to build it into a proper habit for the rest of my life.