They’re going to think I’m stupid

“Don’t give them reason to think you’re stupid”, the colleague tells you about your bosses; or your boss tells you about your clients, or your parents tells you about your teachers, or your teacher tells you about the Olympiad judges. The list goes on.

What about finding something that helps them think you are you? The negatives turn us up more than the positives do and so “Don’ts” feature more prominently in our brains than “Dos”. That is largely because fear is a powerful motivator.

But it is also a short term motivator. It is the NOx in your racing engine. It can have damaging effects on your body if you run on fear too much, for too long. Better to draw on purpose, on inspiration as motivators. And so start asking “why” on the “Dos”.

Don’t bother with avoiding things that will make you look stupid. Because if someone wants to think you are stupid, they will eventually find the reason to. Better to consider who you are and what can inform others of that identity of yours. Too much of our work life is about avoiding being stupid, optimising the frills, making ourselves presentable but forgetting what exactly are we trying to present.

Lose the “don’ts”, focus on the “dos”.

Enjoyment & collection

When I was young I collected stamps. And I think I still have a massive stamp collection lurking somewhere. I’d collect lots of stamps from my family’s mails, and my relatives, even distant ones would know I was collecting and give me a whole bunch of them. I wasn’t so discerning and I collected a lot of repetitions, and they looked good when I lined them up.

I’d spend hours soaking, extracting them from the paper they were stuck to, and then drying them out in the sun. I figured it was easy to process when you can stick the wet ones on a plastic sheet and leave it out to dry. By just twisting the plastic sheet when the stamps are mostly dry, you could take out the dried stamps easily. And that process itself was interesting. Never mind the actual stamps. They were nice to look at, the designs were interesting but I never did study them so much in detail – I did not know the history of each of those series, nor how they intertwined with history of the countries they were from. There were commemorative editions which helped me discover things about foreign lands and culture. But that was all the curiosity I had about my stamp collection. I was enjoying it; there wasn’t a checklist I was benchmarking myself against and hunting for that ‘rare stamp’ or to complete a particular ‘collection’.

As far as I was concerned, my collection was always complete, and never complete, at the same time. The thing about us in the modern world today is there’s always something more we want to complete our lives, that we forget to enjoy our lives for what it is today. I need to consider more of my stamp collecting days.

Getting better or feeling better

I was listening to No Stupid Questions and for some reason I just couldn’t recall and capture the specific episode and reference where I got this from but Angela was mentioning that she is working on a paper that looks at some of the kids in school doing some kind of activity. And the conclusion was somewhat related to how they deal with the particular experience, whether they approach it with the desire to feel better about themselves or to improve themselves through the experience.

I thought that was a very interesting dichotomy; and I’ve never really thought of experiences being set up this way. But indeed, as we go into various experiences, that intention lurking in the background is important. There can be mixed intentions but there will likely be a dominant one; and that can affect our functioning.

If we go into an examination thinking of it as a means for us to be sorted into different boxes, to be defined and ‘caught out’ for the level of proficiency we are at, we are going to enter it with a negative fear. That’s when we think the exam is there to make us feel good or bad about ourselves rather than help us get better thanConsider an alternative where we see the exams as a means to look at how far we have progressed and to uncover our weaknesses so we can work on them. There will be nervousness from anticipation but not that overwhelming kind of negative fear. It will also define how we approach the exam papers when we get them back – whether we just check the grade and toss it aside or mine it for the gold of identifying how we can improve.

Is our education system set up to bother about this? To inculcate the right attitudes? How about the parents? Are parents imparting the right attitude towards test-taking?

Placebos in our lives

Placebos are real; they have an actual impact on us. First described somehow by John Haygarth, it really demonstrates the power of the human mind and its impact on us. They reflect that the story we tell ourselves about things we do and experience is really important in determining our sense of well-being and subsequent actions. These actions can then continue to perpetuate our circumstances and the cycle continues.

And then the question is whether we are consuming placebos. We might not be conscious of it, but things like an Hermes handbag, or a gym membership that we don’t really use but just keep, are all placebos. They are there to make us think we are rich, or fit without really doing anything about our wealth or health. The list continues with magazine subscriptions, club memberships, and many of what people would call ‘trappings’.

So yes, placebos are real and all of us are using them in case you don’t yet realise. But the key here is to notice what they are doing to us. I’m assuming we are using these placebos because they do have a positive impact on us, and they work through the stories that we tell ourselves. What if we are addicted to our placebos? We need to ask ourselves to be conscious about the costs of these placebos – the financial, environmental and mental costs of these. And whether there are cheaper placebos as substitutes.

And in case you’re wondering, the Prata (instead of Prada) bag that was churned out in a random factory is also a placebo – at least for another group of people. So yea, there are alternatives when our placebos are costing us too much

Broken Systems

Our company policy means that you are ineligible for the bonus if you tender your resignation at this point. From the management point of view, it is to discourage resignation at this point of time, or to retain the staff for another month. Question is, what was the bonus for in the first place? Is it to reward you for the work you have done, or the work you are about to do? And what does talent retention really mean? That your people do not resign? Or that you’re developing them, deploying them in the right places befitting of their intellectual capacity, interest, and challenging them?

We’ve all encountered broken systems. They’re systems that are perpetuated because someone decides to follow rules and policies in a legalistic manner, forgetting what they were for in the first place. When we fail to honour and uphold the spirit of a law, but instead, just the letter of the law, systems are likely broken.

Those are points when we need to question who our systems are serving, and whether we designed them to work in the way they are working. Increasingly, there’s polarisation in politics and the world – and we come face to face with the point that some of these ‘brokenness’ is actually systems working as they are intended: to perpetuate the power of those who are already leading/ruling, to define merit in a way that legitimises further those who wield power, and to preserve the structure in place in society, in name of harmony and stability. Such thoughts can be dangerous but they are a culmination of leaders who refuse to admit mistakes, who do not take responsibility for their mistakes and the brokenness of systems that they have set in place.

Done your best

I wrote a while back that ‘Doing your best‘ is really an attitude. And I mentioned in that post that I never quite knew what my best was. Perhaps I know it when I tried; but we aren’t really sure if we did because there seem to be always something more we can do. And our minds are such that if we did put in the effort and already did our best but obtained an outcome less than our aspiration, we start questioning ourselves.

At the heart of every fear lurking around is our sense of inadequacy and being ‘not enough’. It is important to recognise why and how you have fallen short when you do. Because having done your best, in those specific circumstances and resources which you have can yield different results when doing your best in a different set of circumstances.

For example, you could have scored a 75 instead of 70 if you had not missed out reading a particular chapter in the textbook. But you could have gotten 85 if you had money to pay for a few more hours of tuition with Mr Wong. So yes you could have done more, you could have done things differently – the key here is that every outcome contains an opportunity for you. It is an opportunity to know more about the world and how it works. To know more about how your actions, circumstances, resources and even thought patterns interacts with the world. So use it wisely rather than get back into the cycle of fear and anxiety around your inadequacy.

Emissions Targeting

Been working on a project on emissions targeting. Or at least tangentially related. It’s been an eye-opener for me as I come to see how important it is to reduce the carbon intensity of electricity generation. Reducing scope 2 emissions for lots of different industries makes a really significant contribution as it turns out.

Yet at the same time, it got me thinking about those corporates that are targeting to go net-zero by 2030, or 2040, or 2050 for that matter. In each cases, they give themselves a little, or a lot of room to eventually hit their targets. But we need to realise that each year you delay reduction, you’re pumping out more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that actually stays there. In fact it stays there longer because we are simultaneously doing so much to reduce the planet’s capacity to absorb the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

This is unlike our other kinds of goals involving gaining mastery for example. You can give yourself more time to master something; and the consequence is at most that you are still not that good for a few more years. Or you could choose to take a gap year so you will graduate only later (which probably reduce your income by that one year). The consequence of the carbon dioxide thrown out into the air because you were lax with your target-setting can mean we no longer can keep temperature change within 2 deg Celsius – which by the way, will result in increased number of catastrophic weather events.

Intentionally or not, we are creating a future for ourselves and our offsprings. Unfortunately, it is not one that most of us would like to live in.

Value of a live tree

What makes the value of a tree? The quality, quantity of timber it produces? That’s probably just the value of the dead tree. How about the live tree? The value of soil quality it maintains, the prevention of soil erosion? The value of the biodiversity it creates?

How about the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions? And oh by the way, each tree absorbs only 21 kg per year when it is fully grown. And it is estimated over a 100-year lifespan, it will absorb a tonne of carbon dioxide (because when it is young, it absorbs way less and it takes time to grow). And how much are we pricing/taxing a tonne of carbon dioxide in Singapore? $5 a tonne. That’s US$3.70 today. Yes, so we are saying, that a tree, living for 100 years, taking in carbon dioxide for us, and helping to ‘offset’ our emissions, is going to only contribute US$3.70 reduction to the industry’s tax dollars. No wonder we prefer to pay that than to plant a tree.

Not forgetting the value of the shade of the tree, the fruits it provides, but of course it also offsets the ongoing costs of irrigation, and maintenance of the tree. So the Singapore Green Plan claims that planting 1 million trees between 2020 to 2030 would allow us to absorb another 78,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. It is not clear if that statement is a per-year absorption or over the 10 year period. But yes, if it’s per year, it’s possible that because we manage to plant some insanely amazing carbon-absorbing tree that is immediately fully-growth, they can take in 78kg of carbon dioxide per year on average. Or if it’s over the 10-year period, then it’s only 7.8kg per tree per year, which is probably closer to the truth.

And yes, in case you’re wondering what this post is about; it really is about the fact that we are not taxing carbon dioxide enough to get anyone to do anything about it in Singapore. It’s clearly also about trees. Key message here is we need to grow more trees, and tax carbon more heavily.

The Eisenhower Matrix

Busy at work? But not challenged? ‘Bored-out‘?

Try the Eisenhower Matrix and see if you can lead a more fulfilling life. Named after Dwight David Eisenhower who was the 34th President of the United States, the matrix is not just about allocating and organising your ‘to-dos’, it gives you very clear prescriptions about how to approach them:

  1. Urgent and Important thing: Do them now
  2. Important but non-urgent things: Schedule a time to do it
  3. Urgent but unimportant things: Get someone else to do it
  4. Non-urgent and unimportant things: Why are they even on your ‘to-dos’?

Apply it not just to work but to most other things in life; purchase services that allows you to outsource all the bits that fall into category 3. And for category 4, if it’s something you enjoy doing and ‘want’ to do them, they don’t belong to your ‘to-do’ but falls into leisure, so no need to stress over them.

Problem Solving Apps

I was amongst the audience to a couple of pitches by youth entrepreneurs and this archetype of “we found this problem, and we created an app / website to solve it, we need money to scale this solution now” kept recurring. Defining and highlighting the problem is a significant step to identifying the solution – but the inherent elements of the problems that allows it to be solved using information technology has to be related to information.

The nature of problem solving is such that it should be mostly about the problem and less about the solution. I find it useful when people are able to characterise problems so clearly and well that the solution becomes almost a no-brainer. That’s really the value of most consultants because when we have problems, we tend to ask ‘What’s wrong’ but we don’t really observe the situation well. We are not going down enough into the way the problem distracts us from our end goal – rather, we focus on the phenomena we want to address rather than the mission we hope to accomplish.

I think before we articulate problems, we should first consider what is the mission in the subtext of the problem statement. Then draw out clear implications and consequences of not addressing the problem before diving into solutioning. And each part of the solution should speak to that subtext, and continue helping users get back on their feet to go about what they had wanted to do.

Too many solutions in the world are actually not about solving problems but about giving users new missions instead of old ones. They are more about distracting them from the root of their challenges. Take cosmetics for example; they pretend to deal with image when self-image is the underlying issue to be address. Imagine a beauty company that focuses on psychology as a solution. Won’t that be truly innovative?