Kevin Low

What do you think about a world where we use our phones for half a decade or so? A world where people could earn enough to feed themselves and a whole family if they had sold just about 20 vacuum cleaners a year doing door-to-door sales. And those vacuum cleaners could probably last those buyers a generation. It was a world where bankers would not be able to afford houses that much bigger than someone who was a hawker.

It was also a world where money lost value faster; and goods less so. So we would treasure things that were bought and sold for money, perhaps more so than the money. We undervalue durability, and we overvalue change in our world today when we constantly want to chase the next shiny object.

Sustainability starts with awareness and consciousness. But it also requires us to recognise how the culture we have today perpetuate that. It came from the stories we inherit during a time of want. My parents didn’t like the idea of ‘second-hand’ and thought it as something of a last resort when one cannot afford. But today, we need to rewrite that story to be about sustainability and waste reduction. I’d rather many of my things be more durable, lasting, but we also need a culture that supports that. Because lasting stuff becoming waste, is not going to end well.

I recall it used to be when I had some stupid idea about things and I told the adults (this was when I was young) and the response was usually that if it was so easy, it would have been done already. Or that the problem would have been solved. Now what follows is usually not so inspiring as it was intended to be; but I was always encouraged to work hard, learn things, and then try to work on the solution to the problem I care about. That was the good upbringing I had.

But the question is whether we are stuck with the story that if something was so great, someone else would have been able to make it work. Unfortunately, that story is often very much in our head. Important ideas that wins you a Nobel prize often needs to be quite new but they are usually no longer that revolutionary by the time Nobel prize announce the winners. You see, the significant part isn’t about winning the Nobel prize; it’s about changing the world. And changing the world isn’t always about new ideas. They are more often about applying ideas, perhaps existing ones, in new areas, or to even just be able to execute or implement those ideas.

Ideas and improvement in technologies build upon one another. It is the development of satellite technology that allows GPS to exist, and the proliferation of small sensors, GPS receiver hardware that allows the benefit of that satellite to be democratised. Subsequently, it was the development of maps, good quality overlays and mapping of entire cities, that allowed software to properly leverage on the GPS information for navigation. And of course, the business model of ride-hailing apps and food-delivery apps are built upon these innovations. Sequencing of implementation matters; and good ideas are not made bad by circumstances and will require its own time and space to be a great hit. So no, we cannot pretend that great solutions would have already been adopted, and that problems would have been solved if it was ‘that easy’. Our role is to work hard to make the solving of problems ‘ that easy’ by first dealing with prior problems at hand.

You know the objective setting exercise that we do each time we start a project, when we enter a new role and so on? Are you setting benchmarks for success or drawing the line where you define your failures? I think too often, we are thinking more about how failure looks like more than how success looks to be. Or we have such a narrowly defined success that we classify most situations as failures.

I talked about it in the context of regrets before. Our imaginations are so rich that we can be so specific about our alternative lives we forget to live the life that we are given. We fail to enjoy our lives because we are too busy trying to enjoy the life that we think we should be living. It’s the same with our work, and how we want it to turn out – we are so specific about what success means that we think of everything else as failure.

What if we envision just failure – the specific way things fail that you can’t do anything about that is completely counter to what you are achieving. And then we say, that’s it, everything else is success; and that in all other scenarios, you’d be able to make good of it, and at least pick up something that will benefit you somehow.

Then you can start defining where you and your team wants to get to – that range of outcomes where you can be a bit more complacent (isn’t that what you’ve been really after, rather than just what people term ‘success’), and that range of outcomes that would mean there’s more work plans to develop, more reporting and accountability to do. Remember, failure is restricted to that one case you imagined. Everything else is just… life.

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

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.

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.