Have you been asked this question? How do you usually choose to answer such a question? Is it based on technique, or wisdom? Majority of the training industry today is about convincing people that many things in life, the way to work, live and play are just about techniques that can be learnt, sorted through training and then you’re good to go, set for life. Yet that is simply not true. How we accomplish or do things involved not just techniques but also wisdom accumulated through having done different kinds of things.
What about the story you’ve been telling yourself about how you grow, about how you accomplished things? Was it because you mastered some kind of technique or gained expertise and experience?
Techniques are unnatural; they are discovered probably by some kind of accident or deep logical deductions followed by trial-and-error. And it might not always be the most straight-forward or easy way. That’s why they are meant to be perfected, mastered through practice. This is an idea that I got from Seth Godin.
Insights, wisdom are not techniques. You can become really good at something because you master the techniques. For example, you can go quite far with some really good scripts to be used for sales. But more often, you need to know what to do when new situations arises, when new questions you have not anticipated arises. And wisdom is by definition the sort of intelligence involving application of knowledge, awareness from older, historical contexts into new situations and contexts. You cannot master wisdom, you can only grow it through encounter, by going through different experiences, dealing with different things.
In that sense, wisdom is natural. It is like a landscape formed by the elements, the rinsing and washing from the water, the blowing of the wind, the changes in the temperatures, the shifts in the plate tectonics. You cultivate wisdom also through observation and studying the patterns in the way nature is ordered. This is why even the uneducated can be wise. In fact, often, education can stand in the way of cultivating wisdom.
We need good quality people at work. We need them to be serving one another, to do the work that needs to be done. And corporate cogs, people who just follow the script, who push buttons based on a set of instructions neatly put down by someone else tend not to be the good quality people I’m referring to. And in recent conversations, I found out that the excuses that the cogs had for poor work includes, “I can’t find my notes”, “But this is different from what you told me”, “But we are not allowed to change this setting”.
When the conversation does not go towards, “I was wrong, let me take over and correct it.” then to me, the person is just not taking ownership of the work. And it is important that we are allowing people to take ownership; to not just leave the end product to others. When people fail to take ownership of their work, they need to be questioned. What can help them make sure that mistakes are corrected before work submission? What do they need to do to make sure they are applying the knowledge or instruction with understanding and not just blindly.
And more importantly, how would they be able to respond autonomously to a change in situation? Taking ownership, adopting a common sense approach to situations, and being willing to stand up to the rules, and produce results independently is so important. Hence it is important when people bend and break rules, we understand the intent and purpose rather than just go on a finger-pointing spree and miss the opportunity to praise someone for taking charge and not just being a cog.
I was having coffee with this friend, who like me, studied abroad both in the US and UK talking about how this whole education industry has become so mercenary and price inflation just crazy. And honestly, most of the things they are teaching students are really not used in most of our jobs though it is probably just the thinking and problem-solving skills they cultivate in the process that matters.
Today of course there’s this huge industry that helps to train workers after they graduate in all kinds of skills that are required for them to be corporate cogs; from financial modelling, to giving presentations, business writing and so on. I find it fascinating that one have to shell out more money in order to be trained in these areas after having already spent somewhere around a quarter of a million in an undergraduate degree. Where did learning on the job go? Why do companies expect fresh graduates to immediately be able to plug themselves into the work? How can that even be possible?
Alright, maybe the training industry is there to help people pivot into new types of jobs and so on without having to go in from entry level. But honestly, the best way to learn is really to get on a project, network and meet people who can potentially guide you. Of course you can pay for a coach to support that learning journey; but the quality of these various services are hard to evaluate. You need to rely on good word-of-mouth, and be committed to learn yourself. If you expect to be spoon-feed and that a certificate from these courses would magically qualify you for new things, you’ll have to start changing your mind.
How many new ideas did you come up with over the past week? Or are you now obsessing over whether they were new ideas? How many of those new ideas did you actually share with the world?
I wrote about how we kind of self-censor because of the story we tell ourselves about our ideas. It is equally important to recognise that having an idea, sharing them is just not sufficient. Finding the resources to develop conviction, to allow those ideas to derive million other ideas that you are willing to try, test and implement is so important.
Yet, whilst at a theoretical level we know that this is so important for the human race, for our society, we are not so keen on creating an economy and society that does just that. At certain level, we want people to just accept answers as they are, to follow the rules and to not stir up trouble. But having ideas, and being contrarian, accommodating them needs to be part of a culture that welcomes that sharing, and allows for the continuous innovation.
We are terrible at forecasting how we would think when we get into some kind of situation hypothetically. It is why we can be happier in situations that we think we’d be miserable. Dan Gilbert spoke about this more than 16 years ago.
And part of the reason I think, is that we often associate our identity with just a narrow subset of ourselves such that when things change, we imagine that there’s not much more within our identity to accommodate those events, situations or trauma. Yet our real identity is so much bigger, and so much more. Maya Shankar shares about this a bit more on Brene Brown’s Dare to lead podcast episode.
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 found it fascinating that corporatism was an original political ideology that has to do with common interest forming groupings that will help to organise the society. It seem to have nothing or little to do with the ‘corporate’ that we know of today. So this piece has nothing to do with that original term and more to do with what we understand about corporate interests, depersonalisation and the need to be human.
Corporates are typically legal persons, they are responsible legally for a lot of things that the law subjects them to. But they can only be as human as the people who makes them up. Yet like a biological organism, they try to sustain itself, and that brings about certain behaviours that can be detrimental to parts of it.
After all, if your hand is stuck in something and there’s a truck which is about to run over you, you’re going to try rip your own hand away to save your life. When you’re in a corporation, and making decisions for the organisation, do you think as a human? Or have you accepted the only thing you care to keep alive, is the corporation?
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.
