What you do vs who you are

What do you choose when you have aspirations? What you do, or who you are? When I was 9, I wanted to be a librarian. But it was because librarians get to be at the counter to see who borrows what books, and to put the date due stamp on the books. They get to change the date due slips on the books when they are full, and they work in a quiet environment.

I was thinking about what I want to doing rather than who want to be. Because what being a librarian is about organising information, about helping people to access to knowledge they want. It is also about safeguarding the ability for libraries to do so, by making sure people return the resources they borrowed on time so that others have access to it too. It is also about increasing public education and awareness of things that matter: culture, heritage, arts, science, and lots of common sense. The 9 year old me made no such connections nor cared that much about all that.

When we are younger, our parents explained professions and jobs in terms of what they ‘do’; very practical elements. A police catches thieves, the lawyer fights court cases, a doctor sees and diagnose, then treat patients. But in order for us to appreciate the greater purpose of these professions, to be able to aspire ‘to be’ rather than to aspire ‘to do’, we will have to develop greater appreciation of what these people are ‘being’ when they take on the roles. It will involve understanding what policing does to public security and now, to the cyber space. How the legal profession creates avenues to address justice on all sides, and means to ensure laws are applied properly. Or that doctors not just make people better but play a role in public health, confidence-building and psychological comfort to those who are unwell.

As we learn to train ourselves to develop visions for our role and professions, we become better professionals, and work with greater motivations.

Electricity Costs

I buy electricity on the open market in Singapore. So when the bill came for the month of August, it looked pretty crazy. I have never seen my averaged cost of electricity actually exceeding the retail package pricing.

Of course I’ve allowed myself to be subject to the volatility but I wonder how often people really bother to understand or check their cost of electricity. For most part they might be using the overall cost as a proxy for consumption since they usually assume the electricity tariffs to be fixed. Well, that’s if you’re on a retail package. And even then it is fixed only for a certain time period.

I begin to wonder if there were any events and outages in the power system in August that resulted in some of those crazy rates. And with gas shortages in the world, things might be changing in the market quite a bit. People were even warned of the rising prices on the papers.

And this makes understanding the energy transition even more crucial for ordinary people like you and I. Getting a clearer view of the options for energy security for Singapore, greater transparency of the plans by the government, how far the market will be playing a role in determining the energy mix vis-a-vis policies to ensure a low carbon energy future.

Besides how much our electricity cost us, we should be also wondering how much it is costing our future and the earth.

Estimating Growth

I wrote about how we tend to overestimate mental strength and underestimate physical strength. The story is a bit similar with growth; we tend to overestimate our ability to grow and change in the short run. We would think that we can achieve some crazy target or try to force ourselves to get from Grade E to grade B in a few months. They are probably not impossible, but it will take a lot of effort and even if we plan well, things might not work out so well.

On the other hand, if we allow those short term lack of performance to cause us to be disappointed and discouraged from trying on and on, then it would be a pity. Because we tend to severely underestimate the potential for change and growth in the longer term. Even if things don’t seem to go as planned in short term, interestingly, once a direction is well-set, the longer term situation tends to be more optimistic even though more time tends to cause people to think more things can go wrong.

But more good things can happen because of that too. We severely undervalue and underestimate what we can accomplish over longer period of times and tend to think whatever happened in the short term will simply stay the same. If you’re unhappy enough about your situation, you’d tend to change it.

Bored-outs

Dr Wu who wrote about the resignation tsunami anticipated for Singapore, recently introduced us to the idea of bored-out (as opposed to burn-out); apparently it is not a new idea though. What I found hard to reconcile with was the idea of sinecure which involves a position that is actually paid but ‘without work’. Maybe the harsh psychological impact is really in the sense that you’re expected to ‘work’ but then there isn’t work. And there’s that added psychological impact of being paid, expected to produce something and yet allowed none.

Even if your deeper purpose isn’t aligned well with a job, it is important that we see what the role that we have is serving. Even if it’s cleaning a space, we ought to be conscious how we are improving the health and environment of those in that space. Of course, being able to interact with the beneficiary of the work helps. But often we don’t get the chance for the direct feedback.

I think there is truly some severe psychological harm in depriving people of making that connection, creating meaning and purpose from the work. But the truth is baring the extreme case of the Frenchman cited as a case, it is difficult that a company would be so extreme in treating an employee. It is important for the company to help employees appreciate the vital nature of their jobs as well and how it falls in place in the grand scheme of things. Rather than to make them feel like they are amongst just a bunch of replaceable cogs moving a heartless system. Fear is a great short-term motivator of work, but also a great motivator for people to leave.

Real Estate

Everyone needs a house; and places to do different things. And real estate is about really creating and providing spaces for people, for activities in an urban setting mostly. The thing is, for most part, there is a lot of matching activities going on. Because people don’t tear down houses when they move, they just sell it to someone else.

It is one of those things that are kind of completely unique (no two locations or houses are the same) so as long as people have strong emotional attachment to specific locations or sense of place, it is difficult for it to be commoditised. Hence the transaction costs involved are really high; and they are often tied to the underlying prices of the assets when they change hands

Another phenomena is that the prices of these assets will change based on the ability-to-pay of the ones buying them. This means that as the overall ability to pay of the economy rises, the prices rise. The value increases without the actual activity of building, searching, selling, incurring that much more costs. How can a society capture and share this value better without all becoming property agents? Henry George’s ideas and perception of land as a property is worth revisiting.

Strength

What is strength? More often than not, in the world of showiness and social media curation, strength shines forth in being more human, revealing your imperfections and failings, more than appearing strong. After all, what does appearing strong really mean?

Through my coaching I discover that we all tend to underestimate what we are physically capable of; which is why we are often so awed by athletes hitting benchmarks, breaking records, and just being ‘super human’. We celebrate all of these, and we then not to see or focus so much on the crazy amount of hard work, focus on techniques, and iteration between monitoring performance, brainstorming how to approach improvement, and then actually achieving those improvements.

But we also overestimate our mental strength; and we often think we are capable of handling stress that we aren’t able to. We overpromise our bosses on the work we can accomplish (especially in terms of deadlines) and fail to juggle everything eventually. We do not expect that the mental capacity it takes to juggle many things competes with the ability to actually execute and do them well.

Rebalancing this would be important.

Good Schools II

The name of your high school matters. It matters even when you are in your 60s and speaking in parliament. It may seem silly that one can be defined that way but this is classic Singaporean. It’s because we celebrate a very narrow set of talents. That was critical at the nation-founding, nation-building phase where we needed to identify strong problem-solvers, and risk-takers who could be industry pioneers.

But it is also because of that, our ‘elite schools’ can serve as important socio-economic levellers by accepting students from a variety of backgrounds and wider variety of talents – not just academic ones. Demolishing the alumni priority system entirely helps; though what we are doing is a nice first step. Of course it’s nice to have our kid go to the same school as ourselves and share in that school pride. But it is non-essential and you should be giving back to the schools because of what it has given you, not what it is about to give your sons and daughters.

Education is an important opportunity for social mobility. Let us not destroy it. Let us not allow capital and private resources to further entrench its power over labour.

Good Schools

The conversations about good schools and elitism will never end for a society where academic credentials truly influence a lot of our subsequent lives. For me, entering Chinese High after attending an ‘ordinary’ neighbourhood elementary school made a huge difference. And I honestly wasn’t a star student even in elementary school. All I could say is I had teachers who believed in me and parents who did not pressure me to go one way or another. I made it to Chinese High potentially through sheer dumb luck.

But getting into the school showed me a different aspect of reality, where hard work matters a lot more; and I had friends from entirely different backgrounds who thought differently from I did. I begin also to see the difference in the education background of their parents and mine. I truly felt that positive impact of competition at that point – I won’t say I thrived in it, nor did it crush me with too much pressure. I just responded in a rather balanced way and made it through the system somewhat in the middle.

Yet even as a middle student in that school, I was easily already ahead of many others. And that is what every parent today in Singapore is trying to push their kids towards. They rather their kid be last in a good school sometimes, just perhaps for the opportunity to mix around with other ‘good kids’ and also be given the wider opportunities.

Until the ‘neighbourhood’ schools are given more resources than the ‘top’ schools, it’s going to be a tough sell to try and tell parents every school is a good school. Because the parents will think the school will be a good school for some kid out there, just not mine.

Chats & meetings

I realised how important the social glue of interactions before and after meetings are. There is the ability to just pull someone aside to say something that doesn’t take more than 45 seconds. Or to pay attention to actual visual cues of other people while someone else is speaking. Or to just be a little more fuzzy with time and disappear somewhere when things ends early. Now, in the world of video calls and packed schedules, we need to be deliberate about all that. We also need to be deliberate about creating breaks between meetings, the fake ‘commute’ across buildings or just between meeting rooms.

And the kind of ‘tap on the shoulder’ conversation. It now feels weird to be ‘going to someone’ just to say one or two thing – ie. give them a call on the phone or video conference software – must no longer stop us from doing so. Now it’s less efficient to call together 5-6 people together and get them to chip in for a birthday gift to a colleague compared to just shouting out in the office when that birthday guy/girl is away. Yet if this is the only way we can go about it, we just have to do it this way.

Technology has improved tremendously to allow for deeper, better social interactions and they continue to advance. Sure, they might ever beat the actual, in-person interactions. But for someone terminally ill to meet his/her son/daughter who is miles away in another country, technology makes a huge difference. A video call could bring incredible amount of closure. We simply must look to these substitutes to achieve the results we need. It’s going to be important for our mental health.

Conflicted Millennials

Millennials’ relationship with work is broken. We want work-life balance. And yet we want to turn our hobbies into income-generators, side-hustles, effectively desiring to turn our passion into work.

So are we turning the life side of the ‘work-life’ see-saw into ‘work’ too? So when we say ‘work-life’ balance, it is not so much the dichotomy of work and life but really, the kind of work that gives us great amount of autonomy without necessary the pressure of livelihood hinging on it, and the kind of work which supports us and fulfils our dreams financially but may not offer so much autonomy and control.

On one hand, we are starved of work and even willing to pay for internships. On the other hand, we are so overworked because we turn our hobbies into work too. The reality, I think, is something to do with our search for our sense of identity. Because we have such freedom and work was quite a significant obsession for the boomers (and by and large their insecurities around livelihoods and material-insufficiency), we dig deep into it for our sense of identity. If only we can take a step back and scrutinise the void in our hearts we are trying to fill, maybe, we would just be searching in the right places.