Tensions at work

Do you hate your work? Do you feel challenged in the way you don’t like to be at work? What sort of tension are you feeling? Why do you have a sense you want to leave your job? What are the moments that makes you uncomfortable?

These challenges are probably good times to take stock and examine life priorities. As I mentioned before about appraisals, life do not always progress in the manner that our career or organisations desires for us to move. And that alignment between our lives and our current role or job may not always be good. The fit doesn’t have to be perfect but if there’s sufficient strain and tension, it is important to take the opportunity to understand why and use that insight to find your next role.

Is it about the values of the organisation? Or the kind of people the organisation is selecting to work with you? Is it the sense of impact your work has for you? We too often try to make value judgment on these things when it is often really just about how these things fit with one’s priorities at a certain stage of life. Perhaps you joined at a point of life where you were more willing to trade your personal time for learning opportunities but now you no longer so you need to shift to a role that demands less time and yet leverages on what you have already built up? Ponder over these – generate greater self awareness.

Minimum Wages & Negative Taxes

It is significant that Singapore has pushed through some of the more targeted policies to help with low wage labour and effectively try to set floors on wages for labour. The tricky thing about productivity is that it has always been computed as a residue and tend to ignore the relative bargaining power differences between wage and labour.

Research by Thomas Piketty has long shown that return on capital can be persistently greater than economic growth which is to say that what manifests itself as poor labour productivity can just be an overall phenomena of capital gaining upper hand in bargaining power in the market economy. History have shown that the best ways to deal with the resulting inequality is greater public investments, especially in the area of public infrastructure and education.

The state will be an important player in this and the overall systems of redistribution can take place at different levels in many different ways. But ultimately, these policies will have to be anchored on the question of what we are growing for, and whom we want our growth to serve. I think Singapore continues to be open as a city state to draw the right kind of capital and labour but we are now fine-tuning the balance across the relative bargaining power of capital and labour a bit more. Especially the domestic labour force.

Ups and downs

One of the stories we inherit from the boomers is the story of linear growth and unidirectional progress. And I’ve mentioned this oversimplified story having a very adverse effect on our generation. While we are not naive, this story stays with us so strongly we can’t seem to get ourselves out of the psychological rut that our trajectories will always be the same and our future state is a mere extrapolation of our current path.

There are going to be ups and downs; and cycles in life. Growth is not linear and often not unidirectional. Nassim Taleb introduced the idea of anti-fragile which describes something that strengthens with volatility in due course.

Consistency is important but it should be pre-supposed. And so we can be so brilliant at times and then make a stupid decision in the next moment. These individual moments don’t define us and at each point it is the response that determines who we are. And who we are becoming.

So let us learn to shake of that linear, unidirectional story and embrace our up-and-down lives.

Who do you want to be

I think we should ask our children this question more. It helps us take the pulse of the kind of influence that the external environment, ourselves and the activities we allow them to engage in, have on them. Kids internalise the notions of good and bad mostly from the social environment around them and they learn what is acceptable or not. They are feeling the contours of our social interactions and the consequences of it.

To ask them who they want to be is to help them consolidate their learnings and have them recognise consistencies or inconsistencies without being explicit about it. I recall asking my young little 5-year old cousin, ‘why are you jumping around?’ and she replied ‘I’m a frog’. Then when she starting walking instead of jumping, I asked ‘why are you walking now?’ and she responded promptly, ‘I’m a penguin’. There is clearly this sense of our actions and behaviours explained in terms of our identity even from that early age.

Being careful in moulding and helping children understand where and how they find their identity is so important because that’s going to affect the way they think about work and play. For children who responds saying they want to be ‘a doctor’ or a ‘firefighter’, then parents or adults around them should recognise perhaps they already equate identity to professions or jobs. If they respond based on character values (eg. A kind person) or socio-economic status (eg. Rich person), you’d also realise how much those sort of values you’re inculcating in them.

And for now, it’s probably a good thing we should be reflecting upon as an adult. Who did we want to be and did we become him/her? Why?

What makes money

On one hand the government should not really bother about what makes money because that is how innovation happens and introducing constraints on the way people can make money is stifling innovation. But on the other hand we already have tonnes of laws limiting ways people make money. For example through fraud, counterfeiting, extortion, etc.

Now the question is whether clickbaits that generate advertising revenue is fraud. Or bot accounts providing services to increase follower counts. Are they not fraud? Don’t they “counterfeit” the real followers? Can plant based proteins be sold as meats?

How about when you pay for a subcription but you didn’t use the service – can the payment demanded and collected be considered an extortion? After all, that sounds like the scammers along the streets of London handing out flowers and then harrassing you for a “donation” sure seem like extortion to us.

I think we should care about what makes money as a whole society and we should learn to scrutinise them. Because what makes money will happen and will become gradually industrialised if it can be. And it will concentrate wealth and resources in those who are doing it.

Rising expectations

If we take stock of the advancement in living standards over the course of the last 3 generations, the improvements have undoubtedly been phenomenal. Yet the average experience of life as perceived subjectively seemed to have barely become more joyful.

If anything, our generation seem more disappointed, emotionally worn and exhausted than the previous. I’m afraid it is entirely because out expectations, our hopes and dreams have continually outpaced the improvements we experienced.

Every time something genuinely gets better, our expectation rises by so much more. And it seems, we have come to associate expectations with having standards that it is a bit toxic on our mental health. We have to learn to clean up our thinking about standards we uphold for ourselves and the kind of expectations we put upon others. Making others responsible for our happiness is pretty much a sure route to unhappiness.

Purpose on a platter

The fresh grads entering the job market and other young adults still finding their bearings in the market often want to be paid well and also have a sense of purpose in their career. They sometimes fantasize about the sense of purpose in fields they did not enter: medicine, teaching, psychology, etc.

On the other hand I’ve known cynical doctors, wearied teachers and exhausted psychologists who knows their purpose but are so worn out by work they wonder how things square. Then there are banker friends who made tonnes of money and think they need to do their part for the world and hence, get involved in sustainable finance (which honestly have mixed track record and credentials).

Purpose does not come with a job; at least not served on a platter. The story that runs in our mind about our work gives us the sense of purpose. Of course the story must compel us positively and move us forward in the direction the career tend towards. This alignment is not to be taken for granted. One can be promoted into misalignment because the career progress doesn’t fit the story of greater purpose – it can become diminished purpose.

That is why I care so much about stories. Especially the stories we tell ourselves; and this is why I enjoy coaching others especially on careers – the alignment (purpose), the planning (strategy) and the tactics involved. I’m writing an eBook which I hope to share with my readers. Watch this space for more details to follow.

Balancing Trust

Economists have long discovered that trust is an important input to economic development. And institutions in the economy can promote or degrade trust in the society so the institutions that destroys trust ultimately can destroy long run value even if it creates some short term ones.

Focusing on the institutions that promotes and activate trust as a social capital opens our eyes to the various means in which trust is built. On one hand there are institutions that have trust created based on openness and allow broad participation. Then there are institutions that build trust through exclusiveness, tight security around who can do what.

In general, as western ideas permeate, the former is preferred more than the latter. But we ought to recognise there will still have to be gatekeepers, curators to help maintain quality of interactions, and uphold the rules. While a secretive benign dictatorship may not be so pleasant, anarchy is not a viable alternative. The idea of authority and hierarchy is logically part of creating order though it can be abused.

There has to eventually be a balance between maintaining gatekeeping and authority functions against closing it up so much there’s too much exclusivity. The issue with capitalism and markets is that we know they have a tendency towards unequal distribution, even when we equalise opportunity. So even in an open system, there can be accumulation of power and eventually abuse.

Educating the masses and getting people to appreciate the power of reason is not enough to ensure open systems will always maintain trust. More checks and balances to be considered.

Celebrating Youths

There’s a large part of our online media and even traditional media celebrating achievements of youths. The other ideas of ‘strawberry generation’ and the apathy of youths have recently been fading away as the world situation made things more difficult for the millennial generation. It’s important that we recognise the youths who are making a difference and shaping the future that we all want to live in.

One of the challenge with blarring about our 40 below 40 or 30 below 30, and other lists consisting of well-accomplished youths is that we create this sense of despair in other youths. We end up discouraging the ones who have tried and failed or achieved less at the same age. This further reinforces ageism – discrimination of older workers.

We need to think of better ways to celebrate our youths while encouraging others to move forward and continue shaping the future that we all care about. Our youths recognises that we are all one people and there is no inter-generational warfare going on. But they should also see that there is no hurry for those who had more obstacles in life to go through. Life is not that short, pacing things out helps.

Continuous Learning

When I was in school, I was lulled into a sense that we spend first 15-20 years of our lives just doing non-stop learning and cramming all the things we have to know about the world to prepare us for it. And then we just go out there and probably regurgitate or apply all that we learn non-stop for another 40 years or so before we retire. And then we can rest and enjoy the fruits of our labour.

So it got confusing when adults have to go to schools too; and they have to learn new things. Well, it was understandable, that the world is changing and some things in school became obsolete or superseded by new things we had to learn. So people in the workforce had to be retrained. But at the same time, there were skills required in work that wasn’t taught in school as well so it was 2-way: (1) School was not exactly catching up with what is needed for the 40 years or labour; and (2) Work wasn’t really sure what they wanted from their people because it kept changing.

If we are going to be continuously learning through life anyways then what should we really be preparing ourselves for in school? In the first 20-years? We should probably be focusing on how to learn; and being good at it so that during the period where our labour is needed, we can pick up on things and apply them quickly. But often learning requires doing, and instead of having schools create imaginary work for students to do, why not channel them to do real work and solve real problems?

For now, schools have been trying to do that but it is usually difficult for organisations designed to deliver mass education to do these things. So if you’re in college, or even before, I suggest you to try looking for work, different jobs, part time jobs. But make sure they are useful; and to draw relevant, suitable employers, you need to craft your own story about what you are exploring, and what you want to do.

Email Course – Building your story for your career

I’m working on an email course that is just about that; it is designed mainly for first-job seekers who are looking to dive into a career. But it is also relevant for undergraduate students trying to find their bearings in the job market, testing out job hunting, and polishing up those skills. Stay tuned for more updates.