Kevin Low

At some point most of us realise that performance grading on a bell curve would mean we just try to be ‘above average’ unlike the times when in school we could have grade inflation and hence more people could get A. And of course there is less room than in school to dispute your score – especially in Asian societies. When we were all in school, we were sort of forcefully pitted against our classmates in various different things ranging from exam results, to fitness and so on. There’s a sense of that relative performance is quite important; but I think the key is considering relative performance of what.

For our co-curricular activities, we don’t face such anxiety. If we are not in a uniform group, we opt out of the comparison of our ability to do drills. When we are not in a music group then we cannot be compared against our peers on our skills on the musical instruments. But for most basic subjects, we cannot avoid the comparison and we will be graded, and probably ranked. But once we step into the workforce, we realised that all the different dimensions are being considered and lumped together into a single grade. That is vague and hard to work on. It’s difficult to aim for any grades because you’re definitely pitted against your colleagues or peers in all the different mysterious ways you can’t even begin to work on them.

Therefore you cannot aim to be above average. You cannot aim at relative performances even if you know that’s what matters and probably how the bosses make these performance reviews. You’ll need to find absolute metrics to work on; to focus on sales calls you make rather than sales you achieve, to measure and quantify your useful inputs and have the outputs/outcomes as an afterthought. And you must not create anxiety for yourself when the outcomes don’t work, but maintain the curious mind searching for relevant and suitable inputs to work on to drive the output.

I had the chance to be disconnected for a couple of days and I must say that it was a really good time for me. I managed to really stop thinking about work, feeling I have to do this or that in order to move forward and just be really present with things. Embarrassingly, it was refreshing for me – which probably mean that I really needed the break. And of course it wasn’t just about work but also my personal mental hygiene and stress from having to juggle commitments to family, and social relationships.

I realise it makes perfect sense to remain disconnected for at least a couple of hours a day just to get that real rest which we all need. I suspect I’m going to find it difficult but I think I will have to try it to know. To put my phone on airplane mode maybe 7-10pm before I go to bed. Or some other hours like that. Even just for 2 hours would be really good – mind you, when you are awake that is.

I begin to realise how normal it must be to plainly just be present with the people who are physically around you and to enjoy the things in the moment rather than be obsessed with something else in the distance or distant future. How joyful and peaceful life was! Before the smart phone took over so much of our attention.

When a teacher steps into a classroom; what is he/she observing? Is she thinking about who’s the leader in the class, who are the ones who would influence others? What are the attributes celebrated and considered valuable in the classroom? Never mind what the school thinks highly of; what about this classroom? And how did the students end up thinking or seeing things this way? How uniform are they? What are they united around? Why?

No those are not the questions they typically think about. They are just concerned about who needs more help, who behaves more badly, and at the most, who is leading who astray. In the typical day, more effort would be applied to classroom management and then lots of attempts to entertain/teach the class, and then marking. To me, success as a teacher lies solely in being able to inspire and influence the students to learn. Being able to know how to fish is infinitely better than being given a fish.

So what is the role of a teacher? It is to shape the culture and influence the culture of the classroom. To co-create that culture and motivate the students in the right direction by helping them to reconsider what they value. There’s going to be status roles and pecking orders in the classroom; and there will be non-academic elements at play. The teacher is going to have to determine which are the important ones to emphasise and the others to de-prioritise.

If teaching is about sharing knowledge, then the internet and a bunch of YouTube videos works spectacularly better. But if being a teacher is about modelling what it means to be human, to help students attach the right values to the right things, then the schools can play their part to support by focusing on the right things.

In my mentoring and coaching practice, I’ve always encouraged my mentee and clients to do something different when applying for jobs. It will mean taking a lot more effort such as ensuring that your CVs are tailored properly to the job description, investigating the alignment between your motivation and the elements that the hiring manager might be looking for.

Despite these efforts, it’s entirely likely that you are not even called for an interview. And that doesn’t have to do with anything you’ve put on your CV or wrote on your cover letter. It can be related entirely to the processes and logistical challenges that the company hiring was facing. I’ve received rejection notification that came a year after I applied to the opening. Then there are those who goes completely silent on you and you simply give up on them.

Feedback is important in the process of job-seeking and iterations do make a huge difference in helping you improve. But the difficulty is we can sometimes take these things personally when the hiring firm behaves badly. It is important to recognise sometimes we are rejected and they give us a flimsy excuse with no effort to provide feedback entirely because you were not even considered at all. The firms will not try their best to find the perfect candidate. They have vacancies to fill and it’s important they are going to just pick the first person who seemed like a reasonable candidate – who accepts the offer. That means there are CVs/letters they are going to ignore completely and are not even sure about whether to reply to.

You may feel that’s a bit unfair. But we do these things to others all the time. We ration our attention at dinner conversations, and we will not be pondering over every single sharing from our friends to give them our heartfelt responses. We might even spend more time on Instagram instead of the people we are physically present with. So allow that understanding to restore your mental health.

More than once since independence, Singapore’s government have been described more than once as a nanny state or being paternalistic. We’ve been a very Asian society where individuals are expected to sacrifice for the greater good of the society and community. Over the years, thanks to the good stewardship and development, individuals have been able to enjoy progressively less sacrifice and more “enjoyment”.

The outcomes that our society enjoys have been used to justify some of our “controls” so to speak. We have good citizens complying to measures from the government partly also because there were great vision from the leaders at the point of independence. I would argue the vision is more important in getting people onboard than the promise of the outcome – because that outcome cannot be guaranteed. But a vision and a commitment to the vision can be assured.

Our leadership needs to recognise that for all the upgraded tools in terms of policy-making, enforcement and technology at surveillance, we might be tempted to think that government can carefully calibrate every movement of the nation and people to achieve good outcomes. This perspective sets us up for failure because it was never the controls that drive the results but the vision that got people’s buy-in to the controls.

This point is very nuanced and I really hope we can see more vision, and commitment to the vision in the work of our leaders.

The discipline of writing, putting out ideas everyday started out more as an attempt to learn to show up daily. And in Seth Godin’s words, to practise shipping the work. But then it also evolved, it helped me think through ideas more, come up with more ideas, and to learn to craft them, convey them in different ways.

There are some recurring ideas that I keep revisiting such as the importance of the story we tell ourselves, the purpose of life and work, issues surrounding mental health from different angles. Writing daily helps me to build them up, reinforce them from different ideas and also explore the stray connections they may have with each other.

It has helped me be more curious about the world. I had this habit before – in 2006-2007 when I was preparing more for national exams. When I determined that I should write 1 essay a day. It was mainly to train my ability to write cogently; but I did already fall in love with writing then.

So for those out there with ideas to share, I’d say, please write on.

Strategy is required as a result of scarcity – limited resources, time, capacity. If you had infinite resources, you don’t need a strategy because you can afford to squander any amount of resources to get to where you want. But then again if the end goal of strategies are to get more resources, then having infinite resources basically mean you already fulfilled your goals.

Then there is evolution, which is where optimising resources at system level is not as important as proliferating diversity and searching for multiple optimal strategies. This is how a specie survive, and how the market system perpetuates. In such a system, tactics in the short term can become an obsession. So it is important to understand what is the game you’re playing before figuring out how you play it.

So what is the strategy for? Why do you want to be number one? Why is that worth living, training for? Are those questions really necessary? Can we ignore them? Is there something else we are trying to move towards when we think about our “strategies” – can we achieve the something else differently?

We could be focused on sustainability thinking we just want to reduce plastics waste, and think about all ways to substitute it. There’re reusable bottles, food containers, etc. My home is full of plastic reusable water bottles, as well as food containers. We do use them but there’s a sense they eventually become plastic waste as well. And then there’s the whole drive on biodegradable plastics; which I discovered to be more resource intensive than normal plastics – and gets incinerated in our waste-to-energy plants anyways.

When we are militant about single outcomes: eg. losing weight, getting good grades, becoming a manager, or running a unicorn startup before the age of 40, we can lose many things. And we can be burning resources unnecessary to get to those single outcomes without recognising that what we want is something more general. We have this obsession that with this one thing, all things will be alright. It’s exactly the kind of struggle and challenge that Disney Pixar’s Soul (a film) is trying to reflect on.

When we select our desire outcomes, we might want to think more holistically; it’ll be hard to work out the strategy and paths towards that, but allowing ourselves to think this way will help us go farther.