Kevin Low

So Grab announced their $1 fee hike recently and there was a bit of public backlash. It was perhaps a bit of a sneaky marketing where they claimed it was for the drivers but then revealed that after June 2021, they will collect their 20% fee on that $1. There is the expected public uproar which I cannot be sure is matched by actual action of switching to other ride-hailing apps. After all, Grab did change the culture in Singapore’s private hire car industry. I think we can often have sentiments that don’t match our actions.

There are analysis of the consequences to Grab and the sense is that financially, Grab might not exactly be affected so negatively. It is claimed that they were trying to arrest the decline in drivers. I’m not too sure about that. But what I thought is interesting, is that this $1 fee hike in reality is a very good test of Grab’s market power and the extent of cartelisation of this industry in Singapore.

While some of the competitors may cash in and try to grab market share (pardon the pun) for example in the case of Comfort trying to emphasize their rental rebates to drivers; others might actually silently be just repricing their fares to match Grab. After all, consumers don’t have that much options; and even if one of these apps match Grab in terms of the ride fares on customer side, they might still gain more drivers through the fact they have a lower commission rate.

Grab has proven that the ability to keep drivers on their platform is an important strategy to stay in the lead. A lesson Gojek might have to learn (a non-random, unsystematic and limited-sample survey revealed that drivers think Gojek benefits their customers too much over their drivers). Customers in Singapore are not exactly that spoilt for choice. After a while, if most of the apps on average price themselves not much lower than Grab, they’d tend to default to Grab. The habits in terms of apps use is very sticky and Grab’s variety of services that keeps you tapping on their app icon is a powerful habit-forming process.

The fact that when Competition Commission lifted restrictions on fare hikes and Grab started moving fares in that one direction shows that they do have substantial market power. And even if it’s not about this one single dominant firm, they have set themselves as the barometric firm being able to call the shots on the ride-hailing “tacit” cartel in Singapore. These are things Competition Commission should be looking into.

Months back I was participating in a series of online sessions organised by Thought Collective for young people about readying ourselves for New Normal work in Asia. One interesting point brought up by the speaker was that in Singapore we don’t groom and nurture our local artists and then the state spends so much money getting foreign artists to be based in Singapore or to get them to create works in Singapore.

Our society grew through sheer hardwork and obsession with the tangibles. I think those are very important; we want to have clean streets, clean systems, good infrastructure that simplifies our lives, order, and maybe more importantly for Singaporeans, predictability. We are very upset when rules are unclear and there are no paths to follow. Maybe we overcompensated for a time when things were so unpredictable and disordered.

Somehow we accepted this story that creativity is something magical. That it belongs to other people; the ones who grew up in a different world, who can tolerate the risks it involves. The ones who were brought up in a different system which promote ‘creativity’, not the ones in Singapore. But no, creativity is a skill. You can choice to be creative, to free yourself of the implied rules and norms that society is imposing on you about what you should be doing with your own life.

And creativity doesn’t require the assurance of others. It doesn’t require you to hit KPIs or aim for particular outcomes. More often, it’s about achieving something that touches you personally, that mean something dear and important to you, with values not found in the world out there. Just to repeat the quote of Susan Kare, the graphic designer and a pioneer in graphic user interface:

You can’t really decide to paint a masterpiece. You just have to think hard, work hard, and try to make a painting that you care about. Then, if you’re lucky, your work will find an audience for whom it’s meaningful.

Susan Kare

Do something you care about.

I read the story of David and Goliath again. The account in the scriptures. It is interesting how in modern usage, it is about an underdog winning a contest against a stronger opponent that by all measure should be the winner. Perhaps an additional element would be that he wins in an unusual or surprising way that challenges the concept of the contest in the first place.

Now David did win that battle and killed Goliath. But he did not change the way battles are fought. The armies of Israel did not shed their armours and fight only with slings and pebbles. His vision of a war did not change whilst entering the fight with Goliath; it did not change after the fight. There were tactics and strategies but they were preceded by something else altogether.

And that something else is faith. I use the term faith here not just because of the biblical context but the fact that David’s confidence was simply not in himself. There was something greater than himself that he was fighting for, and something greater that he stands for when he fought. He wasn’t believing in his tactics and strategy; he believed in the purpose he was fighting for. And there was a certain order transcending self-interest or the sense of self that was going to take hold.

We kind of missed all that in our modern “fights” – we are too much about strategy, tactics, resources, that we often forget what we are fighting for. And when we miss our purpose, when that wasn’t well thought out to begin with, we’re running a hell-bound race.

“What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant?”

Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic

I think we are not born knowing what we love or hate. We discover them in life; through observations, hearsay, experiences. We can also become conditioned to love or to hate, through our environment, the people we are close to. And so we have to remind ourselves often, that love is not a feeling; it is an action. It is a deliberate action to take towards the subject we’re loving or trying to love. It can be easier or harder depending on the subject, but it is not a mere feeling. It is something that can be cultivated.

Having set that in place, consider my previous blog post on letting love carry you. As a matter of fact, love is often the thing that carries us through the thick and thin, ups and down. It’s harder to go through volatility in your job when you don’t love it. And if you don’t love your friends, it’s going to be a lot harder to keep the relationship when they go through a wild time and they do things to you that you might not be pleased with.

So you can cultivate love, and love will take you through various circumstances. The implications are larger than you might think at this point. Because our whole life is a struggle and wrestle with circumstances; highs and lows from relationships, grades, achievements, instabilities, insecurities and all that. If we are able to learn to cultivate love for what we do, the people in our lives, then they will be taking us through those struggles, they’ll be wrestling with life together with us, rather than wrestling against us.

And as a bonus, we forget about the self.

When I was in school, we had to choose subjects to take when we were 14. I think we had to choose at least 6 or 7 of them including our languages. And if we were greedy (and capable), we could choose 9 or 10. How would you have chosen the subjects to do? If you were like my classmates, they mostly took the subjects they were good at. Teachers encouraged that too, because in our system, they discouraged students from ‘wasting their time’ on things they were not good at. And often, their personal image, pride and vanity was tied to the tangible grades of the students.

I max-ed out what I could do. This is not to brag; but at that point, I loved knowledge so I wanted to sample everything. I didn’t ace my subjects but I did well enough to actually do all of them. There was English, Chinese, Mathematics (including A Math and E Math), Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Integrated Humanities (including Geography, History, Literature), Arts. Arts took up the most of my time; spanning more than 6-8 hours a week of class, studio, execution time. All the other subjects took way less time and I could also get better grades in them. But I did find myself falling out of love with the process of working physically on the art pieces.

Eventually I did well for all of them enough that when at 17 I had to choose a narrower set of subjects to do, I went simply for the subjects which I enjoyed. By then, they were a bit more on the intellectual side of things. If I hadn’t do well in them, I wonder if things would have been different. But I’m certainly glad I chose things I enjoyed and liked; and I happen to live in a society where intellectuals are looked favourably upon. In the long run, it is not your grades that will keep you motivated and going in the difficult things; it was your love for the subject.

Don’t blame the clown for acting like a clown, ask yourself why you keep going to the circus.

Unknown

Hmm. Interesting idea; often we allow ourselves to be in contexts and environment we dread with the kind of people we don’t actually want to hang out with. I discovered at some point of life that modern society often requires that we spend much more time pleasing people we hardly care about at the expense of the ones we love, but thinking all that former was actually to serve the latter.

To that extent, choosing the right clients would be just as important as choosing the right employers should you decide to start out on your own and ‘do your own things’. The freedom to choose your own client comes from positioning yourself, being able to do good work for the type of people you like. It doesn’t come naturally just because you are running your own business. Because you still need to pay the bills, and keep things running.

Like what I mentioned previously, it’s incredibly important who you hang out and spend time with; so it’s necessary that even at work, choosing who you want to serve matters. And of course, it’s not a pure straight-forward choice because within that choice, there are many different derived choices. By choosing to serve only the best, you’d have to make further choices to be yourself amongst the best in what you do.

When we are young, we were taught to work hard, do well in school, so that we are assured of a good life. What is a good life, we ain’t that sure, but the adults sure believed in it. I’m thankful my parents believed in education; but they also believed in me. We are mostly brought up in a system that emphasised on predictability, that was calculative about ‘ROI’ or ‘returns on investment’, acting as though we can know or represent somehow our ‘returns’ with reasonable accuracy that it is worthwhile even considering it.

There’s this idea of ‘guarantee’. It can be very compelling since the onus is on someone else (or something else, ‘the system’) to make good of some kind of promise. That you just have to take care of fulfilling the conditions and the outcome is assured. You think you’re not assuming any risks because you can leave that to wherever that guarantee comes from. Study hard and you’ll pass the exams; get into Med School and you can become a doctor. Turns out, that is not liberating; because for every outcome different from what you are targeting, you tend to think you’ve not hit certain conditions, or there’s some issues with your inputs. You lose your faith in getting genuinely better, choosing to somehow try to hack the system.

If it’s about passing exams, getting into schools, you find the right spot to dig, to inch into the picture. If it’s about getting the right connections, you network your way, contaminating real connections with muddy intentions. Education in the modern world is doing that to us. Do you want to continue perpetuating that or would you like to do something different and finally be yourself?

Norton Juster’s ‘Phantom Tollbooth’ is just such a timeless delight. I discovered it when I was studying in New York University, got a used copy of the book from my favourite bookstore – Strand Bookstore. It was about the adventures of a boy named Milo who went into some kind of fantasy land.

At one point, Milo meets a boy named Alec who belongs to a group of humans who grows downwards. So Alec actually floats in the air because his head is where it is at the level of his full-grown height. Alec thinks Milo is a strange type of human because ‘his perspective changes as he grows‘. Because Alec’s perspective is always the same (‘the grown up view’) through his life.

At the end of some further interactions and adventures, Milo decided he’d like to continue seeings things as a child, because it’s not so far to fall. The interplay between the literal and figurative meanings of words throughout the book is brilliant and the story has so much practical wisdom about reality which we never quite escape from in life.

And yes, I think as we grow, we become afraid of falling, we think so highly of ourselves. Yet the more we want to be put on the pedestal, the less we are willing to try, take appropriate risks, and some day, we just decide to stop thinking altogether and just follow. Because we imagine, there are ‘guarantees’ of what comes at the end if we’d just follow. That tends to be where things start to go wrong.

Picture your 19 year old self. You always wanted to be a [fill in the blank], and you worked hard for it. You took the right subjects, had the right co-curricular activities, checked the boxes on leadership positions and met your number of hours of community service. You met the conditions; or maybe not.

Maybe there were some hidden ones because you didn’t get into the course. Maybe they shrank the cohort in your year and you were excluded as a result. Either way you took a gap year. It was a good time, to gain exposure and experience new things. Suddenly there were new possibilities. The field or career you wanted maybe wasn’t that attractive anymore. But you’ve vested so much. You apply again to the course. You’re so tired, there is so much pent-up tensions.

Nope. Rejected. You didn’t get into [fill in the blank]. Now, that’s liberation. Go lead your life. The life where you are not working for something guaranteed, where you are taking risks because you care about the process of growing, of learning, of being better rather than ‘being someone’. Live the life where you’re defining your own standards and making yourself accountable rather than trying to live up to others’ standards and always feeling like you’ve to justify your worth or abilities to others.