Kevin Low

We don’t like studying hard as much as getting good grades. We may not like the climb up a mountain as much as the view on top. When things gets difficult in school, they sometimes tells us to try harder but more often, they come to the conclusion that there’s another mountain you can climb. So if you’re not so good at a sport, don’t bother; if you can’t make it for the auditions then just find something else instead. Maybe the exception is the most basic stuff in academics; though there are exceptions: if Chinese is too hard, do Chinese B instead.

We want things to go our way; if we can get to the outcome without the process, we rather have just the outcome. We dislike friction in relationships, in life. But we forget that just about everything is held together because of friction. We can raise a glass because of friction; every step we make on the ground is made possible by friction. We need to learn to embrace the friction and the process more than the outcome.

Don’t get me wrong; being outcome-oriented is not a bad thing. But if we forget it is the process that takes us to the outcome, then something is wrong. A culture that emphasises results at all cost compromises on the process for the outcome. This is why people desire to cheat, or to study only for the test. The fact an entire education industry blossomed on the back of grades and results testifies of the fact. If only we can create a culture that embraces the friction a bit more; if only we can say “If it ain’t easy, it’s changing me” rather than “If it ain’t easy, it isn’t for me”.

When was it ever helpful or useful to say ‘See I told you…’? Yet we use it all the time; even when we probably feel nothing positive about ourselves when others use it on us. That desire to be right is so strong we tend to momentarily forsake our important relationships just to feel good about being right.

Maybe, for some time, we can be more right by keeping silent. By giving the knowing nod, lending a shoulder, and showing grace.

There are different ways to grow a society; and also at different rates. We can take the longer path that is often messier, but potentially kinder, leaves less people behind; or we can take the shorter path that is forceful, that relies on clear boundaries and metrics, that might marginalise some groups. NEA announced that they will be enforcing penalties on those failing to clear their tables at hawker centers. They publicly announced that their extensive efforts at public education and awareness have not yielded results so they decided to take the harder stance.

And thanks to the Phase 2 (Heightened Alert) restrictions on dine-in, Singaporeans haven’t quite have a chance to try getting slapped by a fine. Perhaps the Safe-Distancing Ambassador can get extra allowance from NEA by helping with enforcement of people who leave food and trays on the tables at hawker centers.

In any case, I think we are just continuing the story of Singapore, being a ‘fine city’ and using formal incentives and disincentives to govern its people. I think that these formal rules can be ways to pave the way towards better norms but it is important to recognise that the goal in these instances, is not really about having the clean table as an output. It is ultimately about normalising the return of trays, about a clear reallocation of responsibilities. We need to be more creative at thinking of pathways towards this normalisation beyond just setting of formal rules.

The case is the same for recycling – and this is taken care of by the same government agency, NEA. We need to normalise that amongst Singaporeans and if the decision is simply to use rules to normalise the behaviours, they could have done it long ago, but they were perhaps trying out other pathways. It might not be long before they default to their rule-making ways.

The question we want to ask is; whether this rule-making way is sustainable. Does it really become a norm culturally? Especially when the rules are lifted. Because clearing tables, recycling, like being polite, have positive social benefits and are virtues in themselves. Do we, as individuals, value that contribution to society more than the ability to avoid a penalty? If we don’t, then what are we building up in the society? Order, at the expense of mental health, culture of fear and compliance? Is this the way we want to move forward?

The closest thing that schools teaches us about risk and uncertainty is mainly within the Economics and Finance discipline where they are defined, quantified, treated so mathematically that somehow can be managed in a certain magical way. There’s also the behavioural economics side of things where our psychological relationship with risk as humans are being modelled, and that gave some insights to individuals’ biases and faulty heuristics that can be ‘corrected’ to good effect.

Yet risk is potentially the most important thing we have to contend with in our lives after school. In fact, an education itself involves risks, how we conduct our social lives involves risks. I don’t think we necessarily want to create a syllabus and make ‘risk’ part of formal education but I think parents, teachers, and the culture in general can do more about helping each generation appreciate risks better.

We need to better appreciate that our inability to control outcomes as something positive. We are imperfect creatures and if the world was more up to the control of humans, I think we would have ruined it already. So that lack of control can be a good thing, and is meant to be embraced without being disempowered.

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.