Our practice begins with the imperative that we embrace a different pattern, a pattern that offers no guarantees, requiring us to find a process and to trust ourselves. As Susan Kare, designer of the original Mac interface, said, “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.”
Seth Godin, The Practice
If yesterday’s posts put some tension in you and a sense of unease, today’s quote is to ease that. Let us learn to trust in ourselves; and find the right story to tell ourselves. This is why I started my coaching practice.
A lifetime of brainwashing has taught us that work is about measurable results, that failure is fatal, and that we should be sure that the recipe is proven before we begin. And so we bury our dreams. We allow others to live in our head, reminding us that we are impostors with no hope of making an original contribution.
Seth Godin, The Practice
This, is so brilliant. In many ways. So I add no more words to this blog post so you can focus on the quote.
I’ve written before about public vs private sector jobs or career; and I’ve also shared about the story that we want to craft for ourselves. One of the biggest thing that I would urge all those considering public service to think about is the spirit by which you are serving in. Ultimately, as you enter the service, who are you serving, what are you serving?
Honestly, one of the best perks about being in public service is the claim to some sort of altruism – you’re here to serve the people; you want to help the companies, or the lower income families, or to advance the energy system of the country, etc. And of course, with that perk you will want to be able to take a high view of those in the service. This is perhaps why I think developing and considering the spirit of service is important before and while you are in the service.
Because bureaucracy can be self-serving, or serving the status quo. Because when you want to be fair and good to everyone you might end up having to withhold from everyone. And because when you develop measures to try and capture the intangibles, you can end up either giving up or maximising the metric rather than the genuine outcome. And when you get disappointed, the environment can conspire to make you think you cannot change things. These are hard truths, and the reality is not that close to the claims of altruism.
In the toughest of situation, it is the spirit of service that will keep you there and hold you accountable. When you’re tempted to maximise your career rather than uphold the interest of public. When it is all on you to call out selfish leaders. When political interest seem to overwrite public interest. These are times when you look back at the spirit of service and carry on. So be sure you’ve the right spirit to serve before you join.
The thing about putting a group of people in charge of standards and creating standards, is that you risk desiring to create standards for everything. It’s like suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and wanting to make sure everything is so spick and span. And they may lose sight of what standards are there for. Who are standards supposed to serve?
Should they be serving a nation? Should they be there to allow regulators to generate revenue through audits/inspection? Should they be serving an industry? To keep new entrants out and maintain some kind of tacit collusive oligopolistic market structure? Should they be serving the customer? But what about those who are not yet customers but could potentially be once the standards are flexed, tweaked?
Every standard seeks to exclude. That’s the reason they exist. So are we serving the wider society when we exclude? Who is benefitting from the standards, and who is helping to perpetuate the standards? Should we allow monopolies to change a standard in ways that benefit themselves? How can we ensure they put back what they take from the society?
I think these are more important to consider for those who are put in charge of standards. It’s not just about convening committees and putting together paper work.
There’s something neo-colonialistic about standards. After all, in my last blog post, I talked about how Qin Shi Huang who first unified several ‘kingdoms’ in China to form the first proper large dynasty in China actually used standards to help him rule. And from an economic perspective, standards can have some kind of effect of creating some cartel or monopolistic effect but we can agree that the social benefit outweighs the social costs so proper state intervention or some kind of non-profit structure on these standards association or organisations would help.
The attractiveness of being able to develop standards which other people have to eventually follow is that there are ways to monetise that. It’s like how Champagne can only come from Champagne in France – it naturally creates some kind of monopoly. Whenever we standardise, we exclude because we have made a decision to observe a threshold of acceptance. But the key here is to consider who this standard seeks to serve. As long as the standard serves the public and fosters more innovation, allows people to build things upon it and move forward, without too much cost to society, that is fine.
But mechanisms have to be set or laid down for us to question a standard; because once a standard is entrenched, it is hard to convince the system to change it. Which means if there’s no proper system in place to change it when it becomes somewhat obsolete, it may continue to perpetuate. Finding a way for standards to evolve will allow us, as a society to be able to grow and learn to be able to move forward on the right (new) things.
Standards are great tools to get people to move past something mundane and to fix the number of variable parameters so that we can move forward with things, and build upon what have been decided. Civilisations are made of standards, one step at a time. When the “First Emperor of China” (Qin Shi Huang) unified the bunch of squabbling tribes and formed the Qin dynasty, he started to develop standards which helped not only to unify large swathes and number of people in China but allowed more trade and innovation to blossom.
He standardised the currency units and denomination (they were in silver), standardised the length of axles between wheels on carts (thereby also allowing the government to build road infrastructure which were uniform and standard), ensured units of measurement were uniform in the lands where he ruled. Most importantly, he unified the writing system of Chinese at that point and eliminated variant symbols or ways of writing the same character. This laid an important foundation for the script of Chinese characters up till the modern day.
One may say he produced the standards in order to rule more effectively; others may consider his ability to produce standards to be rooted in his monopoly power as the state, especially one that was formed through de facto power. While one may argue a different length of axle, or a different way of standardising the Chinese characters would have been better; or one may dispute the selfish motive of Qin Shi Huang, one cannot ignore the fact that standards are important building blocks to help one move forward and further.
Same for our personal lives; if we can develop standards that helps us not waste our willpower on the small things, the ones that are insignificant or unimportant, then we can save our horsepower to run greater distances.
There was perhaps an impression that public sector has more work-life balance than private sector where people slog hard to earn the extra dime from the market. Well, I think the truth is far from that.
In most organisations, the extent of the slog really boils down to 2 parameters: load distribution and system efficiency. An organisation where some work especially hard while others are not fully deployed struggles with load distribution while an organisation where everyone seems overworked struggles with efficiency. Of course it is usually a combination of both but simplifying to this 2 extremes allows us to look at working out ways to cope with it.
Load Distribution ridden companies need to improve their resource composition and utilisation. They might be chasing the wrong kind of work. Organisations dealing with efficiency issues might need to improve hiring or their overall system of managing their people.
Industrial production might have fallen slightly across the world last year and as we see more waves of Covid-19 hit different parts of the world I’d think industries have gotten better at keeping productions up. So even with more measures kicking back in to keep people safe, industries will probably still continue to hum along.
Energy consumption across domestic sector definitely rose quite significantly as people worked from home, binged on Netflix. Datacenters probably worked harder across the world as well and even more content gets put up online by new content creators and new exchanges online that replaced what was previously offline.
Transport is probably the sector where energy consumption fell drastically last year. First with air travel, but probably also with some longer-range land transportation as well. Though logistics probably continue to move along and delivery apps for food, groceries and all that might still continued running.
Resource use in terms of masks and takeout containers, plastic bags definitely increased. So waste management cost might have risen for most part. Environment wise overall things might not have been so different in terms of moving away from the longer term trajectory.
The opportunity here is rethinking the way and the amount of energy we are consuming, now that we might be spending more time at home, and industries might do with less people being at work. Likewise, if we are taking out more often, perhaps we could use reusable containers more. We might be able to cultivate better habits that set the world on a different trajectory.
Hybrid cars are efficient internal combustion engine (ICE) cars. They are electric vehicles to the extent they have batteries and an electric motor. But the truth is, 100% of the energy used by hybrid cars are from fossil fuels, unlike EVs which could offer a chance of using completely green electricity. Of course, you can argue that Plug-in Hybrids allows for that. So for a moment, I’m just going to declare I’m not talking about Plug-ins.
The thing about Hybrid is that they are probably great in terms of making the power generated by the ICE more efficient. Whether this is more efficient than the total process of generating the power from fossil fuels and then pushing the electrons down the power grid to the charging station to supply a pure battery EV, I’m not too sure. But the point is that you’re still using fossil fuels. On a per-unit traveled basis, your carbon footprint is lower. So yes, it reduces carbon emissions through its efficiency gains.
But then that’s what ultra-critical coal power technology does too. It makes coal fired power plants; and we stopped that. So when we think about phasing out ICE, it is important to make it more of a binary choice such that we are not leaving too much room for ICE cars in the form of hybrids. Accelerating decarbonisation is a significant priority and creating these wriggle room does not help.
At some point in my teens I loved observing the world, so much that I don’t like to ‘participate’ in the world. I enjoyed being by myself and thinking through narratives about what is happening – in those moments I think I’d lose myself and be completely unaware of my own presence in this world.
I wonder what that did for my ability to make friends but I was by and large comfortable by myself. Some like to believe I overthink but frankly, the self-talk I have tend to affect me hardly. In fact, I think the people who tend to fill up silence, who always need people around them are the ones who tend to overthink.
They overthink when they are on their own and prefer to shut it out by having their minds engaged in something else. They prefer to listen to others so that they drown out the voices in their heads which are from themselves. Or maybe this is all just me overthinking? How about you?
