Kevin Low

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

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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.

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.

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.