I left about 1 kg of marinated chicken breast in the fridge for almost a week – having forgotten about it. It was closed in an air-tight container and I thought I’d try roasting it anyways. It turned out to be pretty good! In fact better and crispier than what I’ve previously done.
It was time and the ingredients which helped to draw moisture out of the chicken to the right level such that the roasting brought out a better texture and flavour. And it dawned on me how many things in life do take time and a combination of things to get better. In the modern world where everything seems rushed for time, I’d seek out these things that takes time and become exponentially better because things that compound non-linearly are usually undervalued.
Which is probably why marinated meats while often having been kept longer, actually fetch a higher price. Well actually there’s more to it than that but I’m just pointing out an arbitrage opportunity that our modern lives seem to produce.
I once had a lunch at a friend’s place and her Dad simultaneously praised public service jobs for being good, stable places to be (he tries to get her daughters to join) while being critical about the work of public servants (“what do they do?”). I cannot be sure when he was being serious but one thing for sure, our views of public sector work is muddled and often confused.
Likewise I have someone in my family who used to think private sector is bad. Because it’s all about the bottom line and profits. I often say, well, you could also see that public service is often about meeting KPIs, which isn’t that different even if those KPIs are to drive some underlying good for the public. The chase for numbers and quantifiables is evident and taken as a natural product of “scientific management”.
Having been in both I think it is important to see that a large bureacratic private organisation can be not so different from a ministry while a newly set up statutory board can be not so different from a start-up. Often the skillsets valued would not be too different even when they place different weights on the specifics.
So it boils down to what you want to grow in. Public sector work will be more big picture from day 1 while private sector may involve greater dive into details and big picture work only later in your career. These generalisations are not super helpful and as I already made it clear, there’s a need to look at a specific job role and organisation in order to make the decision. Public or private itself is more of a label that tells very little to someone who has not any experience of either.
Being candid without reproaching people is a skill – it is subtle but somewhere along our upbringing we come to associate people with their actions and/routines as much as we allow those things to be part of our identities.
Habits can be changed, personalities can be transformed. It’s not just about believing in yourself but appreciating how the environment you allow yourself to be in, the things you read or watch, the people you interact with have an impact on you. That means when someone criticise your work or actions you can simultaneously take responsibility (knowing you can change and improve), whilst also not letting it assault your identity (seeing that your work is not actually a direct reflection of your whole self).
I think the something along our upbringing is when we try to nudge our children, peers or friends to change by giving the warning about their identity (rather than a perception of it). For example, we say to children don’t be a smoker rather than don’t take up smoking. We say people are geniuses rather than saying they have a genius (which by the way, is the original way of expressing the concept).
Seen in that light, our inability to give honest negative feedback without feeling/acting like we’re assaulting someone is the same thing as when we receive those sort of feedback. We think we’re assaulting because we feel assaulted. We think it’s being judgmental because we feel judged. Being able to do these well are not “soft skills” – they are life skills.
Bought something from Shopee which arrived after I needed it so I gave it a 4-star review but was hustled by the seller to change it to 5-star on account there was nothing wrong with the product. Left a Carousell review for a very kind and nice seller but on the punctuality point I put 4-star (good, rather than very good), which resulted in him getting only 4.7 stars from me. He deleted his “Thank you” message which he left after I said I reviewed (it was requested by him).
I have nothing against star ratings for review systems and I’ve personally benefitted from kind reviews by previous buyers. But I think the system is broken because it pushes people to desire perfect scores which is not practical nor useful at the system level. Engaging in this mutual pleasing defeats the whole reviews system just like how people in most US restaurants expect a tip and it is no longer tied to service quality.
Of course, the platform gains in short run by attracting more sellers on it but in long run if the review system is broken or perceived as just a pack of lies, they lose their value.
The world have been in chaos for a couple of decades now. It started barely 20 years after the end of World War I. It wasn’t just physical war but there was the Great Depression before that, the runaway inflation in some parts of the world, and the seeds of communism growing. And then even when WWII ended, we had a series of proxy wars during the Cold War period.
But nevertheless, problems starting being solved, people who were fatigued from the world wars, the tragic deaths realised it was important to unite in the right ways. The blueprint for a new world order became laid down in the centers of gravity of the world.
It was hard work but nevertheless, it was about getting on the right trajectory, the right bandwagon, and we’ll see double digits growth in things. Maintaining peace and stability gives rise to natural growth as investment in the longer term rose. Interest rates started falling without as much consequence on inflation, private investment into longer term assets soared, helped by the socialisation of longer term government borrowings, helped by imaginary sense of control investors have through the establishment of sovereign risk rating systems.
Incentives everywhere were getting more aligned towards pumping up GDP numbers, increasing political rhetoric about competition, and investing into the right places. The military-industrial complex took hold because it made sense to industrialise everything and create more wealth; though they were mostly distributed to the industrialists.
These are the conditions of the world that gave the world the Great Moderation, unprecedented growth and lifting of people our of poverty. It has also given us a growing climate change problem, a global economy that was resilient in some ways but more fragile in others.
We all have a choice whether to perpetuate these. Whether to make history, your story.
I was reading this interesting take on the woke meritocracy by Blake Smith. The similarities to Singapore is uncanny not least because we have similarly competitive systems that have evolved to take into consideration academic grades and a myraid of criteria for university admissions.
What is more similar, despite cultural differences in our preferred kind of leadership, is the narratives expected of our elites and accordingly engineered into the social consciousness. The point has become to narrate one’s background in such a way as to simultaneously acknowledge the existence of inequality but to subtly suggests the system of meritocracy is still being able to pull up able members of those seemingly disenfranchised groups.
The contemporary ideal, increasingly, is no longer someone so charmingly personable that others forget he is in fact a ruthless competitor, but a person who so convincingly narrates her having overcome some kind of social injustice that others forget she is in fact a beneficiary of systems of privilege.
Blake Smith
These stories are no doubt powerful and casting skepticism do not help with building up the social fabric. But what I want to point to is the fact that we ought to have a more objective view of the meritocratic system and be more aggressive in combating the downside of the system.
One of the key assumption of the system is that merit as defined by the prevailing narrative and system is independent of your access to resources and opportunities. That is just patently untrue. If the inequalities are actually perpetuating structural inferiority amongst the disenfranchised, then how are we dealing with that?
A humble unasuming man who has done good work for a community where he has been voted to lead the committee for the neighbourhood. He asks God, ‘Why me?’ And takes on the responsibility in trusting in God to lead and guide Him. There is still the ‘Here I am’ moment when he takes up the responsibility but his confidence is not in himself but in God.
His brother had been a fit young man, always exercised and practised healthy habits. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and it was not discovered until late stage. He asks God, ‘Why me?’ And accepts the diagnosis, trusting in God’s plan for him. There will be the struggles, the “what did I do to deserve this?”, but also the acknowledgement: “the days of man are numbered by You Lord”.
Genuine faith is not about being triumphant in your own circumstances but in the victory that God has won on the cross. And each win or lost in the life we live on this earth are but tests – all of them seeks a faithful response. We will not always pass them; but I want to show here that the Christian faith is not one-sided, all positive but much broader and encompassing so much more.
As we step into adulthood, we begin to realise how financial burdens starts to weigh on us just at a point when there’s supposed to be more financial capacity and independence. You look around you and see what you have been working for: being in a good job, wearing the nice suit or dress, driving the car you always wanted, even living in an apartment location in the neighbourhood you want to be associated with.
Yet at the same time, there are concerns about the future: retirement, rising cost of living, cost of raising children if we ever have them, ageing parents who would be faced with high healthcare costs while not having been insured. These concerns will weigh on this ‘freedom’ we believe we have.
The reality is that the modern society we live in have hone its ability to generate wants and demand for goods and services. And that is causing the anxieties. What Juliet wrote in The Overspent America applies as much in Singapore: we live in societies where we are comparing ourselves within reference groups. If our classes were seggregated, the society will be even more divided but our social mixing can impose a huge cost on the mental health of the society as well.
And here is how: in every product we own, we probably have a clear sense of what is the product that is just a little better, faster, classier that we can pay a little more for. When we are in the same schools, camp, office as the people who are of higher income groups, we take reference off their consumption habits as well. We desire to go to the same restaurants, send our kids to the same schools, ensure our kids have the same branded stationery as their classmates.
That is where inequality can hurt our society more than we traditionally think. The middle class who are mixing with the upper clsss, able to get themselves into debt to match the consumption patterns of those in their reference groups suffers the most. So when we think about the issues of inequality, it is not just about the ones at the lower end of the spectrum suffering. Even the ones in upper classes are trying to catch up and move further up the ladder.
We need to sharpen our thinking about the true cost of inequality and the design of our societies, having already did such a terrific job designing the physical space of our country.
Seth Godin have been talking about the concept of enrollment and deepening it for years. Which is why some of his thoughts are really worth looking into, dissecting and pondering over. His influence is really at the level of marketing so to speak- he gives you the incentives that appeals to being human to act in alignment with the ideas he discovers.
Anyways, I want to talk about the concept of the dyad of bosses and bossed which he mentioned really briefly in that brilliant blog post.
Sometimes, this evolves into a mutually beneficial entanglement between the boss and the bossed. The enrollment turns into a desire to please, a figurehead-focused loyalty and dedication that often ends poorly because there’s nothing beyond the dyad. Without external signposts, solipsism and dittoheads result.
Seth Godin
The idea of external signposts point is interesting because most of such pairings he mentioned continues to operate and do not “end” per se as the boss tends to have certain requirements to continue perpetuating. Either because bosses needs to please their bosses and the top is looking at the stock market (which serves as an external signpost) or that they are indeed looking at some external signals.
The “dyad” tends to result more perhaps in a situation where organisations have less resource limitations (eg. Huge MNCs, public organisations, well-resourced donor-funded organisations). Those are situations when the bosses can truly relish so much in being pleased that she/he allows that mutual entanglement to take place.
The issue is how far removed those external signposts are for each one in the organisation. If only the boss cares, then clearly, solipsism and dittoheads will still result. Some people do prefer to be in those context either due to cultural conditioning or just plainly inertia.
But once you are aware of that, the question is whether you want to see that change.
Years ago Singaporeans had a reputation of complaining. I’m not sure if this is still the case. I think they just call it feedback now. But the poison in complaining is not that it taxes resources of companies and government agencies by way of trying to address even trivial issues. It is the attitude that it creates.
It coaxes our mind into the habit of denying responsibility. It is a way by which we de-stress by assigning blame but doing nothing to improve the situation. In short run, you might be better off psychologically but because it does not address the problem at its roots, your stress level remains if not heightened.
There is a way to complain that rectifies this. First state the circumstance – which is completely neutral – to yourself and stakeholders. It should ideally point to things that happen without stating names or parties involved. For example “the pizza arrived at 1600hrs when I ordered it at 1200hrs” rather than “you guys delivered the pizza late”. Then go on to state your intentions and expectations, and take ownership if it: “your website stated that it was going to arrive in 45minutes from ordering and I needed to take my lunch at 1300hrs so I had expected to have my lunch on time”.
Then, having established the reasonability of your expectations (because if by now you articulated it and feel it is not a reasonable expectation then please don’t waste resources complaining); then invite the other party to take responsibility for any mistakes on their part: “I had to bear the cost of your mistake – whether it is the misleading statement on the website or the delay in delivery. I can only appeal to your goodwill in making this up to me”
Ultimately in this case, the actual problem they have is with their system and they have to rectify it. But the challenge we have is our expectations and correspondingly, we have to deal with ours.
