James Clear, author of Atomic Habits made an astute observation that led to his exploration of habits and eventually the best-seller. He observed that people often had the same goals but they do not end up with the same results. This meant that goal-setting, while being an important first step, wasn’t what achievement is about.
Our culture sometimes seem to think that setting up goals is enough, that it would naturally push everyone or everything to place. That cannot be farther from reality; and having that sense of purpose for life isn’t exactly sufficient. We need to discover the means by which we fulfill our purposes and reach the goals.
What do you think are your means of life? Is it about money, resources? Financial wealth? Or relationships, connections, networks? What fuels you towards your life goals?
So I continue my 800th post no longer continuing from the streak I had nurtured over the past two years or more. It doesn’t mean anything as long as I don’t allow it to. Streaks work because it helps build habit and some kind of psychological strength. But if the streak is short, it is way harder to resume when it is broken. Maybe it has to do with having established our expectations of ourselves.
For me, the short pause in writing was during a period of genuine break from the distractions of the world and for the first time since the pandemic started, I had some kind of real rest. One that was more extended than what I had since 2019.
I realised how much more we have drifted from being human, the kind of expectations we have of ourselves and society. There were much bolder and better expectations we can have but we choose not to, rather falling back on productivity and some numerical metrics. What about being kinder, or more patient, or caring better for others? What about refusing to do anything that can cause me to feel ashamed should I have to account the deeds to my family, or a journalist, or the world?
There are better high expectations we can have of ourselves. They are waiting for us to adopt them.
I wrote about how people can’t solve problems that they are not willing to have. Yet one has to master the art of picking the right problems to work on as well. There had been times in my life when I wasn’t sure which problem to pick on dealing with and my attention became so diffused I wasn’t actually solving any problems but simply touching and going.
A lot of that life was during my previous career. We were often under a lot of pressure to do many things and deal with lots of problems with limited resources. And the result was the need to frequently and quickly get through a problem, declare it solved, and then go on to another one. There were long term issues, and shorter term ones. And one must learn to be able to prioritise them, as well as to properly trade-off resources across the long and short term challenges.
That prioritisation eventually becomes another challenge in itself. And this sort of self-referencing issue keeps popping up over my professional life. I discovered the importance of setting up buffer time for planning, to set aside budget for solutions to manage budgets and to ensure sufficient rest to be able to actually be producing more. Often times, we don’t recognise that the problems we pick naturally lend themselves to some peripheral problems that we need to deal with. That problems actually comes in a package when we are picking them.
I first heard about this as a question around which came first and the challenge of studying causality in somewhat circular systems. But then it was also characterised as a problem when we want to develop a new system to displace the prevailing one. It is some kind of situation where you need something to start another and you need the other to get the something you need.
Classically, if you want a thriving business, you need customer, stakeholder support but in order to do that, you need to have the business first. Or that you need capital to build a business but then quite likely the route to getting money for capital is to have a business. When success builds upon success, based on what you can observe, then you have a chicken-and-egg problem on hand when you want to create the success to begin.
Essentially anything that involves some kind of circularity exhibits this kind of problem when it needs to be first put in place. Several strategies have been looked into for this problem. There’s bootstrapping – which generally entails squeezing out some resources from existing pockets/spaces to be able to get the first bit of results which will drive more. And then let it snowball.
There’s the ‘fake-it-till-you-make-it‘ approach, which involves essentially lying to at least a small group of stakeholders to get them onboard in order to bring in the others. I do not recommend this. Finally, you could also take immense amount of risks, exhausting resources, adopting the ‘build-it-and-they-will-come’ approach.
Governments in particular do all three a lot. And it can be wise to learn from them when it comes to business. Sometimes they can be good entrepreneurs.
After sharing David Foster Wallace’s speech, I looked a bit more into the things he said about the kind of themes he tend to think and write about. One of the really big theme is some kind of cultural addiction to entertainment, and in some sense, the growing feebleness of the mind – especially the part that deals with deeper thinking and autonomy.
We have in some sense, replaced that powerful autonomy that Victor Frankl described about the choice of our response to external environment/circumstances, with a kind of superficial sense of choice: which shampoo to buy, what clothes to wear, the jobs to desire, etc. We become weaker at assessing which politician deserves our vote, which friends deserve more of our attention, what character and values we want to truly establish for ourselves and kids.
The sheer noise and pervasiveness of entertainment, and the values of banal, basic type of stuff that gains our attention comes to dominate our lives. Intellectual domains becomes devolved to just what is considered professional and sophisticated at work, or some kind of aristocratic indulgences. Ordinary lives, which is often much more transcendental than we care to recognise, becomes just ordinary for the lack of exercising that deeper bits of our minds.
Economics is not a discipline of the capitalist though they might think so. Because the communist had their study of economics and the manner of trying to deploy the calculations and understanding in central planning. But I digress. What I’m pondering over recently, is that intricate link between the market and capitalism. I wonder, if there was something apart from market capitalism. And as it turned out, there are ideas of alternatives around state-capitalism which is where the state tries to accumulate capital and operate an economy dominated by state-owned firms. But to some extent, that is what communist regimes have sought to do. So ultimately, the ideas of capitalism, when taking the notion of the market away, actually represents something very different from what we commonly believe to be capitalism.
In that sense, capitalism as we conceive it probably still has the market principles and ideals at the fore in the manner it is perpetuated. In that sense, the ills of modern capitalism isn’t necessarily the notion of capitalism per-se but allowing the (unguided) market to take the lead in too many of the things that actually matter. The idea of markets regulating themselves is honestly a little ludicrous to me. In an older world where there were many things in our lives that dominate including ideas around moral, characters, and virtues, we tend to be keen to govern the market and regulate it, seeing that there are higher laws to follow.
But in the world today, we increasingly allow the market to dominate our judgment of things, especially with regards to value of things – tangible or not. That means that what the society needs to care about, which might not be valued by the market properly, may just fall off the radar. It happened for the climate of the world; and who is to say that market capitalism is not coming for other things that truly matter to us as humans.
For a government, it makes sense to periodically step back, figure out who and what the market is not serving that it should really be serving and create interventions to redirect the market.
This is why carbon regulations, carbon pricing and systems of disclosure is so important. And all of these entails the government and the people making a choice to take away that false liberty of choice that the market creates. This decision is driven by seeking to serve the people who otherwise would not be served by the market.
For example, in the case of people who are hard-to-insure. The market-based insurance approach makes things harder and harder for them as the companies are able to discriminate against them and pool only customers with better risk profiles.
The invisible hand is invisible but it is still guiding and directing. Better for us to articulate as a society how we want the market to serve us and get it to do just that.
For those who are already beginning to be overwhelmed by the year, I’d like to confess I’m experiencing the same. There is so much to do, to accomplish and to change or improve. There’s work, family, relationships and the work on myself as well. It seems that I need them all right now! How do we prioritise this all?
Often we want to snap our fingers and have the world as we like it. We fantasise about how the world should be and the changes we could or should make. And then we stop there, frozen simultaneously by the possibilities and the overwhelming amount of work it entails. We then go back into fantasy world and imagine more work to be done instead of doing them.
We then make excuses why the world is fine to be as it is, because we want to get back to doing our own thing, to be in our comfortable patterns. It’s strange how we never fantasise about the status quo and dwell on what it takes to keep things the way they are. But we instinctively resist change, and stop ourselves from making them. So despite the sense of overwhelm, most things are likely going to stay the same.
Better to be selective and careful about the areas we target to change, and then punch hard in those areas. Hit the targets or decide it’s not worthwhile and then go on to the next.
I believe that incentives drives behaviours. That is why big bureacracies are bound to retain mediocre individuals and repel talents. It is why high-paying jobs attract more people even if they are soul-sucking. It is also why high-impact but mediocre-paying jobs like teaching and nursing have people leaving in droves.
But incentives can also be volatile because market signals in the short term may not be a good reflection of fundamentals. That’s why people end up behaving in sub-optimal ways in pursuit of short-term gains. This could involve forging qualifications, attempting to get an increment from attending some third rate data analytics course, etc.
Can we trust incentives alone to govern our societies? Probably not. Because our purpose is greater than just responding to sticks and carrots. So more important to identify what purpose we want to fulfill and allow that to drive us forward. Blind pursuit of incentives bring us nowhere.
Kevin Low 
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