Energy Nerd | Circular Economist
Work gets done through a combination of resources, ideas and time. What happens when it is not done? Can it be forced?
We’ve been lulled by management science, idea of deadline, of being a machine to deliver output that is certain and reliable while also being of good quality despite not being able to even specify the work well.
Forcing work to be done is a lie. And it is not even human.
For a while now, I’ve had a career newsletter which allowed you to download the Dream, Think & Act! ebook I’ve written. And that’s all about creating the marketing funnel etc. Now I think perhaps it works better as well if more people could access it without having to surrender email addresses to me. Though you could still subscribe if you decided my ideas are useful – I don’t write very often and it’s usually just 4-6 times a year.
Thank you for giving me the attention and time to read through my random musings and nuggets of thought this year. Please do share my materials more broadly and tell more people about my materials.
For the new year of 2023, I’m putting up my ebook free. And it gets better, the original version that was being circulated around was a pdf. Now you can get it as ebooks which you can read on kindle or your favourite ebook readers. Download Dream, Think & Act! ebook (mobi and epub versions) here.
We’ve reached the last day of the year! And while we are counting, this is the 728th consecutive post I’ve written daily. Two more days and officially, I’ve been writing daily for two years. It’s amazing how this habit has kept up and ideas never quite run out once you keep going at it. I probably repeat myself but never quite as much as I’d expect myself to. The act of creating a practice that aligns with one’s interest and passion provides the fuel to keep things going.
2023 is going to be exciting from the perspective of my blogging because it is the year I’ll reach my 1000th consecutive post. There are also further interesting ongoing that may materialise in 2023. My coaching practice slowed in terms of taking on clients and growing my work because I’ve been busy working with my team at Enea Consulting to build on our bolder vision of Blunomy. The website isn’t fully fleshed out it – it looks more like the beginnings of a manifesto.
Through the year, I’ve been trying to work on a second self-published book but in the process, I’ve become way more critical of my writing and story-telling. I realised that the ideas I’ve been working on are not well fleshed out yet to be ready in a coherent collection of writings in a book. So that project is going to be on hold for a while until I develop more clarity. Maybe it’ll spring up in 2023, so stay tuned.
A friend who has a workaholic boss became really offended when my friend waxed lyrical about not wanting to work all the time and preferring to have more time with family should his life end abruptly. The boss countered “do you think I really want to work all the time?” This is probably a good question for most workaholics to ask themselves, myself included.
Work has become more than just pure toil and pains of labour. It has become fun, more aligned with passion, with a veil of impact and meaning attached to it, and a lot friendlier (ie. Restful) to the human physique. Perhaps more importantly, our expectations on what we can consume through our wages from labour has risen spectacularly. So work becomes even more central in our lives. And in most cases, we come to see it as so central it is such an integral part of our identities.
So it is strange that we still get offended when it is made explicit that we have allowed work to become so much of us. Maybe because something inside us realise that is true. That in the short term, while we may be enjoying the dopamine hits of problem-solving in work and earning a great income; in the long run, that is not what we are made for. We are made to be more than our worker selves.
And perhaps for some of us, it’s time to discover ‘what else’.
In which direction should one direct his or her efforts? Would it be in the direction of goals? Or the direction of one’s preference and interests? I’ve come to discover more and more than following one’s interests and one’s goals are different and we can set ourselves and our outcomes on very different paths when we pursue one or the other.
Being aware of what journey we are on becomes important when we look at what we are trying to get from it. Often, when pursuing a journey towards goals like career, money and recognition, we forget that we signed up to something that sacrifices our interest and passion, then we get upset about not getting those. Meanwhile people who might find themselves trying to follow their interest complaining about lack of income or opportunities.
We can’t have the best of both worlds no matter how many examples we find in the world to hold up. And we don’t always fully understand the sacrifices and pains involved until we eventually reach that level. When we direct our efforts we must be reminded which path we’re moving along; that determines what the path yields.
Do you create great art by thinking, designing and conceptualising until you eventually have a great piece of work to execute? Or do you execute along the way and figure out how it will look then it becomes great randomly without your control or preparation?
Or does making something great involve continuously trying to make something that serves your interest, purpose and the audience you are developing? Is it the trying that makes works great? Rather than the work itself?
I think as we accumulate experiences, life and mistakes in our lives, they inevitably make their way into our works. If we don’t keep trying and working through struggles and mistakes, the chance of a great work emerging will certainly remain close to nil.
I took some time on Christmas eve listening to the latest podcast episode of People I Mostly Admire and it was a lovely conversation between Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. Over the past few years I’ve really enjoyed the podcast on Freakonomics radio and it’s impressive the amount of quality educational content that has come out of it.
One of the interesting ideas introduced in this episode was raised by Dubner on how one’s choice could be one’s talent. It turns out to be something incredibly important, especially in the Asian context where there’s a highly competitive environment and one could be surrounded by lots of highly talented people. I have in fact talked about how talents cannot possibly be born, but rather, the market recognises some kind of value for it which encourages and incentivise effort that enhances it. For most of us, we could perhaps fare really well by recognising that our choices can propel us in life. Thinking through our strengths and then making the choices to push ourselves into roles where we can leverage our talents works for more people than we realise.
The approach isn’t so much about sticking it through than to define some kind of exploration phase, development phase and pivoting phases where one identifies sets of strength and abilities, then consider the roles, value-creation, and gradually make them work within the context or community they operate within. Each step involves choices. And continually making choices, even if they might be wrong, is the way to move forward, to improve and to keep on pushing towards a point worth going.
As one grows older, one comes to value time more. It’s maybe the busier lifestyle from the commitments accumulated over a longer life, or perhaps becoming more cognisant that time is running out somehow. Time is an interesting object interwined with ones’ life and ability so much that when we consider how we can value it, the whole concept of valuation falls apart pretty quickly.
One person’s time is different from the other depending on how the time is used and what sort of talent underlies the time of that person in question. The opportunity cost of time is also really subjective and hard to determine; because the actual point in time and the place or context determine the alternatives possible.
Is productivity and trying to not “waste” time by trying to produce more output really about valuing time more? Or is it a greater mark of respect for the time we have when we actually use it for much-needed leisure? Is time only well spent when it generates economic fruits?
These questions are important because our society and the pressure of our culture around us constantly presses a particular view on these things upon us. We can be more conscious about how we can better value and approach our time and the way we spend it.
Do you imagine a future you want to be in? Then what do you do? Do you take steps towards it?
Or do you imagine a future you don’t want to be in; and then try to take steps to prevent it?
The second approach means you have to be driven by fear. It’s more tiring than being motivated by possibilities. So it’s important to take your pick how you want to envision futures and move towards it.
Who eat half-baked cookies? Probably someone who have never tasted a cookie; or maybe someone who prefers cookie dough, or don’t know what you were trying to bake. Yes when you don’t know what you’re trying to bake, then something half-baked works just as well as one that is properly baked.
Likewise, there are plenty of half-baked solutions lying around and even implemented by those who have no clue what is the problem they are trying to solve.
We often overlook the importance of specifying a problem well before getting our hands dirty to solve it. Being biased to action isn’t always good when one does not have strong thinking. Of course, if there’s a system of trial and error that continuously test different solutions to find one that works, that’s okay. The challenge is in not knowing what problem one is trying to solve; or attempting to design a solution that tries to solve multiple problems.
Then there’s no proper test for the solution at all, no success indicators that allows the solution to past the usefulness test.
So if a government comes up with a scheme and it is not used; or an incentive programme which no one in the market qualifies, what just happened? Did the problem that it was designed to solve not actually exist? Or is the solution half-baked?