What is the difference between taking an ineffective action and inaction? I think most people think they are the same and in fact they’d rather take no action to save the costs of the ineffective action.
But I beg to differ. How did you know the action you’re about to undertake is an ineffective action? What are the factors driving effectiveness? In taking the action, do you not discover something new? If nothing changed on the situation, did anything change in terms of your knowledge and capabilities?
We tend to think more in terms of how we change a situation rather than change ourselves. But perhaps the change that we need in ourselves is way more pressing than the situation.
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.
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.
When you spend effort figuring out the position in the train station you should stand to catch the train in order to alight at the optimal position at your destination, you’re investing. And you only would find it worthwhile if you take from the same point of origin to the destination over and over again. The reason is that each time you follow the rule you created for yourself, you reap the benefit of that first problem solving. And over time, the gains compound. You save the extra walking and the time.
But in having this figured out, there’s more inertia to moving workplaces, thinking you’ve already got used to commuting and knowing you are comfortable with the way to travel to that same place every day. It might be foolish to care that much on which station you’d alight for your workplace but you still do. And that can be because you’ve invested in that status quo, to the extent you can autopilot to the location you’re supposed to be.
When we learn to drive a car, operate a machinery, use the interface of a new OS, we are investing into some sort of status quo, or what will become a strong status quo for us. It will be hard to change, because we change the calculations involved on what it means to change whenever to optimise for a particular result. It might be annoying, or boring, but it works.
But upsetting that status quo every now and then, getting your mind to crack and solve new problems, or rethink ‘old ones’, makes for a better mind, and a better life.
Imagine an economy you preside over where everyone hones their skills in violin-making and produces violins. Everyone in the economy works really hard to make and sell violins. They do so many other things such as growing their own food, trying to sustain themselves, just to make violins. In the economy, there is no other markets; no one is producing food to sell, no one providing laundry services. Money is exchanged only to buy and sell violins. And only violins have a price.
That sounds absurd. Because if only violins have a price, then money is only worth violins. Then what is the value of money in this economy? Yet, without answering such questions, if we were to allow the metaphor to continue, say you are supposed to spur productivity of this economy, what would you do?
You could do things that enhance the labour productivity. This means everyone produces more violin in the economy, thereby driving the prices down and causing violins to be worth less vis-a-vis the currency in circulation.
Or you could start getting people to perform other work for others. That enhances productivity of the system overall as the ones good at violin making gets to outsource parts of their chores so that they are freed to make more violins. You allow more goods and services to be priced using money hence allowing more things to be exchanged and money becomes more valuable too. The higher productivity raises overall wealth measured in money and allows people to demand for more violins or pay more for them, enriching the violin makers.
Before I go further, you must be wondering what I’m talking about. I’m thinking about education, where grades are the only thing that matters, where students are expected to focus on grades despite having to fulfill other requirements such as CCAs, including sports, student activities, leadership activities, etc. All these while trumpeting that different students have different strengths and then consigning a future michelin-starred chef to the E-bucket and having him sent to vocational school.
Our system ties up and stifles talents, force everyone to be denominated and priced using just one attribute of their capability: intellect/academics (or test-taking). And so if you want to improve the system, do you still force everyone to produce more and better grades?
When you try to please everyone, very often, you end up doing and producing things that would make nobody happy. When you try to be everywhere, as I’ve seen some of my college coursemates who tried to attend multiple parties and networking sessions on the same evening, they end up nowhere.
Fearing that you miss out inevitably means you miss out on everything because you’re not even at where you’re physically present, which is just about the only joy you really can have.
We are not capable of pleasing everyone, nor designed to be everyone, or to be everywhere. Let us enjoy these things that constrain us rather than putting our emotional selves intensely at odds with them.
We envision an end point and we want to be there already. We think of time as a barrier. The fact that parts of the steps take time annoys us. We rather it takes less time as though it is better when it is faster.
And then on the other hand, we acknowledge that timing is everything, when to strike a ball, jump to defend one, meet your potential spouse, ask for a promotion and all. Time is an input, not just the passage of time but point along time.
So let us reconcile our views on time. Where things are taking time, let us recognise it is an ingredient that enriches and enables the outcome we are trying to move towards.
There are areas of our ignorance we are aware of, but there are also vast spaces of our ignorance we are unaware of. This area is perhaps where we would exhibit the Dunning–Kruger effect. It is really important for us to know and understand our circle of competence, and to create boundaries and rules for ourselves to navigate within, and beyond this circle.
Think of it as comparing a person who lives in a town for many years and know his way around it by his senses and strong local knowledge, against an out-of-towner who had got hold of a map and managed to navigate successfully to a few places of interest. The guy who is new in town tend to overestimate his understanding of the place and might make overly risky decisions or commitments as a result (eg. showing friends around, or bragging loudly about his knowledge of the best local foods).
One of the critical skills that we need to acquire especially as we are new to a space, and trying to grow ourselves, is to be able to develop not only the self-awareness but the toolkit to navigate a new space when one runs the risk of getting into the Dunning-Kruger effect. In fact, even as kids, we should already be conscious about what is happening and how we can deal with such struggles.
When you don’t know something, what is your response? It depends very much on whether you expected yourself to know it. As it turns out, when you don’t expect yourself to know it, you’d happily confess not knowing. But when you expect yourself to know it, then you’d often times get angry. It is usually at yourself, but then you’ll soon direct that at the questioner. How dare he or she question you on that?
Or, even if you confess you don’t know, you’d question the intention of the question. Or express surprise, thinking that should be something the questioner don’t ask, or would have to figure out themselves.
So when you’re new at work and you don’t know a tonne of stuff, do you lash at people when you’re embarrassed about things you don’t know and feel so vulnerable? Do you confess you don’t know and encourage others to help you?
How you respond when you don’t know something critically affects your ability to grow. The more you cover up what you don’t know and try to learn on the side, the more you have to be defensive, impatient, angry and resentful. And the more you’re able to cover up and pick things up on your own, the more isolated, alienated and resentful. So you have to choose how you want to grow when you don’t know – to be alone and proud of yourself; or to be surrounded by helpful souls and lifelong friends?
Counterfactual thinking is a concept in psychology that involves the human tendency to create possible alternatives to life events that have already occurred. I’ve no doubt this is a sign of intelligence and it is a residue in our ability to project forward into the future. After all, if you can imagine the different possible futures, you could also imagine different possible pasts.
The question is whether the content of your counterfactual thinking is upward or downward. In other words, do you think the reality could have been better or do you think things could have been worse? People could be more positive when they consider that something worse could have happened rather than the actual outcome. In that sense, downward counterfactual thinking is actually a habit or strong mental re-frame that helps improve our well-being.
Nevertheless, the mind tends towards negativity because it sticks more than the positive. What I think is interesting is that different positions we are in can cause us to have inclination towards upwards or downwards counterfactual. It is interesting how being in second place encourages upward counterfactual thinking more than being in third place – just because you only have one person in front of you. So there are some kind of defaults that our counterfactual thinking drifts towards.
That’s not to say you can’t change your defaults. Part of my coaching practice especially around mindset shifts is exactly about that.
