2-3-4 Friday 6 Sep

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1 thought

Please note that identifying features have been changed to preserve their confidentialities.

When I studied university abroad, I had 2 other friends.

All of them were government scholars, funded on a full-expenses paid scholarship. This meant that beyond their school fees, they had an allowance to live on.

In 2022, before COVID really ended, my friend quit his job in government, after having worked in social services for 2.5 years. He paid off the scholarship bond (which was around SG$100,000), no small sum for a 27 year old then. He moved into starting a bakery.

I thought this was an anomaly.

Then a few months ago, I chanced upon the other friend at the train station. During the 5 minute chat, I happened to ask her where she was working.

Was it the same as when I had last met her?

She told me she had also paid off her bond, and moved onto finance.

Now now, please don’t read this wrong.

This is not a piece to tell you to quit your noble role in the social sector, and to move on to greener pastures.

But what was interesting for me was the cost they were willing to bear in order to adapt their decision.

These were 5, 6-figure sums, that were hardly small amounts. The cost of breaking the bond was anywhere between $60k, to $100k.

And yet before turning 28, they were willing to take that leap to break the bond, and move on. In Singapore we tend to view these ‘bond-breakers’ quite negatively. Some think they are ingrates for not fulfilling their side of the agreement , and simply quitting and moving on.

But I think what’s worth noting is the cost they were willing to pay to close a chapter of their lives, and to move on. This is not something many are courageous enough to do.

Often, we continue in places and situations that don’t work for us because of the sunk cost fallacy. We think that because we have invested $27k in our 3 year degrees in a U.K. university, and 3 years of our lives studying this degree, it may seem foolish to just cut, and move on.

But this can also be for other situations, whether it be a friendship, a business relationship, or even an area you’re living in.

What we don’t see is that in continuing in our decisions, there are already implicit costs that are stacking up. These aren’t just the tangible opportunity costs of say:

1. The difference in salary when you move from a social service job to a financial job
2. The easier ways of working when you’re working amongst those who are well compensated

There are also the emotional costs involved.

Here’s a thought to think through:

Where are the areas in your life where you might have wanted to move on, but find yourself held back by the costs involved?

1 talk

Mediocrity is competitive.

• Andrew Davies, Chief Marketing Officer at Paddle, a global payments infrastructure service

1 tip

Andrew Davies, the CMO at Paddle, a U.K. fintech company that manages payments infrastructure, said the above in the context of marketing efforts. 

He had observed that many companies were doing similar things in crafting insight reports, ebooks, and then trying their best to market it.

He did many things differently.

For one, he sent a balloon to space, to demonstrate how Paddle was trying to reach the next frontier for businesses.

But you might be thinking,

well how does this apply to my daily job?

One important thing is to realise that even when you feel that you’re working hard, pushing, advocating for the clients you work with, you might be competing in a way that does not significantly change how things are being done or how different outcomes are achieved.

When we hear other care professionals are doing some new-fangled way of doing social care, we might be tempted to quickly follow that. Do more, do faster, do better.

For example, in my previous social service agency, after a new director entered, he pushed us to start focusing on research. He wanted us to do ‘research’ into the work we were doing with our clients, present it in conferences, as part of the push towards ‘evidence-based practice’.

Sure, that was important. But what we forgot to ask was whether that would work well in an agency of our scale, with a leaner budget. Was it driving the most outcomes per unit time spent?

We barely paused to ask,

why is this working for their context? How different is that context from mine?

Mediocrity is competitive, and addictive.

When we see others doing something, we follow, without pausing to ask whether it’s something that delivers the outcomes we want.

We follow the route others have trodden on.

Back to the beginning of this story.

When I studied with these students, they were the ones that everyone looked up to as the role models. They were the ones who had ‘won’ the ultimate prize of the Singapore education system - the overseas scholarship with a value of around $200k.

But they eventually broke the path, and figured something out on their own. And even if they hadn’t figured everything out yet, they realised they would figure it out along the way.

They just made the decision at that point that whatever it was they were doing, it wasn’t for them. And they took the decision to make a clean break.

It doesn’t take anything that’s much more special for us to take the paths less trodden on.

My encouragement is for you to first take the step off the path, and to trust yourself to figure things out along the way.

John

Live Young, Live Well - Work Your Love

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