The Multi-Tasker
A brain dump at the intersection of technology (which we all use everyday), work and entrepreneurship (which most of us spend most of our working hours at), and mind. Then I write it all down.
Alisa Miller’s entry in Seth Godin’s new eBook caught my attention (pg 34). In the entry, and a TED presentation, she talks about the abysmal state of global news coverage by the US press corps. Anybody who’s ever been subjected to around-the-clock styled American news programs can nod at the following.
Too often, American commercial news is myopic and inwardly focused.
This leads to a severe lack of global news. And increasingly, a shortage of “enterprise journalism” – journalistic depth built over time through original sources – that provides the context and enables thoughtful response.
Too often, the news sticks to crime, disasters, infotainment, and horse-race politics. Many important topics such as education, race and ethnicity, science, environment, and women and children’s issues are often less than 5% of all news combined.
Much of widely-seen online news isn’t better – it’s often just re-circulates the same stories.
The result: much of our news can’t be called “knowledge media” – content that builds insight about our world.
Things happen all the time, everywhere. What gets made news, and what doesn’t, more often or not depends on where the news take place, and whether the happenstance in question belonged to one of the above-mentioned items deemed headline-worthy. When we think about it, it’s really not at all unlike an abundance of trees falling in a remote forest. Trees fall all the time, but only those that fall at the right time, at the right place, witnessed by the right bystander that deem it important enough, will have their fate made known to the world.
As indicated by Miller, Americans are becoming more, not less curious about what’s going on around the world, aove and beyond what the cable networks are able to deliver. It is evident, because British media outlets that do a much better job with their foreign correspondents are eating into the audience pie. BBC and Guardian, not to mention the revered Economist, all command respect and eyeballs of those across the Atlantic. But with cost-cuts and and ensuing shutting downs of foreign bureaus, especially for on-air networks in the US, we hardly get a glimpse of the outside world beside bombings and disasters. That job has been relegated to public broadcast outlets such as PBS, NPR, and new private outfits the likes of Current and GlobalPost. Read more...
Great dialectic, in case you ever need to fend off a case of late-stage platonic advances from your whipping sidekick/ non-boyfriend.
I mean, sure, we could go on some dates, maybe mess around a little and finally validate the six years you’ve spent languishing in this platonic nightmare, but then what? How could we ever go back to the way we were, where I take advantage of your clear attraction to me so I can have someone at my beck and call? That part of our friendship means so much to me.No. We are just destined to be really, really good friends who only hang out when I don’t have a boyfriend, but still need male attention to boost my fragile and all-consuming ego.
[The Onion]
For a lot of us, the decision of what course or specialty to follow usually got made when we were still teens. However well calculated or arbitrary they might have been, they often set us on a somewhat deterministic path in life. With time, we discover more of who we are, what we like, and what our strengths and weaknesses are. Those later stage discoveries either reinforce the choices we had made earlier, or come into conflict with whom we had grown to become.
Much of the existential angst for young adults centre around the issue of what to do with one’s life. But it always strike me as somewhat counterintuitive, how we have been brought up, and parsed through a system that seem to facilitate, if not actively promote, a somewhat backward way of assessing and arriving at that vital decision. The issue on hand is really the conflict and compromises illustrated by this graph, courtesy of Bud Caddell.
I will not generalize, although I believe this is a common rite of passage for many of us. While still in high school, we choose, or at least look forward to learning more about a field, based on our own social upbringing, family influences, our own interests. But more importantly, we looked at fields of specialty, extrapolated them into careers, and measured them up against prestige, salary, and employment statistics. It was no coincidence that while I was in high school in the late 90s and early 2000s, half of my graduating class went on to study engineering of some kind – the most popular sub-discipline being that of computer engineering. Even though a few years later, the same group could have easily chosen another hot field, finance anyone?
So as a first step in our tentative journey to find our calling, we were guided to look for careers that pay well.
Read more...
You think I’m advocating sexual abstinence. No. Let me explain.
When I was 18, I wanted to be older so desperately. For some of the reasons that everyone can relate to, and others that were unique to me (or not, as I found out later). I wanted independence. For me, that involved getting my parents out of my hair, and gaining freedom. There was no doubt in my mind that becoming older was the panacea to all my problems. Ha Ha. And Ha.
The word “freedom” is probably the second most misconstrued word in history, shortly trailing “love”. Just like there are many varieties of love indulged in by people both balanced and unhinged, there are just as many different editions of “freedom”, subject to use and abuse, interpretation and misinterpretation. The triumph of leaving home at 18 (albeit for school) lasted only for so long, as I soon found out that 1) freedom means nobody will tell you anything anymore, and 2) freedom sure ain’t free.
First of all, freedom can turn into a burden when you are old enough to supposedly make tough choices for yourself. Decisions like choosing a major, picking a summer internship, or whether to go long-distance with your significant other. Your parents, siblings and friends now recoil from giving you any sort of concrete advice, but resort to lame catch-all phrases such as “only you can make this decision”, or worse yet, “just follow your heart”. Highly impractical and definitely not actionable. Soon enough, the only times that you can get yourself some decent advice is by sitting next to a complete stranger on a cross-Atlantic flight, munching over peanuts and wine in a plastic cup. Or more expensively, lying on the couch in your therapist’s office. Read more...
Nobody’s watching you!
At least not all the time.
I wish I knew this when I was 18, because life would’ve been so much more chill. In fact, there are lots of things I wish I knew when I was 18, but nobody told me, or I just didn’t listen. So a while ago, I wrote about what I wish I knew if I was 18 again, the first being that smartness isn’t really envy-worthy. It generated a bit of discussion. Easily encouraged, I decided to follow up with this.
I’m told that kids grow up hell of a lot faster these days, so hopefully they have this figured out by now. But when I was 18, I had all the symptoms of a paranoid schizophrenic without the benefit of medication or therapy. I felt as though everyone was watching me all the time, and was only just waiting till I stumbled on something (literally and figuratively) and made a fool of myself, so they could erupt in collective laughter with the satisfying knowledge that I, was a complete idiot, and they, were superior in every aspect. I felt self-conscious walking down the street, eating out in restaurants, talking in class. So pretty much every activity that required some, or any level of self-expression. Parents were of course, a major source of attention magnet, and I refused to be seen in public with them. Life kinda sucked back then.
It wasn’t until I turned the ripe old age of 23 that I was forced to grow some thick skin. I prefer to think of it as calloused, as a result of repeated rubbing. A series of changes began to take place, culminating in the liberating (or humiliating) final act where I allowed myself to fall asleep on the bus. That’s right, the bus on my way to and from work. Because I was too tired. I was too tired to care that I probably had drool spilling out from one side of my mouth, with a bus full of people “watching”. It was around that time that I finally figured out (without truly inhabiting the full implications of such realization, that took another couple of years) that people are generally 1) self-absorbed and has too much going on in their own lives to care about anyone but themselves, 2) most people, friends or frenemies, are not permanent fixtures in life (nothing is), and therefore, are not worth the worries. Read more...
Armed with technology, globalization changed the way of life for many of us in a shocking span of time. The way we work, live, communicate, learn, has been completely transformed. Learning has undoubted changed too. But how will this change impact the way we value education and knowledge-based work going forward?
In the past few years, more and more educational materials have moved off of campus firewalls, and onto the web for all to consume. We are talking about entire course curriculum, reading list, lecture notes and videos. When the accessibility of information is no longer constrained, and the cost for knowledge acquisition is inconsequential, what does that mean for the education of knowledge workers?
Horizontal playing field
A horizontal playing field means that students and workers in less privileged countries or regions have a much more equal starting point, where the only determinants of success is motivation and hard work.
Right now, the up-and-coming parts of the world are still performing relatively mundane and technical tasks outsourced from the west. But let’s not forget how much of a leap that had been already. Computer engineers two decades ago were a rare breed and commanded high salaries. Nowadays, programmers with little business experiences are a dime a dozen. And they compete directly with well-educated coders from India, Russia, and China.
But as the next generation of customer service operators and programmers become exposed to the vast sea of free information readily available on the net, what’s preventing them from “pricing options, or calculating weighted average cost of capital, or mechanically ploughing through ‘five forces’ analysis”? It seems to me that any activities that require only technical proficiency will become low value-added tasks going forward, and can be contracted out.
Value deflation in certain areas of knowledge-based work
In the coming decades, information will become more free and more readily available than ever before. As a result, more than one category of jobs will be made obsolete, or attain the endangered status in their current forms. It’s not only the low level tasks that get outsourced anymore. Read more...
I am across-the-board average by all accounts, so I used to seriously envy the smart kids. Why smartness? Because I became convinced early on that having great body parts doesn’t translate into long-lasting success in the real world. Adding to the delusion, I was TV-schooled during the Dawson’s Creek, Popular and Felicity era. The general take-away was that looks were only worth celebrating when it played supplement to a brooding yet brilliant mind.
So you can imagine my seizure when I discovered in the real world, intelligence held only a fleeting chance at success when challenged by obstacles such as luck, to-die-for connections, good looks (gasp!), passion, and most importantly, a great personality. Needless to say, this was hugely disappointing, since half of my brilliant high school graduating year had gone on to study computer engineering, and most of them possessed little, if any of the above. It was also hugely disappointing for me, since it robbed me one of the only things that I could consistently blame Mother Nature for: shortage of brain power.
The thing was, stepping into university, and subsequently the real world, put Relativity Theory to test, for real. Once the bubble wraps burst, what was deemed brilliant when I was eighteen was not much when placed against the myriad of talents out there. People had all kinds of stuff going on for them, and very few of those could be quantified by an entrance average or a percentile ranking. It began to make sense after a while, since we do not robotically assign people scores we meet based on their understanding of quantum mechanics or their ability to recite and analyze Paradise Lost in iambic pentameter. What seemed to get brownie points were one’s ability to tell or take (preferably) a self-deprecating joke, to have some kind of special talent that was driven by passion versus competitiveness (bragging about piano grades and Taekwondo belt level were not cool), and if they have ever tasted the humbleness pie. Read more...
Welcome Gen-X readers, and thank you for visiting my blog. I write about investing, macro-economics, society, culture, career, and any other ideas and thoughts I have from my own experiences. Some samples are available here. If you enjoy my posts, then please consider subscribing to the RSS feed and spread the word, I would love to hear from you!
Here are some places to start that will give you a taste of this blog:
More on the Recession
- What are high profile economists saying about 2009? Hear from Roubini, Taleb, Faber, Rogers, Schiff, Coxe, and more. Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the gloomiest of them all?
- For Gen X and Ys, the recession presents a myriad of opportunities in housing and investment. They are there, you just gonna look for them, and be very optimistic. Believe it or not, the recession has perks
- What the recession and the past can and can not teach us. When the paradigm changes, one must re-adjust. So perhaps looking back on history is not a great thing. One way of dealing with a broken economy: Ignore history
On investment
Some investment ideas Read more...
The human mind cannot grasp the causes of phenomena in the aggregate. But the need to find these causes is inherent in man’s soul. And the human intellect, without investigating the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions of phenomena, any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, snatches at the first, the most intelligible approximation to a cause, and says: “This is the cause!”
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace [via The Big Picture]
The populist pitch-forking movement has duly commenced, and fingers are pointed in all directions. In a classic case of pot calling the kettle black, all the players are now seizing populist rage to divert attention from itself. The momentum must be maintained, should the public calm down and re-assess, everyone is culpable.
Government
The whole debacle surrounding the AIG bonus is ridiculous. The government passed the legislation with the inserted lines that allowed for bonuses in the first place. Even if Chris Dodd is the culprit, surely it only serves to highlights the incompetence and indifference of the system. If what he’s saying is true (that the administration made him do it), then it shows complicity. This indignant outrage shown by politicians from both sides is nothing but political grandstanding to placate mass anger. Better this mess is channeled towards the evil executives than at the government, right?
The de-regulation of US financial system started with Clinton, and continued with the Bush administration. Policies from ten years ago directly contributed to the California black-out (Enron), and the current mortgage crisis. Without the government’s collusion in both banking deregulation and predatory lending practices, corporate greed would’ve had little opportunity to spread.
It doesn’t take much digging to see the hypocrisy of politicians now railing against exorbitant executive compensation or incompetence. For the most part, those very politicians were responsible for the rise in reckless risk-taking behaviour of those financial Einsteins. Members of the public are beginning to see the thinly-guised witch hunt as a way to deflect blame and secure public support. This kind of shameless and ingratiating behaviour from publicly-elected officials is insulting and condescending: because it pushes accountability away from itself, and props up effigies of greedy corporate executives for the public to burn. Read more...
If I was eighteen, and clueless about what I wanted to do with my life, I would do business school all over again.
I’m not eighteen anymore, so I would not go back to business school. Not when there are many other ways of learning out there.
1. I’m not fit to give you any business advice
A couple of months ago, a friend of mine headed back to school in a remote community in interior BC. She wrote to me, excitedly about her new surroundings. She was also excited about a business idea she’s had: the campus was set up miles away from the nearest town, so why not start a grocery delivery service for the hungry students? I was the only person she knew with a business degree, so it found me.
I started to write back somewhat vague and non-committal, than I stopped typing, hit the ENTER key, and wrote the following: “The thing is, a business degree is probably the least helpful to someone that wants to start their business, because in business school, all we got trained on was how to service someone else.”
I wrote this to concede that I had little practical advice for her.
I was not wholly clueless when it comes to entrepreneurship – I did get my hands dirty on a business for a couple of years during university, and that has proven to be one of the biggest confidence-booster of my life. But whatever skills I had gained during this time became neutered in a classroom setting.
School trained us to become task-masters, one that is great at driving efficiency, expediency, and a razor-sharp ability to prioritize. We become extremely proficient at functional tasks, but terrible at matters involving creativity and imagination. It takes a smart and able person to answer a question correctly, but a non-conformist to re-phrase the questions posed in the first place. In face of the current crisis, I think that kind of out-of-the-box inquisitiveness might have been helpful. Read more...
It’s been a month since the Investoralist officially kicked off, and I thought I’d briefly pause and write about what I’ve learned so far. Granted, a month is barely a blip, and some of the musings may seem pretty amateur to bloggers that have been labouring in this medium for years. But hey, this is the Internet, everyone gets their piece. And there’s hardly anything that I can do to prevent you from clicking away. So off I go.
The need to provide value. Before I enrolled in politics – that was my choice for graduate studies, I was interested in the Middle East. To prove it, I went traveling in the region and ended up living in Egypt for three months. I took Arabic classes. Then I went to grad school, and realized that everyone was interested in the Middle East, and everyone has seen the sufferings of the Palestinians, first-hand. I then promptly decided that I was no longer interested in the Middle East, since whatever problems it may have had, it was not for a lack of concerned political science students. And if all these smart, motivated, and outraged graduates of political science studies around the world have yet to find a solution to the problem – other than becoming bitter and indignant and depressed, I had little to offer. At least not through the same path. Or not at all.
So now I find myself blogging about investing, which is a subject that’s pretty vast and covered by a lot of people. The same issues are frequently debated up and down the journalistic and blogsophere chain. Some opinions are fruits born from careful examinations of arguments and data, some agenda-driven, some are pure drivel and derivatives. The issue of adding value to the discussion is never far from my mind when I write.
The need to be interesting. I’m not sure if the importance of being interesting should take a back-seat to providing value. God knows that we are subjected to enough dull and dreary readings. I can barely work up the will to look at my tax re-assessment from 2007 and call the government to see why they are demanding $64.36. Read more...
I’ve felt ambiguous and conflicted about education for a long time, because it inspires while it stifles. But here are two ways it has always resonated with me.
One is learning for learning’s sake. Now looking back, and without sounding nauseatingly cheesy, there is something pure and unadulterated in the joy of soaking in the world. I was never a science person. But I still remember in Grade 11, the excitement I felt bubbling from my belly, when trying to explain to my mom the idea of atmospheric pressure and rain formation and somehow likening it to the pan on the stove that was steaming our vegetables for dinner.
But I am also diabolically practical. So this form of learning left me feeling somewhat indulgent. Coming from a family where money was never something to be taken for granted, I always felt slightly guilty if what I was putting in my brains was somehow not contributing to the process of attainment that would eventually be responsible for putting food on the table.
The second source of turn-on is the sometimes masochistic pleasure of having to perform under pressure. Yes, I am perfectly aware of what that sentence sounded like. But the truth is, when overwhelmed to just the right degree, education has contributed greatly in honing my “getting-things-done” skills.
For me, education hit the right spot in high school. It was broad enough to sample from, yet challenging in its particularities to stimulate quite a bit of brain activities. But university, not unlike technical colleges, tends to churn out specialists, whether in the fields of art history, chemical engineering, or accountants.
The often repetitive and dogmatic field of business studies made me more cautious, practical, and cynical about the institutional delivery of education. It also iterated the value of an education by continually flashing dollars signs in front of students in the forms of sponsored conferences, prized internships, and the ultimate plushy fruit – a prestigious, high-paying job. Read more...
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