My intent for this blog was initially to document my journey post-university. Again, this rolled over into a larger personal project questioning how I plan to design my life. Unlike university and schooling years, once you reach the working world, there is no curriculum to follow. You have to measure your life on your own terms and define your own priorities.

Throughout this journey, I hope to consolidate my frameworks and mechanisms for comprehending the tumultuous ups-and-downs of life. The learning process is iterative and I hope to continue to challenge my own self-beliefs and relearn if need be.

What is my life purpose? What questions intrigue me? What am I curious about? What do I want to optimize?  

A large portion of this blog is also dedicated to identifying and answering what I term as 'core question areas' (fields that I want to attain some level of mastery in). At the time of writing, these lie in the fields of technology, design and business.

If anything on this blogs connects with you in any way, good or bad, please feel free to share your views. I am against toxic arguments but am for constructive feedback and learning from one another. If you plan on sharing anything, please do so in a manner that is conducive for positive reflection and discourse.

1. Document everything
2. Become a cross-team asset

Document everything

For smaller companies / less developed companies (startups included): Most processes and knowledge are not well defined and documented. This is due to lack to time, constant things to deliver, siloed workstreams, poor office culture regarding sharing, etc.

Regardless of the reason why it does not exist, documentation is necessary. Necessary for new-joiners to understand the business, necessary for a single-source-of-truth to agree upon, necessary for process improvement projects in future. It is also a form of scalable knowledge.

Even a simple PowerPoint dictating the key processes, roles & responsibilities, order sequence, decision items, constraints, dependencies (on both internal and external systems/people/teams), etc. contains so much information:

• Lead times for each process (allowing us to identify bottlenecks)
• People that are overly specialized - if knowledge is not shared and they leave the business, there is a large opportunity cost to the business. Cost is the time and effort needed to either a) find someone else to hire or b) train someone internally. Training costs & time costs in allowing the new person to get up to speed. Maggie example where she is also not willing to share i.e. gives up her info reduces her bargaining power
• Dependency identification - either strengthen or diversify or in-house?

The question then becomes great, I should document. How do I do that?

First, is there a clear need? At my first month on the job, most teams had different information about a process. Everything was in everyone's heads. But everyone had a different story (slightly). This made the method of collating a process simple.

1. Identify a process that needs documentation
2. Identify the people that can contribute to building the full picture
3. Interview them and collect insight
4. Consolidate information - identify any areas of alignment vs. contradiction
5. Review low-level documentation with everyone (don't make anything pretty yet); should just be legible and easy to review - make sure the information is correct
6. Iterate until everyone is happy with the single-source-of-truth
7. Build a nice looking visualization to support the sharing of this document
8. Use the document to further research / analysis for improving processes / reducing risk

Become a cross-team asset

How do you go about getting information?

Support multiple teams - talk to different people, share your ideas, etc. By being an asset, you do not necessarily need to be working for a particular teams. Instead, you could simply be a soundboard and share ideas. What I realized within my first month was because I was one of few proactively speaking to multiple stakeholders, I learned a lot about the different ideas going around each team + learned about what projects were being conducted.

Be the gateway to bridge internal stakeholders. Example: I was working with Ellen on testing the ETC survey which enabled us to capture certain information from our customer base. I also worked with Koen on the geocoding assignment to categorize all our customers by location. I then later met Jeffrey who was talking about how he wished he could get access to: a) customer demographics and b) address data. It was very easy to bridge the gap.

Jeffrey, in particular, is incredibly swamped with constant BAU work in processing sales orders. He does not have that much time to go about collecting all these insights. Identifying similar individuals that hold responsibility but have too much to deal with are perfect candidates to show support because they will value this the most.

Above is a typical upward sloping yield curve, with long-end interest rates higher than the short-end due to the longer term having higher volatility and an increase in inflation.

Everything in finance assumes that as risk increases, the return compensated to investors to take on that risk also increases. Hence, the phrases 'high risk, high return' and 'low risk, low return'. In the same sense, the long-end provides a higher return due to the higher volatility which implies higher risk.

However, if the yield curve inverts, it reduces banks' ability to make money, as we can see nowadays with a flattening yield curve and negative interest rates at the short-end. The flattening yield curve is reducing the spread (profit opportunity) available to banks, whereas the negative interest rates disincentivize deposits as a whole. At first glance, this may seem highly counterintuitive and strange, but in deflationary environments, central banks want to increase consumption instead and therefore shift the price of money to lenders instead.

How does the short-end and long-end move up and down? The short-end is controlled by the Federal Reserve setting interest rates through reserve ratios and open-market operations i.e. buying or selling government Treasury bills. Buying government T-bills in large quantities increases demand, which in turn increases prices. Price and yield are inverted, so buying T-bills decreases yield.

It can also be thought of through money supply. Buying T-bills increases the money supply, which in turn causes lower interest rates (lower yields).

• Market controls long end - buy more, price goes up, yield goes down (fed might do this to allow for companies to
• Lending is locked in at given rates - for corporates
• Yield curve inversion and pricing
• https://www.frbsf.org/education/publications/doctor-econ/2004/july/yield-curve/
• Trading the yield curve - bond fund trading strategies
• https://www.pimco.com.hk/en-hk/insights/viewpoints/negative-rates-negative-view/?gclid=CjwKCAjwoc_8BRAcEiwAzJevtW6YWRCIQLau_rZpXPA3etU0OdXCvUTIXFumQogCoMQDqpDyRJsIjxoCjlAQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds&

• If you want to set-up an aesthetic blog for nearly free and are comfortable with some basic command line arguments, I recommend a) setting up Ghost for the theme and CMS solution, b) GitPages for free hosting, and c) Namecheap for a good price on the domain name.
• The general process involves: a) installing Ghost and setting up your content, b) adding content, c) pushing changes to GitHub and linking to GitPages, d) registering for the domain name (~$5/year) and linking your custom domain to GitPages.

Developing my own blog set-up was something on my to-do list for quite a while. I wanted a public directory to store my notes and thoughts, similar to a document management system.

I started this journey last year with Blogger and continued to write on Blogger for a while, typically storing learning journeys and key takeaways from my experiences, even using it to store short essays responses in Mandarin as part of my language learning. But I was definitely not satisfied.

I came across great personal websites and always wanted to create one of my own. My journey started learning about existing CMS options such as Wix or Wordpress, hosting solutions like Bluehost, and domain name registries like Namecheap. Though comprehensive, these solutions had a price point higher than I expected. There must be a better solution, I thought to myself.

After a rabbit hole deep-dive on the subject, I found myself reading up about the GitPages and Jekyll set-up. Jekyll is a static site generator and GitPages is a free static site hosting service.

Jekyll • Simple, blog-aware, static sites

Transform your plain text into static websites and blogs

Jekyll • Simple, blog-aware, static sites

You could effectively copy a pre-existing template from Jekyll, make a few edits, and push them through GitHub to GitPages, all for free!

GitHub Pages

Websites for you and your projects, hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live.

GitHub Pages

The only drawbacks: GitHub only allows hosting for one site per account (obvious circumvention: make more GitHub accounts), and Jekyll's templates aren't the most aesthetic. There goes that option; I really wanted something good looking otherwise I was comfortable sticking with Blogger.

I soon came across a site that really piqued my interest and whilst scrolling, came across a link to Ghost.com. Wow, a beautiful interface and set-up built just for blogging. This was too good to be true...but was it free? Never mind, it's $29/month!

Ghost(Pro) - Official managed hosting for Ghost

The best Ghost managed hosting from the creators of the open source publishing platform. Spend less time on your server, more time on your site.

Ghost

When Thomas Edison* developed the light bulb, it lit up the world (pun intended). One invention could be scaled to tremendously impact the lives of so many people, for so long, allowing for increased productivity and development.

Once humankind figured out how to generate energy from steam, we developed the steam engine, which in turn was used to develop trains. Once we developed the first train, we could scale to build many more trains. Once we developed the first building, we could scale to build many more buildings. Once we developed the first city, we could scale to create many more cities.

As you can tell, developing the first anything has a lot of importance. In the same sense, we should focus on knowledge, ideas, or inventions of our own right that benefit a large number of people. Now, we might not be able to replicate an invention as impactful as the light bulb, but we all definitely can offer some form of 'shareable' or 'scalable' knowledge.

How do you go about developing 'scalable knowledge'?

Why would you ever need to develop scalable knowledge? Because it can make a tremendous impact, both in your own life and for others too, even at work. As someone working at a large corporate, it tends to become difficult to differentiate yourself from your peers. I identified building 'scalable knowledge' as one such mechanism to help improve that, but how exactly should anyone go about developing it?

1. What 'scalable knowledge' is needed and is it useful? These should be 'knowledge bases' or 'materials' that can be developed once but used over multiple times in multiple ways for multiple people across the business to generate value. Examples include building web-scraping scripts to pull competitor data, automating manual daily workflows, or even developing a company-wide slide template for internal/external presentations.
2. Do I have the capacity and the capability to build it? This is dependent on your own skillsets I would highly recommend that you identify your own strength areas and  
3. should be 'knowledge bases' or 'materials' that can be developed once but used over multiple times in multiple ways for multiple people across the business to
4. How can others benefit from it? Sharing your developments with others does not make you cocky or egotistical in anyway. It is actually beneficial for others that you share t

Scalable knowledge I realized that the company did not have a strong understanding of the address locations of our customers. They never truly mapped out their customer base!

Sure, the back-end system recorded customer addresses but these were manually filled out by our service staff. Hence, the data was incomplete and had a number of errors. By incomplete, I mean if I wanted to plot a geographic heat-map based on customer address, or identify particularly which district a given customer was residing in, I wouldn't be able to.

So my first contribution of 'scalable knowledge' was to clean our customer address information and use a Python library called geopy which connects to external mapping APIs to record the full address. It was incredibly easy from my side given the library handled all the parsing, but .

Libraries are actually great forms of 'scalable knowledge', and I just had to be resourceful enough to figure out it existed and read the documentation so as to learn how to make use of it.

The purest form of scalable knowledge is training others to redesign their systems. Systems can refer to anything habitual that you develop for yourself from how you plan your nutrition or fitness routines, to even their work processes.

I saw space to automate my co-workers work processes, but if I were to support automating or improving their workflows myself, it would take quite a while! What if they had the ability to marginally automate their own workflows? An understanding of fundamental programming would definitely be scalable knowledge that could grow to allow everyone to participate in improving their own workflow processes.

*For those arguing he stole from Tesla, let's just consider him a placeholder for whoever actually built the light bulb...

One of the French-Algerian absurdist philosopher, Albert Camus's most respectable novels, The Outsider / The Stranger is a short, choppy, intriguing piece of philosophical literature. The novel is centered around Mersault, an uncanny protagonist who kills an Arab man a few days after his mother's funeral. Throughout the novel, we get a taste of his nonchalant attitude towards everything, from falling in love to being executed for murder. To aid this character development, the novel opens with the line:

"My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."

Note that the different translations of the novel phrases this in slightly different ways (this was from the Sandra Smith Penguin Classic edition). Nevertheless, it frames the central character's indifference towards life and death, particularly that of someone dear to him, his mother.

From the many commentaries on The Outsider, a large focus is placed on the absurdity of life, that there is no inherent meaning. Towards the end of the novel, we see our anti-hero face-off against two characters, the judge of his murder case and the priest. Both of these characters attempt to 'convert' him into accepting Christianity, get him to surrender himself to Christ/belief in God, and finally repent. The judge tries first to do this, but fails. Once he realizes that Mersault will never 'change', his attitude towards Mersault changes from hope to pity. The same goes to the priest which tries something similar.

There were two main ideas that I extracted from this:

1. Society's dependency on religion as a form of meaning

"He said that...everyone believed in God, even those that turned away from him. This was his firm belief, and if he ever had cause to doubt it, his life would no longer have any meaning "

This was a quote from Mersault's conversation with the judge. It was almost as if Camus was trying to pose the question: Do we use religion as a form of fiction to give us meaning? Are we relying on a "false reality" to provide meaning to us? Are we that fragile that these stories we tell ourselves of a higher source of power could reduce us to nothing if we broke away from them?

Undoubtedly, religion can provide solace, community, ideals, and virtues to many. It is something humanity can have faith in to soothe their minds from the randomness of reality. But is philosophical suicide and blind following the best approach? We may end up like the judge, who holds a prominent position in society, but is fragile when it comes to his beliefs. It was highly ironic that Camus used the judge as the first spokesperson for religion in the novel. The judge and the judicial/legal systems as a whole is society's representation of logic and reason. We argue in courts to superimpose one form of logic over another another, one reason over another. Yet, the judge, who is supposedly the keeper of this logic, is shown to also be susceptible to the fictions of religion, indicating a sense of frailty even within people commanding institutionalized power and authority.

2. The consequences of not accepting the dogmas and doctrines set by the authority/majority

I can take this even further by moving away from religion and discussing the flaws of institutionalization of anything. Extrapolated to our current times, we have seen that during the coronavirus pandemic that has swept the world, the institutions in power are also faced with maladies. Individuals at the top, that we provide so much power to and whom determine how we should live our lives, get it wrong too! In fact, the beauty of the absurdity of life is that we can challenge institutionalized meaning i.e. getting a good education, working for a large company, getting a good salary. All of this is framed as being obedient and not truly appreciating that if life has no meaning, then all of these notions of institutionalization are anything but brittle. Perhaps it is a way of informing us of our power in customizing life the way we want it instead of kowtowing to authority?

The issue with this stance that Camus brings forth is that it may not be implementable in reality. I turn to the stock market to make my point. In the stock market, the true value of a company may be $50 but due to either positive or negative hype surrounding the company, it swings far away from $50. The market, through their irrational exuberance, are not able to reach the hypothetical true value of the company. This suggests that the market is always right, even when they are 'wrong', for they decide the stock price for the company. In the same way, although we should continue to challenge the institutions in place, because they for the most part are well-accepted, our quality of life is dependent on them. In Mersault's case, partly due to him denouncing institutionalized religion and not surrendering to it, he was not able to appeal to a leaner sentence than if he agreed with the judge and the priest. He is set to be executed, society's way of filtering out the unwanted, anyone who is not accepting of the majority doctrines at the time.

The question remains that given this, what side should we lean towards? How do we maintain an open-mind if society is hell-bent on pushing us towards a certain way of thinking? What is interesting here is the notion of rebellion which occurs when there is significant imbalance and power held in groups against the authority (this can be saved for another time).

"Let China sleep, for when she awakes, she will shake the world" ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

I ended up reading my brother's IB history resource on 20th century Chinese history on one Sunday morning, titled "China: From Empire to People's Republic 1900-49" by Michael Lynch.

Considering everything that has happened in Hong Kong and also globally this year, I thought it would be interesting to have a better understanding as how China and the CCP came to be.

The book does a great job at highlighting political, military, economic and social catalysts and drivers in Chinese history. It starts with the end of the Qing (Manchurian) dynasty, moving through Sun Yat-sen's  vision of a republic, the rise of the GMD (Guomindang), the Japanese Occupation, and finally the Chinese civil war between the GMD and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party).

One of the greatest takeaways from reviewing China's rich and complex history was the general theme of organizational fragility. By fragility, I am referring to the phenomenon of governments collapsing on themselves due to lack of morale, disloyalty, lack of a cohesive vision, lack of understanding of the needs of the typical Chinese person, etc.

From my synthesis, there were two forms of fragility in China. The first was fragility within specific parties. The GMD, for instance, faced severe disloyalty and had a number of soldiers and officers "switch sides", providing information to the CCP and thus compromising the tactics and strategic objectives of the Chiang Kaishek's GMD. The second was the country-wide lack of cohesion, which was obvious due to the large number of different parties and organizations that aimed to achieve very different visions of the future of China. This weakness was capitalized by foreign powers that submitted the Chinese to providing unequal treaties, concessions, forced trade, and large loans, profiting off the continuing internal conflicts.

The fragility of organizational systems in China at a macroscopic scale can be attributed to the general size of the country and its population. Without the strategies and technologies in place to effectively govern all of it, power was distributed. This was seen clearly in the early days of building the republic after the Qing abdication in 1912, where a political vacuum post-Yuan Shikai's death in 1916 created pockets of power created regional factions controlled by provincial warlords. With their own provincial militias, they warded off GMD and CCP enemies.

In fact, it is surprising how important military might was back then. Through all attempts at reunification and the development of a centralized government, military intelligence and power was of incredible importance. The inability for Sun Yat-sen's initial Alliance League to gain a stronger foothold in negotiations with Yuan Shikai at the time of his presidency were predominantly due to his wider military presence and relationships with Northern and Central provinces, in contrast to the GMD's weaker military power and control in Southern provinces.

There were many times that these different 'governments' actually further stifle cohesion and cause further systematic failure. For example, instead of appreciating the power that local authorities and municipal governments had with their respective regions, particularly in terms of facilitating a sense of trust and authority with the populace in those areas, the GMD instead coerced large swathes of these regions into obedience. Such examples are just a few takeaways that describe the fragile systems in place, which is why the CCP's eventual ability to outmaneuver this issue is intriguing, something the GMD was unable to do.

I have a few questions to further thought surrounding this theme:

• What holds our institutions in place?
• Are our organizations stable?
• Why are we obedient to the rule of law?
• What causes revolutions and a change in perception?

Barbados explores launch of a “digital nomad” visa to allow you to work remotely there 1 year — Adventurely

Ready to “work from anywhere” but frustrated with the limited options to do so abroad? Barbados might be coming to your rescue soon! Yesterday it was reported that the Barbados government “is considering introducing the 12-month Barbados Welcome Stamp to allow visitors the option to work remotely

Adventurely TVAdventurely

The world has been shoved into working remotely thanks to Covid-19. Countries like Barbados are considering using this as a marketing tactic to attract people to come and stay in the country as digital nomads on their 12-month Welcome Stamp.

Barbados has long been a hotspot for freelancers looking to simultaneously work and travel and the visa restrictions are quite nonexistent. Most US nationals can stay up to 6 months without a visa, but the introduction of this 'Welcome Stamp' obviously allows for extended stay.

Once the travel industry starts getting back on its feet, we may see a rise of countries with economies that rely heavily on tourism to leverage this tactic. We may perhaps witness larger growth in the digital nomad trend, as the location of where one works is not of as high an importance anymore.

This becomes particularly true when a person is earning higher income or pay in a stronger currency and is staying as a 'digital nomad' in a location with a relatively lower cost of living.

The opposite dynamic is the world is flat and businesses that outsource work based on price (a lot of companies are focusing on cost control now) will opt for the cheaper team in a developing market that produces at similar quality to the more expensive one from a developed market. Let's see how these dynamics play out.

We may start to see more of a blend between tourism and work among millennials. Just thought that this was an interesting trend to look out for. Open to hearing any thoughts on this!

A reflection
The story is set in a dystopian future, where breeding issues prevail and the people have returned to the church and religion as the sole power, forming the state of Gilead.

Atwood doesn't fully dive into how the state is formed, only sharing fractions of story, how an entity known as The Eye took over the US government and issued military forces to enforce new rules, such as removing women's rights (their right to a bank account, their right to work). Throughout the novel, we get a glimpse of this world through the eyes of our protagonist, Offred. This is the temporary name given to her based on her post - as she throughout the book serves Commander Fred, she is thus of-Fred. If she was serving Glen, she would thus be named Ofglen.

Already, through just through the naming of these handmaids, we see the direct objectification going on, where they 'belong' to a given household. The temporary nature of the name indicates that they will never have their own name, something to take pride in. Rather they will continue to be passed along the different commanders like rag dolls, changing their name as they go along.

Now, what exactly do these Handmaids do? They provide the important service of procreation. Remember, the story is set in a world where nuclear waste impacts birth rates, sterilizing large amounts of the population. The Handmaids are a selected group of individuals that are fertile and support the upper class 'nobility', the commanders and their wives, in bearing a child.

Our main character goes through thoughts of suicide, her slow loss of memories from the past (her husband, her daughter who was taken from her by the Eye), and conformity. In a situation like this, most of us would likely conform, a scary thought indeed.

One of the main themes that I personally resonated with was her perspective of other people being stronger than her. She often compares herself to her friend Moira who is a symbol of rebelliousness, escaping the Handmaids training camp. Later though, we find that Moira herself has "settled" and given up on the fight against the Eye. The comparison between reality and the narrator's idealism is clear.

The self-help genre has always been a popular lot, sharing an appeal similar to one would find with new year’s resolutions. So many individuals attempt at undertaking the “higher learnings” provided in the texts, with the hopes of improving their life by depending on the abundance of tips, tactics, and strategies that this set of literature provides. Nevertheless, truly digesting such literature is uncommon, with most individuals reverting back to their normal routines and selves after gathering that short boost of motivation. Why then is the genre oversaturated with similar content, repackaged over and over again, only for more individuals scurrying to buy the next read? Why are self-help books always at the top of the bestsellers list and constantly overhyped?

Throughout the ages and various epistemes, humans have rarely veered away from this notion of continued improvement; we always evolve in order to achieve success in some way or another. Perhaps this is more of a larger comment on human ingenuity and intelligence, but this innate need for constant improvement is a factor that is ingrained in the very being of what it means to be human. Why does this exist? Is this driving force one that is formed due to the societies and various ‘fields’ that individuals live in? Or is it something more intrinsic to the DNA of what it means to be human?

Regardless of the source of this great power, it can be argued that this driving force has also been manipulated over time by institutional powers that have many a time clamped down their ideals, whether right or wrong, as to what humankind should strive towards. Put forth initially through religious institutions through the existence of a God, a higher soul whose guiding principles define what is means to live a good life and be a good person. With the entrance of God, success became clear; there were step-by-step methods towards the attainment of this perfect self.

In some societies, success was defined as becoming one with God, as in Hinduism and Buddhism - Hindu and Buddhist principles encourage individuals to live by a certain code and purge themselves of any ‘karma’, in order to gain ‘enlightenment’. Other cultures and religions simply developed ‘values’ that a perfect individual would strive for. This perfect individual would not commit sin, and fall in line to respect, not harm, society. Though this concoction of sorts attempted to bring harmony and was for the betterment of how social groups operated, it arguably chained up individuals to a set of ideals. This early ‘penalty of the norm’ edified individuals to behave in certain ways, to the extent that it shifted their perspective on what their purpose was in life. A quote from Servan best describes this: “A stupid despot may constrain his slaves in chains, but a true politician binds them more strongly by the chain of their own ideas” (Foucault, 1995). In the process, this original form of self-help was able to harness and manage the multiplicity of the masses, and acted as a tool in depressing society into willingly conforming.

Centuries later, discussion centralizes around the rise of new forms of language, such as how fast capitalist, neoliberal texts are forcing the next revolution, where, yet again, institutions in power are able to “manage the multiplicity” (Foucault, 1995). Gidden’s notion of the reflexive project of the self dictates that all individuals are on their own journey, constantly monitoring and self-correcting, in order to “reshape their biological narrative” (Cameron, 2000). What if individuals are still naive, and when given a meaningful target, all reach out like moths attracted to the lull of a flame? Are individuals truly in control of shaping their own reflexive project of the self, or is attachment to institutional conventions, such as having a good job and a successful career, preventing them from truly enriching themselves? Is this modern-day, first-world determination of what success is just fueled by meritocracy? Or are there other elements to it?

The two research questions that will be considered throughout this paper are:

1. To what extent has the rise of neoliberalism influenced the development and uptake in the consumption of self-help books?

2. How has the popularization of self-help books garnered a newfound understanding of the reflexive project of the self and redefined the bounds of what constitutes as success?