Above all else

At the beginning of this year, our family received this word - if you're willing to be ready, you're ready to be used ( Jan 2020 blog entry ). The real condition precedent is willingness, not readiness. This is important, because most times, no one is really ready until we're actually doing the thing. But God's promise is, if we are willing, we are ready. If we're ready, we can be used. I certainly didn't know in January that we were going into a year where the world would be turned entirely upside down, with the way we live, work and interact with others! No one could have been ready for that! Yet here I stand, at the end of 2020, able to testify that simple willingness to hear God and obey Him made many of us ready to be used for His purposes in ways - big and small, special and mundane - that we didn't even imagine were possible. At work, it wasn't just the Covid pandemic that was creating chaos. Increasing nationalism and the reversal of globalisatio...

It's not you, it's me, is the sort of line one hears in rom-com movies when the hapless protagonist (or antagonist?) is trying to peaceably break up with the girl. But that's not my line of thought for today I'm afraid - yes, it's more football! Those who read this probably know I'm a big Liverpool fan. After last year's historic league championship win, the team is going through a rough patch with a scarcely believable series of injuries, as almost the entire defensive lineup has been wiped out with long term injuries. The manager Jurgen Klopp has been forced to pick 4th or 5th choice players. Nathaniel Phillips had been farmed out on loan to a second division club in Germany, and but for the Covid-19 impaired finances of the football industry, would probably have been sold off. Rhys Williams is a 19-year old, and had been farmed out to a 5th division club in England. Yes, FIFTH.  Yet in his league debut as stand-in for his injured colleagues, Nathaniel Phi...

There's a famous experiment, in which two monkeys are rewarded when they perform certain tasks. One is rewarded with cucumbers, while the other is rewarded with sweet grapes. The first few times, they both obediently carry out their tasks - then the monkey who's getting cucumbers sees that the other guy is getting a better reward, gets fed-up, throws the cucumber back at the researcher and sulks in a corner! A similar story is told in the Bible in Matthew 20. Early in the morning, a vineyard owner pays some workers a denarius to work for the day. Later on at 9 a.m., the owner sees some other workers and gets them to go to the vineyard too. He does the same at noon, 3 p.m. and even 5 p.m. At the end of the day, he pays the guys who joined at 5 p.m. the promised denarius. So the guys who joined earlier expect to get more. But they don't - he pays them the same amount. They immediately cry foul, but the owner says - you got what you agreed. Don't I have the right to be gen...

It is a corporate truism that strategy is as much about choosing what not to do, as it is about choosing what to do. Why? Because there will always be less resources than are possible plans, and because some plans simply contradict or cannibalise others. Synergistic adjacencies do exist, but a company that tries to be everything to everyone is increasingly unlikely to succeed as it spreads itself ever thinner, until it breaks.  For this reason, we continually have to choose what not to do. This can actually be quite a liberating experience, if we do it right. The psychologist Barry Schwartz noted in his book "The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less", that although autonomy and freedom of choice are critical to well-being, the proliferation of choice in much of modern society does not seem to have resulted in increased happiness. Schwartz posits a few reasons for this (some of which I admit are beyond me!). But here are some points that make sense to me. First, increased in...

Some days are bad days. Some days are good days. Then there are those days which are simply amazing. Yesterday was one of those days!  What's the secret for having more amazing days? Bill Gates famously said " I can understand about having millions of dollars. There's meaningful freedom that comes with that, but once you get much beyond that, I have to tell you, it's the same hamburger. "  What he meant, of course, was that having lots more money doesn't bring much more happiness. And this is true not just for billionaires. Bill Gates' anecdotal observation is backed up by Nobel Prize winners Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, whose well-known study showed that once your income exceeds US$75,000 per annum, your day to day experience doesn't improve much as your income grows, even when adjusted for whether you choose to live in an expensive locale or an inexpensive one.  For reference, the 2018 median household income in Singapore...

So I finally went for my long overdue health screening the other day. I've gotten to the age where every year I kind of expect that there'll be some anomaly or other! So thank God this time everything was fine. Must be all the circuit breaker home workouts :D One interesting thing though - the doctor pointed out that some antibody levels were dropping, so I should go for booster vaccinations. This was a bit surprising to me, since I knew I had gotten vaccinated just a few years ago. I am generally not gooey about injections, so I'll probably get around to getting those booster shots soon. This got me thinking. The only reason why I was even considering getting booster shots was because someone had pointed out that what I thought I had (immunity), I actually didn't have. If we think we have something, naturally we don't go looking for it. We're only motivated to go looking for something we realise we don't have .  This is something I've recently re-encoun...