Pictures of Japan, Sometime in February 2019

It’s been a while since I travelled with a film camera. This Olympus mju-ii has been with me for a good decade, and I’m pleased it is still working after years of neglect.

I’m always surprised by film photographs. I see photographs with unintended focus areas and prefer them this way over my iPhone backup photos with their deliberate framing and multiple angles. My favourites are the those I remember taking but whose sub-subjects, unseen by me and unmetered/unfocused for, pop up to mark their presence in my tangible memories.

Books in March 2019, Part 3

Creativity, Inc.
Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace

I didn’t know if I would enjoy this book and it took some time before I finally borrowed it. Super happy I did, and I’m glad that I managed to finish it before I start my new gig. 

I did not know that Pixar has been around since 1980s! A sorta-aside, I loved Toy Story and was really pleased to read the stories around its origin and development in here!

I enjoyed reading about Pixar’s culture and the methods put in place to protect and nurture its creative culture. 

Catmull concluded this book with a list of starting points, which was an awesomely succinct and useful list of reminders. From that list, here are my favourites:

Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors, you won’t have errors to fix. The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. 

• Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover when unexpected events occur. If you don’t always try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.

• Similarly, it’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them. 

• The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal — it leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make rather than by their ability to solve problems.

• The healthiest organisations are made up of departments whose agendas differ but whose goals are interdependent. If one agenda wins, we all lose. 

• Do not accidentally make stability a goal. Balance is more important than stability.

• Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Working on our processes to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something we should continually work on — but it is not the goal. Making the product great is the goal.

(Goodreads)

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Escaping the Build Trap
Melissa Perri

I heard Melissa Perri speak last month at UX Thailand; she was the opening keynote speaker and her talk on product-led organisations was insightful and engaging. 

Perri used a fictitious company Marquetly and their journey to  describe and illustrate the four components essential to build a product-led company — role, strategy, process, and organisation.

For the most part, I found the stories helpful and highly relatable (sadface). I saw lots of parallels between Marquetly and my previous workplace, and I wish that I had this book then so I could borrow its articulation and eloquence. 

(Goodreads)

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Lean UX
Jeff Gothelf with Josh Seiden

Sometimes you read so much about a topic that every new thing you read feels derivative. To be fair, this book was published in 2013, so it is possible (and probably so) that the hundreds of Medium, Smashing Magazine etc articles were developed from this book then vice versa.

Read for background.

I did wish I read this before UX for Lean Startups. The two books aren’t exactly overlapping, but I would say that the principles and concepts are similar.

(Goodreads)

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The Making of a Manager
Julie Zhuo

Last year, I managed a team for the first time. Many times during the reading of this book, I wished that I had its advice and assurances. That Zhuo led a design team made the examples and advice here more relatable.

For a short excerpt, read Zhuo’s Making the Most of Your First Three Months as a New Manager on Medium.

There are great tips in here on giving and receiving feedback, hiring, managing yourself, and driving outcomes. I’m still making notes, and am foreseeing that I’ll be rereading some of these chapters in the near future.

(Goodreads)

Books in March 2019, Part 2

UX for Lean Startups
Laura Klein

Lean startup or not, it is more than likely that few design teams have the luxury of time. If you are not new to UX or design and have been keeping a somewhat conscientious tab on learning, you probably don’t need to read this book. I did anyway, just to let you know that you don’t have to. 🧐 

It did drive home several points for me (your mileage may vary) and while these aren’t new insights, it’s good to be reminded: 1. User research need not be a mammoth task; be clear about what you want to achieve and don’t boil the ocean; 2. Qualitative research helps create hypotheses and narrows down what to test; 3. Experiment, test, and iterate; set up a cadence for continuous discovery and design. 

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Measure What Matters
John Doerr

I’m going to be brief here and say that I like what I hear and read about OKRs.

I liked this book too, and though I’ve read slightly negative reviews about how this is just a book of case studies (which truthfully, it is), I enjoyed it because of them case studies. Stories are more engaging, and it is easier to believe them. However, I shall also acknowledge that stories are often flawed, misremembered, glorified collections of details and incidents. Doesn’t make them less memorable. 

The concept of OKRs is straightforward. Make a goal or an objective, then put in place activities to achieve it and metrics to measure these activities. Reviewing them is simple and impartial — were the key results achieved? While the book talks about implementing OKRs on an organisational level (I very sincerely wish that they really do help with strategic alignment and focus like the stories here mentioned, because it makes me hopeful), I think personal OKRs would be a good substitute for new year resolutions. I like that it is a goal and a plan -in-one, so you can’t make one without the other.  

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AI Superpowers
Kai-Fu Lee

I don’t know enough about artificial intelligence, and I want to know what lies beyond sensationalistic headlines and hopeful high-level discussions. And, this is a great book to start acquiring that knowledge. There is a lot to know about AI as well as its development in past and present technologies. Its role in the future products and services can’t possibly be overstated, given how pervasive technology is in our day-to-day. 

But the part I enjoyed most was reading about how China came to be a major player in AI and digital technologies. The country’s rise to being a digital and data powerhouse did not come by sheer luck. China’s first internet boom in the 1990s yielded copycat companies (Wang Xing’s Xiaonei and Meituan, Charles Zhang’s Sohu etc), and the fierce competition amongst these companies and their other copycats meant that only the fittest would survive. They learnt what worked and what failed with Chinese users, and continuously iterated and localised their products and services. “Every divergence between Chinese user preferences and a global product became an opening that local competitors could attack”, and Silicon Valley’s reluctance to adapt their global products (eBay, Groupon, Google) for Chinese users precipitated their demise.   

The government’s campaign and support for mass entrepreneurship and innovation + the emergence and subsequent ubiquity of internet-enabled mobile devices in China in the late 2000s and early 2010s = enabled companies and enabled users. Tencent’s angbao move / attack into the mobile payments space was very smart! On a local note, I wonder if Grab’s angbao campaign during this year’s Chinese New Year had similar intentions.  

Ok, back to AI. According to Lee, most of what AI is and will be in the near future is based on what has already been existing in the AI world. Breakthroughs in AI research will be harder to come by, contrary to popular media representation. The implementation of AI is the innovation. Lee mentions 4 waves of AI: 1. Internet AI (data, machine learning, and algorithms to serve up more accurate and relevant content/recommendations); 2. Business AI (Leveraging huge structured datasets to identify weak features or recognise correlations, and predict or execute outcomes); 3. Perception AI (OMO — online-merge-offline — environments where data generated and collected in the digital space is used to inform our offline and physical environments); 4. Autonomous AI (your lovely robots and self-driving cars). 

However, as AI revolutionises manufacturing and production, it will “deprive poor countries of the opportunity to kick-start economic growth through low-cost exports”. Even within developed economies, the gap between companies or industries with a foothold in AI and those without will continue to widen, as the former leverages AI-enabled productivity advantages and benefits. This may have the worrying effect of driving down prices and eliminating competition. 

Lastly, and one that hits closer to home, is the concern about jobs. The author mentions two different kinds of job losses: one-to-one replacement (your job is lost because technology can do it better); and one that results from ground-up disruption (essentially, your job no longer exists because the capabilities involved are no longer necessary). 

In the last few chapters, Lee laid out a blueprint for “human coexistence with AI”. Among his suggestions, I found the stipend for social investment, where individuals are rewarded for socially-beneficial activities, intriguing and frankly, a possible one (though the reward matrix would be a tricky one). 

Ah, this is more a book summary than I expected it to be. Good for forgetful ol’ future me.  

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The Coddling of the American Mind
Greg Lukianoff, and Jonathan Haidt

Do you remember how old you were when you were first allowed to venture outdoors alone? I remember evening sessions at the playground when I was in kindergarten, and the adult supervision was a handful of parents or grandparents of a couple of kids also at the playground. Sometimes my mum would be there, but most times, she would be back at our flat. We would get summoned for dinner, or when chores awaited. My parents were pretty laid-back, but to be fair, Singapore was and is still a very safe country, and accidents at the playground and elsewhere were far and few between.  

Despite knowing that the crime rates in American cities have declined, it wasn’t a great surprise to learn from the book that American kids and teenagers don’t quite enjoy this kind of freedom (well, it is all thanks to all these crazy shooting incidents). It also wasn’t surprising to read that freedom beyond physical whereabouts and activities has also increasingly been curtailed. Even in Singapore, I’ve noticed that parents have gotten more watchful and anxious; expectations have gotten to be rather plentiful in an ever-increasing number of areas. With expectations, I would say, come anxieties. With anxieties, comes overprotective and overindulgent “helicopter” parenting that ironically has failed to ready our youth’s attitudes and mindsets for well, real life. 

The book talks about three great untruths that have contributed to this coddling: 1. The Untruth of Fragility (What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker); 2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning (Always trust your feelings); 3. The Untruth of Us Versus Them (Life is a battle between good people and evil people). To elaborate the effects of these untruths, the authors raised various events that happened on American campuses in the past decade — pointless witch hunts and actual violence arising from a “common-enemy” mindset in reaction to presumed threats to emotional “safety”, resulting in a call-out culture and a lack of rigour in exploring diverse and necessary viewpoints. This is a worrisome self-perpetuating cycle.

While the book is ostensibly about American youth, I found the ideas and the described effects relevant for my non-American and non-youth life. A particularly sobering one is the “concept creep” of the meaning “safety”. Where it used to refer to physical safety — and it is never wrong to ensure physical safety — the term “safety” has now expanded to include “emotional safety”. That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? But “emotional safety” is fraught with subjectivity and personal biases. It also sounds very much like an echo chamber to me. Expecting others to maintain your “emotional safety” is training in fragility, and that will make you weaker over time. 

“A culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need to become strong and healthy.” 

“When children are raised in a culture of safetyism, which teaches them to stay ‘emotionally safe’ while protecting them from every imaginable danger, it may set up a feedback loop: kids become more fragile and less resilient, which signals to adults that they need more protection, which then makes them even more fragile and less resilient.” 

Needing some Guang 光

I watched Guang 光 on a half-whim, half because while I didn’t know I was heading to the cinema and I didn’t know about the film until today, I had thought of watching a movie and had checked for possible can-watch movies just before I went for my driving lesson. 

Guang is a story about a pair of brothers, one of whom is autistic and has a penchant for collecting glasses (the drinking type). Based in Kuala Lumpur and directed by Quek Shio Chuan, the film was an authentic blend of sentiment, humour, empathy, and love. I particularly loved how natural the dialogue felt, and also the bigger-than-life scenes of Guang’s elation because I’m pretty sure/hopeful that they are representations of how the protagonist felt. 

This is the second movie I’ve watched this year, the first being Captain Marvel a couple of weeks ago. It seems a little ridiculous to compare these two movies because they are as different as they possibly can get, but there I was, minutes after the lights went back on, evaluating both shows against each other. 

Captain Marvel is a huge show. It’s big on everything — the budget, the actors, the plot, the intergalactic setting etc. There are aliens and super powers and supreme intelligences. Humans are the hapless beings, serving only to foil a plan, or squirm as hostages, or die as collateral damage. Agent Fury no doubt realised that because look who decided to set up a superhero task force. That’s fine, superhero shows have a place in cinema and I’m waiting to book tickets for the next Avengers movie. 

Watching Guang, on the other hand, made me feel less helpless, more hopeful, and more assured of our tenacity. It’s a small story set in a small cinematic world, but the introspection it provides beats any intergalactic alien war. 

So you’re thinking of taking a break from work?

Last December, I left a job. When I started telling co-workers from other departments about my impending departure, two questions usually came up. The first was, “Why??”. The second was, “Where are you going?”. 

For me, both questions were hard to answer. For the record (whose, I’m not sure), there were several reasons for leaving, and committing to one for the sake of simplicity in communication always felt unfair (to whom, I’m also unsure).

And well, I guess if I had an answer for the latter, I would think that I would get away more easily with not answering the why. When you leave without the next job in place, you trigger a couple of reactions. People either think you are very, very upset with your current job, or you are well-to-do enough to deal with an unknown period of unemployment. Also, everyone will express envy (I would too). 

There is probably little logic in this, but I had always felt that I would be cheating on my existing job/company if I started actively looking for a new job 🧐. A more understandable reason was that I wanted more time to work on my resume and portfolio. I also wanted the chance to properly decompress and reflect on what I had learnt in the past couple of years before deciding on my next steps. 

However, a week into unemployment and after sending out a few applications, the panic started setting in. Why is no one calling yet? Why is my email inbox so quiet? Was there a deal-breaker typo in my resume? Never mind that it was one week before Christmas, never mind that even I was going on vacation in a couple of days. The brain thinks what it chooses to think. 

After I returned from my holiday, what awaited me was a stretch of unoccupied days. Weekdays without any meetings, without fires to put out. I didn’t get angry at “Open from 9am - 5pm” notices anymore; I could stand in line for stuff. I turned up for dinner appointments early. The stove at home saw renewed activity. I could see the bottom of laundry baskets. I planned an itinerary for my next holiday. I tinkered with my resume. I rewrote sections in my portfolio. I rewatched Grey’s Anatomy for the nth time. I read.

It wasn’t until the third week of employment that I decided it was wiser to take a more structured approach. Rest was important, but I was dying inside from not feeling productive (modern life, eh) and from worrying that I wasn’t doing anything meaningful during this period and that I would stay unemployed for longer than expected. So, I started being more deliberate about how I was spending my time. 

Set some goals — big or small 

What was one something that I could do for myself, that I would be proud of achieving at the end of this break? Goals are a good way to focus energies and free time. Also, they are very easily understood by other people who may not understand your self-imposed joblessness.

My big goal was driving. One hot Thursday afternoon, I made my way down to the driving school, signed up, and loaded up a thousand bucks in my account. Too expensive to back out. I told all my friends that I was learning to drive. Too many witnesses (and potential teasing) to back out. I told my parents. Too much nagging to back out. 

I also started a few smaller goals — to read a book every week, to write here twice every week, and to post something on Medium every week. Of these, I’m shamefully only keeping the first. To my credit, I have tons of unpublished drafts. To my discredit, I have thought and edited them to death (some of them will hopefully eventually make it out here alive). 

While I have not been keeping to these smaller goals 100%, making them in the first place ensures that I dedicate time to thinking and writing each week (and that I feel some well-deserved guilt whenever I choose Netflix). 

I’d also like to mention again that I’m surpassing the reading goal by quite a bit. 

Enjoy do-nothing guilt-free days

Isn’t every day of unemployment a do-nothing day? Sure, but they don’t come guilt-free. 

These are days when there is nothing planned, and where I tell my brain not to feel bad about it. No lunches, no dinner appointments, no lessons. When I set my goals, I made sure to leave a day each week as a do-nothing day. I spend my do-nothing days reading, watching Netflix, cleaning the toilet, or just surfing the internet. I check in with friends, play Two Dots, or sort clothes hangers. 

Think about work

Unless you’re not planning to go back to work any time soon, work- and job-related thoughts will pop up. I spent a fair bit of time reflecting on the work that I did in the last couple of years. What were some things that I should had done, and what were some stuff that I would do differently the next time around? These were simple and common questions, and I had already given them some thought previously. However, with more distance, time, and learning, I found new answers. These post-mortems helped when I was writing up my portfolio and case studies. 

On case studies: they are time-consuming and frankly, pretty darn tedious to write. But writing them organised my thoughts and really, really helped when I needed to talk about my projects in interviews. I knew my projects inside out, but explaining to people who have zero background required a disciplined balance of storytelling, context, and simplification. 

Money concerns will always be at the back of your mind. I had made sure that I was comfortable for a couple of months without income. That comfort meant no changes to my lifestyle, two holidays, and enough to learn something. I had thought I would attend some courses initially, but I managed my education with MOOC and books. The $$ went to driving school. Despite being prepared financially, I still worried a fair bit and felt guilty whenever I spent on non-essential items. Probably not a bad thing, really.

• • •

When you leave a job, you will worry. The economy isn’t great, jobs are changing, we’re getting old. Lots of what-ifs will enter your mind, as they did mine. 

During periods of no-interviews-lined-up and no-follow-ups, I wondered if my decision to resign without a job was a good one. I reminded myself repeatedly that outcomes do not necessarily reflect the quality of decisions. I could make a perfect decision but a shitty outcome could still happen, and vice versa. 

I needed these reminders to focus on what I want, and I found them waiting whenever I hit the pause button on my worries. By purposefully setting goals and setting aside time for reflection, I managed to tame the very counterproductive feeling of unproductivity (writing is hard, but it feels great to hit the publish button) and create worry-free environments (it’s hard to worry about joblessness when you’re trying to cut 3 lanes to the right in a swarm of heavy-vehicle traffic).

🙇🏻‍♀️

In related news: in a week, I go back to full-time work.