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PJ Teh

@fatmonky

Interaction/service designer/developer-wannabe, exploring the intersection of tech & Dharma. I meditate & read, when not a cat slave.

Singaporeinquivision.comJoined April 2009

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PJ Teh

@fatmonky

Nov 14, 2021

“It’s always a pleasure to deal with another person who sees you not simply as a means to an end but as a human being worthy of kindness and consideration.” - Louise Aronson, “Elderhood”

Not an article I wanted to write. The deadly H5N1 bird flu is spreading widely, including to mammals. For the first time, it's now likely spreading mammal-to-mammal, among minks which are exceptionally well-suited conduits to humans. We must act now. nytimes.com/2023/02/03/opi

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Second order effects.

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Planet Clojure

@planetclojure

Feb 4

Unfortunately due to the upcoming changes in policy of use for Twitter API we're stopping to cross-post links to this Twitter account. Please subscribe to RSS or Atom feed at planet.clojure.in Thank you! P.S. We're looking to implement posting to another social network...

Cat loves helping her dad remake movies with her as the star — wait til the Jurassic Park scene 🖤 To keep up with Owl Kitty, follow along on Instagram thedo.do/owlthekittyIG

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I taught my team a specific way of engaging with me to remind me to slow down: “Hey Chris, this is important. I’d like you to take some time to think about this before we move forward.”

And so, Khai Seng and I are co-hosting a *Studio Dojo an in-person Unconference on blind spots at Common Ground on 2 March 730pm*. Sign up here to join us for interesting conversations with interesting people like Khai Seng and his team. :)

studiodojo.com

Design Dough: Let's Talk about Blind Spots

Join us for our latest Design Dough series - a 2-hour in-person unConference on blindspots and growth, to discuss what it means to discover and deal with one’s blindspots, and to connect with others...

The good news is that when you discover your blind spots, that is where you can *start* to do something about them, and that is probably where your growth really starts. It's quite a big fuzzy topic which is intimately connected with growth & development.

Reality then tends to creep in and slap us in the face with a lesson (if we choose to accept it!) If you add in cognitive effects like confirmation bias (where you tend to see what you want to see), blindspots are also where strengths can also become weaknesses.

Blindspots are very tricky, because (by definition) we cannot see them. And precisely because you can't see them, we might not know they exist. So they tend to be a point of failure in our mental models of the world.

I caught up with an ex-colleague yesterday, and shared a realisation from the three-month meditation retreat I enjoyed last year: we grow by discovering our blindspots.

(Sidenote: you can hire me to apply design to your teams, services & strategies. Here: buff.ly/3w391Om ) I wrote more details, including the remaining two principles in detail here:

inquivision.com

Notes about Power, from "The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate"

I finished reading Robert Caro's "Master of the Senate", which is the history of Lyndon B Johnson's time in the US Senate, and had a few learnings about power.

4. Power comes from understanding & knowing. As a designer, this is super relevant, as the human empathy & listening is the core skill of human-centred design. Basically, Johnson applied design-thinking to politics!

2. Getting power is inevitably tied to a person, and often comes with a price. 3. Power comes from being useful & productive to others. Johnson created power out of wielding information, being super useful & productive to others.

1. Power is structural. There are structural elements to power e.g. the US Senate's Constitutional power to block legislation, is deliberately structured as part of a series of checks & balances.

My favourite book of his so far is "Master of the Senate", about Lyndon B Johnson's time in the US Senate, and I took down some notes & observations, which I felt were applicable beyond politics. These are 6 principles I got out of the book.

I was chatting with a colleague who works in service design, and we started talking about power. And I recommended her to read Robert Caro's books, which are an in-depth investigation into power and the nature of power.

This is a great hack by

@AdamMGrant

: if you want to find out who might be a taker, ask them to give their estimate of other people’s likelihood of stealing $10. The higher the % they say, the more likely they are a taker, not a giver!

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Insider Business

@BusinessInsider

Feb 2

Wharton professor Adam Grant on why it's important to look for employees who give back to the company

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If you’re looking for advice on creating a successful developer ecosystem for your platform, look at Twitter and do the opposite. twitter.com/TwitterDev/sta

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Whoa!

please ride safe!

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Steve Stewart-Williams

@SteveStuWill

Jan 28

Amazing how much more dangerous motorbikes are than all the other options “A motorcyclist who traveled 15 miles every day for a year had an astonishing 1 in 860 chance of dying. A person who took a 500 mile flight every day for a year would have a fatality risk of 1 in 85,000.”

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PJ Teh

@fatmonky

Jan 28

This thread can be read here:

inquivision.com

The Singaporean Conditioning

In 2020, when I was talking to younger friends who asked me about career advice (see link for earlier thoughts), I shared an episode in my CIID experience that

Written date 10 Aug 2020, Photo & Links added 28 Jan 2023

…discover what they actually WANT to do. Bregman ends the chapter with the powerful words "It speaks to a new movement- a new realism. Because nothing is more powerful than people who do something because they want to do it (Note: author's emphasis)." Majulah Singapura.

And in a way, breaking out of the Singaporean conditioning might actually be a good argument for SkillsFuture: as a structured programme that lowers the cost for Singaporeans to explore and learn new skills, that increases the likelihood that Singaporeans might actually…

To use Silicon Valley-speak, the difference is between 'missionaries vs mercernaries'. And the Singaporean conditioning is really the latter.

It's all well and fine to compel people to do stuff, and they will get things done. But the level of commitment, energy, inspiration, etc., will be a fraction of the energy, commitment, creativity that people put in, if it's something they WANT to do.

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In chapter 13 "The Power of Intrinsic Motivation", he has a case study on Dutch healthcare giver Buurtzog (buurtzorg.com) and French company FAVI (favi.com/en/about-favi/), which have operated on the principles of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation.

favi.com

About FAVI | FAVI

From Hallencourt, Picardie (near Amiens), FAVI, specialized in pressure die casting, delivers its customers, the most renouned industrial groups and the car manufacturers.

But most recently, I just finished reading Rutger Bregman's book "Humankind" (goodreads.com/book/show/5287), and he makes the same point. In the psychology literature, this is about intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, with the latter including things like monetary compensation.

goodreads.com

Humankind: A Hopeful History

From the author of Utopia For Realists, a revolutionary…

This also has implications on leadership. Again, Paul Graham captured this super well in his essay on What Business can Learn from Open Source (paulgraham.com/opensource.html).

…for you. Increasingly, I am of the view that there is really only one feasible way to become so damn good that people cannot ignore you, and that is to find that activity that you can play with for hours on the end without it feeling like "work".

It's not as simple as "doing what you love": I think Paul Graham has elaborated and articulated it far better than I can in this essay, "How to do What You Love" (paulgraham.com/love.html). But it is about discovering what does not feel like work, but feels like fun and play…

But it was something that I really wanted to do: I chose my project subject, did the research, etc. And that's when I realised that I have been subject to this Singaporean conditioning all my life, frequently doing things for others, or seeded by others.

I asked myself why this was the case, and realised that, this was the first time in my life that I was doing something that I actually wanted to do. It wasn't something I "should" do, it wasn't something that I should do for my parents, my family, my team, my boss, etc.

As I headed home, I was still super energised and wide awake, even though it was 3am in the morning! And this was despite being off the ketogenic diet for a while.

So one evening, when I was working on my final project till 3am at CIID (with Amit (ciid.dk/education/port) and Mitsu (ciid.dk/education/port)also working on their final projects), I was quite surprised to find myself very energised.

In the last few months of the IDP, though, I was off the diet, as I was travelling around a lot: it's quite hard to stay on the ketogenic diet, especially when I'm staying as a guest in people's homes.

…co-Head both on maternity). So when I went into CIID, I tried to keep to the ketogenic diet for the bulk of the year: it helped me survive the late Thursday nights.

In recent years, though, the focuson diet has been because of performance: I experimented with the ketogenic diet when I was in Strategic Planning, and that helped me survive the extremely tough work period (at one point, I was double-heading two teams, with my Director and…

Friends and colleagues who have known me for a while, all know that I often obsess about my diet. This probably stemmed from my childhood when I was clinically obese (I was so fat that I literally couldn't dive in the swimming pool: my sister still laughs at that memory).

The episode that made me realise I was subject to this Singaporean conditioning happened in the final project period of CIID, when I was in the final weeks of the design process. But before I go there, a short explanation of context is required beforehand.

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