My Advice to Tan Jun Yen - SPM achiever with no scholarship

I read the article posted by the Sun written by you. It’s discouraging to see repeated attempts by the Malaysian government to discourage students from entering the national education system, but I’m keen to hear your thoughts on the alternatives.

The only reason why I see non-bumiputra students still keen on local scholarships and placements is because of cost. A secondary reason could be family. But I don’t know. I’m not in the position to say much. You and the students in the same boat as you should know better.

But I want to ask if the alternatives seem as bleak. Will the National University of Singapore be equally uncompromising to high achievers? Or even other overseas universities? Some universities in India are world-renown, especially in areas such as medicine and engineering. You don’t have to go as far as the UK or the US, though I feel that it would broaden your perspectives even further.

Try to think for the longer term (5 to 10 years). It appears that the kind of experience a high achiever stands to benefit from in other countries seems much more fulfilling, compared to some of our local students here. At the end of the day, I believe both types of graduates stand the same chance to enter the workforce - it does come down to personality, attitude and experience. And what you gain from that experience can be worth everything.

My question to you is - what do you want?

If it’s a fulfilling education experience you want, I don’t know if you’ll find it here as compared to overseas. If you stay, the obstacles you will have to put up with may not even be related to your field of study.

You’ve already come this far - I’d hate to see your qualifications and experience go to waste. The world is a big place, and sometimes searching for the right thing can be extremely frustrating and lonely. But the treasures that you will end up receiving is worth far greater. My advice to you is to broaden your perspectives, challenge the status quo, seek alternatives, consider all your options, and work hard to find what you want.

You have a potentially rewarding life ahead of you. For your own sake as well as your family’s, I hope that you will continue your fight and determination to get what you deserve and desire.

Are you Generation Y? You Should.

Generation Y are people who tend to be born between 1983 to 1997, and can be sometimes be called

Millennials. They are ‘peer-oriented’ (which explains why Facebook is so popular), don’t look at jobs in the traditional sense, and are comfy with gadgets.

I love working with them. They’re quirky, fun, groupish but not clique-ish, and have good working habits. I teach voluntary classes to teens around 15 to 19, and they’ve got entire books loaded onto their cheapish phones, talk about the latest movies and gadgets, but seem fine not owning them. It’s more of a really big club than a generation.

Anyway, you don’t have to ‘get’ Generation Y. Generation Y gets you. They’ll fit in mostly anywhere, and you’ll want them around cos they’re the people who know Facebook and ipods better than anyone else. And they don’t sound geekish either. Geek for the masses.

How this compares to life - I don’t know. I think that it helps me get an understand of where the world is going, and that ethics will be a big part in all this. Companies will need to run their businesses more ethically and authentically, because Gen Yers are socially conscious. It’s affecting other Generations too - even oldies like me (I’m sorta in Gen X) are looking at the world in a new positive light.

If you’re fearful that Gen Y is a cop-out, don’t worry. Generation Y can get jobs in IBM.

Now, maybe I’ll use this excuse to get a Nintendo DS.

Some interesting facts from Wikipedia:

In their recent book, Reynol Junco and Jeanna Mastrodicasa (2007) [22] found that in a survey of 7,705 college students in the US:

  • 97% own a computer
  • 94% own a cell phone
  • 76% use Instant Messaging.
  • 15% of IM users are logged on 24 hours a day/7 days a week
  • 34% use websites as their primary source of news
  • 28% author a blog and 44% read blogs
  • 49% download music using peer-to-peer file sharing
  • 75% of college students have a Facebook account [23]
  • 60% own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod.

More Career Advice: Don’t be popular

I don’t think popularity can be manufactured. There’s always some amount of human randomness that dares to defy the ‘obvious’, and in Murphy’s terms whatever can go wrong will go wrong.

So why bother being popular? It doesn’t get you anywhere. It only gets you along with other people very well. And unless that’s what you want, you really should ask yourself if it’s really worth the sacrifice.

Focus on knowing who you are instead. It’s much much healthier, has longer lasting benefits, and leaves a trail of positive influence.

Specifically, in order to build a successful career, you must focus on building and improving your strengths, NOT your weaknesses. Studies has shown that people fare better being average performers on their weaknesses, while excelling at their strengths.

There are ways to resolve weakness through collaboration, delegation, outsourcing, or creatively arriving at a solution. It’s what some people call adapting. But you can call it whatever you want.

The reason why following popular vote is detrimental to your career is because there are way too many signals and it can be too confusing. It’s more economical to focus on yourself and knowing who you are, and just living your life according to your needs and wants.

I would even encourage you to challenge the status quo and stand up for something you truly believe in, and are willing to take a stand for. It is enormously rewarding and seriously impacts your ability to navigate life for the longer term. It may not be so rewarding short term, but you don’t want to end up regretting something you wish you should have done over and over again.

References:

Career progression for the lost - 3 best options

This might come as a hard hit - the three options for anyone who really wants to do what they love, assuming you can’t find it anywhere around where you are:

  1. go abroad (increased chances)
  2. start your own company
  3. do it alone anyway, but care less about getting paid

Sometimes you’re never going to find the perfect job, the perfect company, that one customer, who will pay you what you want to do best. You don’t have to conform to the expectations of a 9-5 job. It’s not illegal, it’s not evil, and nobody will kill you if you decide to do something else really bad.

You just need to give yourself time to plan things out properly. As for timing, there never is a “best” time to get anything done. You just sort of have to get started by yourself.

I have a friend who’s working as a software researcher whose dream is to start a childcare company. I told her she shouldn’t wait until she gets older. There are opportunities to do it now, and there’s no reason why it is of any loss should she quit.

In fact, I see it the other way around - she could potentially be robbing herself of an opportunity of a lifetime, if she decides to delay longer.

Thanks to Google and our ability to operate a QWERTY keyboard, it’s a lot easier for folks like us to do stuff. That includes getting the information we need, talking to experts in the field, sourcing for businesses, sourcing for customers, getting new ideas…

I would encourage anyone who’s stuck in the rat race, and have a desire to do something different - to start looking at alternatives now. Don’t wait. Find your street smarts and use all the advantages you can afford to leverage on.

We all work differently, but then there’s culture

Culture is the glue that helps people understand a lot of things about each other - in a very short period of time. We are able to make all sorts of quick observations by the way somebody talks, walks, smiles, pays the bills, etc.

That’s all fine - we all need to reduce clutter in how we deal with things. Culture is good to get everyone on the same page, and it’s fun when foreigners come so we can tell them nice stories.

The thing is - culture gets a lot more complicated in business. I think there’s a lot of battle going on about which culture fits best for work. There’s West vs. East, Top vs. Bottom, Boy vs. Girl, Rich vs. Poor, Profit vs. Purpose - all kinds of stuff.

I think the best way to deal with this is to fit in, or leave - and if you’re serving as an employer, you should watch out for these things the minute you start work at the company. The reason is because no one’s looking out for you, and the best person to know if you fit in is yourself.

There’s no point trying to change organizational behavior, UNLESS YOU’RE BEING PAID TO DO IT. The same reasons why people continue to operate under culture even though it doesn’t do good business is because it keeps things manageable. So, don’t bother changing the corporate culture. Change yourself instead, or move out.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with leaving a company, especially if you know darn well what you’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, well … that’s a different story.

In this day and age, no one will ask you why you’ve been jumping companies like breeding rabbits - because everyone knows it’s a tough world out there and companies operate so differently these days with so many factors involved.

The average job seeker has more complex demands than 10 years ago, which is why we jump companies on an average of 2.5 years.

If you’ve been doing just that, THAT’S OK. You don’t have to feel bad. You know what you want in life - you know what skills you can bring onto the table - go for it. Live your life.

My only premise is that you have a powerful story to tell. One that provides meaning and purpose to explain the kind of person you are and the kind of job that matches your very being.

Get a life - care less about jobs other people care about

I’m a Malaysian. I’ve spent over 20 years in this country. One thing bugs me - I haven’t really met anyone in Malaysia who has told me they really love their jobs. The only people who told me that they have are people who tell me the love everything.

Sure, a job is better than no job. But I think if you keep doing that long enough and you’ll start to lose brain cells a lot faster.

I encourage the youth of Malaysia to go for rock concerts, fight for social injustice, make some side-income, play sports, join competitions, get involved in art and design, start new things, and travel to other countries. I feel these things are far worth more your experience than worrying and over-working about a job.

Jobs will always be there. If someone doesn’t hire you, someone else will. It just depends how desperate they are. Plus, there are a lot of desperate people out there. You won’t have to fight very hard because your exposure and experience would have served you better.

The only catch is that you have to play smart.

Smart companies these days know how to sift through people who are concerned about “am I” vs. “can I”. And you don’t want to join a company that’s not smart. So, basically, you shouldn’t care too much about whether you have what it takes. You should be more worried about understanding how stuff works - asking yourself what you really want in life, and what you’re really capable of.

I really feel that you end up saving a lot of time, money and avoid unnecessary pain.

Of course, in order to be confident enough to get the right job, you need to start asking the questions early. What will prepare you for the interview to the right job is not text-book material. It’ll be about experience.

That’s what matters most in life, anyway.

I recommend Alltop

If you’re short on time, and you want a fulfilling life/career/relationship/whatever, ditch the mundane crawl through newsreaders, google news, and forum posts. Alltop.com gives you the headlines of every news-based site you should read. It was created by Guy Kawasaki.

This means you can focus on living your life, and then spending that 20% of your time through GOOD CONTENT to assess yourself, plan your journey, laugh or cry… whatever.

Also, if you watch TV, forget TV. You got me, Stop Watching TV. Or watch less of it. Take time out to decide what you really want in life, and get going.

Doing something you’re not: Bad

I currently work in South East Asia, where the people around me are predominantly Asian. There’s a cultural stigma that seems to glorify traditional roles as they go - technicians, engineers, people managers, salespeople, big bosses. It helps to keep things simple and straightforward, but can get in the way of improvements, sometimes.

There aren’t many “custom” job roles, here. If any, they’re not the norm, and it would be difficult to find people with specialized skills - particularly because people don’t want to specialize.

Usability engineering is one such role. The demand for usability engineers in the country where I work is close to none. This is a stark comparison to the West. But my point isn’t about usability. It’s about its departure from “traditional” jobs such as software development or technical support, and that some jobs (and increasingly more jobs) are better suited for some people than others.

Being an INTP, my role as an engineer seems to fit like a glove. I’ve managed to bring benefit to the company by leveraging on my strengths. But I wonder how many people find themselves doing something that doesn’t quite match up.

Penelope Trunk thinks that it’s not about doing what you love, but doing what you are, that’s important. And she’s right - love can be temporary. It’s much better to do things that are a natural fit for you.

It doesn’t help that some jobs pay much more than others, either. Just because CEOs have high salaries doesn’t mean that I should strive to be one. There’s much more to a job than the salary, and I’m a firm believer that it would be increasingly difficult to advance if choices were made based on what jobs we wanted to climb up to, for money’s sake.

I do observe, however, that companies are more willing to explore new job roles these days, and are willing to allow employees to introduce improvements and ease into specializations that will benefit the company in the long run. This means that it’s possible for someone to carve out a niche role - and be rewarded for it.

This can especially happen to people who do a lot of pioneering work. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from taking the initiative to do something different and beneficial for the company - even if it’s potentially out of the job scope.

Specialization is a good thing to have these days.

First Post - Why I like to Leapwalk

I just spent a few minutes watching a video clip of David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) delivering a speech to some techies for Startup School about “The Secret to Making Money”.

The fact that I just said that indicates that I’m some kind of techie myself, and that this blog is going to be about programming, web applications, and computer games.

It’s not.

As much as my tech work pays the bills and that I do have an insatiable desire to solve problems with it, the point of the DHH clip (if you watch it) will summarize some values to which this blog subscribes to.

In a nutshell, it’s about life. Your life, and mine.

Leapwalking is a term I use to describe how we live that life - it’s like walking (to get to somewhere), but the way in which we walk allows us to arrive at our destination faster or better.

I believe that there are way too many confusing signals in today’s world. And there’s just not enough time to consume, let alone process, all of that information. We have but 24 hours to make decisions ranging from what food we eat to what person we should become, and everyone seems to be going in all different directions.

Leapwalking is a way to make a decision about our lives - in a way that doesn’t make our neighbors go crazy, in a way that doesn’t require nuclear reactors or traveling to space or becoming the next President.

If you had a choice to make today, and that small choice to make a difference, that would be enough - no matter whether that difference would be big or small.

That’s what leapwalking is all about. To conscious effort to make the right choices, with our own abilities and opportunities, and due respect to the people around us.