Category Archives: Lessons

Notes to myself

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Jotting down a few thoughts and advice dished out recently by great people before they disappear from my mind and my Facebook timeline. I will keep updating this so I can pass this on to someone else :)

  • There are few things more important than having a clear mind.
  • One must always find time to think.
  • Choosing what not to do, is as important as choosing what to do.
  • Repeated success teaches the smart that it is ok not to fail.
  • “Who remembers what quota you hit in which year?” People remember you by the legacy you leave behind, and by your professionalism.

 

Why I don’t feel sorry for Kodak

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It was all over the news today – Kodak has finally filed for bankruptcy protection.

Nobody was really surprised. Kodak has been on a decline since the beginning of the 2000s as digital cameras began to supercede film cameras. Unlike the recent passing of Steve Jobs, I haven’t seen many people on my social media networks lamenting the loss of the company that popularized photography. Looks like people just aren’t shedding a tear for Kodak.

While I do feel sorry for the Kodak employees and pensioners who face an uncertain future, they had little say in how the company was run to the ground by their management over the past few decades. Yes, Kodak film allowed for the creation of millions of amazing images, but in my lifetime, Kodak didn’t care for the consumer very much.

I’m normally a very nostalgic guy, and I will always remember walking past the bright yellow decor of film-development stores that were sponsored by Kodak in the 1980s. It was always fascinating to see how long strips of negatives would pass through the innards of the gigantic machine which would spit out 3R-sized color photos.

However Kodak left more of a bitter taste in my mouth than nostalgia is worth. Let me tell you why.

1. Film was ridiculously overpriced.

When I started getting into photography in the late 1990s, it was such an expensive hobby. If I remember correctly, it was $5 per roll of film, $10 to develop a roll of film and 30 cents to print each photo in 4R size. So to shoot a roll of 36 exposures would easily cost you $25 before inflation.

That’s not counting the cost of batteries as film cameras were power guzzlers – remember the sound of film being rewound in a compact camera? Today you can shoot thousands of photos without considering the cost – it costs just about nothing on the digital platform. But we always had to consider the cost of reloading each roll of film.

You can argue that it forced us to become better photographers when we didn’t waste film, but I can also argue that Kodak profited handsomely from enthusiast photographers.

Kodak and other film makers never really sought to lower the cost of film. The centuries-old method of using silver halide worked for them until digital overtook it with dazzling speed (actually it took about 5 years for digital to go into the mainstream from the time the first decent digicams appeared in the early 2000s).

2. Kodak never understood digital, and still doesn’t

As a tech writer in the mid-2000s, I always groaned when Kodak’s PR agency would pitch their latest digicams for a review. Compared to current models of the day from Canon and Olympus, Kodak’s digital cameras often seemed like backward and ugly cousins. And their image quality was never up to par. I could be wrong, but they were probably re-branded OEM digital cameras. For a company that invented digital cameras, they put little effort and money in advancing the technology.

As film development stores began to shutter down rapidly, I didn’t see Kodak doing anything significant to save their retail partners.The shopkeepers were helpless as the landscape shifted and so was their principal supplier.

I remember it was so expensive to request for film negatives to be converted to a digital format. I tried it for a few rolls after a professional shoot and the quality of the scan was not fantastic. Where was Kodak then? Still trying to sell more Portra film to professionals, and over-saturated Gold label films to clueless tourists.

If you read any business story on Kodak’s decline, you’ll see so many other ways that they failed to capitalize on the digital tsunami. It’s not that they didn’t have the money to invest,  (especially at their peak in the 1990s), but like many legacy companies, they clung on to the past desperately and turned their noses at consumers. We just wanted a better solution instead of having to panic every time our film canisters or strips became accidentally exposed to the sun.

I embraced digital photography the minute I discovered it, and was over the moon when digicams finally reached an acceptable level of quality compared to film (that was about 2007 if I remember correctly, while dSLRs achieved that about 2004 with the Canon 1D Mark II). When I used the Canon 1D Mk II, my first 1GB memory card cost a whopping $400, but it paid for itself quickly – that card was approximately the cost of 16 rolls of film (or 576 exposures) and I shot thousands of photos in a few weeks.

It was sad at first to see how Kodak failed to change itself for the times (in contrast to its greatest nemesis Fujifilm), but after a while, one didn’t care for the company at all. It looks like after this bankruptcy protection, Kodak wants to focus on digital printing. That’s another silly move – everyone in developed countries are gradually moving to ebooks and Zinio mags on tablets, and we’re now sharing photos on Facebook folders…thousands of them, all for free. Who will pay for digital printing in the future?

Like the cliche goes, change is a constant, and we have no choice but to embrace change. If you work in a company that doesn’t embrace change, please take a look around and see if you can get out before the company becomes obsolete by its own choice or ignorance.

Kodak may emerge from its bankruptcy protection a better company, but the young people of today don’t even know how iconic it once was. Perhaps I should be sad for the past, but that feeling just isn’t happening.

Presentation Power – Yes You Can!

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A few years ago, I attended a company course called Presentation Power. Its main objective was to teach people how to make more powerful and impactful presentations. I’m going to distill the entire course (or at least what I can remember of it) into one single sentence:

“What’s in it for your audience to listen to you for more than a minute?”

You can be speaking on any topic on earth, but as long as you know what your audience is interested in listening to, and you know how to tell it that way, you’re already a powerful presenter.

I write this post because recently, I sat through an awful presentation. The presenter spoke English well (he’s a native speaker) and he had interesting things to say. Unfortunately, it was on a topic I had little interest in, and I was made to believe before the meeting that we would be discussing about something else.

I gave it my all to be as polite as possible and listen to what he had to say (why, maybe there might be something I could learn or benefit from this), but then it was Death by Powerpoint for nearly an hour. Look, I might work for Microsoft and I do use the Office Suite a lot, but I can tell you that with a great program comes great responsibility – Powerpoint is very easily used for the wrong purposes.

To make it worse, the Powerpoint deck he was using, appeared to be designed for another audience and objective in mind, but the presenter had deemed it okay to re-use it on me. To cut the long story short, by the end of the presentation I was really tired and not really interested in finding out more.

Not everyone can be a good or great presenter, and I think I speak too much Singlish to be a great orator. However, I can share with you a few tips I learned from the course, my journalism experience (where I met hundreds of good and horrible speakers) and my work in Microsoft.

1. Be very clear, both to yourself and your audience, what you are going to speak about before you even begin. Otherwise you’re mismanaging expectations. I often dread attending church when their most boring and longwinded speaker is giving a sermon, and ironically, he gave a sermon called “Are you wasting your time” a few weeks ago.

2. Give a good summary page/overview of your presentation, so your audience has a chance to tell you which segments they might want to skip to. Or just get to the point and expand upon it from there.

3. Use as few slides as possible. Some people have learnt how to cut down on the number of images and text paragraphs on their slides, but it’s still not enough. You have to distil distil distil your slides until it contains the barest minimum of information and visuals. Let your mouth do the talking, and not have people staring at the slides all the time trying to read reams of information.

4. Learn to read your audience and adjust your presentation on the fly. Are they yawning? Are they getting stoned out? Are they playing with their handphone? What is the reason? The one thing NOT to do is to keep droning on until you get to say what you planned to say. The right thing to do is to engage them directly and start asking them questions. You get to know if they were listening, if they were interested or if their mind is already on another planet. The feedback that you get from them will allow you to decide if  you want to change topic, cut short your speech or just do something else.

Once you lose your audience’s attention, your presentation has broken down.

5. Give them a great reason (or many reasons) to listen to you with absolute rapt attention. Like I wrote earlier, what’s in it for them to bother about you and your topic? No matter whether you are a sales guy, journalist, teacher, doctor etc, your audience needs a good reason to keep listening to what you have to say. Does it benefit them financially or emotionally? Is it a matter of life and death? Will it change society as they know it? Can you say it in five minutes instead of fifty?

(Note to church preachers – you don’t need to fill up the entire 45min speaking slot you know).

Really, you don’t have to speak like a lawyer to be a great presenter. Just put yourself in the shoes of your audience and you can soon see the flaws of your presentation. Poor presentations are often the same in nature – they just don’t connect with the audience.

Sadly, many people are only interested in listening to themselves, not someone else, and that’s why they’ll never understand what an effective presentation should sound like.

You can avoid their pitfalls very easily – just recall all the bad presentations you’ve been in, or keep observing the bad one you’re stuck in right now – and ask yourself how do you avoid boring/annoying people like the guy on the stage.

Thoughts before 2012

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2011 was an amazing year in many ways. But isn’t every year amazing for you and me?

We went through a General Elections where we managed to finally exercise our collective voice through the Internet (the Prime Minister actually apologized on behalf of his party, can you believe it?) as a galvanizing force, we demonstrated to the local news media that we no longer consumed media in the old, top down manner, and technology continues to transform the way we consume content with greater acceleration than ever.

On the personal front, I completed my fourth year working in Microsoft, and my SPH journalism days are but a faint and distant memory. My thought processes remain much like a journalist – always probing, always skeptical – but my daily skill sets have shifted from the verbal to the numerical.

It’s hard to believe, but I’m finding it harder and harder to write posts on this blog. The older you get, the less you want to say about how you feel and the things that you observe. It’s also more difficult in a corporate world when people can easily misconstrue what you write. Facebook now offers me a private space where I can share my ramblings and images constantly with my close friends and acquaintances, without fearing some random stranger who would read my posts and form an inaccurate picture of me.

And this year, after 15 years since I first rode my army motorcycle, I finally got my own civilian bike, freeing me from the tyranny of the Certificate of Entitlement (which have returned to sky-high levels of the early 2000s) but exposing me to the relentless Singapore wet weather and reckless Johor riders.

As we head into 2012, apparently the year the world ends according to the Mayans, I do have some wishes I hope to see come true before the Mayan or Christian Apocalypse. They might seem insignificant to some of you, but hey, they mean a lot to me. These are things I think about daily these days, and I hope the new year brings improvements in these areas.

More good drivers on the roads, seriously.

If you think about it, there is much stress, anger, time wastage, loss of productivity and general unhappiness that is generated by lousy drivers and riders. One fool tailgating and smashing into another car in front can generate a traffic jam on the PIE, CTE and AYE combined. And totaling your car today by choice or otherwise, is a very expensive proposition, since COEs are so high. Bad drivers can really spoil everyone’s day, so for brighter days ahead, let’s drive well and be better role models to the young drivers around us so they won’t pick up bad habits that other people impress upon them.

Better weather

Global warming is upon us and it sucks. From higher temperatures to colder Novembers, we who live at the Equator suffer pretty badly. We don’t get hit by typhoons or tidal waves, but there are people who do and we should pray for them too.

More sensibility

Personally, I don’t like Twitter. I mean, why restrict me to a stupid 140-character limit? And I’ve mentioned before that it drives poor social media behavior as people seek to be as controversial or as witty as they can, even if the situation does not call for it. We’ve seen various companies and individuals taken down by poor use of Twitter and Facebook. In the new age where we talk less and post more, we need more common sense, and more wariness of what the Internet can do to our reputations.

Sensibility also extends to the way we think about our society and our neighbors. I’m personally appalled by much of the xenophobia and bias towards foreign talent in our country, when society is a free-for-all and everyone has a right to grab their opportunity if the talent and the heart fit the job. So what if they speak differently from us? They’re still people, with families, with dreams and with emotions. Just like you and me.

More guts

More people need to speak up on the things that are going wrong. For too long, we’ve kept mum as some public services have deteriorated (MRT services, COE management, housing policies etc) but because so many Singaporeans like to complain about the smallest things, people think that it’s wrong to complain too much. Excuse me, it’s never wrong to complain when something is really wrong, but one must also provide intelligent solutions, Otherwise, the ones you complain about will always say you don’t know what’s going on, so keep quiet. Show them you know, show them you’ve got the guts to speak up, and show them you’ve got the brains to offer alternatives and answers.

A greater pursuit of happiness and contentment 

My personal philosophy of life is to seek happiness + contentment for myself, my family and my friends. I recently cleared a few drawers full of old letters and receipts. Now I was cheered to see letters and photos of long lasting friendships, but I was also stunned by how many receipts I had for materialistic goods like speaker systems, cameras and other gadgets. I love technology, and I love gadgets, but I have to remind myself I’m no longer writing technology stories and keep my gear to a minimum of what keeps me happy and contented. Many of my gadgets served that purpose, but quite a few didn’t. I will also have to work harder on bringing happiness to those around me.

Contentment is another tough thing to achieve. When is enough enough? Especially in a society like ours where it is so difficult to satisfy everyone? We should not be content with poor services or policies, but we should be thankful that life here is much better than many places in the world. We should not be content with the terrible education system that forces children to lose their childhood, but we should be glad that the kids can grow up in a safe environment here. Contentment doesn’t mean accepting every situation, but being positive about what we have that is good and useful.

More believers

And finally, I pray that many more people will come to know Jesus and the message of hope, love and eternal life that he brings to us. I also pray for older Christians like me who are constantly on the verge of forgetting his grace and power. Every day, I remind myself that the things I have are made possible only because He allows it, and we pray daily with the kids, always hoping that they will walk the straight and narrow path, and not veer off it. In a world where so many things are uncertain and where many of my desires as listed above may never come true, God remains the one constant that does not change. Whether we’ll have a financial meltdown again, or whether we will get stuck in another train disruption, there’s only one person to rely on no matter how bad or how good things get for us.

So here’s a great new year to you.

What my violin taught me

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Every Monday, I will bid goodnight to my violin teacher JJ and hurriedly pack my books, violin and bow so I can get home. On the way down the escalator, I’m either feeling pleased over a good lesson, or miserable over a not-so-good performance. Inevitably, the question will bubble to the surface: “Ian, why are you still doing this?”

It’s been ten years since I started my violin classes. In the beginning, I was fueled by curiosity and fascination. Could an adult like me pick up an instrument at 25 and do well at it? Could I fulfill a lifelong dream to read and play music? And how good could a violin sound in my hands?

Over the past decade, the key goals haven’t really changed, but I see it so differently now.

1. There’s a long way to go in improving myself.

The technical difficulties of the violin, coupled with a working and family life, means that it takes me much longer than a child to learn and play new violin pieces. And every time my teacher demonstrates how to play a piece, I feel so embarrassed because it’s a reminder of how poorly I still play after all these years. But while there is momentary discouragement, there is hope, that perhaps one day I can play as well as my teacher.

The violin epitomizes the ACS motto: The Best Is Yet To Be.

2. I have bad habits I cannot see, and they take a long time to remove

My teacher will sometimes teach me techniques to overcome my bad habits (eg. too much bow strength at the end, rather than the beginning of a bar). These habits are so ingrained in me, they take a really long time to abolish. The worst thing is that when the piece is difficult, these habits come back immediately and I don’t even realize it.

Thankfully, my teacher has infinite patience and continues to help me along, and I’m very grateful for it. The same also applies to the way I live my life at work and home – I have bad habits that have become so much a part of me, I need others to tell me and help me change for the better. It’s never nice to take honest and brutal feedback, but it’s even worse to continue on the wrong path.

3. Technical excellence is possible in anything, just practise, practise and practise.

I’m a pretty good photographer, because I spent so much time on it during my younger days. I devoured books, shot off hundreds of rolls of film, spent countless hours on Photoshop and in my home darkroom, and received continual feedback from my seniors in TNP’s Photo Desk. I wish I spent that much time on my violin, because technical excellence remains within grasp, but I just don’t practise enough.

The difference is that I desired so greatly back then to become a pro photog, but I am fearful that I will never be anything more than a lousy violinist. There are two very different motivations here, and I’m still trying to motivate myself to overcome my fears, and plunge myself into music like I did with photography.

And truth be told, music is far more difficult than photography, and requires several magnitudes more of commitment to excise the errors and to be able to emote the tunes with flair. It is always humbling to attend classes with young kids and see them play so well because they have, voluntarily or not, put in the hours needed to create the muscle memory in their fingers.

My teacher told me this gem: “Don’t practise till you get it right. Practise till you don’t get it wrong.”

4. Life is about enjoying the moment and letting go

I know I need to relax in order to play faster, but I still get too tensed up and I mess up the semiquavers. It’s such a paradox that you need to unwind more to play more difficult pieces, but it’s true. Once in a long while, I might enter the zone and play with a relaxed mind, but most of the time, I’m worrying to much.

That has taught me that in life, when the going gets really tough, you really need to let go and let the practice kick in. Everything else is up to God.

 

How to increase your likability by Kawasaki

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From Guy Kawasaki’s blog. Some of the words are a bit small and hard to read, but because it is a vector image, you can zoom in (Try CTRL + on a PC, and Command + on a Mac) to read the text. I was so excited by this image I bought the book “Enchantment” immediately on Amazon as a Kindle ebook. After 2 hours, I am already halfway through it and feeling uber inspired.

Enchantment - Increase Likability

And I always thought I was being objective

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I was at our neighborhood watch shop today and checking out a Seiko model. I noticed that the second hand was not pointing directly north, and was aligned a little to the left, by a mere fraction of a millimeter.

The shopkeeper looked puzzled and took a good look at the watch. He said: “No, it’s pointing straight up! If it is misaligned, I’ll have to send it back to the distributor but it looks ok to me.”. His father also took a quick check and affirmed there was no issue.

I took another close look again and it was just a bit off. And as an ex-photographer, I do pride myself on noticing the smallest details, especially when something minute is misaligned.

Both of us were puzzled for a while, then I took a look at my own Seiko wrapped around my wrist. To my horror, the second hand was misaligned in the same way as the shop’s Seiko!

I realized that it could be related to my lazy (left) eye, so I closed my right eye and voila, the second hand was aligned correctly on both watches. I took off my glasses and peered closely at the watches, and there was no more apparent parallax error. But when I put on the glasses again and looked at the watches at arm’s length, there, it seemed a little misaligned once again. The stereo image my mind was forming was misaligned, not the watch.

Just so you know, I’m very short-sighted in my right eye (about 400 degrees) and just mildly myopic in the other (about 150 degrees). This was because as a child, I  used to read lying down on my side and put too much strain on my right eye. Over time, the right eye became the dominant one while the left eye became the “lazy eye”.

So as I thought about it, it could have been two reasons:

1. The glass curvature in my right spectacle lens was causing light to bend more than it should. Rather unlikely but you’d never know. 

2. My brain is so used to processing information from my right eye in priority to the left over the years, that now when I see a stereo image, it is actually an image with a bias towards the data coming in from the right eye. 

It dawned upon me that this was a demonstration of the brain’s wiring that leads to our lack of objectivity and personal bias. No matter how balanced we think we are, our brains may be processing information in different channels and mixtures.

So before I tell someone that “I’m objective about this matter! I can see both sides of the story”, I’ll take a step back and think hard: “What am I seeing wrong about the picture here? Or what am I not seeing though it is right in front of me?”

Frightening isn’t it, when what you always thought was a fair and balanced worldview, turns out to be otherwise.

Living a disciplined life

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nike plus sportband

Gadgets can change your life in the most unexpected ways.

Last Christmas, I bought myself a Nike Plus Sportband which works with a Nike sensor in your running shoes to track your pace and distance.

I bought it because I thought it might help me do better at my IPPT fitness test in March but it went much further and transformed the way I’ve been living my life in 2011. Here’s what happened:

Previously, I would use online maps to decide the distances that I would run around the Bishan area. The trouble was that I did not have a fixed running schedule, so there would be weeks or months between each run. And that I could never go past the 3km mark because my mind was telling me that the distance was long enough.

After all, the only reason why I ran was to ensure I would pass the annual 2.4km test for National Service.

The Nike Sportband changed my approach to running because it keeps a constant log of all your runs and speeds “in the cloud”. And with every upload of data, you can share your latest run on Twitter and/or Facebook. You can see this as either showing off to your friends, or asking them to keep you accountable on your running regime. And because it measures your running pace, it makes you feel embarrassed if you drop below your usual speed.

Over the past seven months, I found myself running three times a week, and at least 5km each time. That’s phenomenal by my own standards, because apart from my dragonboat and army days, I could never bring myself to go exercising regularly. At one point in April, I actually ran over 10km, which was the first time in 15 years. To date I have clocked about 288km since last Dec and by God’s grace, my knees are still feeling fine.

At the same time, as I dragged myself out of bed every other day at 6am, I began thinking about how to lead a more disciplined life. Where I used to relish in an unpredictable life, I now desired more order, more control and more awareness.

- I sleep earlier now and have largely stopped playing PC or console games so I can have enough energy to run. Doing up a Gundam model can take months instead of days as my sleep comes first.

- I’m trying my best to practice my violin so my teacher doesn’t give me his weary look every Monday. But man, scales and arpeggios are more tiresome than work! 

- I began to go to work earlier so I could get some emails done before 9am.

- I started an aquarium which required me to do constant water changes and daily feeds (It’s been a really tough hobby as I’ve had two or three batches of fish die on me, but the latest bunch of tetras seem to be doing well)

- I drove less and walked more, to add more calories burnt every day.

- And recently, spurred on by a finance discussion with old buddy Weizheng, I decided to cut excessive bills like my Starhub broadband account (I went from 100mbps to 30mbps with a recontract), and started to balance my budget for each month with Excel and an expense tracker on my phone.

It could be that I’m getting older and being more careful about my health and expenses. But I do attribute a lot of the changes to the daily discipline and clearer thinking (running clears the mind, my friends) unwittingly enforced by the Sportband.

In an ironic twist, the Sportband didn’t help my 2.4km run very much. In fact, my timing actually got worse compared to last year. That’s because I’ve gotten so used to running longer distances at a slower pace, I really struggled to run briskly during the 2.4km test!