A change of course
At some point growth stops and fruiting begins. Otherwise what is the point of growth?
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At some point growth stops and fruiting begins. Otherwise what is the point of growth?
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Throughout 2017 as I gained confidence in my financial security and searched for meaning beyond financial terms, my retirement plan evolved into my plan for how I would fund the projects that would accomplish my life purpose. As I dug into these questions a major constraint was removed in Dec 2017 when I received my Singapore Permanent Residence (PR) letter of approval. This news had an important effect on my sense of life satisfaction and marked a milestone in my immigration journey that had begun 7 years earlier. It also had real implications in expanding my âdicking around licenseâ since it meant that my runway extended from 90 days to 5 years, the grace period I am allowed to find a new employer under Employment Pass (EP) and the time between PR renewals, respectively.
I wanted to learn what it means to be an entrepreneur, to add domain knowledge in topics that are related to problems for society such as agriculture sustainability and to develop my core strengths in data science and research. I felt a restless sense that I was losing valuable time diverting my skills and energy towards meaningless projects to increase capacity or save costs in manufacturing processes when I could be learning skills that I would need for my projects for society. I wanted to learn the components of the life effort framework although at the time I had only an opaque general direction to get started on.
I left full time employment and set up a new for-profit private limited corporation without a clear idea of what it would do. I started with an ambitious project âfootprint zeroâ to move Singapore towards full or near-full food self-sufficiency. The government would later come up with their own less ambitious goal of being 30% self-sufficient by 2030. I hired an intern, recruited a director well known in the field and signed a lease for a workshop to build a hydroponic based farming prototype. I started out with a conference in Europe with a set of fresh ideas but no idea of how I would attract funding or create a sustainable business model. I wasnât motivated to make a multiple from selling a niche product and there were a number of conversations pulling me in that direction. I didnât want to solve a problem for an investor, I wanted to solve the problem for society. After a number of rounds of pitches and conversations, leads that didnât go anywhere I had come to accept that any financial resources I put into the project would not be recovered. I considered exiting the lease early in Jan 2018 when I was contacted by a few young students and fresh grads that offered to volunteer. They were interested in the aim of the project and attracted to the opportunity to learn about hydroponics hands on. One of them was the same intern I had briefly hired in the early part of the project but now she was returning out of her own interest and not for the money. That was an important milestone for me in my learning journey. Up until that point I had been working alone and was disappointed that I hadnât produced anything worthwhile. Things started to change once there were partners in the journey. One partner helped to build the growth chamber prototype, another helped to learn about capsicum annum and another helped to write the technical report about a novel vertical farm concept design as a facade extension - âFoodwallâ. I could have turned back at that point when the lease ended and the report was done in mid 2019 and collect my thoughts on what I had learned. Instead, something unexpected disrupted my plans.
You say nothing in life is black or white, but that is a lie. A very dangerous lie. Either we prevent a 1.5 degree of warming or we donât. [...]
I donât want your hope... I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is. - Greta Thunberg Jan 2019 Davos
The gravity and urgency of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of 2018 on global warming of 1.5 C hit me in March 2019. While I would eventually read the report, it was the delivery of the message through Greta Thuburg that connected the problem to me through words and tone that sounded like my own. Gretaâs scientific reality was the foil to Nickâs engineering optimism and I could identify with both of them in that moment. In one of the two times in my life, the recent divorce being the second, I cried. I was overcome with a range of emotions of grief, anger, but also a sense of responsibility to do whatever I could afford to make a dent on this problem. What I saw when I looked at the problem of climate change was a slow motion risk management failure turning into a crisis global scale. It had an uncanny resemblance to the management failures that I had been given the responsibility to prevent in chemical process safety such as Piper Alpha. I understood that problems like these are failures of appreciating the vulnerabilities of human systems. Unlike Nick I would not put off solving climate change so that I could build an iron man suit.
Together with my wife as a partner I moved into the public spaces to find others that shared the same sense of urgency. The way that I approached problem solving had a different character from the footprint zero project. Instead of looking first for a solution, I chose to look for the community of other like-minded people who shared my concern for the problem. It took a few iterations but it wasnât hard. During the summer of 2019 the panic of climate change could be felt everywhere if you bothered to look. In this new project
I was not moving in with my solution idea to sell to others, but insead asking myself what role I can fulfil to help this community to solve the problem for themselves.
Sometimes I did more knowledge intensive tasks like research, at other times it was more simple things like conducting workshops, setting up training materials or doing catering logistics. I wasnât a decision maker, but rather a facilitator. When the group was going through a break, I would hit the books and do some research on questions that had often come up in conversations. Through the second half of 2019 and 2020 I improvised by listening to the needs of the community and filling in when I could opportunities to plug a gap. Usually this involved research. I published articles on various platforms - ResearchGate, Medium around the theme of how to apply a just transition âGreen New Dealâ to Singapore.