Taking stock

Just as for the footprint zero project, I had to decide for myself what would satisfy me to bring this sprint to a close. It was again time to collect on my learnings and take stock of where I was at in my mission impossible. In 2020 US politics intersected with the climate change problem globally when then president Donald Trump took an openly hostile policy towards the climate change effort. The combined freezing of social opportunity from the pandemic and the unprecedented drama of the 2020 US presidential election focused my remaining cursor of effort on the US election. On 7 Nov 2020 when Pennsylvania was called for Joe Biden and his ambitious “Green New Deal in all but name” agenda, that was enough closure for me.

In this moment of closure I have a few questions to address:

1. What have I learned from my 2.5 year crash course as a social entrepreneur?

2. What do I want to accomplish in the next 5 years and what do I need to prioritize now to have the best chance of getting there?

3. How worried should I be this year about losing S$ 37k from my net worth? and why?

4. What does that mean for how I plan for retirement?

What have I learned from my 2.5 year crash course as a social entrepreneur?

What I had learned in the past 2.5 years was a learning-by-doing introduction to social entrepreneurship and deeper clarity on where I fit in and the problem definition for urban sustainability. I had set out to learn what it meant to be a social entrepreneur. I wanted to understand how to deploy financial resources and organize teams constructively towards problems of the commons. Towards that end I had achieved what I set out to accomplish. I went through several iterations, false starts, initiatives that didn’t go anywhere but I also had some successes. Near the end of my journey in Jan 2021 I had successfully organized a small team of volunteers to apply for a government grant and applied the skills and domain that I had learned.

I also learned my comparative specialization in teams. I gained practice in various competencies of research from problem identification, literature review analysis and building a compelling argument narrative. I also learned how much I enjoy the role as an educator and communicator. This is the passion component of my career discovery. I enjoy the process of curating and disseminating knowledge content. That was the common denominator in Nick and Greta’s speeches. It is the shoulders of the giants on which all of us stand and it is the black and white warning beacon from IPCC climate scientists. My contributions frequently took the form of something that can be published with a Creative Commons license - writing (code and prose), data analysis, videos, etc.. I could validate the cumulative impact from my efforts in measures of followers, mentions and downloads.

While I hadn’t identified it as a need at the time, what I had also learned was depth into the complexity of urban sustainability. Climate change is only a symptom of long standing questions in human behavior and how we organize ourselves for large scale collective action. The urban sustainability question touches on among other things open questions in economics, the use of technology, trust and leadership. To solve urban sustainability demands both to understand the final steady state model of the new society and the roadmap for how to get there and I have taken away learning insights on both questions.

Which brings me to the present in February 2021 where I have different paths ahead to choose from and to decide on the next sprint.

What do I want to accomplish in the next 5 years and what do I need to prioritize now to have the best chance of getting there?

I have much remaining to learn in my entrepreneurial skills and urban sustainability domain knowledge, and will continue to capitalize and grow these strengths. There were, however, other gaps that I had hardly made a dent in - community, turnback capacity and constraints.

Building relationships in my communities

The connectivity of relationship networks are the means by which ideas grow into movements. This is true for conventional entrepreneurs looking to make millions or social entrepreneurs aiming to change the world for the better. From the beginning of my venture I could feel that I was missing both the starting network connections to begin my search and the skills of navigating these relationships. I could see there was always a force that would pull my attention back to the technical depths of the problem analysis or getting the prototype out. The effort of expanding and deepening my network feels either intimidating, tiring or uninteresting or some blend of these and others. The end result is that I am critically starved of the lifelines for an entrepreneur. In the later phases of my efforts when I could see the benefits of working in teams and making a more proactive public presence it provided further evidence that networks had been in critical deficiency. Recently I started practicing icebreakers, conversations and exploring with a bit of curiosity to see what expanding my network could look like by jumping right in. I am reminded of the energy investment and my inclination to revert back to the comfort and stimulation of knowledge curation in solitude. I want to learn how and where to search for communities that share similar interests, passion for the mission and complement my skills. That gets me up to the door so utilizing these opportunities demands that I also develop relationship building skills and decision making clarity for how to strike the right balance of online and offline effort.

The search for community that shares my interests in the curation and dissemination of knowledge may lead me to look for opportunities into academia. Entrepreneurs often find themselves situated in the nexus of academia, government and the business world. This is an idea that has come up a few times in the past but for concern of my retirement plans I had always found a reason to give it a pass. While there are skeptics, academia is an institution that values the use of knowledge for improving society and a path in this direction may be an appropriate fit for the moment.

Turnback

Turnback is the ability to recover a rate of savings that would maintain a predictable slope towards retirement. Keeping my living expenses most is relatively easy for me to control. The critical factor is an hourly compensation rate of >S$40/hr. It took three years to recover my income level after the disruption of the move from Texas to Singapore. One of the features of this life framework from the conventional script is the idea that my earning potential can be recovered again if I need it. I broke into a continuous employment streak and there is no guarantee that I can recover back to what I had before. Recovering may demand that I continuously practice my core strengths and add new competencies to adapt to opportunities in new roles and industries. Picking up knowledge in a new domain is something I enjoy. What I have come to appreciate is the skill of committing and controlling my focus. There were several natural turnback opportunities through the 2.5 year journey and at each of these points I had not invested in the resolve to turnback. Without a sufficient commitment to re-establish income even if for a short period the uncertainty could risk eroding the resolve for more deep investments towards the larger mission.

Constraints

Short run constraints matter. The sudden extended leash from the news of the PR kickstarted my journey and now are the forces pulling back to consider a more careful way forward. If I respond to discomfort of readjustment in this moment with reactive recoil the uncertainties may end up being more limiting than the actual constraints. For this reason clear resolution of short run constraints may be equally as important as the long run retirement math.

How worried should I be this year about losing S$ 37k from my net worth? and why?

When I look at where I have been, and where I need to be I have no reason to doubt that I will be ready for retirement or that I will reach critical constraints to meet my basic living needs. What I am more concerned about is my turnback resolve and resolution of short term constraints. If I move through this year and lose S$37k but I gain confidence on these questions then I have what I need for executing in the future. If however this is continued to be left as an open uncertainty eventually it will put an abrupt end to whatever momentum I had accumulated. Reducing the - S$37k hit to zero, or - S$15k may be worthwhile for the purpose of validating my turnback capability so that I have a greater understanding of what assumptions I can take in my planning decisions.

What does that mean for how I plan for retirement?

Now when I look at the retirement map I don’t see one curve but instead an operating window between the slow road and the fast road to retirement. This represents the boundary conditions in which I can operate. In the fast road I make a hard pivot into a role that puts me back on track to retirement much as I was doing before, but now when I do reach that launch off point I can come back to the lessons from this trial period. In the slow road, for a few more years I forgo accumulating capital developing skills, investing in the problem development while keeping a careful eye on turnback capability and constraints. Towards the end of the turnback scenario either I have found a new source of sustainable income in the role I create for myself or I start to increase my turnback capabilities and move into a mode of balancing my time between the two.