We have always viewed our small size and lack of natural resources as liabilities.

But in an increasingly uncertain, rapidly changing world, our size and our reliance on rapidly-retrainable human resources are increasingly valuable assets that few other countries have — and that we should actively cultivate.

Unlike countries whose economies depend on industries that take decades to build and change, Singapore has many of the prerequisites to be a country that can turn on a dime. But we are not there yet.

To get there, as a country and as individuals, we will need to learn to think small so we can be adaptable.

Since 1965, we have done the opposite; we’ve thought big as a country, figuratively, to compensate for being small. Thinking big is particularly true of how we have approached training Singaporeans.

Our education system is extraordinarily effective at funnelling Singaporeans from a young age into distinct streams for high-quality training in concrete skills that are useful for clearly-defined and stable jobs.

Take, for example, a student who wants to eventually get into a mechanical engineering degree course and become an engineer. She decides to take more than the minimum number of O-level subjects and chooses Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Additional Mathematics among them.

These O-level subjects make her both more suited for and more comfortable with a science and mathematics-intensive A-level course, which makes her a better candidate for an engineering programme at university.

She eventually enters the workforce after university as a mechanical engineer, replete with relevant skills built over a decade of preparation.

This intense, single-minded commitment to skills education has given Singaporeans hard academic training that few countries match or exceed, and has made many Singaporeans well-adapted for the particular careers and situations for which they have prepared.

Such intense investment in skills-oriented education was strategically wise when a person’s career could realistically be expected to last for decades and evolve predictably.

But this is increasingly unlikely, now that whole economies change frequently and unexpectedly.

Singaporeans today urgently need training in the meta-skills that will allow them to adapt to many different situations instead of just one situation.

As light industry becomes less important and services become more important in Singapore, jobs for “pure” mechanical engineers will be increasingly hard to come by.

What will happen to our well-adapted mechanical engineer if she does not want to do any other kind of work, or cannot?

Singapore’s economy has been changing increasingly quickly and profoundly and this trend will probably continue.

To survive and flourish, each of us will have to be able to puzzle out unfamiliar situations on our own, detect unexpected changes in our environment, and then be able to change the way we do things when we realise that the rules of the game have changed — as they have already begun to.

We are not naturally comfortable with this level of ambiguity and uncertainty. Most of us have tried our best to avoid it by seeking the most certain, stable path we can find — a path that often leads to a single destination.

But just as living in a sterile environment seems safer but ultimately makes the body’s immune system more susceptible to attack, always pursuing safety and certainty ultimately makes it less likely that we will have the skills and habits that allow us to survive or flourish when things change suddenly, when we suddenly realise that the destination we are heading for no longer exists.

Forcing ourselves to learn to be good enough at many things — to learn to be adaptable — requires much more failure than getting on, then travelling, a clear path to a foregone conclusion.

But being good enough at many things instead of being very good at only a few things is perhaps the most powerfully adaptive form of thinking small.

Someone who is good enough at many things finds it easier to do many things, and is more likely to be able to adapt to new work and ways of living every time the economy changes.

When conventional engineering jobs dry up, a trained mechanical engineer also interested in and knowledgeable about coffee has options a pure engineer would not: She might, for instance, find it enjoyable and profitable to start a small company making niche coffee equipment.

Training ourselves to be more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty does not mean taking only big risks, or resigning ourselves to lives adrift and permanently unmoored. Instead, the opposite is true.

Becoming more comfortable with uncertainty requires us to consciously design our lives to be smaller and lighter, so that the risks we must take are more manageable and what we care about most is more carefully protected.

Part of this design process involves thinking harder and more clearly than we have in the past about what we really want and what we are — and are not — willing to give up to get what we want.

With a clear idea of what our true priorities are, the other things we now pursue can be stripped away. Our coffee-loving mechanical engineer will find it much easier to find an unconventional path to a good life if she has many other interests and abilities and knows what she really wants.

And she will find it much easier to choose that unconventional path if her needs are few and carefully selected enough to give her the freedom to take a few wrong turns along the way.

A smaller and lighter life from which many things have been stripped away probably sounds like failure in itself — but it is not.

Thinking small and designing our lives to focus on only the things that matter allow us to have more control than we used to have.

Smaller, lighter lifestyles are easier to maintain when circumstances suddenly change.

Most importantly, they free us to try many things that might not work, and thus make it easier for us to discover some things that do.

Source:
courtesy of TODAY

by Vaughn Tan

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