Reprogramming Directive

It’s taken for granted that at least once in your life, you will do a whole lot of soul searching and wonder “Who am I and what am I doing here?” Sometimes this crisis happens very late in life (the “mid-life crisis”), sometimes people are really pro-active and start asking as soon as they can talk. These days, it’s often happening to people in their twenties or what’s been termed a “quarter-life crisis“.

I first heard this term about a year ago from a colleague as her twenty-fifth birthday was approaching and she started questioning whether she was in the right career. Myself, I started questioning where I was going back in 2007, after I had finished my Ernst & Young internship and during the final year of my Bachelor of Commerce degree. I was 20. Either I got to an early start or my colleague is going to have a much longer life!

At the time, my colleague and I commiserated, discussed our options and gave each other a few suggestions on what we could do about our situation.

One year later, my colleague has taken full advantage of the opportunities which opened up to her and she is now working in the Ernst & Young London office, in a completely different capacity (i.e. not an audit senior).

One year later, I’m still here, working as an audit senior in the Ernst & Young Sydney Office.

We both had comparable motivations, education and skill set and opportunities. Why was she able to change her situation so completely in a year and why am I still here, one year later?

Chinese Tradition in Ancient Times

Disclaimer: This is a purely anecdotal account based on my own upbringing and the upbringing of my family and friends and not intended to be held as a historically or statistically accurate statement of fact.

Ancient China was a scholastic meritocracy, where education was the ticket to a better social position. By studying hard, you were more likely to pass the Imperial Examinations, which meant you could gain a position at court, even if you were born into a poor peasant family, bringing honour to your family. That is why to this day, Chinese people believe white collar jobs are better than blue collar jobs and see only four generally acceptable career paths: doctor, lawyer, accountant/business person and teacher. That is also why Chinese people believe jobs at big prestigious companies or governments are better than jobs at small- and mid-sized businesses.

Chinese culture also has a very deep rooted respect for elders. Your elders have lived longer than you; they have more life experienced because they’ve “crossed more bridges than you’ve walked along roads” and “eaten more salt than you’ve eaten rice” and so they are wiser and more knowledgeable. You do not disrespect or dishonour your elders or your family. You do not disobey your parents.

Chinese Tradition in Modern Day Society (20th/21st Century)

While there are no more Imperial Examinations, in Hong Kong and China, the university entrance exams have taken over instead. Getting into a good university can make a huge difference.

As a result, many Chinese parents demand academic perfection. Chinese kids are brought up very differently to their peers.

• They are sent off to intensive after school coaching classes very early on, as early as primary school.
• They don’t have play-dates with other kids; they go to piano or violin lessons or go home and do extra homework.
• Because of physical build, Chinese kids generally play sports like badminton, table tennis or gymnastics, rather than track, field, football, or cricket.
• Chinese kids don’t take non-traditional subjects or subjects which don’t to either one of the allowable career paths or a white collar job.

Failure is not an option. Admitting defeat by quitting is not an option. Also, the definition of “failing” is not the same as the school’s definition or the standard definition of below 50%. “Failing” in modern Chinese culture is a flexible term which can refer to any or all of the following:

• Not equalling or bettering your previous result in that subject
• Getting a lower mark than your friend, or your parents’ friends’ son/daughter/niece/nephew
• Not being at or near the top of your class/grade

I am very lucky and blessed to have Chinese parents who don’t adhere blindly to Chinese Tradition. They never sent me to coaching class after coaching class; they never told me I couldn’t do subjects like Drama; they supported me when I wanted to do an insane array of extracurricular activities; and most of all, they never demanded more than me giving everything my best effort.

I’ll illustrate with a flashback to a Year 11 Parent/Teacher Night. I was taking Extension I Mathematics with the intent to take Extension II Mathematics in my final year. I had never failed anything before my life but on my last class exam, I got 4 out of 32.

Completely. Unacceptable. By any standards, let alone Chinese Tradition. My parents weren’t furious, they were only concerned. But even with my awesome parents, I was still affected by this Chinese Tradition mentality. Failure. Unacceptable.

I’ll never forget sitting in front of my maths teacher (hands clenched in my lap, face burning with embarrassment and trying to hold back tears) as she told my parents that I was better off dropping out of Extension Mathematics altogether and just stick with plain Advanced Mathematics. I did not like maths. It was not my favourite subject. Being Chinese and failing at maths (well, failing at anything, but particularly failing at maths) is like dishonour. I felt I had to prove my teacher wrong and prove it to the world. So I never dropped that class. I refused to “quit”, took Extension II Mathematics and got a great result in my HSC exams.

Escaping The Chinese Tradition Trap

The Chinese Tradition Trap is rooted in an unwillingness to “admit defeat” because “failure is unacceptable”.

While companies use internship programs to screen candidates for permanent positions, it’s also a way to see what a particular career path is like. Probation periods also work along similar lines. Usually by the time you’ve been in an industry for anywhere between three to six months, you have a good idea of whether you like being there. At any point in time I could have decided that auditing and accounting is not for me. Many of my peers did – only 5 of my intake of 13 interns still remain at Ernst & Young; the rest figured out the internship wasn’t what they wanted and made their moves.

Similarly, going through high school, there was a huge perception that you had to get your subject choices right so you could get into the right degree for the right job; and if you didn’t get all of that right, that was it. Having gone through university now, I know that’s not true. You can change your subjects, your majors, your university, even your degree. You can choose alternative pathways like vocational education, summer school and short courses or pursue further studies after your undergraduate degree with graduate diplomas and masters degrees. There are an incredible number of ways to get to where you want to go.

My colleague had a very different upbringing so I don’t think she ever got stuck in the Chinese Tradition Trap. She was able to view her options objectively and consider them on their individual merits without automatically associating one of them with failure. As a result, she didn’t hold back and she was able to fully pursue the opportunities that came her way.

But for me, quitting the internship, changing degrees, majors or even subjects was unthinkable. On some level of my mind, I equated that with admitting failure, and it was unacceptable to fail. Thus, I never seriously took up any of the opportunities that came my way.

Not for a minute did I consider that the true failure was being unable to say to myself “This is not for me” and spending a lifetime doing something I don’t like.

If you’re a fairly easy-going person, chances are you’ve used the phrase “Oh, I might as well” before. Once or twice usually isn’t a problem. It becomes a problem when once or twice turns into every so often which inevitably becomes every time. “I might as well” is probably one of the reasons why I’m still in audit.

We say “I might as well” for a lot of reasons, but mainly because:

• We think it won’t take a lot of additional time or effort, OR
• We lack direction and don’t really know what we should/want to do
• We can’t bear the thought of throwing in the towel after spending X amount of time and Y amount of money already on something (because that would be like failing)

Most people who have studied economics would be aware of the terms “sunk costs” and “incremental costs”.

“Sunk costs” are those costs which have already been incurred and no matter what you do, you can’t change that and get your money back. In accounting and finance, when we learn about what information to include in a decision-making models, we exclude “sunk costs” since no matter what is decided, those costs cannot be recovered and therefore shouldn’t affect the decision one way or another. It’s easy to condemn bad decision making when it’s presented in textbook format but it’s very hard to acknowledge it when it comes to sunk costs in your own life. In other words, you’ve already invested time and resources into your situation, so you “might as well” go through with it to the fullest extent.

“Incremental costs” are those additional costs which you will incur in order to do XYZ. You can avoid incremental costs by deciding not to go through with XYZ as they are future costs which you haven’t committed to yet. If you’ve committed yourself to those costs and you can’t do anything about it, they become sunk costs.

Mistake #1: Failing To Consider Incremental Costs When Deciding What To Do

When I was selecting my subjects in high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I hedged my bets and took mainstream subjects which were supposed to give me a higher UAI score. Lo and behold, before I even realised it, 8 out of the 10 minimum units were taken up by 2 subjects, 1 of them maths. I don’t even like maths!

According to the Board of Studies NSW, each unit of study requires 60 hours of classroom study per year. I ended up wasting a lot of time.

That’s 18 hours of class that could have been spent on more relevant subjects that would have helped considerably and that I enjoy:

• Drama – I could have learned about dramatic structures and techniques
• Design & Technology – I could have learned about set design
• Textiles – I could have learned how to design and make costumes

Or 18 hours that I could have spent on extracurricular activities like:

• Joining a local musical society
• Staying involved in choral activities in high school and producing the third instalment of “A Night On Broadway”
• Trying to write a high school musical like so many great Broadway composers (side note: apparently it would help tremendously if I were also male and named “Stephen”; maybe I should change my name to “Stephanie”)

None of these were sunk costs when I was selecting subjects. They were all incremental costs that I should have thought about when I was making my decisions.

Mistake #2: Considering Sunk Costs When You Shouldn’t

I am still stuck in the “I Might As Well” trap today. You would think after coming to the realisation that I didn’t want to be in accounting I would have stopped right then and there and figured out what I could do with my life. Instead, I thought “I have a steady job so I might as well go back to work while I figure out what I want to do.” I then thought “I might as well start my CA while I’m here.”

2 years comprising of 500 hours of study and about $10,000 later (5 modules at approximately $1,200 tuition fees plus $600 in study support), I’m now in the middle of studying for my final EBA exam and my care factor is non-existent.

After every module, I would kick myself. What was I doing, continually racking up these study costs? But I couldn’t stop, not only because that would be admitting failure but because it seemed like such a waste of my undergraduate degree and my entire internship. It also seemed like a tremendous waste of the modules I had completed to date, especially after I had completed the FIN and TAX modules, since they were perceived as the “hardest” and by then I was halfway through my technical modules.

What could I have done with 500 hours and $10,000?

• Finally learned how to read and write fluently in Chinese
• Paid off a significant chunk of my mortgage
• Saved 5% towards a 2 year graduate musical theatre writing degree at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU and completed a significant portion of the 20 minute portfolio requirements
• Gone on an awesome holiday in Europe
• See 100 shows with awesome seats

I continually kept thinking about the costs of my degree, my internship and the modules I had done to date. These costs would only be relevant if I am going to continue to pursue a degree in business. But the moment I decided I’m going to pursue my dreams of music, these costs became irrelevant; they were sunk costs. I would have been much better off disregarding the CA altogether.

The Root Cause: Forgetting The Opportunity Costs

We all know we should weigh the pros and cons of each decision, but most of us are pretty terrible at it since humans are naturally both loss adverse and risk adverse, “a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush” and all. Thus we always tend to choose the safe option of what we know, rather than chasing the uncertain dream. But we forget that in doing so we tend to overvalue what we have.

“I Might As Well” Is Not Good Enough

It’s really easy to just go through the motions every day, forget why we’re doing things and just go along with the flow because you “might as well”. But a day becomes a week which becomes a month and before you know it years have gone by and all you’ve done is live life by going through the motions.

I look back at my life for the past two years and I can count up the total number of meaningful things I’ve done that really mattered to me on a “this is my reason for living” level on my two hands. Assuming each meaningful thing takes an average of 1 day, that’s at least 355 days out of the year on which I am not doing a single, meaningful thing.

That’s a pretty miserable way to live life. It’s not life at all, it’s a waste of a life. I think Jonathan Larson summed it up best in these lines:

One Song Glory

From the pretty boy front Man
Who wasted opportunity

Every time I hear Adam Pascal sing those words I get a chill.

Some people might be lucky enough or focused enough or self aware enough to be doing meaningful things every single day of their lives.

Another Day

There is no future
There is no past
I live this moment as my last
There’s only us
There’s only this
Forget regret
Or life is yours to miss
No other road
No other way
No day but today

The rest of us are generally too afraid or too complacent. We lose sight of the big picture and get stuck worrying about these sunk costs. Or we get caught up and forget to consider incremental costs. And so we end up with a really big bill in opportunity costs.

I don’t want to keep putting off living life to “another day”. There’s “no day but today“.

Many people spend their lives wishing they were good at something. They look at people who are good at that something and they envy them. And because of that, it is not socially acceptable for someone to dislike something they are good at, since they will inevitably cop a backlash of “How can you say that? You’re so good at it! I would love to be as good as you are.”

There’s an overwhelming expectation or assumption that if you’re good at something (i.e. you have aptitude for it), you must enjoy it (i.e. you have a passion for your aptitude). I think this is a fundamentally flawed assumption. We can be great at things we don’t like and we can love things we’re completely hopeless at.

I have great attention to detail, an ability to understand complicated issues or concepts quickly and analyse a set of facts. This makes me very, very good at being an external auditor. But I spend most of my free time buried in a fantasy novel, going to shows, playing the piano or reading design blogs. This means my job – where 90% of the time is about whether you’ve ticked a box in a checklist or not – is a horrible fit given my passion for the creative arts.

The logical conclusion is obvious. A lifetime of being good at something that you don’t like and not being allowed to express the fact that you don’t like it means you end up with a lot of issues, such as disliking your job but not being able to quit, thinking there is something fundamentally wrong with you for not liking something you’re good at and so you keep on trying even though you really don’t like it and internalising all your misery and end up depressed, burning out, having a nervous breakdown or all of the above.

Depression: Affects More People Than You Think

Since I officially moved out into my own apartment in August last year, I’ve been getting a lot of junk mail. Generally, it’s the usual run of IGA catalogues, real estate agents hounding me about either selling my place or renting it out, and pizza coupons and takeaway food menus. I also got pamphlets and handy fridge magnets from Beyond Blue, an Australian organisation dedicating to providing information about depression to the general population at large. At work, I also constantly see signs notifying everyone that there’s a free counselling service available to all partners and employees.

The most recent ABS study on mental health and wellbeing in 2007 found 1 in 5 Australians suffer from mental illness each year with depression being the second most common disorder. Running the numbers, that means over 650,000 Australians suffer from depression each year.

Up until recently, I pretty much shrugged off all the facts and figures and everything being shoved in our face about depression. It wasn’t until I started talking to my friends and colleagues and listening to my parents talk about their network that I really started paying attention:

• Most of my colleagues at senior accountant level and below are not happy at work. Accounting firms are in a high turnover industry but the recent spate of resignations at the level at which they are happening is ridiculous. Over the last 12 months there’s been more than 10 senior accountants and half of the experienced junior accountants have left in my division alone, with more contemplating their alternatives, like Matthew Caldicott who is a junior accountant in the Financial Services division and took a career break to go on MasterChef Australia 2010.
• My managers at work appear to be generally content with staying in their jobs, even if they are getting hammered by client deadlines.
• My partners at work love it. Probably because they get an average cash salary of $500k.
• Most of my ex-colleagues who have left are far, far happier than before and don’t regret a thing.
• Most of my colleagues who are still here have stayed because they like their colleagues.
• In every single farewell speech I have ever heard and departure email I have ever read, everyone always mentions the great people they worked with – no one has ever mentioned the great work.
• My happiest friends are not the ones with the flashiest cars, most expensive clothes or highest-paying jobs.
• My happiest friends are the ones who are in jobs where they have both aptitude and passion, or the ones who still have no idea what they want to do but are out there doing their best to find out.
• My unhappiest friends are those who haven’t worked out what they want and haven’t done anything about it.

A Google Trends search on depression, happiness and career shows some interesting results (out of curiosity, I threw in global financial crisis just for kicks).

Obsession: The Pursuit of Happiness

I don’t think anyone will find it surprising that people are obsessed with being happy. We grow up listening to fairy tales where everyone lives happily ever after. We’re brought up with the idealised Great Australian Dream of a house on a quarter-acre block, 2.5 kids and pets. We think having a stable 9-to-5 job, a house like the ones in Better Homes & Gardens magazines and more money than we know what to do with will make us happy.

A whole industry around the pursuit of happiness has developed with companies such as The Happiness Institute providing seminars, training and events based on the science of positive psychology. There’s over 1.3 million research papers on positive psychology and articles in management publications and at least 50 TED Talks on understanding what makes us happy.

What does surprise me is unhappy people can be so 矛盾 (máodùn). They’re unhappy with their lives but they refuse to acknowledge it or, worse, they acknowledge it but refuse to do anything to change their situation or, worst of all, they place their hopes in things which aren’t going to help at all, like lottery tickets or hoping their dream job will fall into their laps from out of the sky or thinking if they wish enough it will come true.

Change is difficult, I know that. I know how difficult it is to fight against your upbringing, what it feels like to contemplate leaving the certainty of a well-paying, stable job and the sense of being overwhelmed by a seemingly unreachable goal. After all, I’m probably crazy in thinking I could go from being an external auditor to writing Broadway musicals.

Repression: The Disconnect Between Aptitude and Passion

By virtue of competition and the laws of supply and demand, most of us end up in jobs where we have some degree of aptitude, but not a great deal of passion. Some of us are not so lucky and end up working dead end jobs where we don’t have any aptitude or passion just to make ends meet. Others decide they’ve had enough – only to fail horribly and/or gain internet/popular culture infamy when it becomes evident they have no aptitude for it. A small group are able to find their dream jobs, but even then, they need to work hard to stay there and some come to realise dreams are not what they seem.

Progression: Keep Trying New Things

千里之行始於足下。
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
—老子 Lǎozǐ, Tao Te Ching

One of the hardest things to do is to look at yourself critically and acknowledge truths you don’t like.

I don’t like the fact I’ve spent 720 hours in high school, 3 years at university and another 500 hours and $10,000 towards a career I have a lot of aptitude for but zero passion.

I don’t like being torn between wanting to pursue my dreams and the constant internal voiceover telling me music is not an acceptable career path and I should stick to something I’m good at, that’s stable and pays well.

I don’t like the idea of looking back at my life when I grow too old to dream and find that I’ve made no difference at all on the world.

The next hardest thing is doing something about it.

It’s been two years since I came back from New York. Since then, I’ve watched a few shows, started a web design business with a friend, picked up two clients at work in the music/performing arts industry, attended a Talent Development Project workshop, met Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty and negotiated a flexible work arrangement to allow me some time to figure out what I want to do and I started a piano blog which I’m still not too good at updating.

It’s been exactly one month since I started my flexible work arrangement. In the last month, I closed down my old blog and started this one to keep me accountable to myself so I don’t end up doing nothing at all, watched more shows and went to the UNSW Post Graduate Expo to figure out what my options are. I’ve talked to more people about what I want to do and how to get there and feel like I’m making really slow progress, but progress nonetheless.

My EBA exam is happening in the next month so I don’t expect to get a whole lot done, other than going to more shows and keeping this blog updated. Loathe as I am and as much as I’ll harp on about it, I need to focus and get this done because at this point, the incremental benefits of completing my CA far outweigh the costs.

One step at a time. Get the CA done, then get back on track with figuring how to get to Broadway.