Reflections on a Year Spent in "Solitude".

2020 begins in earnest for me in Korea, with great holiday and an impromptu business meeting in Seoul that went well. A couple of business trips and successful deals later, I am set to take a couple of days off for Chinese New Year. But there were some troubles brewing in the sidelines - the detection of a new strain of Coronavirus in the city of Wuhan.

We all know how it all went from then on. It was nothing but mayhem and frustrations for all of us. Being in the PPE business, it was a lot of hustle and bustle. Being a parent, the year "zoom" by quickly but painfully in the literal sense with home-based learning through Zoom. I admired the teachers greatly for keeping the energetic bunch of kids glued to the screen for even just the first 5 minutes of the lesson. Being a citizen, not a day goes by without much focus on how my country is coping. Being alive in 2020, not a day goes by without checking out the latest #Covid19 update.

We were forced to work and live in solitude in 2020. The irony is that because we made the world so well connected and social, the only way to prevent a highly infectious virus to spread even faster is to isolate ourselves.

Reflecting on this irony brings wry smile to my face. God has a way of injecting dry humor into our lives. This is not the only irony I learnt from 2020. As I looked back at myself and the world in 2020,I spotted 3 ironies:

1. We know everything but we also don't know anything. Despite predictions and preparedness for disaster, pandemic and crisis, we are still ignorant about how we are going to react. One virus made us retreated into our "caves" for months until we somehow figured it out.
2. Opportunities of the whole world is at our doorstep (in this internet and highly connected era) but so is everything else that is negative. Just as goods and services arrived in the plane loads, viruses could enter by the same way. (This was sort of a repeat lesson from history when smallpox and other diseases arrived by sea and decimated the natives in South America.)
3. Fortune reversals. If anything, 2020 is the year the Oil & Gas industry is taken off the drip. It is not dead yet but 2020 is not helping it either. Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil were some of the most profitable shares to own but their value had diminished greatly in 2020. It is not dead but would you hold onto it? Sea Freights looked to be dying but now, its successor, Air Freight, looks more dead. Online meeting tools were merely sophistical toys for the big corporations before 2020. Now, my 5 year old girl knows how to use Zoom better than i do. The fortune reversals of 2020 is right out of Rocky movies. A battered up Rocky Balboa swaying and staggering but never gave up. Then, he landed a punch. It worked. He landed another. And soon, the opponent was knocked out cold. (I could go on and on about fortune reversals but guess i should stop here.)

2020 was supposed to be the year where we get more connected. Ironically, we lived in more solitude than in previous years. World issues like income equalities, poverty and racism, instead of getting solved, had became worse.

I took a short ferry trip yesterday evening with my family to one of the outlying islands. Since we can't travel out, taking a ferry out seemed the closest we get to a tour. While admiring the sunset on the second last day of the year, I was reminded of a satire comic i saw last year. It showed a couple of aliens looking at each other puzzled. in between them is a screen showing images of our New Year Celebrations. One of them had a speech bubble that read, "Why are they so excited about completing an orbit?"

It was then that I realized that I almost missed out on one of the biggest lesson 2020 brings. It is also something that I always encouraged my daughter to do. It is also something we always ask our domestic helper to do. Yet, I had somehow almost miss out on that. I always told them to "always ask questions till you are clear on what to do."

The Year 2020 taught me to ask it questions. On looking back, my year involved asking questions and lots of it (before asking for more orders from my clients). Somehow, the minimal successes achieved in 2020 was due to questions being asked. And those questions are not being ask for the sake of asking. These questions are asked to challenge assumptions. These questions are asked to redraw boundaries of considerations. These questions are asked to identify root reasons.

A: Ask to Challenge Assumptions

We hold all sort of assumptions within us. I assumed my wife would like flowers for birthday this year like she was last year. But she don't. Assumptions are derived from our knowledge of things. In 2020, I had learnt to challenge all assumptions and to ask if they still hold water. It is important for us to revisit all of these assumptions that they eventually formed much of the basis for our decisions.

In all honesty, I had told myself that I could not sell more goggles in September. The prices that are coming from China and Vietnam just looked ridiculous. I assumed that no one is going to pay more than they are paying for these cheaper products. Even though there were still pretty stout demands for it, my assumption in part stopped the sales. A conversation changed my assumption of that: "What if someone else is paying for it?" (Since every customer since start of Covid was essentially buying for own use, I had formed the assumption that I should look for "users who are also buyers"). That, in part, broke down my assumption and we did achieved results and sold more goggles. That would not be achievable if I did not challenge my assumption that the buyer and user are the same.

B: Ask to redraw boundaries

Without business travels, I have a lot more time at hand. I immersed into work, like any good employer does. In June, I realized that something is not quite right. Perhaps it was "working from home" PTSD, I was feeling agitated rather easily. Being a man with a history in area of anger management, this is an alarm. I began to ask myself questions to redefine my boundaries between work and life. (I'm a believer that there is no work-life balance but just work-life equilibrium. you can do 90% work and 10% and still be in equilibrium if that is the need proportion at that time of your life.) More importantly, I was able to put to better use resources available to me at work and at home.

With this, I tried many different things in the time gained. I do online courses (and still doing and enjoying). I did more housework and grocery. I spent a lot more time with my daughter and in her school work. I taught her how to play football. I taught her how to paint. A year ago, my family life is troubled (to put in the mildest term). Because 2020 forced me to ask questions to redefine my boundaries, it became better. In fact, there will be new addition to the family in 2021.

C: Identify root reasons

My daughter is going to Primary school in 2021. We spent a lot of our free time preparing her and enrolling her for schools. We wanted her to receive education in the local school systems as it is our opinion that the international schools in HK aren't suitable for her. (Without competition and pushing, she will probably be learning nothing laissez faire style -a style quite commonly used in international schools in HK.) We did not make any headway in the beginning. We were getting frustrated until we started asking questions. We started looking for root reasons why we aren't successful. Is it nationality? Is it language? Is it her skipping of K1 here? We found out that being an extrovert, she is not accustomed to being taped for videos or even Zoom interviews. She preferred face-to-face interaction, much like me. That refined our criteria and we only focus our efforts on schools that still does face-to-face interview during the Covid period. And she was accepted into a couple of schools. The school enrolment is a mayhem for parents in HK but asking questions to identify root reasons can sort it all out.

Looking back, in conclusion of 2020, it wasn't a year that all of us hoped it would turned out to be. It was more of a Dolph Lundgren raining blows and fist on a prime and fit Rocky Balboa. But we all stood strong. We all strong up. Like Rocky, we returned the punches.

Today is the last day of 2020, we made it to KO 2020 and say, "we made it".

We made the orbit.