So, hello!
This would be my first ever blog post written on a whole new Blogger interface. I have been getting the prompts about the update being rolled out soon and it kept on asking me whether I want to try first or not. And I kept on ignoring it too! I've been on this platform for too long and I think they did make changes several times but nothing has been significant enough to confuse me. I gotta say, this newest change that they make is by far the most significant. The interface is much simpler and probably cleaner (thus it should be more aesthetically pleasing?); however, I think the thing with the back-end is that sometimes functionality rules over aesthetic.. And with the new massive simplicity that is being offered at the table, I just miss the old-school complexity where I just knew which to click when I need something. Basically what they removed (and I can't seem to find how to reverse/show this feature) is the HTML part.. now it's weird for me to embed videos from YouTube on posts because the code won't work and I need to copy-paste the video frame, which works too but it's more unreliable on the UX.. okay enough with the ramble.
Basically I'm sharing you guys another video from YouTube! Only this time, it's not a K-pop song recommendation, though I would definitely still have a lot on my hand to give you hehe.
Tonight, on a random event of YouTube-ing (and I gotta say, fate!) I stumbled upon this inspirational video:
I say fate too because I wouldn't have gotten the recommendation to this video and would never click on it if I didn't read my friends' tweet on the other day. On that tweet, he was complimenting on Pak Gita's presentation skill. I was intrigued and did a quick look on his videos on YouTube. At some point, it got me to a video of Sacha (a Youtube) who did review on Pak Gita's English. I think people's good English pronunciation has always been my weak points.. hahah so I did watch the video and wow he is one of the most fluent Indonesian I have ever seen!
On that video, Pak Gita was moderating a talk with Nadeim Makarim. Nadiem is also a cool person that I kinda look up to. He is intelligent, he is eloquent with words, and he is (from what I perceive) quite sincere too. In this (what I planned out as a short reflectional writing), I will try to lay out several key take-aways that might be useful for me to read again and for you to know :)
"DO GOOD TO DO WELL"
On a faithful day in May 2018, I was chosen as the top 2 students from UI to proceed to the final stage of Deloitte Student Ambassador. We will be given a 3-minute time to give impromptu talks about a random topic. I was super glad because I was given a question that is able to entail what I genuinely believe as a person. The question is basically like this, and I quote: if you were the president of Indonesia, what would be the first thing you do?
My answer was to immediately fix the education system because I believe that education is the most crucial part of humanity. With education, people learn how to live with dignity, how to earn a living, and how to furthermore amplify the education that they get for the betterment of a bigger society. Basically, what I want to do as a President is to do good things to society.
This is something that I brag to this day: that day, the only foreign Partner asked one and only question, and that is to me. He asked something about the bureaucracy in Indonesia that I may have to break if I wanted to pursue my goal to do good. I answered that I believe that people are inherently good (this is naive but just let me hold on to this while I still can haha) and since what I want to pursue is basically a good thing, I think at the end of the day I can convince them.
What I saw in that video basically proved to me how people can be inherently good and realistically realize that good deed.
In that video, I get to witness how genuine he is in envisioning Gojek and that kinda moved me. I can tell that he is someone who values good moral compasses greatly. He was also given the same kind of question by Pak Gita, in a business world where you have shareholder to satisfy, how do you convince them? Nadiem answered that basically, the people working in VCs, PEs, etc are people, they are human. Though they indeed want to pursue profit, they also want to make the world a better place. The thing that they do in Gojek is so much transformational that the additional aspects, aside from the financial thingy, excite them too. Wow, my naive talk in 2018 is actually proven here! :)
ON GOJEK VS GRAB
As team Grab (hehe hello Grab rewards), I always see Gojek as just another competitor who did not have a well-developed app, a marketing gimmick that they are pursuing the betterment of Indonesian society, another Indonesian company who oversells their "Indonesianness" as a competitive advantage. However, listening directly from him talking about how the other party is an irrational spender giant made me think otherwise. I started to see Gojek as really an app that is built from our guys to our guys with whatever flaws that they may have. It rang with me too because I did pick Grab aside from Gojek because it pampers me more in terms of discount and that it had muchhhh smoother app compared to Gojek.
Notice that I use past tense when talking about Gojek's app performance. It's because recently Grab has been giving me few and fewer discounts and the Grab rewards started to get less interesting that I started to use Gojek occasionally. I then noticed that the app is much smoother! It is starting to update my balance in real-time, something that I used to only get from Grab. The chat feature is much less buggy. They solved pain-points relating to personal numbers being leaked out by the drivers. They also fixed their problems with GPS positioning. I see improvements and as I watched in that video, how they are really working on their flaws and consumer pain points to be better and better.
Sure, I still have some disagreements over their development direction, like how they provide pay-later which is basically just another credit facility for most likely financially illiterate people, and that is jeopardizing people's spending behavior. I sometimes still cringe when they used "Karya Anak Bangsa" too much like, what, are you trying to have excuses for your more crappy performance compared to competitors? (well they used to). But despite all that, Gojek is basically a tech-giant created under the big belief of "Do good to do well" and hell, that resonates deeply with me! Basically this segment makes mo wonder how does it feel like to actually be able to make impactful decisions in a company as transformational as Gojek. It also makes me question my loyalty too with Grab HAHAHA.
YOU DON'T LEARN FROM YOUR SUCCESSES, YOU LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES
This is nothing new, but I was quite surprised when he straight answered that he learned nothing from successes. It was so straightforward and he did not even try to flower the words, but it's true! I did a lot of things back in uni, I got so many exposures, I got so many experiences. There are wins and losses, there are things that go my way and things that don't. I agree so much with him in this part because honestly, the experience that I remember the most throughout my life is when I fail and how I learned from it.
The worst (and turned out to be the best) committeeship experience was when I was rejected to a division that I hated the most. It was awkward, I clearly showed that I did not like to be in that division. I was shocked by the workload that is beyond my boundaries at that time. That experience is too lengthy to talk about here, but I still believe that my answer in an INKOMPASS interview with that experience in mind to answer the "tell me about the time when things don't go as you planned and how you deal with it" question got me my current amazing job.
WHEN YOU GO THROUGH SO MANY UPS AND DOWNS, YOU REALIZE THAT THINGS DON'T ALWAYS GO UP, BUT THEY DON'T ALWAYS GO DOWN EITHER. YOU GET USED TO IT AND GET A CERTAIN LEVEL OF ZENNESS.
I did realize that I am quite a stoic person. I am not someone who gets stressed a lot. I did get stressed and when I do it's quite severe, but it's only for very few things and usually for the things that I never experience before. I remember not getting too stressed over deadlines anymore because I know that up to this point, I have conquered so many deadlines. I don't get stressed about giving presentations, because I know that I can always survive another even impromptu presentation (geez I just did this morning!). I start to relax more about giving review presentations because I know that I have conquered a few before.
Stoicism is a way of life. But to be realistic, it is also a goal to work towards to, since stoicism requires some kind of life experiences with failures in order for it to be planted well in your mindset: that the failures you have now will have its resolves. This too shall pass, or as Chaeyoung said in TTT (hehhe tetep): 이 또한 지나가리라!
AND IN THE END ASIDE FROM ALL THE LIFE LESSONS, MONEY IS EVERYTHING
I happen to know a thing or two about what Gojek is trying to pursue in the future and probably that thing kinda clashed with what I do in my organization HAHA. In the end, it's all about money. You may do good to do well, but you do good in hope that you can feed yourself too along with the process. If you might have to take over another market and grab a portion of share in that market, might as well that you do.
This last part is a self-reminder for me. As naive as I can be, I need to be skeptical too. People are not human, not angels. They want to contribute to a better world, but only because they also want to live comfortably in that world! So know your purpose, think about how you can contribute to a better world with that purpose, and try hard to live well too.
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I root for Nadiem Makarim so much as our Education Minister and I really hope real changes will start to roll out with him in the ruling now. I am someone who wanted to pursue a better education if I were a president, now that I am not a president but he IS an Education Minister, I wish the best for him! And I wish that like my naive self back in 2018, he will never stop to believe that basically, the one running the bureaucracy (that I am sure as hell is something he lives with every day) are people who want to make the world a better place. Indonesian bureaucracy maybe 310x as hard to conquer compared to rational investors, but as many fallbacks that he endured, I hope he goes pass this too.
Yow, and that is all for my random thoughts that turned out to be a long-ass essay! I know the structure sucks, but hell, it's my random thought!
TMI: This is a super random side note. To be honest, I did not believe that he didn't know the Indonesian electricity penetration is low, our media has always been like that haven't they, always so keen on pointing out people's mistakes because that's what we do, right? Talking about someone else's flaws is like the most basic thing that interests people.
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