林綠出生的記憶小碎片 2024.9.29

1. 2024/8/30 找我老婆中午一起吃午餐，因為要恭喜她下週一開始的待產假，終於可以好好休息了。我跟我老婆在同一棟大樓的不同樓層的不同公司上班。我們挑選了12：30出發用餐，結果這時間每個餐廳都客滿，我們最後去吃肯德基。

2. 每週六早上我都會在家上英文課，最後一個月孕婦每週都要產檢。因為家裡離醫院很近，我老婆都騎機車載我女兒一起去，第一胎的時候絕對不敢讓這件事情發生，第二胎倒也不是隨便，可能就是少了一點戰戰兢兢。

3. 2024/8/31 快要下課的時候我女兒衝了進我書房，因為她每個禮拜都會衝進我的書房，第一時間也不覺得有什麼異樣，但是這次她衝進來說，「爸爸！媽媽流了好多月經！」但我老婆在外面喊說，「沒關係啦～」。跟老師完成最後的討論後，出門趕快關心老婆。

4. 確認老婆沒事之後，我老婆在客廳吃她回家路上買的蛋餅，我就在房間跟我女兒玩。玩一玩，我就跟我女兒說，「你去跟媽媽說，爸爸想要睡一下，如果要去醫院的話再叫爸爸起床。」嘴巴是這樣講，我心裡想的其實是，應該就是今天了，照這時間點應該今天還有得忙，我可得趕快補充一點體力。不知道是上一次的經驗還是靈感，但當時就非常肯定今天會生，不過我當下沒特別跟我老婆說就是了。

5. 大概一點出頭，我老婆叫我起床，我們整理了一下行李，我還挑選了一頂比較百搭的 Carhartt 帽子，因為我想說這一出門，下次回家就是林綠出生之後了，我可能不能很沒有風格的迎接他的到來。我老婆則是很細心的分開打包了生產包跟住院包。這樣就不用一次扛超多物品到診間，真是縝密。最後我們抵達醫院的時間是 13:10。

6. 隨著一波又一波的陣痛，我跟我老婆都非常確信今天就會生產。中間還遇到護理師跟值班醫師想退貨，但是都被我老婆說服了。我老婆認真想說服別人的時候真的很強，堅定的語氣搭配誠實的面孔。

7. 大約在17：00附近進入生產間，我也有進去，但護理師跟醫生忘記詢問我要不要剪臍帶，所以這次我沒有剪臍帶。不過沒關係，老實說，剪臍帶很無聊，如果可以的話，我想試試看接生，我看兩次了，我覺得我應該可以。

8. 林綠在 17：19 出生。這傢伙不知道是天生帥哥病還是怎樣，衝出產道的姿勢跟氣勢真的頗帥，有一種 superhero landing 的感覺。

9. 比預期早了一些，不過是個非常完整的嬰兒。2,830g，頭圍32cm，身長43cm。十根腳趾，十根手指，兩個眼睛，兩個耳朵，一個嘴，一個或兩個斷掌。好樣的，你爸爸也是一個斷掌。

10. 在嬰兒誕生完的好一段時間，嬰兒到底怎樣，我其實沒有很有所謂，對我來說，我老婆的一切才是最重要的。對我來說，我老婆就是我的一切，也是在這段過程中最在乎的人。 

Building Consensus: 3 Strategies for Gaining Support for New Ideas in the Workplace _ 2024.9.28

As a proactive worker, I believe in the process of optimization. For instance, Google must adjust its algorithm frequently to ensure search results always align with what users are seeking; also, developers of a popular mobile game should iterate the app fast to provide gamers a better playing experience. Innovation helps many companies become successful in the market. As a part of a huge organization, how can we build consensus around a new idea? Here are three strategies I’ve learned recently. 

1. Gather Agreement Before Publishing Your Idea:
Sometimes, suddenly revealing a new idea makes colleagues feel that you are too aggressive without thinking. At the same time, a new idea should get support from decision-makers and peers. A good strategy is to review others’s perspectives first and revise your idea into a more suitable solution for everyone. Finally, when you present this idea in a meeting, you are more likely to win their agreement unconditionally.

2. Reduce The Information Asymmetry:
When you want to have a new workflow in your organization, you will likely encounter some difficulties and unnecessary processes. Share your bad experiences to let everyone know and give space to those show disagreement by describing the reasons. After that, your discussion could focus on figuring out the middle point that makes everyone feel satisfied. It’s easier to evaluate an idea with transparent background information and find a consensus from all members of a unit.

3. Transform Your Novelty Into Value: 
It’s harder to assess the novelty of an idea than its value. For example, it’s easier to understand whether we will earn more revenue from the new solution; whether we will shorten the process to achieve the same goal, and whether we will reduce the marketing cost? No matter how innovative it is, transform it into how valuable it is for the team is crucial. It builds criteria for your new idea and can be evaluated.

Don’t be upset when you face a lot of disagreement. This kind of experience improves your skills in building a consensus next time. Hopefully, these three strategies are useful for your career.

Embrace Consistency Over Perfection 2024.8.23

Everyone sets goals for careers, family life, financial plans, and personal habits. It’s great to have goals so that when you wake up you feel energetic to do something to achieve your goals. But how can we develop better strategies for setting goals in different areas of life? An outdated method is to divide your big goal into three categories: the final goal, the mid-term goal, and the short-term goal. Beyond this approach, how can we maintain our values or make sure we can keep going toward the success we believe in? Here are three strategies for reference.

1. Reduce the difficult and impossible goals: 

The key to setting goals is to let you know how to ensure you are on the correct path to the goals. Too many challenging goals are hard to break down into little steps and make us feel upset when realizing how far we are still from achieving them. Then, we give up on achieving doing what we want to achieve. Set some reasonable goals at first, and when we have a little progress, set the harder ones.

2. Be consistent: 

Sometimes, it takes decades to become an expert in specific areas. How you can keep on practicing or doing something for a long time is more important than what your goals are. If you can keep on doing certain things consistently over time for a lifetime, you can achieve anything more easily than others. Find a balance between you current achievements and what you are eager to achieve in the future, which can help you keep on learning skills you don’t have now.

3. Be brave about giving up: 

When we realize some goals are not important to us anymore, don’t feel guilty about giving up even if we have spent many hours on them. We can’t achieve everything, but we can always focus on what is the most important. Giving up is not abandoning the efforts we’ve made previously but about making essential progress in our lives,

Especially as adults, we are burned out from job and family responsibilities. Goals are not meant to add more pressure but are intended for a better life we want to have. Feel free to celebrate when achieving a little and don’t put the blame on yourself when failing at something. Hopefully, we can find joy in achieving some goals and continue setting new ones.

How Taiwan's Athletes Flourished at the Paris 2024 Olympics 2024.8.14

Although we won fewer medals this year compared to the Tokyo 2021 Olympics, the Paris 2024 Olympics has been one of my favorite experiences of watching and cheering for athletes from Taiwan. I enjoyed every match and every game, not because we won, but because I noticed that the athletes from Taiwan genuinely enjoyed the competition as well. This is truly special to see because in the past, I felt that athletes from Taiwan were always very nervous on the court and stage. Perhaps they carried too much stress on their shoulders before.

I wonder why athletes from Taiwan are able to enjoy the games more now. First, I think they have gained more international experience. Young athletes must have participated in many professional sports competitions and tournaments over the past three years, which makes the Olympics feel like just another international event. Second, athletes realize that no matter how they perform, they will have full support from Taiwan. For example, Taiwan has set up a local food station near the Olympic Village so our athletes can enjoy familiar food. Many sports fans have also bought tickets to Paris to watch the games, and there's been an outpouring of love and support on social media for our athletes.

When we learn more about a certain sport or athlete, we realize that the Olympics are just one stage in an athlete’s entire career. Sometimes, an athlete participates in the Olympics solely for the honor of Taiwan, so we shouldn't complain when they lose a game. Instead, to show our gratitude for their contribution, we should cheer for them unconditionally as well.

Furthermore, many organizations have put in a lot of effort to ensure we can watch the Olympic Games at home. If you haven’t yet, next time you can purchase a paid subscription on Hami Videos or Elta OTT online, allowing you to enjoy many different sports right from your computer or smart TV.

Beyond Encouragement 2024.6.26

 If you are a parent, I believe your expectations are similar to mine. Parents want to encourage their kids to do everything nowadays. When our kids encounter frustrations, we say phrases like, “I Know you can do that because you are the best.“, or “Practice makes perfect, so you should practice more to get better results.“ undoubtedly, we love our kids unconditionally, but is this kind of encouragement good enough? Should we also take care of more spheres in our family?

First of all, our world is changing so fast that we can’t just have a single approach and always be positive when encountering everything. Flexibility, resilience, communication skills, and adaptability are also crucial for survival. The path to learning these skills is learning from experiencing frustrations. We all have negative emotions when we face frustrations, and parents should teach their kids to realize these emotions and manage them healthily.

Second, families should embrace both positive and negative emotions. In my opinion, that is not the only but the most essential value in a family. Kids at school are not encouraged to cry or yell, so they don’t affect other kids. Adults in a company may need to hide their emotions when facing supervisors and clients. However, we as human beings do have emotions and family plays a role in containing all kinds of emotions. We don’t always have to be optimistic in front of our family members.

In conclusion. while it is good to encourage our kids and foster a positive spirit, it’s equally important to teach them how to face negative emotions and learn more approaches from them. Too much positivity would let our kids misunderstand that the  warmest function of a family is loving each other unconditionally. A family has many sides, and it’s essential to maintain the balance.

Embracing Agility: Thriving in an Unpredictable World 2024.6.20

This world is changing so fast that we can’t always predict everything precisely. We used to be taught to have a plan for our lives and implement the plan before, but it becomes more and more difficult because many things happen accidentally. If the conventional approach doesn’t work, I think we can learn or have the new idea to face the future: An agile mindset. I would like to apply an Agile mindset in my life in these three spheres.

Education: 
The traditional approach to learning a particular skill is to learn the origin first and then expand the levels step by step. This process is fine for a child because if you know the origin well, you will have a better foundation to learn some more difficult parts in this field easily. For an adult, this cause you so spend too much time that , and you don’t have enough free time slots to follow the steps. Therefore, you need to set the goal first and then try to plan a path that can make you reach the goal from the beginning. Essentially, realizing the goal and the path allow you to know how to find the resource to become your personal educational content and then you focus on the content, knowing that not everything in the field can make you achieve your goal more easily; that is a kind of agile mindset.

Work: 
I’d been asked questions such as “What is your career goal?“ or “What role do you want to play in this company after five years?“ before, especially in a recruiting review. I used to answer these questions carefully because I wanted to demonstrate my vision, ambition, and loyalty through my responses. Now, I have different ideas about these questions. First, it doesn’t matter if I really have a career plan or not because my plan might not perfectly align with the organizer’s expectations. Second, Things can change a lot in five years and my five-years imagination may not exist in the future. Therefore, I see these questions as an opportunity to show my agile mindset and I should express more like ”No matter what role, I hope I can always stand a step ahead of the market. Because… .” and “I don’t have an ending goal of my career because this changing world brings countless interesting things I’d love to try. I believe I can… .“ This approach can allow the discussion to continue and help the reviewer know my advantages better.

Family entertainment: 
My kids are still young. When I was as young as my kids, my parents spent a lot of time taking me to a family restaurant that had a kids’ play area. I always tried to finish my meal fast because I couldn’t wait to play with the other kids. I guess my parents were bored when I played in the kids’ area. The family restaurant is super exciting for a kid; however adults can barely have fun at the same time. I alternately change what we do for family entertainment with kids’ and adults' ideas. This time, my daughter wants to see ocean creatures in an aquarium, so we can enjoy the underwater world together. Next time, it’s the adults’ turn. Maybe my wife wants to go to a paid art exhibition, so everybody should join Mama’s plan together and try to experience something fresh.

Applying an agile mindset will help you not only survive well in a job, but also give you different ideas for many spheres in your life.

Beyond the Degree: Innovative Hiring Strategies for Evaluating Young Talent 2024.6.14

If you have two candidates both are around 22 years old, one has a degree and another doesn’t. First, they might not have many working experiences at the same time so you can’t easily ask questions like “What have you achieved?” or “How did you complete such a big project?“ to verify their working abilities. One thing you can do is to research the college of the one who has a degree, and assess if his/her major is competitive in the specific area. However, this approach is unfair to the other one who does’t have a degree. That’s why more and more companies choose a skill-based hiring process. Additionally, I imagine three other criteria that companies can use when recruiting and selecting candidates.

1. Short-Term Contract: 
In the NBA, if there are too many injured players on your roster, you can sign a short-term contract with a player. This player will put in a lot of effort to prove he can survive in the league and contribute his skills to the team. In some cases, they may sign a long-term contract before next season. It’s a win-win situation for both the player and the team. Organizations and companies can utilize this approach when facing a dilemma between two candidates. Aggressively, a hiring manager may offer two short-term contracts and then promise that one of them will earn the official offer. One thing to be cautious of is that everything you do must be legal under the Labor Standards Act.

2. Demonstrating Real situations: 
Some skills can’t be measured by standard qualifications or tests. For instance, it’s really hard to assess one’s sales skills. Therefore, there are behavioral tests in specific recruiting processes. Some companies give candidates a demo solutions and then let them sell it to the hiring manager. It doesn’t matter how much you realize this solution’s advantage, and the most important thing is how you introduce and make clients feel confident to you and the services your company offers. Moreover, how you react to questions you are not sure about during a pitch will determine if you are a good salesperson or not.

3. The Critical Thinking test: 
If you own a startup company, you don’t need a person who operates daily tasks but a talent who can bring new inspiration and critical ideas. Start by sharing some background information about your vision and encourage the candidates to ask you questions. In this approach, some will ask out the key issues worth resolving and some will show their whole research of the field by their questions. Sometimes, those who can ask the right questions are the ones who will provide the right solutions and they must be the suitable employees you need.

These three approaches help employers have different angles to find a better talents your organization needs.