Self-Discovery, Leadership, Optimism and NS

Hello again. I have had loads of  interesting comments of late on the issue of NS and sometimes, I find that I have so much to say in response to a comment that I just have create a whole post to dedicate to the topic. So for today's topic, Jonathan has raised a question which I shall address: it is about learning new things and 'discovering' your talents (such as having the qualities to become a leader) in NS, quite a controversial one as I clearly disagree with him. But to kick things off, here's Jonathan's comment (and I have taken the liberty to correct his grammar, sorry to play the part of the English teacher here, poor grammar irks me so much): "Well, I do agree OCS cadets are usually of high caliber to begin with. But have any of them ever had chance to discover their leadership talent prior to becoming an officer? I believe at least some of them would have benefit from the experience of being an officer and discover their leadership potential."

Do you now if you can be a good leader?

So, that's the crux of the issue here: is it possible to discover that you're actually good at something you've never realized you good at during the course of NS? Well, we've had a lot of talk about having a positive attitude and going into NS with a healthy does of optimism, but Jonathan does take this to quite an extreme. More generally, is it possible to discover that you have a talent for something you never knew you had? Well, it is possible, but highly unlikely. I'm sure you've heard of stories like the old woman who starts learning how to play the piano or the violin after she retired, only to discover that she had a latent talent for it. I don't know how I feel about these stories because there's always a sense of sadness attached to the missed opportunity. It is such a blessing to have a talent like that when so many people out there have no talent to speak of, but to leave it dormant and ignored for so many years is nothing short of a tragic waste. However, even with late-bloomers, there's always some indication that the talent has been there all along. I am part of the adult gymnastics programme at my gymnastics club and there are plenty of adults who start gymnastics in their 30s or even 40s. You may think that's really late for a sport like gymnastics, but some of them pick it up incredibly quickly. But when you speak to these people, they usually have done something like dance, martial arts or other kinds of sports in the past where that natural agility, flexibility, sense of coordination and core strength has been put to good use.

Likewise, I discovered I had a gift for languages at the age of 18 - I had always just assumed that I was terrible at languages as I struggled with Chinese at school and I was destined to be a monolingual English speaker. I only started learning French at the ripe old age of 18, becoming fluent in it in record time before moving on to conquer another ten languages. Do I consider myself a late bloomer? Actually no, because it has been pointed out to me that all the indications were there that I could be good at languages given how I excelled in English and English literature - now if I had sucked at both English and Chinese but excelled in French, then that would have been highly unusual to say the least. But if you're very good at English, then chances are, you're going to find French pretty easy to pick up. There will always be some kind of clue to point you towards where your talents may lie and it is only in quite extreme circumstances when it is totally repressed. Now that can happen - I have heard too many stories about strict Asian parents forcing their children to go down a career path like medicine, engineering, banking that they didn't like when their children would have preferred to do something else instead, but they reluctantly went down the career path chosen for them by their parents because they were culturally conditioned not to displease their parents and didn't dare defying them. So it is possible to suppress talent if it is there, but to discover something you never knew you had? Now that's something else altogether.

Since Jonathan talked about the issue of leadership in reference to OCS, I'm going to quote a comment left by one of my readers on the topic and it is quite telling about the selection process for OCS. Disclaimer: I did edit this down for size and corrected some of the English - sorry to play the role of the pedantic English teacher again. You can read his original comment here if you wish. "I went to OCS back in the day. I've seen some things I can't unsee back then. Cadets who are lucky enough to get the easy tasks, cadets who skive at every opportunity, cadets who step all over and 'use' others to get ahead. All of them passed out to be officers, maybe these traits are what made them leaders. I'm just glad I got out alive (there were a few near misses) and I wouldn't want my son to have to go through it, if it were possible."

I think it is quite telling, so I ran this by another close friend of mine who did make it through OCS and this is what he told me in confidence. "The SAF do try their best to recruit the best for OCS and the selection process is quite rigorous. However, what does happen is that they do over-recruit for the OCS, that means that they expect a certain percentage of officer cadets to flunk out of the course for a variety of reasons - you need to set a minimum standard to ensure that the officers are of a decent, acceptable quality. This is a double-edged sword though: firstly, you don't want to recruit just enough for OCS and end up having to pass cadets who have clearly failed to make the grade. However, in over-recruiting and expecting some to fail, you create a 'Survivor' (the popular American reality TV show) type situation where the weakest start getting picked off by the others and there is more rivalry than cooperation. The atmosphere can turn very toxic if the rivalry and competition gets intense and the mindset is like, somebody's going to fail the course and it sure as hell won't be me. I have seen a group of guys gang up on someone whom they want to seen thrown out of the course. It is like the programme Survivor where one tribe member has to be voted out each episode and the others are happy to gang up on one member as long as they're not the one being voted out that episode. It is the survivor of the fittest but if you're expecting this process to bring out leadership skills then you're completely barking up the wrong tree."

He continued, "You become top dog in an environment like that by being better than everyone else whilst constantly watching your back, to ensure that no one is trying to stab you in the back. Thus the physical aspects of the training pales in comparison to surviving that atmosphere, now a good leader would be someone who will have good people skills, he would command the respect of the people he is responsible for and would know how to establish good relationships with them regardless of their background. This kind of people skill is not something they teach you in OCS at all, rather it is something you pick up as a child if you have grown up in a very social environment. You can spot the popular kids in schools with loads of friends and it is very obvious they are good with people, whilst the loner in the corner with no friends clearly lacks social skills. Yes you need a lot of social skills to survive the cut throat environment of OCS, but the people who do make it to the end of the process are not necessarily nice people - the same way the people who win Survivor are probably those who have made friends and alliances, only to stab each and every one of them in the back on the way to victory. Some of the guys I've seen in OCS are megalomaniacs - they are evil, nasty, tyrannical, power crazy people who want to become an officer simply because they can then throw their weight around, bully those of lower rank, they want to feel important and they are possibly the worst kind of people to become officers. They are also the ones who'll do whatever it takes to succeed in OCS, that makes them not just unsuitable but dangerous."

"I'm a father in Singapore today - I have a son who will eventually have to do NS and I would ideally want the officer in charge of him to be a caring officer who will take his job seriously, or even just an average officer who became one just to avoid being at the bottom of the pecking order in NS. But my worst fear is that he gets the kind of officer who is nothing short of a bully - I've seen one guy in my time - let's call him Jun (not his real name), sure he got through OCS but he had a lot of emotional baggage. He came from a poor family, many siblings, never got enough love or attention in his childhood - always felt that people were looking down on him, he had a big chip on his shoulder, you know, he had a rough time growing up like that. Once Jun became an officer, he thought that's it, people have to respect me for the first time in my life and he became power crazy. Once he was talking to a group of soldiers and he suspected two guys of not listening, like he thought they were having a private conversation instead of paying attention, oh Jun totally lost his shit and the whole matter was totally blown out of proportion. He threatened the two guys with all kinds of punishment and made them plead for mercy. People were genuinely scared of him and he liked that - he relished the thought of being feared. Now is that a good leader? Of course not, he was a terrible leader, he bullied people, abused his power - just because he managed to survive the challenges of OCS doesn't mean that he automatically is a good leader. And okay Jun may be a bit of an extreme case, but I've seen loads of people like him and I pray to God that my son never meets an officer like Jun. I do wonder how Jun would cope back in the civilian world where he simply can't behave like that."

What kind of officers did you encounter in NS?

Thus someone like Jun would do whatever he can to get into OCS and become an officer - I just wanted to highlight that story to demonstrate how officers are not necessarily good leaders. The SAF isn't exactly looking for perfect leaders - or even good leaders when it comes to OCS. Someone like Jun may be ruthless, cunning and cruel - some may condemn him to be a terrible leader, whilst others may point out that an officer is not there to be everyone's best friend but to manage a large number of personnel in camp. Being strict, even cruel at times, may be a necessary evil because the soldiers may not respect your authority or take you seriously if you come across too nice. Like a teacher, a good officer would know where to strike the balance and clearly, someone like Jun hasn't got the balance right. What is clear though, is that OCS didn't allow Jun to 'discover' his leadership potential - hell no, it clearly just created a monster - it brought the very worst out of him when really, people like that should have their demons neatly packed away somewhere far away, safe from the rest of us. But let's talk more about 'discovering' your leadership ability - is that even possible? No way.

In short, you don't suddenly discover you not only want to be a leader but you're going to be a good one. Students have plenty of opportunity in school to exercise their leadership potential be it in a more formal setting, such as joining a uniformed group or becoming the captain of a sports team, or in a more informal way, simply by becoming popular amongst a group of friends. I remember back in my JC days, there was a very popular guy - let's call him Boon - who would often organize activities for us, "there's a public holiday next week, why don't we have a barbecue party at East Coast Park? It will be fun!" Then when Boon got enough people buying into the concept and interested in his idea, he would organize everyone to make sure that we would have the best barbecue party of the year there. He would draw up a list and assign tasks: everyone who came knew exactly what they were bringing, where to go, what time to turn up, what to expect, even what to do if it rained. Sure it was just a barbecue on the beach, but it was clear that Boon had the ability to create a team, delegate various tasks and make sure that everyone did their part since he couldn't have done everything on his own. Without this natural leadership ability, he certainly wouldn't have been able to organize activities. You don't need to wait for an organisation like the SAF and OCS to 'discover' your leadership potential - just organize something amongst your friends this weekend and we'll see pretty quickly if you have the leadership potential that Boon had. True leaders like Boon take initiatives like that whilst others are quite happy to simply go along with Boon and say, "oh let him take the lead, just tell me what I have to do. We all know Boon is really good at organizing things like that."

Are you a leader or a follower?

This begs the question: are you a leader or a follower? Not everyone can be a leader and there's really nothing wrong with being a follower. There are different kinds of followers in fact - there are followers who are good at team work, they are the ones who work best in a team and will cooperate with other members of the team to get the work done. Then there are the specialists who are not happy working in a team - maybe they lack the social skills to work well with others but have valuable skills in their areas of expertise, thus they are better off simply given a task they are good at and then  left on their own to get it done. A good leader would recognize a specialist for what he is and not force him to work in a team, for that would not yield good results. Thus trying to put a follower or worse, a specialist in a position of leadership is going to be a disaster - some people simply don't want to be a leader and it is not something you can easily change because that would mean trying to teach them all those skills that a natural born leader like Boon has. Boon has accumulated those soft skills over many years, being extremely sociable and great at making friends - if someone hasn't already done what Boon has done with little effort, then there's really no point in trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole. Life is a lot easier when you just play to your strengths.After all, no amount of training can turn a follower or a specialist into a great leader like Boon - he is born with that talent, the same way Vanessa-Mae has a talent for music.

This does beg the question, why did Jonathan even ask this question in the first place? Is he plain illogical? Perhaps. Vanessa-Mae, the famous violinist, trained at London's Royal College of Music (RCM). If I were to somehow manage to enroll myself in the RCM, would I suddenly discover I am a talented violinist and can learn how to play the violin as well as Vanessa-Mae? Hell no, the teachers at RCM wouldn't know what to do with me as I simply don't have the talent. That's not how it works - talented musicians go to the RCM to make the most of their talent, RCM cannot somehow impart that talent to you if you weren't born with it. Sure, I would probably be able to master the basics of playing the violin if I paid a good teacher and took some lessons but without the right talent, I'd never get past the basics. The same goes for OCS: without natural leadership talent, there's really only so much OCS can teach you about being a good leader. Nobody would realistically expect the RCM to turn an untalented violinist into the next Vanessa-Mae, so why would Jonathan somehow expect OCS to turn a man with no leadership skills into a great leader? It makes no sense.

But I tell you what is probably clouding his judgement: optimism. But wait, this kind of optimism is not fact based but rather, it is more akin to wishful thinking. It is the same mentality that makes people buy a lottery ticket knowing that the chances of winning the big prize is tiny, but they still go ahead and believe that it is worth a shot anyway. All Singaporean men have to do NS but there is no guarantee they will learn anything useful or even make any good friends whilst serving, there's little point in worrying about what can go wrong, so many enlistees actually face NS is a very positive attitude and embrace everything that NS can throw at them. I encourage my nephew to face NS with a good attitude for it is a learning experience, I'm not going to discourage him by telling him things that will worry him. What's the point of worrying anyway - it won't change anything. What some of them do however, is take this 'positive attitude' a step too far and start imagining that NS will solve all the problems that they had accumulated in the fist 18 years of their lives or instill in them talents that they never had before. Yes there are lessons that one can learn from the NS experience, but let's get real here - there are limits as to what the SAF can teach you and giving you talent you never ever had is just plain impossible. They are not magicians nor have they ever claimed they could do that. It is however, this wishful thinking in the name of optimism that perpetuates this gross misconception. But is it really so bad to generate hope and feelings of optimism regardless of the basis, when hope is such a powerful force to get you through something like NS?

So there you go, that's it from me on this issue. What do you think? Have you met people like Jun and Boon? What makes a good leader? Are good leaders simply born in an innate talent to lead, or can the right kind of training turn anyone into a fine leader? Apart from OCS, how else do you think we can test the leadership skills of our young people? Thus, are great leaders born or made? Let me know what you think, leave a comment below. Many thanks for reading.