Life Has Additionality Too, But It Isn't Found in Being Better Than Others

In August this year, Taiwan's university placement results were released.

According to rankings compiled by admissions consultants, the top seven choices on the science and engineering track were all electrical engineering departments, at National Taiwan University, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, National Tsing Hua University and National Cheng Kung University. Another figure also drew attention: the minimum admission score for NTU's Computer Science department fell by 12 points from last year. NTU attributed it partly to harder exam papers, but did not rule out that changes in the AI industry had shifted applicants' choices.

These are encouraging numbers: Taiwan's brightest young people are choosing to enter the country's most competitive industry.

But think one layer deeper, and another question appears.

When the brightest eighteen-year-olds all crowd toward the same door, what kind of life is waiting for them on the other side?

More than thirty years ago, I stood at the same door

I studied at a five-year junior college. Given my department, the natural path was to sit the university transfer exam for computer science, information management or electronics.

But those were also the most crowded departments in the transfer exam. Getting into a good public university meant competing with a large crowd of people with the same background and the same preparation, over who could answer one more question correctly.

So I made a contrarian choice: a department where I felt I had done reasonably well, but which was relatively unpopular: mathematics.

Because of that difference, I was admitted to the mathematics departments of NTU, Tsing Hua and Chiao Tung, and chose NTU.

At the time I didn't know what to call it. Only many years later did I find the most fitting word, in the language of impact investing.

First, what additionality means

One of the most central concepts in impact investing is additionality: without this investment, something would not have happened, or would have happened many years later.

Money that goes into a company everyone is rushing to invest in has low additionality; without you, someone else would quickly fill the gap. Only money willing to go where others dare not truly makes something "additionally" happen.

I have long felt that a person's life is itself an expression of additionality.

If what you do could be done by many people other than you, you quickly enter a game of intense involution: you have to keep doing better than others just to maintain a brief distinctiveness. Today you are a little better than others; tomorrow someone will be better than you, and that "better" is often quickly flattened out.

Being better than others is a distinctiveness that depreciates; something that would not happen without you is additionality.

An opportunity most people would not take

In 2008, I came across an opportunity most people would not choose: going to rural areas to do microfinance.

Almost every part of that decision ran against "rational career planning." I took my wife with me; I took a pay cut; I left the comfort of Taipei for farming villages around third- and fourth-tier cities in mainland China; I left familiar friends and family; I entered a field I had never worked in and had no background in, small loans; and I settled in a city I had never visited.

What I thought at the time was: it would be hard to find a second person in the market who would make the same choice as me. If I didn't go, many smallholder farmers might not receive that support.

A bit of mission, and a bit of "if not me, then who."

To be honest, I didn't see it as a career investment back then. I simply knew clearly that in that position, without me, things really would be different.

Additionality grows the next additionality

Three years later, things took a turn I had not anticipated.

Precisely because of that unusual rural experience, I had the chance to join the Temasek group in Singapore, working alongside many senior figures in finance on investment and financing for small and medium-sized enterprises. Later, thanks to the Temasek experience, I had the chance to help run one of the top five investment and financing platforms of that time.

At the end of 2016, a friend told me that a financial media group in Taiwan, Anue (cnYES), was looking to transform by building a financial trading platform, and needed a Taiwanese person with platform experience. My background happened to be something rare in the market.

Over the next four years, alongside what had been a financial media business running on a single engine, we added Anue Securities Investment Advisory (Anue Fund), upgrading the media group into a financial group, and it became the largest online fund trading platform among private-sector players.

Looking back, not one stretch of that road was earned by "being better than others." Experience that no one wanted back then later became a background that very few people in the market had.

To be clear: this is not about being contrarian for its own sake

At this point I need to rule out a misreading.

I am not saying unpopular means good, nor that popular majors are not worth studying. Electrical engineering and computer science are the foundation of Taiwan's most important industries, and young people who choose them have not chosen wrong.

Unpopularity itself has no additionality. When I chose mathematics, the premise was that it was a subject I did reasonably well in; if you go somewhere only because it is uncrowded, you may well end up doing something no one needs, in a place where you are not good at it either.

Going against the grain also has a cost, and it does not always pay off. I can write this article because those choices later worked out; the same decision, at a different time and in a different place, might have been just a stretch of hard, empty years. And a large part of the cost of those rural years was borne together with my wife.

Additionality is not "doing what others don't," but "doing, where someone needs it, what would not happen without you."

Back to that list

So I would not tell the young people entering electrical engineering this year that they chose wrong.

What I want to say is this: popular places can have additionality too, but it doesn't appear automatically. Once you walk through the most crowded door, the question has only just begun: among a whole cohort of equally excellent classmates, what is there that would not happen without you?

It might be that you are willing to work on an application everyone thinks is not exciting enough; it might be that you bring chip capabilities into a field no one cares about yet; or it might simply be that you are willing to stay somewhere a little longer than others.

It seems we all spend our lives searching for some kind of distinctiveness. Many people just assume it can only be won by beating others.

What I have come to understand over the years is this: distinctiveness is not won by comparison; it comes from being needed.

So, among the things you are doing now, which one would not happen without you?

The author is Chairman of DoublePortion Capital, and also a Partner at SIC (Sustainable Impact Capital), Executive Director of the Taiwan Impact Investing Association, Executive Director of the Cross-Border Innovation & Entrepreneurship Association, and a deacon at Taipei Bread of Life Church.