Here is my reply to both your comments: Thoughts on what Singapore lacks.

“I am a creative individual. Now I have some problems. Can I find a way to work around it? If I am creative enough, I can.”

My examples here are more along this angle:

“More creativity is a good thing for Singapore. But the environment in Singapore seems to contain many obstacles that obstruct or impede creativity. Shouldn’t we get rid of some of these obstacles, for the good of Singapore?”

I think that the local environment has a lot to do with it. If local environments do not have anything to do with creativity or entrepreneurship, we would expect the people in all nations to be more or less equally creative or entrepreneurial. This clearly isn’t the case ….

Cobalt Paladin himself asserts that Singapore is one of the best places to be an entrepreneur. By implication, this means that some places must be better than others, for an entrepreneur to be in. Since entrepreneurship is generally felt to be lacking in Singapore, and entrepreneurship is felt to be important, the question from a policy maker’s or civil servant’s perspective must be “What can we change about S’pore, to make it more conducive for entrepreneurship?”.

It may well be that Sim is right when he says that the best way for the government to encourage entrepreneurship is to “do nothing” – ie leave them alone. Again, by implication, this means that right now the Singapore government is not leaving them alone – the government must be “doing something”, and too much of it, right now.

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A personal example, from me. I once won an award from the National Arts Council. Among other things, the award included thousands of dollars for me to go overseas to do a course in my artistic genre (if I wanted to ).

However, my job situation would not allow me to take 3 months or six months’ leave to do such a course. So I said to the NAC, “I won’t be going for any such course. However, I volunteer to run a project locally, whereby I will work with young, inexperienced Singaporeans (who show potential) in this field to improve their artistic ability and give them some exposure. Let me use the money to sponsor this project.”

They rejected my altruistic offer. I was offering to help them develop local creative talent, for free – I wouldn’t get a cent out of this for myself. All the NAC had to do was to sponsor the project using money which they were already prepared to give to me for another reason, but which I wasn’t going to use for that reason.

But they rejected me, because it was “against the rules” – the money was meant for overseas courses, not local projects. They would rather see the money not used at all, that is, totally wasted on nothing … than to be used for something useful, constructive, creative and artistic, but which wasn’t in accordance with “the rules”.

The losers? All the young, creative Singaporeans whom I could have helped with this project. See what I mean? About a local environment that obsctructs and impedes creativity.

Thanks for that fantastic post, and the time it took to write it. My analogy is, perhaps to you, simple because it really is. However the implications are far from shallow.

Perhaps I was not clear, but let me further explain, the way I see it is creativity is an action and a process and entrepreneurship is the result of applying creativity. This result of applying creativity could be anything, a drawing, a sculpture, a bridge, a cocktail, a new way to get to work. My point was you cannot start this process in the semblance of total freedom. Total freedom gives you no framework or point of reference to start this creative process. Total freedom gives you nothing to base your exploration on, nothing to control your limits, nothing to move on from. Even an artist has the size of his canvas, a sculpture the properties of his materials, or a dancer the strength of his limbs.

The examples you have described, can be viewed as the framework where we navigate from. So in an equally simple fashion is my solution to your points is:

Think creativity to get a solution around the problem.

Really it