Reflections on going home

“Wow, never thought you were the type of person to go back so soon.”

— Literally everyone

Since deciding to go back to Indonesia for good, everyone I met had the same question mark on their face. They would say how surprised they were to see me leave so soon. Then, they would ask “But why?”

To which I would always answer “gua bucin.”

It is quite unexpected to see a person who has no family business to inherit, loves living abroad, and whose friends are mostly still in the States — to leave the country for good. Especially due to the unspoken but universally acknowledged truth saying that if you don’t get a job in the US, you’re sort of a failure. Of course, my boyfriend is not the main reason behind my homecoming. But explaining my case required more effort than I cared for, hence the boyfriend excuse (which they were more surprised to hear than my previous announcement).

I would say, however, that the person I surprised most was probably myself.

I hadn’t planned to go home right after graduation. Like most people, I wanted to work in the States using my OPT. Maybe brush up that resume a bit with an American company, be away from crappy traffic for another year, get after-work happy hours without worrying how to drive home, feed my pride by telling my friends and family “I work in (insert West Coast city name) now”… Seemed ideal. When the thought of going home surfaced, two things came to mind:

A. I don’t want people to think I’m incompetent

B. I don’t want people to think I’m incompetent!!!

Back then, my naivete was caught up with the thought that no one goes home by choice. People go home either because of their family or because they couldn’t land a job. My insecure, fragile ego could not accept having people think of me as a failure.

I imagined people saying; “Dia for good? Bukannya dia pinter?” Or, “Dia gak dapet kerja? Emang sekolah dia jelek?”

Fortunately, I have gotten rid of this naive and highly toxic mindset since then. I came to learn that a huge part of job-seeking is based on luck or so-called OPT “agents” and that a handful of competent people I know were not fortunate enough to stay in the US.

I decided to go home because the prospect of working in the US did not excite me.

True, it would be nice to live in America for another year. It would be nice to stay in the same bubble I have lived in for four long years. But at the same time, even thinking about it did not excite me.

After all, it’s named Optional Practical Training (OPT) for a reason.

So here are my reflections on going home for fresh graduates and post-OPT friends.

I thought I would miss the vibes you could only get abroad — people-watching at brunch, getting work done at a coffeeshop, having white people say they liked your bag… Truth be told, I found pretty competitive substitutes here that made me miss America a little less. I get to eat bakmi for breakfast while sharing a table with kind strangers, I get to do my workouts and yoga classes for free (thanks to Classpass), and my favorite; I get to people-watch at the new Jakarta MRT system. I’ve always loved the NYC subway because of the diversity-NYC-feel it has, and the Jakarta MRT kind of has the same thing — it’s so Jakarta. It’s an unbiased random sample of the entire city; the soleh families, the corporate slaves, the gays, the anak-anak Selatan, the cici-cici… Everyone.

But that’s just secondary. The main reason that makes me love being home is this: the opportunity for innovation.

The one thing that keeps being the dilemma for the Indonesian diaspora to come home is this huge quality of life disparity between here and abroad. There are so many gaps in Indonesia right now and where it should be in terms of living conditions, work efficiency, and productivity. The answer to this problem is innovation. And because we have a huge problem in trying to be an efficient, productive country, we have a huge potential for innovation. It works just like the theory of diminishing marginal returns.

Needless to say, we have an abundance of examples for such innovation today. I won’t go into the bazillion startups that have appeared in the past few years, but this phenomenon proves my point.

These tech startups aim to close this gap, each in their own ways, using one universal method every Indonesian is talented at: copying. Now I know I said that the benefit of living abroad was to be able to “innovate” but I realized that these innovations do not have to be proprietary.

There are so many “copycat” innovations in Indonesia — most famously Gojek to Grab, Traveloka to Expedia, but even players like Fore (to China’s Luckin Coffee) or Doogether (to Classpass). Customer experience and speed to market are ultimately the only important metrics in innovation — not novelty.

That brings me to my first point: Rather than be discouraged by the bad and the ugly, we can leverage these gaps using our experiences abroad. Local problems, when paired with the right, contextualized global solutions, can become business.

But what kind of innovation is needed? Don’t we have enough startups already? Aren’t we tired of seeing fintech discount wars at every corner of Jakarta? There is no need to innovate for innovations’ sake.

The question is rather, where is innovation needed most? Where innovation is needed the most is where it would generate the biggest returns. Most problems in developing countries like Indonesia lie not in the What, but in the How.

Let me give you an illustration.

Angkots suck. But when you think of it, there is nothing fundamentally wrong about them except for being slow and having the tendency of stopping in the middle of the road. They only do that because they don’t have designated pick-up spots like bus stops, and they still exist because the Jakarta bus system does not suffice. In other words; we don’t need to disrupt Angkots as much as we need to enable them to operate better.

Solving the How in business should be the aim of anyone wishing to innovate. Better yet, the How mindset implies that innovation does not necessarily have to be a product. It could take the form of a method, an idea, a way of thinking. It could even be a policy.

Anything that increases efficiency and/or productivity is innovation. In the Fore example, it is innovation in human capital training. In the Angkot case, it is innovation in route optimization or urban planning that is needed. In this sense, you could be continuing your family business and still innovate, for example, by increasing your workers’ education levels through a new company policy or by digitizing your father’s paperwork.

The challenge is that this kind of innovation may not generate quick returns despite having high switching costs. For example, improving labor education level through a new corporate program is timely, costly, and disrupts “business as usual.” All that, and you may not even see its ROI for several years.

This is parallel to why education reform in developing countries is so hard to achieve. Despite plenty of estimates for the returns to education, no government regime wants to wait 10 years for results. Thus, us developing countries always fall back to government assistance programs like fuel subsidies or healthcare — policies that see their end-to-end in one electoral period.

How innovations, however, generate impact. Don’t get me wrong; Impact in this sense need not be an entirely social artifact exclusive for gold-hearted social entrepreneurs or impact enthusiasts. Instead, impact creation in this sense is based on capitalist incentive, not patriotic responsibility let alone humanitarian love.

In order to see this, we have to first be able to monetize the projected future impact of innovation. Then, we will see how beneficial a How innovation really is for the long-run. This is point number two: Innovation should be understood as long-run investment.

We should start thinking of building our social ecosystem the way we think of environmental conservation — as preservation for future generations. Just like how our grandchildren will enjoy the rainforests we don’t burn, the next generation of businesses-doers will reap the benefits of our How innovations today . The benefits of having a smarter and more productive workforce or of having an efficient procurement method, for example. Upon adopting this rhetoric, hopefully we will find that taking the long way home ultimately produces more value than maintaining the status quo.

So far, I have discussed two main points. First, we could and should leverage the deficiencies in Indonesia today using what we have seen abroad. Second, that creating How innovations will create the most value. But we can’t do either without fully grasping the full going-ons within the country. Hence, my final and perhaps, most important reflection is this:

We need to be continuously, obsessively, relevant.

Many can graduate cum laude, a handful can produce fresh ideas, but without relevancy, none will eventually make meaningful innovation. Luckily, relevancy is actually one of those things you can easily master. It’s not something you study like math, or be endowed since birth like IQ. Relevancy is a habit of reading, listening, and being up to date. It’s like riding a bike — chances are you will be able to do it if you just do it often enough. Being relevant is as simple as reading the news and catching up with current affairs to know who’s who and what’s hot. Easy, and the returns are huge; you get to know what gaps desperately need to be filled right now, what innovation can fit the current climate, and most importantly, not sound dumb in front of your colleagues.

Relevance is your ticket to being part of the conversation. It lets you become the partaker, not a spectator. At the end of the day, we don’t care if someone’s smart or has plenty of ideas. All we want is someone who gets it. I personally found the value of being relevant to be so important that I declined a UN Internship offer in New York City to work in Jakarta.

It’s honestly a little discouraging to find that my reflections eventually conclude with me telling myself that I know nothing. Jokes on me that now I need to learn even more than I needed to in college.

But that’s OK, because I still don’t want people to think I’m incompetent.