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January 23, 2012

Pick a side


I've been going through a very difficult decision process and then I saw this poster echo my thoughts completely. Amazing what you see when you're ready for it.

January 16, 2012

Fashionably late

There's a sweet spot between being on time and being late and I want to hone in on how much expectation plays a part and why it's "cool" to be a little late. My yoga class for example begins at 7am sharp. The rule and therefore expectation is that the doors close at 7, so you have to get there early or right on time to make it. What actually happens is doors close around 7:03 and class begins at 7:05. This is a little annoying for those that made the effort to come in early and get settled for a 7am start, but it gives a little breathing room to those that happen to be running a little late due to circumstances out of their control. The class starts fashionably late. It finds the sweet spot, 7:03, not annoying the early birds too much and giving the late comers a chance to get there.

The reason I'm focusing on the timing is because 7:03 wouldn't be the sweet spot if everyone knew about it. Meaning if everyone were told the doors close at 7:03, expectations would change and so would the sweet spot. Even if you explained the reason for closing the doors at 7:03, people would understand and then continue to adjust their actions to a sweet spot a little after 7:03. Knowing we have the option allows for a little moral hazard.

The sweet spot can't be known. It just happens. At least for those "cool" enough to let it happen.

What makes the yoga teacher cool is not being too strict and closing the doors at 7am sharp and not being too haphazard and closing the doors too late. This kind of time leniency happens often, when you're catching a bus, running to a meeting, going to a dinner. There will always be people who arrive on time for the sake of punctuality and those that will arrive late because they didn't time it right. The sweet spot is somewhere between the two and what makes it possible is the choice of the guest or the host to take it easy and arrive or start a little after when they're "supposed" to.

This is what makes being fashionably late so cool.

January 8, 2012

Movie Review: Pina

Pina is a cathartic experience. It pulls at you. I felt like I was going through a fight or flight experience half the time I was watching it. Not because I was stressed, but because I wanted to be involved. I wanted to do something. There was an urgency to it.

When you see such open expression repeating itself again and again, it's no surprise that it primes you to be openly expressive yourself. I didn't quite want to dance, but I did want to move, do something, yell out.

It was the kind of movie where you expect to blink your eyes and see the audience suddenly erupt in the same form of dance that's on the screen. I wouldn't have been shocked if I saw dancers synchronously moving down the side aisles. In fact, I'm a little disappointed it wasn't part of the 3D experience.

It's satisfying to know that an entire group of people are thinking and doing something so different from what you normally encounter. It reminds me of when I was doing bhangra and dancing 6,000 audience shows and I would meet people who had no idea what bhangra was. The world seems incredibly big sometimes.

I appreciate movies and books for so many reasons, but this has to go back to the root of their origin. To introduce. To reveal the unknown in an awesome way.

The trailer itself is beautiful and what it should be, a tease to entice you to the full experience.


January 6, 2012

Black Pepper Tofu

Cooked from Plenty last night. Tried my hand at black pepper tofu, which came out a little spicier than I would've liked. I'd only do 3tbsp of black pepper instead of 5. Here is the full recipe.

The pictures are pretty close though!

My Picture



Picture from the book

Negotiating mutually

"I offer my thoughts not as a Buddhist nor as a religious believer, but simply as one human being among nearly 7 billion others. One who cares about the fate of humanity and wants to do something to safeguard and improve its future" 
-Dalai Lama
My personal definition of negotiation is changing. Before, I used to think negotiation was very hard edged, it was fighting with somebody to get what you want. Now it has turned into explaining to the other person where you're coming from. Letting them contextualize it from their own vantage point. The other person truthfully needs to understand what you're going through. Putting them in your shoes and putting yourself in theirs extrapolates on the do unto others as they would do unto you rule. It's not a trick, it's just two humans working to understand each other.

One example is my negotiation with Verizon a few weeks ago when they called me the day after I got my iPhone about a promotion of 500 free minutes if I renewed my account. Since I had already renewed my plan, only 12 hours before, they said I wasn't eligible for the promotion anymore.

At this point, I had several Machiavellian choices. I could have gotten angry with the agent, making them so annoyed that they would've just given me the deal instead of staying on the phone with me any longer. The agent could've hung up on me, but that leads into the next strategy of calling as many agents as necessary before I got the one willing to give me the promotion. I could've pulled the "let me talk to your supervisor" bit, I could've threatened to cancel my plan, thereby being switched to the cancellation department who would've gladly conceded to keep a 5-year subscriber to their service.

Instead, I kept chatting with the agent who originally called me about the promotion. I told him how I got the iPhone after going to three different shops who all said I wouldn't get it for two weeks. He liked the tall tale I told (which was all true) and we laughed about my luck in finally finding a manager who was saving a new iPhone for his friend but gave it to me anyway (part of the reason he gave it to me was because I told him my story of looking for an iPhone all day and he understood why I wanted it before Christmas). The agent lived my experience and realized it was seriously dumb luck that I got the phone and that he called 12 hours later to give me the promotion.

He asked me to hold while he talked to his supervisor to get the authorization code to override the denial. He did this completely of his own accord. Turned out you couldn't override it on his system. Makes sense, just in case someone is up to those Machiavellian techniques I mentioned earlier. He apologized, but then decided to connect me to the customer service department to see if they could help. He was my spokesperson about why I wanted the 500 minutes and the customer service rep said she'd try it on her end. She could in fact make the change and we all had a "woohoo" moment when it worked. All in all, I was on the phone for under 20 minutes, generally had a good time talking to customer service reps and got the promotion on grounds that it made sense to everyone involved.

Empathy won out in this case and that's not to say it will in every case. The process of negotiation - I hesitate to even call it that in this case - was much more enjoyable for all parties. Their system could just not have accepted the promotion and even then no one would've been for the worse. We all would have tried to make the computer system understand human common sense and if it didn't, so be it. That's our loss, not just mine. At the end of it, they commiserated with me, we all had a laugh and moved on.

It was only 500 minutes after all. And that's the crux of it. I'd rather leave off feeling good if none of it had worked out, because it's a measly amount to worry myself over. If I had pursued the call to battle the reps, and not won, my blood pressure would've been up, the taste in my mouth would've been sour, my viewpoint would've been generally negative for the next few hours and the reps would've also been a worse place because of me. Later on in the day, I would've regretted messing up my mood for a mere 500 minutes on my plan.

Negotiating mutually may as well be called mutual understanding and if you take the "mutual" out of it, negotiation is just another form of coming to an understanding. There are a lot of tactics out there about leverage, stake, walking away and so on, and they have their place. Sometimes - car sales for example - you're simply walking into a battlefield.

Most negotiations aren't of this sort. Whether it's your rent going up or your insurance company denying your claim or a store not accepting your return, there's a human on the other end of that desk or phone. The system may not allow you to negotiate, but humans can come to an understanding that can override the system they built in the first place. You have a personal story to tell now and you'll have your chance to listen to someone else's story soon too. As they say, keep paying it forward. Maybe we'll even make it easier to buy a car someday.

January 3, 2012

Legacy blogging

When we can be honest about who we are and what we want, there is no need to demand, be rude or aggressive, or manipulate others that are involved in helping us get what we want. Instead, we know that we are transmitting a signal on the right frequency to bring all that we desire into our experience. 
-Madisyn Taylor
I realized after reading yesterday's post that the idea of legacy blogging can mean many things. From my perspective, it means not only charting my growth, but meeting other like-minded individuals.

Legacies aren't built single-handedly. They are an outcome of growth with a curated community. I have worked hard to consciously curate both my personal and professional networks as I've discovered new ideas and grown to understand more deeply what I care about. Now I want to share that understanding and find others who reflect on a similar level.

I have made the mistake in the past of thinking that my interests, whether in health, food, politics or some other field, are echoed in occasional posts that fit into these buckets. The posts I wrote or linked to were important enough to my thinking at the time to share with others. For example, I would be interested in the construct of language, read books and articles about it, have in depth conversations with friends and colleagues and share my findings in a couple of posts I thought best reflect the subject.

I shared the outcome but not the process.

Without a context behind why I was writing about the construct of language or where my interest came from or how I discovered material on the subject, these posts would seem to come out of nowhere. Even now, when I look back on these posts, I remember my personal journey through the subject which has repeated itself many times since. But my posts weren't additive. They didn't build to anything but a memory of my interest.

I hope to change my approach even as I write this post. I could have let my thoughts about legacy blogging simmer over the next few weeks, found others who had written on the subject and curated my findings here. Instead, I'd like to share what I bring to the art of learning.

We all have a unique process of getting from point A to point B. Many people have been at each of these metaphoric points before. They've struggled through the same things we struggle through now. It's not about being at point A or getting to point B, it's about how you evolve from one to the other that weaves an interesting story. Your story. 

If we don't provide a glimpse into how we change, we're just planting flags for markers in our development. Our story deserves more than that.

Starting Anew

"But my vision of success is my own to nurture. It’s not for anyone else to decide. I intend to grow in the ways that matter most to me, not the ways that society tells me I’m supposed to care about."

- Steve Pavlina
I've often started writing in my blog and stopped. I write in a private journal and occasionally in 750words, both of which are very cathartic as well as milestone-capturing experiences for me. The feeling of writing for an audience, even a small one, is quite a different experience.

The problem is that you feel like you are writing for them. It's different from being up on stage giving a lecture, where the metric of success is very likely how well your message is received. In the blogosphere, it's more like writing for an empty auditorium in the hopes of filling it. There's nothing truly to grasp.

Another problem is trying to effective. As they say in journalism, don't "bury the lead". You worry about this. Titling your post with a "How to" or "5 reasons why" is another strategy that increases page hits, and you spend more time thinking about this than you ever care to. You think about your "voice", the consistency of your writing, whether you can keep up a routine.

You think about all this before you even start your post, which of course hinders starting your post.

Blogging serves a different purpose for everyone, but it should be fun. It takes valuable, personal time, at least an hour per post writing, editing and reviewing. There's nothing wrong with having goals for your writing, but it helps if they're sustainable.

My goal is to build a legacy through my blog. I see the evolution of my personality in some of the articles I've written over the years, but overall it's a series of interrupted writing held back by the belief that I need to perform for an audience that may not be there.

In some ways, this is a fresh start in a new year. I didn't make a new year's resolution to do this and I hesitate even now simply because it may be viewed as such. But that doesn't have to be a bad thing and I see 2012 as a year of pacing ourselves. Taking a second to think if we're on the right track as revolutions, both personal and worldly, continue to trail us.

I hope my writing reflects that decision to take stock before moving forward. I have many projects underway and I'm trying to better judge success from a personal vantage point, not one that is handed down to me. This can only come from a deeper understanding of past experiences, observing others and being part of a community and culture I care about.