I’m a devoted husband and father to an awesome family. For work, I’m a Product Manager who looks at the goals of the business and uses technology to deliver those business and customer goals. I’ve driven transformational change at Citi, AIG, and Amazon Web Services. For more information about what I do at work, please visit my LinkedIn profile.
I collect stories. There are so many amazing things happening every day. I need to spend some time writing them down before they slip away. Some of these ideas are so powerful that they hit me like a bolt of lightning. It’s my job to capture that lighting and put it in a bottle to share it with you. I want to capture that feeling that Archimedes had when he had an insight sitting in the bathtub screamed “Eureka!” and ran naked down the street. I know that I’ll rarely if ever make it there, but that won’t keep me from trying!
I wanted a place to put all the stuff I think is awesome. Growing up, I always wanted to have a great library in my house. I remembered the excitement when I learned that I could buy the entire collection of The New Yorker in bound volumes and put them in my house. I’d imagined that I would collect great encyclopedias from the past to peruse whenever I pleased. They would live in mahogany bookcases that looked like they’d belonged to JP Morgan. Then I realized that a New York City apartment doesn’t have the space for a physical library. So I did the next best thing. I’ve created a virtual library that includes lots of the things I enjoy, like my favorite books, words, and humor. You can check it out on the menu at the top of the page.
Blog Highlights
My Time at Amazon
Nine Amazonian Secrets You Can Use. When I was at Amazon, I learned some open secrets about the company, like behind the scenes view into its culture, great discounts, and real world tours.
On Amazon – A Peculiar Company. Amazon is a self described peculiar company, doing things differently than your standard company.
Guest Post: Blake Schlaff on Fortnite Friendships. My 10-year-old son Blake is an avid Fortnite player who often plays with his friends. I thought it would be good for him (with my help) to tell everyone about the world of social gaming.
How I (Re-)Built My Favorite T-Shirt. When I was in college I saw a T-shirt that was attractive, geeky and protested government policy. No one had produced it since 2000. So I recreated it.
Taking the Red Pill of Art. Here’s my love letter to art. It’s a story about the red pill and the blue pill, opening your eyes, and what art means to me.
The Joy of the Hunt. While I haven’t been outside on any new adventures in the last few months, I wrote about some of my favorite adventures, from finding a hidden castle on top of a library to discovering an old historical text from one of Yale’s secret societies.
Capture Better Memories Without a Camera. How technology is preventing me from building great memories and some techniques I’ve come up with some ways to use my brain to capture special moments instead of my phone.
Life Lessons
My Ideal Retirement Plan. How I’ve realized that my goal in life shouldn’t be to retire early but to live well, now and through retirement.
Thank You for Being a Friend. Friendship is about being there for other people. Anyone can celebrate with you when it’s convenient. A true friend stands by you when things are tough and just be with you.
How Numbers Work in the Real World. In school, we were taught that math is linear; however, in the real world, distributions are more likely to be exponential.
Human beings want more of everything. We are on a hedonic treadmill that says, “What I have now is OK, but I really want more—more stuff, more money, and more friends. That would make me happy.” From a societal perspective, the hedonic treadmill has some benefits. It keeps us on our toes and moves society forward. It also gives lots of people jobs. If people didn’t want more Oreos, no one would have jobs selling Oreos at the grocery store, or stocking the Oreos on the shelf, or making new kinds of Oreos.
I don’t know exactly when I took the red pill.(1)Red pill and blue pill: I’m referring to the red pill in the movie The Matrix. Neo takes the red pill to see the world for what it really is. He had a choice to take the red pill or the blue pill, which would have left him in blissful ignorance. It’s much easier to talk about a time when I’d taken the red pill and was talking to someone who hadn’t. I was at the Whitney Museum of Art with my friend. We saw the exhibit fruits, vegetables; fruit and vegetable salad.
Red pill and blue pill: I’m referring to the red pill in the movie The Matrix. Neo takes the red pill to see the world for what it really is. He had a choice to take the red pill or the blue pill, which would have left him in blissful ignorance.
I know that money wouldn’t make me happy, but I still had dreams of being an early retiree. I dreamt of being that person who quit their job, moved to Hawaii, and sipped margaritas while I cashed my dividend checks. But as I got older, I realized that it’s not about the age of retirement but the quality of that retirement.
Guest Post: My 10-year-old son Blake is an avid Fortnite player who often plays with his friends. I thought it would be good for him (with my help) to tell everyone about the world of social gaming.
Fortnite is not just a game about fighting. Yes, there is a lot of shooting, collecting guns, and exploring the world. The most exciting part isn’t about fighting it’s about spending time with friends online. Even though my parents only let me play Fortnite with people that I know, playing Fortnite with them is different, and in some ways better, than playing with them in the real world. Playing Fortnite is a lot like being in a virtual world together with my friends, like the Oasis in Ready Player One.
At the end of last year, Bubbie, my last living grandparent, was fading away. She couldn’t see, could barely walk, and her kidneys were failing. It was becoming clear that we needed to savor each moment with her. So we created some great memories — like the last time we had a steak dinner with her and needed to push her on her walker around the corner to the restaurant. Or the last time she came to our house and Ari asked if he could snuggle her because he really likes snuggling people. We spent those last months finding special moments with Bubbie. And it was exciting because Bubbie was always up for some good fun.
When my Bubbie died in January, I wasn’t sure how to deal with it. People kept telling me that, “She lived a good long life” and “Her memory will live forever” but this wasn’t helpful. I know that she lived a great life and I know that I was very lucky to be 41 when my last grandparent died. But how should I deal with her death? What do I do now?
This year Professor Laurie Santos created Yale’s most popular class of all time. The class is titled Psychology and the Good Life but it’s really a course on how to be happy both in the short and long term. I was excited to hear that Yale was offering the course but even more excited to see that the class is available online. She expanded on the class with her Happiness Lab Podcast. While there’s little I hadn’t heard before, it did a great job of focusing me on what’s important and helped me get into the practice of being happier.
This is a letter to my Zaid (Yiddish for grandfather) Norman Schlaff on what would have been his 95th birthday on June 4, 2023. Zaid died in 2012.
Zaid,
We went to Disney World with my in-laws last year for my father-in-law’s 80th birthday. While we had a wonderful time, there’s something that really bugged me. When you used to take us to Disney World, we all trusted Disney to create new and exciting adventures to surprise and delight us. After my last visit, I realized that Disney has lost its courage to invent, deciding instead to join the hoard of technology fanboys.
Before he died, Richard Feynman said, “By the time people die, a lot of what is good about them has rubbed off on other people. So although they are dead, they won’t be completely gone.” My Zaid died a decade ago on December 20, 2012. After I had an accident skiing, Zaid surprised me with a visit.
When we think about being successful at work, we all know that it takes a lot of hard work. But even with that work, success is elusive. That’s because we don’t have a good sense of what it means to be truly great at a job, even for seemingly obvious jobs, like being a doctor. I provide a simple framework on how you can be the best at any job.
“What would you do if I punched you in the face right now?”
That’s the question that Mark Craney, former Operating Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, says is the best sales interview question he’s ever received.
NYC’s new OMNY MetroCard shows how the city is creating products that better meet customer needs, just like tech giants like Amazon do.
While it’s easy to get sucked into discussions on “important” topics like COVID or politics, sometimes it’s fun to focus on the little things in life. These little things can be incredibly frustrating. Other times they can lead to wonderfully delightful surprises.
Before COVID,(1)This is less of an issue these days, now that I use a Citi Bike for work. one of my minor frustrations was deciding whether or not to buy an unlimited ride subway card or a pay-per-ride card. I’d used to take the subway 5 days a week and a little on weekends. An unlimited ride monthly was normally the right choice. It paid for itself plus a got juiced up that I could ride the subway for free to explore the city. The unlimited ride ticket helped me feel more connected to the city. But what if I went on vacation? What if I had work travel? I would feel cheated if the pay-per-ride card was cheaper that month.
The first time I experienced “Insane Mode” in a Tesla was in Knoxville Tennessee. We were outside cousin Greg’s house next to a beautiful lake. Blake was in the back seat while we rolled to an empty straight-away in front of his house. Then Greg said, “Do you want to see something cool? Make sure your seatbelts are buckled.” He brought the car to a stop and pressed a few buttons. “Ready?” he said. Then he stepped on the accelerator and sent us from zero to sixty in less than three seconds. We were immediately pinned back in our seats as the sides of our eyes and mouth reached for the backrest. After we got out, I thought, “I would love to buy this car.”(1)Here are some NSFW reactions of people with their first time with Insane mode.
But even if I bought the car, I wouldn’t be able to replicate that experience. The first time trying Insane Mode (or its newer cousins Ludacris Mode and Plaid Mode) can’t be duplicated. Companies try to convince you that you can do it—just purchase their products! This happens with kids’ toys all the time. A few years ago, I bought the Little Bits R2-D2. This is a nifty little kit for kids where kids build a remote-controlled R2-D2 that we built with some friends. We enjoyed building it that first time, but the box said, “Create. Play. Invent.” But after we followed the instructions and played with it, we never did create or invent, and R2-D2 went to hibernate in the closet.(2)It occurred to me that it would be better to rent toys like this rather than to buy them.
Each time you use something, you get a new experience. The first experience is the most powerful, then each additional experience is less so. Eventually, you just take it for granted and don’t appreciate it anymore. This is why behavioral economists(3)Behavioral economists study the psychological side of economics. say that experiences are more valuable than things. When you purchase that experience, you are spending all of your money on that first experience. The joy from these later experiences are a lot less valuable.(4)In his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard tells a story about how a truly novel experience can become commonplace. Most interesting is that transition, at the second experience.
GUILDENSTERN: A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until – “My God,” says the second man, “I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn.” At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are, the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience… “Look, look” recites the crowd. “A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.”
People become accustomed to almost everything, even something as wonderful as living in paradise. The Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahnemann was offered a position at a California University after having spent years in Michigan. He thought that clearly, people were happier in California with all the great weather and good vibes. If he would be happier in California, that might tip the scales on whether to take the position. So he did a large study to figure out the difference between people’s happiness in Michigan and California. He learned that when people move to California they see an immediate uptick in their happiness. But over time, that fades and the people settle into the same level of happiness they had before the move. Kahnemann pointed out that it’s very hard to get answers to questions on happiness. When you ask people, “How happy does living in California make you?” you invariably get the answer to the question “How happy does living in California make you when you are thinking about the fact that you live in California?” This is an important distinction because rarely are people thinking about the weather and good vibes of California on an everyday basis.
When I was at Amazon, I wanted to see how experiences fade over time. The company had these beautifully designed badges you’d use to get into buildings. The designers spent a huge amount of time and money to get them perfectly right. They had this silky matte sheen that reflected the light perfectly. When I got the badge, it was immediately placed in a plastic sheath, providing it with a more gauche glossy protection.
Unable to decide whether to leave it exposed and attractive or protected and shiny, I decided to do an experiment. By default, I’d leave it in the plastic sheath for the night. When I got to work, I took it out of its plastic covering so I could appreciate it. At night I’d put it back. So each morning I’d have to take the action to unprotect the badge and make it prettier. For the first few months, I took it out and really admired the craftsmanship of the badge. After three months I realized that I didn’t care about the design anymore and left it in the protective case. The experience of appreciating the badge had worn off.
Experiences are also great because they create powerful shared moments.(5)The group Improv Everywhere creates amazing experiences between people. One of my favorite experiences in college didn’t cost any money—well, not any additional money. $2 bills have always been pretty rare. Back when people used to pay for everything with cash, I’d get one every few years. My grandfather Barney Liebman used to save all of his $2 bills in his desk drawer. But something strange happened in Harvard Square in 1995. I was at the Au Bon Pain, standing behind a young African American grad student waiting to pay. He bought a pastry and a coffee. He paid for his $8 purchase with one $5 bill and two $2 bills. Two $2 bills! One would have been unusual. Maybe he didn’t care about his $2 bill. But two?! How could this be?! I had to find out. After a thorough investigation, I learned that you can ask for $2 bills at the bank, just like any other money. So I got a bunch and started buying things with them. It would always put a smile on the cashier’s face, and it was free!(6)The one problem was that banks would only have a few $2 bills at any time. If you’re really serious about two-dollar bills, you can have your bank order you a stack from the Federal Reserve. It’s less relevant these days as no one pays with cash anymore.
Even though I know that experiences are more important than physical items, it still seems like physical items have more weight (no pun intended). There’s still the temptation to buy something “real” even when it’s less useful. Before the pandemic, Blake asked for virtual Fortnite presents for his birthday. These were outfits for his virtual characters.
Abigail said, “That’s such a waste. It’s just something that will live on his computer. He’ll use it once or twice and then forget about it.”
I replied, “Yes. It’s awesome. He gets a gift he really wants for his birthday and has a wonderful experience. And when he gets sick of it, we never have to throw it out!”
Note: For people that want a good compromise between renting and purchasing movies, Amazon’s Prime Video has an interesting solution. Each time you rent a movie, you are credited for the purchase of that movie. You can rent the movie as many times as you want but you are capped at the total cost of buying the movie.
In his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard tells a story about how a truly novel experience can become commonplace. Most interesting is that transition, at the second experience.
GUILDENSTERN: A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until – “My God,” says the second man, “I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn.” At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are, the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience… “Look, look” recites the crowd. “A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.”
The one problem was that banks would only have a few $2 bills at any time. If you’re really serious about two-dollar bills, you can have your bank order you a stack from the Federal Reserve. It’s less relevant these days as no one pays with cash anymore.
But alas, I’m not a designer or a YouTube creator. I’m a writer. So this is my holiday gift to you.
MY WRITING
In 2020, I did a whole lot of writing. This year I have a more demanding job which has limited my quantity of blog posts. Also, my big writing project is my book which I’ve excerpted at the end of this email.
If you’d like to poke around through my thoughts, visit schlaff.com for blog posts or check out my library for other random thoughts. Here are some of my favorite recent writing:
Why We Love Camp Ramah. My essay on Camp Ramah, the Jewish Summer Camp we send the kids to each year. It’s about how we are trying to raise our kids with positive values and how we can use religion to help guide our family in that direction.
Zaid’s Unopened Hannukah Present. I letter to my grandfather and about how I’ll always remember him, even if I couldn’t do everything that I wanted with him.
This has been a hard year. It was different from last year. In a word, 2020 sucked. Plain and simple.
When 2020 was over, we expected things to get back to normal. Instead, 2021 was a year of waiting, partially frozen in time. It felt like we were in a chrysalis, that cocoon between being a caterpillar and being a butterfly. The chrysalis is a complete breakdown of the caterpillar into its foundational amino acids and reconstituting itself as a butterfly. That’s what this year was like—a complete breakdown of everything before and waiting to see what will happen when we emerge. While inside the cocoon I learned to appreciate the little things in life, like taking daily pictures for my virtual background while I worked from home.
I’ve also got a lot of happiness and inspiration links on my website. I’ve also written some pieces you might find inspiring in these difficult times. Here are some of my favorites:
Thank You for Being a Friend. Friendship is about being there for other people. Anyone can celebrate with you when it’s convenient. A true friend stands by you when it’s inconvenient.
The Best Vacation Ever. Thank God We Survived. This year reminds me of a vacation we took a few years ago. Everything was planned impeccably only to completely fall apart. It was an awesome trip in spite of (or maybe because of) all of these challenges.
And I’ve also got some of my favorite inspirations here.
Movie:Come From Away on Apple TV+. A Broadway play about the 6,000 transatlantic passengers who landed in Gander, Newfoundland when US Airspace closed on September 11, 2001.
My kids live in the future. Two years ago, Blake taught me about Fortnight and the Metaverse, well before Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company. This year I learned how YouTube is taking over the media landscape. If you don’t have tweenage boys, you may not know that being a YouTuber is the #1 dream profession, significantly ahead of old favorites like movie star or rock idol. Here’s a quick summary:
My friend Adam Chase is one of these Young Turks of new media. He writes the YouTube channel Half as Interesting (HAI) which has humorous takes on interesting and complicated topics. These videos average 500,000 views. By comparison, Jimmy Kimmel averages about 20% of that for a monologue. When I asked Adam how writing HAI changed him, he said, “I’ve become the most annoying person at any party. Like last week when I was introduced to someone at a party who used to be in the Navy, I could have said something normal like, ‘Thank you for your service.’ Instead, I decided to say, ‘Did you know that Pepsi once had the world’s sixth-largest navy.'” Abigail highlighted a very funny joke with the same idea.
During COVID-19, everyone seemed to be having the same experiences at the same time. So our family had the same experiences as many people on YouTube. Our favorite online family is the Holderness Family. Here are our favorite videos that take us through 2021:
In the early part of the year, I found some fantastic podcasts about COVID-19.
This American Life Episode 727 had an interview with 4 of the scientists that did the basic research on the COVID-19 vaccine. All the research on the vaccine was done years ago, on MERS. Without that huge jump start, we would still be waiting for a vaccine.
The Great Vaccinator is about the most important scientist you’ve never heard of. Maurice Hilleman created the Mumps vaccine in 4 years and 8 of the 14 standard childhood vaccines.
Every Day is Ignaz Semmelweis Day is an homage to the discoverer of germs and the first proponent of hand washing. The medical community was not a fan of Semmelweis, annoyed by his guidance on hygiene. But why were they so against hand washing but so in favor of anesthesia which was discovered at the same time? Atul Gawande explains that you can see anesthesia working right away but don’t physically see the results of hygiene.
The Thing I’m Getting Over is a This American Life did a podcast on how recovering feels. spoiler alert: it’s not a fun process.
Under the Covers of Excel. Did you ever wonder how Excel works? Enter Joel Spolsky, the founder of Trello and Stack Overflow, who worked on Excel in the 1990s. I learned a lot from his entertaining talk, You Suck at Excel. My favorite part was how R1C1 notation explains how Excel’s “magic” of dragging cells works.
Fun with Alexa. Here are twolists of Alexa Easter Eggs. My favorites are “Alexa, open the pod bay doors,” “What’s the answer to life, the universe, and everything?” and “Up up down down left right left right B A start.”
“Fresh” Krispy Kreme Donuts at Home. There’s nothing better than a fresh-from-the-oven Krispy Kreme donut. They just don’t taste the same they’re not fresh. But I’ve learned that popping a cold one in the oven for 10 seconds brings back all that fresh-baked goodness.
Ruth Belville was known as the Greenwich Time Lady. Each day, she would go to the Greenwich Observatory and set her pocket watch to the Shepard Master Clock and then go around London selling the time by setting people’s watches.
The are many words that we use every day that used to be trademarked like Escalator (generically “moving stairway”), Bubble Wrap (generically “air bubble packaging”), and Dumpster (generically “mobile garbage bin”). Here’s how brand names can become generic.
MY BOOK
Thanks for sticking with me for long! For you intrepid readers, I have a special treat for you. This is the beginning of my leadership book based on Amazon’s culture, called Thinking Amazonian (Day 1). It’s what I learned from the company, and how other people can use Amazon’s best practices in their own lives. It’s in the early stages and I’m still looking for an editor to clean it up and an agent to help me sell it. If you have any thoughts, please email me. Here’s the beginning:
I had the privilege of working for one of the world’s biggest celebrities and now I’m writing a book about it. OK, that’s not exactly true but it’s close. I worked at Amazon as their head of cloud banking and I’m writing a book about how Amazon gave me a new framework for thinking about the world.
I was the Head of Banking for Amazon Web Services (AWS), responsible for AWS’s strategic initiatives for banks and lenders across the world. I worked with these organizations to transform their existing businesses and bring new, innovative solutions to market with AWS.
There are lots of great books and videos about Amazon, but this one is about being Amazonian. That’s what Amazon employees call themselves. It’s more than a book about Amazon. It’s about how to take the core of Amazon’s culture (called Leadership Principles) and apply them to your work and your life. While they often look like boring management principles, they offer insights into Amazon’s success. They also offer an avenue for deeper personal growth. For example, one of Amazon’s Leadership Principles is “Dive Deep.” The principle exemplifies Amazon’s focus on operational excellence, but it also highlights how you can appreciate the beauty of the everyday world.
Understanding Amazonian thinking is key to being successful with technology. I’ve seen companies try to be like Amazon and fail. They spend millions of dollars on an innovation center and gloat about how they’ve implemented design thinking. When companies try to be more like Silicon Valley, they wear hoodies and jeans to work without knowing why. They think that the casual dress code of Silicon Valley started with the hippie counterculture of Steve Jobs. But it has a much deeper and important meaning. Silicon Valley’s casual dress code started with the godfather of Silicon Valley, Robert Noyce.
Robert Noyce was born in Burlington Iowa into a deep Midwestern Congregationalist ethic. When he started Intel, the first modern tech company, he brought his Midwestern roots to the company. He believed that no one was better than anyone else. He had a casual dress code because he believed that the best ideas should win, not the ideas from the people with the best suits and the biggest offices. As other tech companies emerged in Silicon Valley, they imported their culture from Intel. Most companies don’t know this history and adopt the dress code without adopting this focus on the meritocracy of ideas, missing the point and most of the value.
Most books about Amazon and other tech companies treat the reader as a tourist visiting a new and mystical land. It’s kind of like watching the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The UK paper, The Register, even refers to Google as “The Chocolate Factory” because it’s as weird and wonderous as Willy Wonka’s candy factory. There are wonderful and amazing things about Amazon that I’ll share in the book, I want you to get more than that. What if you could get the mind of Agustus Gloop, the glutton who fell into Mr. Wonka’s chocolate river, and find out how the experience changed him. That’s the feeling I want to give you in this book. I want to take you inside Jeff’s peculiar company.
Throughout the book, I refer to Jeff Bezos as Jeff, not because I know him personally but because all Amazonians call him that. At each all-hands meeting, Jeff highlights a few of his favorite things posted on Amazon’s internal website. Once he pulled up a humorous quote from another Amazonian named Jeff that said something like:
I am the founder of the Amazon support group “Jeffs who are not Jeff.” We come together to support the “other Jeffs” at Amazon. We meet every Thursday at 8 PM between the groups “Fire Phone Owners Anonymous” and “Amazonians named Alexa.”
So what does it mean to be Amazonian? From the outside, Amazon looks like a holding company—a collection of businesses from a bookseller to a grocery store to a television production company. There’s even my part of the business, Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud provider. But all of these pieces are held together by one thing—Amazon’s culture.
Amazon’s culture is centered around 16 Leadership Principles. These Leadership Principles are the core of Amazon’s interviews, promotions, and making everyday decisions. In this book, I’m going to take you through the 16 principles and show you how I’ve applied them and how you can use them in your personal and business life.
Let’s start with the first principle: Customer Obsession. This means providing the best possible experience for each customer. When Amazon was just selling books, it meant providing the best book-buying experience in the world, but things have gotten more complicated over time.
Customer Obsession applies to the whole firm, even unlikely areas like recruiting. Most companies treat their interviewees as vendors selling their services. They want to hire the best people and ignore those that they don’t need. But Amazon knows that virtually everyone that interviews is a customer, so it strives to give each interviewee a great experience. It doesn’t want to lose that retail customer and their friends because of a bad interview experience.
What does Customer Obsession mean for this book? Well, you, as my reader, are my customer. I want to give you an amazing experience reading this book. Having an exceptional experience is about looking beyond the ordinary and creating something new. Here’s an example of an exceptional experience.
In June of 2019, I went on my first visit to Japan when I spoke at the AWS Summit in Tokyo. This is a massive conference where over 10,000 Japanese coders streamed into the Makuhari Messe Conference Center in suburban Tokyo. I tried to find my way in the flood of attendees, where everything looked familiar but slightly off. Our Japanese hosts had t-shirts that said, “ASK ME! I’m with the AWS Summit!” but when I needed directions, he responded to me with all the English he knew, saying, “AWS. Yes. Yes. AWS.”
I was excited to experience everything Japanese. Familiar things like cheesecake took on a magical new meaning, both fluffier and sweeter than the American or Italian versions. 7-11 was a place to get high-quality food like beef teriyaki jerky or dried squid. While my hotel room had one tiny bed, the hotel also had five bathhouses. These bathhouses were traditional in Japanese hotels, and I had to try them. The signs said that there were absolutely no visible tattoos or bathing suits allowed. There were various different stations filled with cold water, like one where you were massaged by rollers and another where sitting one tub caused water to cascade into others. It was a novel and exciting theme park for nude cold plunges. At the same time, I was terrified that one of my business colleagues would come in and sit next to me. Luckily the bath was empty the whole time I was there. I was in a world of sensory overload where I constantly wanted more. If the 7-11 was this good, the best thing in Tokyo must be mind-blowing. When I asked my host, he told me the best thing in Tokyo is the Imperial Palace.
The Imperial Palace is the main residence of the Emporer of Japan. After crossing the moat that protected the palace from ancient invaders, I entered a history far older and more powerful than I imagined. I walked through a grassy lawn area where the Emperor housed his concubines and visited the base of the giant Tenshu tower that burned down in 1657. The rulers of Toyko were so powerful that they never felt the need to rebuild it.
But walking through The Palace, something was missing. I felt this when I was walking through the palace’s East Gardens. While the gardens were beautiful, they weren’t that different from the gardens of Central Park a few blocks from my apartment. While it sounds silly and pretentious, I wanted more from these trees and plants.
But how could I have a better experience at the East Gardens? The Emperor had done his part. In 1968, the Emperor opened the gardens to the public because he wanted to share this treasure with the people. People like me could walk around except on Mondays and Fridays when it was closed for the Emporer and the Imperial Family to stroll around.
I wondered what the Emporer did on those days in the garden. I bet I could do these things too. I could sit and meditate next to the Emporer’s iris garden, one of the most beautiful in the world. The irises were transplanted from the iris garden of Meiji Jingu, a shrine dedicated to Emperor Meiji, the great-great-grandfather of the current Emperor.
Approaching the Emperor’s Iris Garden
In the Emperor’s Iris Garden
As I sat there for an hour my perspective totally changed. Instead of demanding more and better experiences from everything, I was able to appreciate the best things in life. I felt a sublime calmness and happiness come over me. Strange and wonderful things started to happen as I let things unfold, like when a couple sat next to me with a Yankees cap. I learned that they were from Chile and were in Japan visiting a friend they met through an organization of international friendship created by Jimmy Carter. The Yankees cap came via one of their friends who lived a mile north of me, halfway around the world in New York.
When I left the garden, I felt like an Emperor. It wasn’t about the quantity of experience but its quality. I was able to take this experience and feeling with me when I went home. In this book, I want to give you that kind of experience, treating you like the special customer that you are.
As I sign off from this email, I wanted to leave you with one of my cards. I wrote about the story behind these cards, but the message stands by itself. Thanks for being my friend. You’re Awesome. Let’s Talk.
These days, all of these products are being sold as services. With Amazon Web Services we’re buying IT infrastructure and computing as a service. With Apple Music, we’re no longer buying music but streaming it over the internet for a monthly fee. We don’t even store our own pictures anymore, they stored in the cloud rather than on our own computers. With “Subscribe and Save” from Amazon, we can even get toilet paper as a service.
You walk into the field and see a group of children huddled around a fire pit. They’re having fun, performing strange rituals, singing odd songs, and building a community. What do you call this? Summer camp. If the songs are in Hebrew and the rituals are thousands of years old, then you’d call it Camp Ramah.
Summary: Kids do incredible things. Instead of trying to teach them as little adults, give them some tools and flexibility and see what they create. They may not do what you expect, but it’s fascinating (and funny) to see how they think.
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