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It’s Time to Up Our Game

Last Saturday morning I was in the apartment of one of my best friends from Yale, hanging out with him and his father-in-law. We’ve been friends for thirty years. At one point I pointed to him and said to his father-in-law, “This man here is the best thing that happened to me at Yale.” I heard it come out of my mouth and realized I had never said that before. I’m not sure I had ever let myself think it.

When people ask me whether I enjoyed Yale, I usually give them a tour. I talk about the classes and the professors and the old buildings. I think about whether they would like it, or whether their kid would, and I try to say something useful. I normally answer for the person asking. This time I gave myself permission to answer for me. Yes, I enjoyed Yale. There were plenty of wonderful things there, but my friends are the best thing I got out of Yale.

That afternoon I went to the memorial service for my friend Kate (not her real name), who was in my residential college, Saybrook. She was a physically small person with an enormous personality, and the thing I remember most about her is her infectious smile. Every picture of her at the memorial had that same smile. It wasn’t just too big for her face. It was too big for her body.

At the service I learned how much of an adventurer she was. She and her husband once took off and traveled around the world for ten months. Over the years she broke a lot of bones in a long run of unlucky and ill-advised adventures, and she kept going anyway. Her mother said there were many times she thought Kate was going to die in one of her crazy adventures. Kate just wanted to have fun, and sometimes the fun got there before the planning did. Her cousin told the story of her first memory of Kate. Kate was very young and had come over to her house, and they took her bike riding on a trail. Kate didn’t know how to use foot brakes. Who would think you’d need to explain that? So when she started down the hill, she had no idea how to stop. I thought this might have been one of the times she broke her arm, but there were so many stories about Kate breaking her arm that I couldn’t tell.

When a wonderful person dies, everyone has to figure out how to deal with it. One of the mourners talked about the providence of God. She said that when people like Kate are taken from us, she feels it’s because someone needed them more. I understand why people say that, and I don’t like it very much. Rabbi Harold Kushner didn’t like it either. His son Aaron died at fourteen of progeria, a disease that makes children age rapidly, and a few years later Kushner wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He went back to the book of Job, the story of a good man who loses everything, and decided that if he had to choose between a God who is all-powerful and a God who is good, he would keep the good one. “I cannot believe that God ‘sends’ illness to a specific person for a specific reason,” he wrote.

For comfort, I go to Richard Feynman. Near the end of Feynman’s life, his friend Danny Hillis told him, “I’m sad because I realize you’re about to die.” Feynman said, “Yeah, that bugs me sometimes too. But not as bad as you think. By the time you get to be my age a lot of what is good about you has rubbed off on the people and so although I will be dead, I won’t be completely gone.”

When Kate’s husband spoke, after he talked about how wonderful Kate was, he talked about John Green. Green did an episode of his podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed about Auld Lang Syne, and it’s really a eulogy for his friend Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Kate’s husband talked about how clearly Amy accepted death. Green says one of the last lines she wrote was, “Death may be knocking on my door, but I’m not getting out of this glorious bath to answer it.” Amy used to get whole rooms to sing a song with her, to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” The song is one line, over and over. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. On paper it’s a bleak song, but Green says that singing it with Amy, “I could always see the hope in it. It became a statement that we are here—meaning that we are together, and not alone. And it’s also a statement that we are, that we exist, and it’s a statement that we are here, that a series of astonishing unlikelihoods has made us possible and here possible. We might never know why we are here, but we can still proclaim in hope that we are here.”

I have a new way of thinking about death that I learned at the memorial. The idea that someone needed Kate more asks me to hand her death over to God. Feynman and Amy ask me to accept it, and to look for Kate in the people she rubbed off on. I’d rather take it as a challenge. I started telling people, “Kate was one of the really good ones. She made the world a significantly better place. We’ve lost one of the best members of our team, and now we’ve all got to do better.”

Further Reading

Green’s episode ends with a short recording of Amy and friends singing the song, and it’s worth hearing her lead the room. I hear a couple more things in the song than Green does. Here is now, the only place any of us actually lives. Here is also just what is, accepted without needing a reason. And “Auld Lang Syne” itself is what people have always done at the turn of a year, raising a glass to old friends.

If you want more of Amy Krouse Rosenthal, start with “You May Want to Marry My Husband,” the Modern Love essay she wrote about her husband, Jason, while she was dying. Then read his answer in Modern Love and his book, My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me, and watch his TED talk on grief. After that, go to her memoirs, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life and Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal, and watch the films from The Beckoning of Lovely, the project where she invited strangers to meet her at the Bean in Chicago and make something together.

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Life Lessons Uncategorized

The Dizziness of Freedom

I played weekend soccer in elementary school. Though I was far from the best player on the team, I was the fastest kid on the field. That meant I’d sometimes end up on a breakaway, with the ball at my feet and no defenders ahead of me. When that happened, I’d fall down. I’d literally laugh and fall down, and I wouldn’t even try to kick.

Now, decades later, I realized what I was doing. My body was sabotaging itself. The laugh came first, then the legs going soft, then the grass.

This was a reflex. If I had thought about it, I would have had plenty of options. I could have practiced it, until my body knew what to do when the moment came in a real game. But I wasn’t thinking. Underneath the not-thinking was a fear I couldn’t have named at the time. It was a fear of making a decision, and possibly failing.

I thought I didn’t deserve to score. That was the fear underneath, and the usual advice only made it worse. “Fake it till you make it” sounded selfish, a way of saying “I don’t know what I’m doing, so please bear with me while I figure things out.” But the real selfish act is sitting with your own insecurity so long that you forget there’s a job in front of you that needs doing.

Alfred Adler, the great psychologist from the early 20th century, had a word for how to think about this: Gemeinschaftsgefühl. It’s a German word that loosely translates to “community feeling.” The idea is that we’re here to contribute to something larger than ourselves. We are here for the benefit of others, not ourselves.

I have one friend who’s genuinely curious and warm, and asks people good questions. But when a conversation gets into really interesting territory, where something ambiguous or tender is sitting on the table, she laughs. She’s laughing because it’s funny and interesting to her, and also a little uncomfortable. The laugh shuts the conversation down right when it’s getting good. She doesn’t mean it that way, but the laugh does the work of closing a door.

I recognize this because I do versions of it myself. My adult version of the soccer fall is gratitude, both giving and receiving. If someone thanks me for something that actually mattered, I feel the reflex start up. I’ll crack a joke or shift the credit to someone else before the moment can land. Giving it is almost as hard. When I want to tell someone what they’ve meant to me, I can feel my body trying to find a lighter, safer version that won’t require me to sit in the fullness of what I actually mean.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard had a name for this reflex. Writing in the 1840s, he was one of the first people to treat anxiety as a philosophical problem. He’s sometimes called the father of existentialism, and what he named was existential anxiety, the dizziness of freedom. It’s the intense uncertainty that hits you when you realize the next move is yours, and so is whatever comes of it. That dizziness is terrifying enough that we spend most of our lives trying to avoid this responsibility.

This matters more as I get more senior at work, where people look up to me. Authenticity matters when you’re a leader, because other people are depending on you. The temptation is to talk about the problems rather than trust the company strategy. But that’s its own kind of falling down in the grass. Part of the job is putting on a brave face even when you’re not confident. Your job isn’t to feel brave. It’s to give other people the steadiness they need.

One of my mentors, a former CEO of several companies, told me once, “You don’t have enough time to be an expert in everything. You do it a couple of times and then move on to something new.” It wasn’t advice so much as access. He was showing me that even at his level, he hadn’t figured everything out. Nobody does. There’s no moment when someone tells you that you’re allowed to take the next step. You grab it anyway.

Now I have the chance to do that for other people, and it’s become one of the best parts of my job. Someone I worked with, I’ll call her Nancy, was very competent but had spent a decade without a real chance to grow. She didn’t feel worthy of the space she was taking up. We worked on small things together, starting with how she introduced herself in a meeting. It was a tiny thing, but it was the same kind of muscle memory I needed on the soccer field. I could stand with her as a coach while she did the work.

Immanuel Kant, one of the great moral philosophers of the Enlightenment, wrote that we stay children, and not because we lack reason. We have the reason. What we lack is the resolution and courage to use it without someone else directing us.

Being an adult doesn’t mean the dizziness goes away. It means you learn to manage it. You stop waiting to feel ready and start. I came across a phrase from the Disordered podcast that sums up this whole essay. The hosts were talking about clinical anxiety, but it applies to existential anxiety too. They call it shortening the time between “oh my god” and “oh well.”

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The Holiness of Numbers

I used to think numbers in Judaism were kind of random. Noah was on the ark for 40 days and 40 nights. The Jews wandered in the desert for 40 years. I thought “There’s no way there were actuaries counting out 40 days.” But then it got worse. I learned that “40” in biblical Hebrew doesn’t really mean forty. It means “a lot.” It’s basically the ancient equivalent of “umpteen.”

This made me feel like religion wasn’t scientific at all. The whole thing felt parochial and naive. Clearly, the ancient Jews didn’t understand numbers as well as we did.

But recently I’ve had a change of heart. It’s not always about mastering mathematics and bending numbers to our whims. It’s about taking the profane (which is a more colorful word for ordinary) and making it holy.

When Numbers Were Holy

We live in a world where we’ve domesticated numbers. We’ve made them perfectly obedient servants in our spreadsheets, tax forms, and grade point averages. We teach children to manipulate them in school. We’ve built machines that can crunch millions of them per second. Numbers, in our world, are tools—precise, mechanical objects to do our bidding.

But go back into Jewish tradition, and numbers were something else entirely. They weren’t just for counting goats or measuring grain. They carried weight. They had meaning.

Take the number 18 in Judaism. The Hebrew word for “life”—chai—is spelled with the letters chet and yud, which together equal 18 in gematria (Jewish numerology). So 18 became a number infused with the essence of life itself. People give monetary gifts in multiples of 18. They gave a meaning to numbers beyond an amount.

Or consider the structure of Torah reading. Seven aliyot (people called up to read) on Shabbat. Seven—not because someone once decided it was a nice round number, but because seven is woven into the fabric of Jewish time. Seven days of creation. Seven days of the week. The seventh day, Shabbat, the most holy. Weekdays have 3 aliyot and holidays are somewhere in between, depending on the importance of the holiday.

Then there’s the counting of the Omer—50 days between Passover and Shavuot, marking the journey from physical to spiritual freedom. Eight nights of Hanukkah. These aren’t random. They’re part of a sacred mathematics, a calendar built on the conviction that certain numbers resonate with divine patterns.

To modern ears, this all sounds a bit naive. We know numbers. We’ve mastered them. What could be sacred about seven or eighteen or fifty?

The Miracle Hiding in Plain Math

It’s easy to say that we should be thinking about bigger things—matters that are more meaningful. We should be appreciating great art and music, because that’s the ultimate expression of being human.

But we can appreciate the beauty of mathematics as a holy thing too. Think about it. You have three goats over here. Three fish over there. Somehow, your brain can extract this abstract concept—”three-ness”—that applies to both. You can hold it in your mind, manipulate it, combine it with other numbers, understand that three plus three equals six whether we’re talking about goats or fish or stars or centuries. That’s crazy. It’s about as powerful a human capability as we have.

We’re just meat computers, basically—neurons firing in particular patterns—and yet somehow we can comprehend infinity. We can grasp limits and derivatives. We can calculate the trajectory needed to land a probe on Mars. No other animal does this. Not even close.

Math isn’t just a tool we invented. It’s a capability central to human thought and understanding.

Even Isaac Newton, one of history’s greatest scientists, saw numbers this way. We all know that there are 7 colors in the rainbow: ROYGBIV. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. But what’s the deal with indigo? Look carefully at the actual spectrum and you’ll notice indigo doesn’t really hold its own as a distinct color. Newton included it to get to the number seven—that sacred number.If God created the rainbow, there had to be seven colors, not six.

Reclaiming Wonder

So what do we do with this? I’m not suggesting we all start practicing gematria or refuse to use the number four because it sounds like “death” in Mandarin. But maybe there’s something worth recovering here.

In his book To Life! Rabbi Harold Kushner writes: “Everything in God’s world can be holy if you realize its potential holiness. Everything we do can be transformed into a Sinai experience, an encounter with the sacred. The goal of Judaism is not to teach us how to escape from the profane world to the cleansing presence of God, but to teach us how to bring God into the world, how to take the ordinary and make it holy.”

Now when I look at the numbers of aliyot on Shabbat or weekdays, or the ten people needed for a minyan, I pause and remember that there’s something powerful and primal and wonderfully human in numbers. The ancient reverence for numbers wasn’t primitive—it was holy. It recognized that our ability to abstract and pattern-match is one of the deepest things that makes us human.

It reminds me that the goal of life isn’t to control everything. It’s not to turn everything into a number. It’s to recognize that everything in life can be holy or magical—even numbers.

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I’m Not Who I Thought I Was

For most of my life, I carried around a fixed idea of who I was: Smart. Impulsive. A little weird. “This is just who I am,” I’d tell myself, as if it was literally set in my genes. But this year, after reading some great books on psychology and working with a life coach, I’ve learned to start letting go of that story of a fixed me.

Nothing made me realize how unstable the concept of “I” really is quite like breaking my ankle. There’s nothing that represents “me” more than my body, and I had this revelation lying on an operating table watching a doctor prepare to cut open my leg and screw a metal plate into my ankle. This wasn’t a doctor wrapping my arm in a cast—this was hardcore carpentry on my body.

When I woke up in my cast and started moving through the city, I realized how interconnected the world was and how reliant I was on it. I’d always thought of myself as independent, self-contained. Now I saw how much I depended on everything around me.

I thought people would be annoyed by me. But it was actually the opposite. People went out of their way to help—holding doors, offering to carry things, scanning for ways to make my life easier.

Then there were the products. I was delighted to find that companies made devices exactly for my condition. If I needed to get to work on the subway, I could use a Knee Rover, scooting along by pushing with my good leg. If I needed to do the dishes, I could strap on the iWALK and feel like a modern-day peg-legged pirate.

But each of these devices made me far more aware of the world around me. I started noticing things differently: where the stairs were, where the scooter couldn’t go. On the Knee Rover, I learned about sidewalk slopes—not just forward and backward, but left and right. Suddenly, the infrastructure of the world—the parts we usually ignore—became visible.

What I’ve come to realize is that the world isn’t made up of individual people so much as the interconnections between them. The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls it “interbeing”—the idea that we don’t just exist, we “inter-are.” Remove the surgeon, the Knee Rover, the helpful strangers, the sloped sidewalks, and there’s no “me” to speak of.

The philosopher Martin Buber wrote something similar: that we become real, become someone, not in isolation but in genuine encounter with others. Every person who held a door, every designer who thought about accessibility, every stranger who made eye contact and asked if I needed help—they weren’t just helping me navigate the world. They were part of what made me me in that moment.

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Being a CEO of a product wasn’t what I thought it would be

I published this in Mind the Product.

I was excited to manage my first product. It was over a decade ago. At the time, we didn’t have all of these product management resources and best practices that spelt out what a product manager did. All I knew was that I was going to be the CEO of a product. 

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Design Uncategorized

How a Small Fly Became a Big Deal in Bathroom Hygiene

Have you noticed the fly that lives in the urinal? In many urinals, a fly has been etched or printed near the drain as a target. This clever addition is a simple image of a fly that serves an important purpose. The idea is to provide a target to aim at, reducing spillage and keeping restrooms cleaner.

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2022 Review

A HOLIDAY GIFT FOR YOU

I wanted to give you all a meaningful holiday gift. This is difficult during normal times, and even more difficult during the pandemic.

I’ve always admired people who can give holiday gifts that are truly unique. I’m inspired by some of the great holiday gifts of the past,  like those Thomas Heatherwick’s Christmas Cards or Improv Everywhere’s Holiday Videos. There’s also Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night holiday gift where he included the names of the backstage cast on the show.

But alas, I’m not a designer or a YouTube creator. I’m a writer but I’m not Aaron Sorkin. So this is my holiday gift to you.

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Happy 2022!

I wanted to give you all a meaningful holiday gift. This is difficult during normal times, and even more difficult during the pandemic.

I’ve always admired people who can give holiday gifts that are truly unique. Designers do it best. Last year, I wrote about Thomas Heatherwick’s Christmas gifts. From 1994 to 2010, Heatherwick, creator of New York’s Vessel, created original, unique, and surprising Christmas cards. There was even a museum exhibit of these cards.

This year I wanted to start with a holiday gift from Improv Everywhere. During this time of year, they surprise people with wonderful holiday experiences like Giant Boombox, The Light Switch, and Light Up Someone’s Holiday. Since 2001, Improv Everywhere has been turning New York City into a communal space for positive pranks. You can find a quick summary of Improv Everywhere from CBS This Morning.

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.
  • Amelia Earharts’ 77-Year-Long Journey Around the World (video). My story about 2 Amelia Earharts—the one who started the journey around the world and the one who finished it.

ON HAPPINESS AND MEANING

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.

In this section, I like to highlight the goodness of the world. This year I’ll start with Dave Pell’s piece I read more news than anyone. Trust me, people are better than we’re led to think. Dave writes the newsletter NextDraft, my favorite source of daily news.

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.

A KIDS GUIDE TO NEW MEDIA

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:

A HISTORY OF 2021 IN HUMOROUS VIDEOS

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:

COVID PODCAST RETROSPECTIVE

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.

SOME COOL LIFE HACKS

  • How to Transform Your Notebook. I’ve been looking at productivity tools for years. Recently I picked up The Bullet Journal. This is a ridiculously simple way of managing your notes and to-do list all in one place. I’m really enjoying the custom notebook and the companion app.
  • 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 two lists 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.

BOTTOM OF THIS SECTION: FUN FACTS

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.

You can also read more about the book and why it’s called Thinking Amazonian (Day 1) or check out some sample chapters:

Introductory Chapters

From Amazon’s Leadership Principles:

BYE FOR NOW

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.

My Card

Rob

P.S. If you’d like to read more of my writing check out schlaff.com. If you want to get more articles by email you can subscribe here. If you want to unsubscribe from this annual letter you can do it here.

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Emotional Intelligence for Kids (and Their Parents)

This pandemic is difficult for kids. They don’t have the same emotional skills and perspective that we do. But there’s one thing that my kids are learning that wasn’t in my curriculum growing up: Emotional Intelligence.

Some people think of Emotional Intelligence as a soft skill and don’t see why it should be taught in school. I see Emotional Intelligence as a way to control yourself in difficult situations and how to motivate others. These are the key skills of leadership.

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That Time I was Catfished by a Robot Secretary

Catfish: To trick someone into a relationship online using a fictional persona and/or photographs.

I was trying to set up a meeting with one of my friends. He has his own venture-capital firm so he runs a lean shop. Also, as a venture capitalist, he likes to leverage new forms of technology.

I sent an email and said, “Hey, let’s meet up.“

He writes me back, “That sounds great! Clara, can you set something up?” and CCed his secretary Clara.

Continue reading “That Time I was Catfished by a Robot Secretary”