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Mind Like Water

David Allen wrote Getting Things Done in 2001 and became a kind of secular priest for ambitious, overwhelmed professionals. His central claim was almost absurdly simple. Get things out of your head and write them down. He wasn’t just pitching better organization. He was promising you’d feel calmer, think more clearly, and be more present with the people around you. He called the result “a mind like water.”

When I first heard this, I was drowning in work. I tried it, and it made me more relaxed. But I kept wondering why making lists made me feel better. The answer is a simple principle called the Zeigarnik Effect.

Bluma Zeigarnik was a Soviet psychologist. In the 1920s, she was sitting in a Berlin café when she noticed something odd about the waiters. They could hold an absurdly complicated order in their heads while it was still open (twelve people, substitutions, dietary restrictions) and then forget it almost instantly once the bill was paid. She went back to her lab and confirmed what she suspected. We remember unfinished tasks far better than finished ones. The brain treats incomplete work like an open file on your desktop, staying active and demanding attention until it gets saved or closed.

Maria Ovsiankina noticed something similar. Open loops don’t just stay active in memory. We also feel a strong pull to return to them. The Ovsiankina Effect is why it’s so hard to stop in the middle of something once you’re engaged, and why interruptions feel so grating even when they’re minor. We remember the open loop and feel compelled to close it.

And that’s what I notice in myself. Whenever I start a new project, pick up a new book, or start a new text conversation, that’s a new open loop. Often these unfinished things would scream, “Hey! Look at me!” By the end of a busy day, the tiredness I feel isn’t just physical. Every loop I opened and didn’t close is still there, demanding to be dealt with until I do something about them.

That’s why I could get a mind like water just by writing things down. Writing something down closes the loop for a while. My mind can stop circling. The list holds my open loops so my attention doesn’t have to.

The most obvious thing I learned is that the number of open loops matters. Right now I’m reading a book I actually want to finish, and every instinct says to start the other one on my shelf. But if I do, I’ve just added another loop pulling at me from somewhere I can’t quite see. If I really want to finish the first book, the answer is to wait. I’ve made a commitment to the first one, and splitting the loop makes both harder. In the end, the answer is to close some loops before opening new ones.1

When I’m in the middle of something I love, the open loop isn’t a burden. Everything is in alignment, like a brigade of tiny soldiers who were all wandering in different directions suddenly snapping into formation and marching together. My mind is going to be obsessed with this thing anyway. It becomes the single most important thing in the world, and if I do anything else, it’ll just be a distraction. It’s what keeps me thinking about it in the shower, wanting to talk to everyone about it, working on it the moment I have ten free minutes. I’m in a flow state, and the incompleteness is what keeps it going. Then, when the loop finally closes, everything settles into a beautiful harmony—at least for a little while. When I finish a book, it becomes a memory, which is why I try to write about books while I’m still in the middle of them.

The thing I keep coming back to is how much better everything feels when I’m actually inside one thing. Not managing ten things, not half-finishing six of them, just present with one open loop that I care about. I’m trying to keep the loops few and stay inside the good ones. That’s as close to a mind like water as I’ve managed to get.

Footnotes

  1. Software engineering calls this keeping your Work in Progress (WIP) low so one project doesn’t distract from the others. ↩︎
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The Massage Convert

For many years, I’ve been wrong about massages.

My mistake was that I thought about them scientifically. If it’s worth doing, there should be measurable outcomes. Deep tissue work releases lactic acid. Pressure on trigger points reduces inflammation.

That didn’t work for me. It just hurt, and then hurt a little less, and the whole thing felt expensive and strange and not worth it.

What changed wasn’t the massages. It was me getting better at relaxing. And once I stopped bracing against the whole experience, I started to understand what it actually is.

It’s not a medical procedure. It’s something much more human than that.

Think about the moments when you truly feel pampered. Not just served, but genuinely attended to. A great meal where the waiter anticipates what you need before you ask. A barber who takes their time. A tailor making small adjustments with real care. Another person giving you their full attention, and something in you settling because of it.

A massage is that, taken to its logical extreme. You lie there and surrender completely. Someone spends an hour doing nothing but tending to you, figuring out where you’re tight and working on it. And then there are the oils.

Across every tradition that ever tried to heal the human body, Ayurvedic practice in India, Egyptian medicine, Greek and Roman bodywork, Traditional Chinese Medicine, you find oils. Warm substance applied to skin. The specifics differ. The impulse is identical. Cultures with no contact with each other, no shared language, no reason to coordinate, all arrived at the same answer. That’s not coincidence. That’s something true about what a human body needs from another human body.

There’s a ritual to all of it. The quiet room. The dedicated hour. The ancient map the practitioner is working from. This architecture isn’t decoration — research into how healing works suggests the more ceremonial and physical an intervention, the more powerfully it works. The body registers: something significant is happening here. And it opens.

Acupuncture is a great example of something working even though it’s not supposed to. The studies are genuinely mixed — some show it works, some show that sham acupuncture, needles placed nowhere near the traditional meridian points, works just as well. The scientific community mostly reads that as debunking. But there’s another interpretation sitting right there: maybe the ritual is the mechanism. The needles, the serious attention to your body, the quiet room — maybe that’s what’s doing the work. If sham acupuncture works too, that’s not proof that acupuncture is fake. That’s proof that the ritual is so powerful it doesn’t even need to get the details right.

Reiki takes it even further. It’s a Japanese healing practice where a practitioner places their hands lightly on or just above your body, working with what they describe as life energy. No needles, no oils, no manipulation of tissue. Just presence and intention and the belief that attention itself can do something. Reiki shouldn’t work by any measure. No physical contact, no chemical intervention, nothing you can point to. Which makes it the purest version of the argument. It can’t possibly work through scienc,e yet it still produces results. So it’s probably not the science doing the work here.

I was making the same mistake with massage. Focused on whether it worked, whether it was worth it, whether Vladimir was hitting the right spots. Missing the whole point. The massage didn’t change. I did. I got out of the way of something that was always going to work.

Why did every human culture, independently, land on the same answer? Ayurveda. Egyptian medicine. Traditional Chinese Medicine. Greek bodywork. All of them. Oils, hands, ritual, presence. One person anointing another and saying: for the next hour, this is all I’m doing. Because it works. That’s the whole argument. I get it now. Took me long enough.

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Judaism Uncategorized

Profaning the Sacred

Apologies for posting this on a nonstandard day, but I wanted to post this in time for January 27th, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The remains of the fire that tore through Beth Israel Congregation, the only synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi in January 2026. 

I’ve been thinking about Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass. It’s a strangely beautiful name for such horror, and the word has actually fallen out of favor in Germany, where people now recognize it as a euphemism that downplays the violence and brutality of the pogroms. They prefer alternative names: Novemberpogrome (November Pogroms) or Reichspogromnacht (Reich Pogrom Night). These names capture the truth more honestly—violence, desecration, a turning point.

A few years ago, listening to a survivor speak at our synagogue, something struck me about that night. Not just its historical significance, but something more fundamental about the nature of evil itself.

The Banality of Evil

The woman who spoke was quite old. She had been a child during Kristallnacht, which means we’re approaching the end of an era when people who actually experienced the Holocaust can speak on their own behalf. Once they’re gone, these events become history—easier to file away, easier to forget the ordinary horror of it all.

She described how people came into synagogues and desecrated the Torah. Synagogues were torched. Torah scrolls were ripped and trampled. Cemeteries were defiled. Jewish books were burned. Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

We like to think that if we had been there, we would have known. We would have seen the evil clearly and stood against it. We imagine we could have explained things to people, made them understand. But the reality is that evil is far more banal than that. It doesn’t always announce itself with horns and pitchforks. It begins quietly, by gradually stripping away their humanity, and what better way of destroying their humanity than destroying the things they hold most sacred?

That’s why the desecration of the Torah hit me particularly hard that day.

From Sacred to Profane

The word “profane” originally means to make something ordinary, to strip away its holiness. I thought about my son when he was two years old, trying to climb into the ark that stores the Torah scrolls in our synagogue. To him, it was just a cabinet—an object with its profane, functional purpose. But to us, it’s sacred space, the holder of our most important text, our connection to thousands of years of tradition and meaning.

Profane also means to violate or treat with contempt. That’s what happened during the Jewish pogrom that night—the systematic profaning of sacred objects, the desecration of things that held deep meaning for an entire people.

When they destroyed the Torah scrolls on Kristallnacht, it wasn’t simply about destroying Judaism or trying to destroy the Jews. When you destroy the sacred objects of a people you’re ripping away their humanity. Once you do that, you can do whatever horrible thing you want to them, because these people are no longer human in your eyes. They’re objects. Worse than objects, actually—they look like humans but you’ve decided they’re not. That’s why the Nazis could do all of these horrible things to the Jews—because we were no longer human.

Where are We Now

Dara Horn captures something devastating in her Atlantic article Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse? She writes that Holocaust education treats Jewish murder as a universal metaphor instead of honoring Jews who died. The dead Jews of the Holocaust are being used to teach a general lesson on tolerance and genocide—profaning their memories.

She points out that the National Museum of African American History doesn’t end its slavery exhibition by pivoting to “other enslaved peoples throughout history.” That would be insulting. But Holocaust museums routinely do this to Jews, ending with other genocides and generic “upstander” pledges. Jewish experience becomes a metaphor, never something valued for its own sake.

While we talk about the atrocities of the Holocaust, students make “Jew jokes” without stigma. People throw pennies at Jews in 21st-century America. Shopping carts “accidentally” ram someone wearing a kippah. When you set the bar for bigotry at mass murder, most of it doesn’t make the cut.

David Baddiel captures the double standard in Jews Don’t Count. We’ve created a hierarchy of protected minorities, and Jews don’t make the list. Whoopi Goldberg can say the Holocaust “wasn’t about race”—just “white people doing it to white people”—as if Jewish identity doesn’t count. “What should we do about Israel?” has become the new “What should we do about the Jews?” The rhetoric around Israeli “misdeeds against humanitarianism” is eerily similar to the Nazis’ reliance on science—different vocabulary, same structure.

When those men desecrated the Torah scrolls on Kristallnacht, they stripped away Jewish humanity by profaning the sacred. We can’t just teach people about gas chambers and expect them to recognize anti-Semitism—yet that’s exactly what we’re doing. Holocaust education has trained a generation of “upstanders” who will spring into action the moment they see another Holocaust—and do nothing about everything that comes before it. We need to teach the continuum: the constant dehumanization of Jews throughout history and today.

Jews don’t count. Except they should. They must. That’s how we honor both the dead and the living.

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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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Life Lessons Uncategorized

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. 

Continue reading “Being a CEO of a product wasn’t what I thought it would be”
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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.

Continue reading “How a Small Fly Became a Big Deal in Bathroom Hygiene”
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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.

Continue reading “2022 Review”
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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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