Just start doing it. Inspiration will follow.
]]>Irina: Hi, I am looking for a hair salon in San Francisco. It is on Bush and Kearny and its name starts with an “F.” I do not remember the full name.
Operator: I’m sorry. I need at least the first four letters of the name.
Irina: Try “Fes.”
Operator: I’m sorry. I’m not finding anything.
Irina: Um, okay. Could you check on Google, because I checked half an hour ago and it found it without a problem.
Operator: I’m sorry, ma’am. I do not have access to Google. I only have access to my database.
Irina: Okay. Thanks.
For nothing.
AT&T, I hate you.
Google, I love you.
User experience is everything in a competitive market. Unfortunately, AT&T is a monopoly. They do not have any incentive to improve their notoriously bad customer experience. In addition, they have a monopoly on the iPhone. I really hope Apple strikes a deal Verizon soon. It will benefit their market share!
]]>From the beginning, I was drawn by the honesty of its contributing writers. As I read the early posts, I extracted lessons for myself on how to act at work and how to learn to become a valuable employee. Brazen Careerist was a daily destination, along with Gmail and Google Reader. Instead of bugging my friends for advice, I had Brazen. And via Brazen, I received more targeted and customized advice.
Then I overdosed a bit. The discussions were fascinating, but had so much content and so much depth that reading Brazen over my morning cup of coffee became emotionally exhausting. I felt the need to comment on every post. I bookmarked each one and came back to them after work. It became a chore and I needed a break.
And now Brazen is brand new and shiny. It continues to innovate and draw in its contributors and its audience. The introduction of groups and Twitter-like conversations was a great addition (and addiction!). The Ask Penelope Trunk group had me hooked for a while. And watching Brazen Careerist take on a sleek new look is absolutely exciting! The network is living and breathing high quality content. The ideas are abundant. Any question can be answered. And even better, your voice can be heard by a group of smart and enthusiastic people who are eager to help out and share their ideas! I am not sure where Brazen is headed, but it seems like a successful somewhere.
Now all that is left is Brazen Dating.
]]>And since last Friday, I cannot get “J’Envoie Valser” out of my head:
It is a song about love, but oh what a song! Perhaps it is the folksy tune that reminds me of Russia. Or perhaps it is her feminine voice of an 18-year-old girl. There is such optimism in her voice that I want to call all my friends and tell them I love them. The lyrics are so simple and so powerful. Here is my cursory translation:
I see them who give
Give each other jewelry right to the neck
It is pretty but
But nothing but pebbles
Stones that roll
Roll and that roll down cheeks
I like it better when you love me
Without spending a penny…
But I, I do mock
I send their way
Jewelry-junk
The gilded cage
You when you hug me so strong
It is like treasure trove
And that, it is worth gold
I see them who fire
Looks and flowers
Then who leave each other
Somewhere else
Between roses and darlings
I know so many
Who would do better just loving each other
A bit, a bit like we love each other a lot
And to send their way
Elsewhere to waltz
The rings and the hearts in strings
For when we love each other strong
It is like treasure trove
And that, that is worth gold
Forevermore
I send their way
The proofs of love
In gold-plated gold
For when you hug me so strong
It’s right there, my treasure trove
It’s you, you who are worth gold
Ok, so I definitely took some artistic liberties in this translation (and it still sounds stupid, that is my fault, not Zazie’s), along with some Word Reference help. What is most important for me are not the words, but the rhythm with which Zazie tells this simple story and how much life she breathes into these words. Oh what a song!
P.S. I really need to move to France soon.
]]>Go to Life Without Pants to read the full post!
I still keep failing at change regularly, but sometimes I succeed. What makes those change “projects” successful?
]]>And what they mean is that there is no set course anymore. Life is now a free current (direct translation from Russian). In high school you worked hard to get into the best college. In college you worked hard to get the best job out of graduation. Now that the preparation for your life is over, you suddenly find yourself living the life that you prepared for during the last 8 years. But how do you actually live it? Is it worth going out to bars or to parties twice a week? Is it more valuable, in the grand spectrum of your life, to work 8 or 10 hours a day? Should you write a blog post or get 8 hours of sleep? Is it worth reading that really interesting article to educate yourself on a topic?
When I started working, I asked my mentor “How do I live my life now that I have a structured 9 to 5 work schedule? Where do I find the time to discover myself?” He answered: “You get really good at managing your time. And you learn to spend time on the things you actually want to be doing.” You learn to only spend time with people you actually want to spend time with. Instead of reading everything, you read only those articles and blog posts that will teach you something new and spark a new thought, resisting the urge to read everything because you are hungry for an understanding of this world.
And then you go through sad and down states. Because transitioning from college to adulthood is emotionally unstable and you will feel this emotional instability if you dare to stop and think for five minutes. And when you feel sad and scared, you might snap at your friends, the friends who will be there for you no matter what and who tolerate your post-college-transition emotional ups and downs. But you do not want to push it too far and alienate them.
So when you feel a pocket of joy amidst the emotional transition, immediately call and text your friends. Because that pocket of joy might pass in 5 minutes, but the positive call or text will last them longer. And because those happy calls remind your friends of who you really are or the person you strive to be - the best and happiest version of yourself.
]]>It is almost undisputed. It is just what you do.
And business school always loomed on the horizon. Until I recently started to actually think about it. The impetus was going to XX Factor conference at Stanford GSB a few weekends ago. A well-orchestrated marketing event, it nevertheless provided gourmet food for thought. As you think about your applications, the hosts recommended, think of what you want in life, which skill sets you enjoy using and what kind of career path you want to pave for yourself. Think about what you want to do.
And then I had to think about it. Without holding myself back. What do I want to do? I want to make enough money so that I do not have to worry about it (and not have any reservations about buying a $3,000 plane ticket to go see my grandparents in Ukraine). I want to find a job I enjoy doing so much that I cannot wait to get back into the office. I want to not be in $150,000 or more debt even before I buy my house and (probably) get married. I want to move to Moscow and work there for a year and prove to the world that I can make it there.
Why do people go to business school? At the conference, satisfactory answers from my fellow attendees were scarce. I asked an ex i-banker turned private equity banker:
“Why do you want to go to business school?”
“Well, I want to start my own business and I do not think I have the skills to do that.”
“Well, why go to business school? Why not just talk to entrepreneurs who have started their own businesses?”
“Well…um…”
Her eyes got shifty. So I let her move on to people with whom she could talk about how much she liked the presentation and how the students on the student panel seemed to really have a great time at the GSB.
The final straw came when I met Brandusa. Both Eastern Europeans, we found a common language within five minutes. Brandusa stated explicitly the thoughts I was afraid to think. Maybe business school is not the right answer. Maybe, as Fran Maier mentioned, “momentum” is just as important. The momentum to do what you are doing well and make enough money in that way.
So I got home from the conference jaded, but relieved. Suddenly, I had two years “back”, two years free and business school looming on the horizon just a little bit less. I tweeted my thoughts out into the Twittersphere and received a wealth of responses. To be continued.
]]>I have many ideals, most of which consist of admired habits that I picked up on the road called life. I observe, I like, I try to adapt. The latter only sounds easy to your mom, who always gives you hell for drinking milk out of the carton. What she forgets it that habits have their own control mechanism, and it’s not your rational, conscious self.
A habit can be your best friend or your worst enemy. So how do you train your brain to unconsciously do what you want it to do? Clearly, the trick is to transition your desired behavior from being the product of willful effort into a knee jerk reaction. But how do you do it?
Unfortunately, I don’t have a simple answer to this question. I’ve been waging multiple wars with myself for years. I won some, I lost some; but I’m not giving up, because I’ve developed a habit of thinking that anything worth having will never come easily.
Here are some of my recent victories:
And some failures:
Even though my list of bad habits is long (this is just the tip of the iceberg), I am still a strong believer in the power of my conscious self. If I can win once, I can certainly win again. It just takes effort and the realization that it will not come overnight. Going to bed thinking that you will start exercising everyday starting tomorrow never works out. Take it easy on yourself – start with jog.
]]>The Last Straw
I am going to a concert of a Russian artist this weekend. I am going with a friend and the tickets cost $25 each. ? few days ago, I logged into the concert hall’s website to purchase tickets for the two of us, happily filled in all the fields and proceeded to checkout. The total was $63.50 with a total of $13.50 in service fees!
Um, what?! Are you serious?! I am not being stingy here or anything, but I was completely outraged by this website’s (who shall remain nameless as I do not wish to give it the honor of advertisement) fees. So as an indignant consumer and avid advocate of financial responsibility, I made the trip to the concert hall and bought the tickets in person. Hours spent = 1.5. Dollars saved = $12.50 ($1.50 was spent on bus ride).
As I got home, I happily tweeted the news of my accomplishment out into the world. My new Twitter buddy @PaulTran92 quickly calculated that this project earned me $8.33 per hour. Not so great, is it?
Paul’s tweet was exactly the impetus I needed to write this long-overdue post. Listen up, people, you have to learn about yourself to learn how much your time is worth.
How People Tend to Think About the Value of Their Time
I encounter people making this mistake all the time. When my dad deals with annoying things like health insurance reimbursements, fixing something around the house, etc. he always says “I have already spent too much of my time on this. My time is worth a lot of money. I could have just paid someone $200 to fix this and made more money in those two hours I just wasted.”
This is flawed reasoning. Really, you can only use this reasoning if you are actually getting paid by the hour and you have a project that is just waiting for you to spend your time on that could generate you positive earnings. Then, yes, the trade-off is between the money you generate through cost saving and the money you could be generating by working on the project. Otherwise, you are comparing apples with oranges!
How People Should Think About the Value of Their Time
Let us face it - most of us do not get paid by the hour (neither does my dad). We are salaried employees. Therefore, we simply would not make more money during the time that we spend on time-consuming cost saving projects. So stop thinking of it in that way. That is not reality!
The good news is that you can think of it in the correct way by slightly adjusting the perception of the value of your time. But for this, you have to invest some time in getting to know yourself and learning what you value.
Let us review with a real example:
During my 1.5 hours spent saving $12.50, I spent:
All these things I would have done if I had gone home directly (and it is questionable whether I would have been that productive at home due to all the distractions such as Twitter, Facebook and my comfortable bed), so really the hourly payoff of this activity was higher than $8.33 per hour since I did not waste any of it by chasing the $12.50 cost saving. This is because I know that educating myself on the economy and family talking time are valuable to me.
Now, I am not going to put monetary value on those things because I am a practical person and assigning dollars to intangibles has no place in my personal financial infrastructure. But what I will point out is that this is the real trade-off you should be considering; the trade-off between what you “earn” by engaging in cost saving and what would ACTUALLY be doing if you were not engaging in it. It is NOT the $8.33 per hour vs. the $30- or $50- or $80 per hour that you have mentally calculated you earn from your yearly salary and anticipated year-end 2009 bonus.
In my case, I got lucky since it was not a trade-off at all because I was able to save $12.50 and do all the things I would have been doing during that time anyway.
Conclusions?
P.S. Please note that during that trip I made $8.33 per hour in after-tax earnings. In fact, it really was $10.42 per hour assuming a conservative 20% income tax rate.
A few days ago I wrote about a some of my tips and tricks to overcome my laziness in life. Well, I just came back from a workout, during which I thought of fifteen new ideas for a follow-up post. I forgot thirteen of them of my way back, so here are the remaining two before my brain stops working completely:
The Habit I Adapted
In addition to general laziness, I am also very lazy with working out. Seriously, I hate working out. Exerting any kind of physical pressure with my body is usually very hard for me, so getting ready to go to the gym is a nightmare.
However, I have been adapting to the gym habits of a very good friend of mine, who is also a co-worker. She is gym-crazy and recently told me that she was not always like this. In high school, she felt the same horror towards working out as I do now. However, she persevered with it and made a habit out of working out. And by “made a habit”, I mean it became one of her habits that is now hard to shake (how you frame it is important).
So by watching her go to the gym every day after work for two months, I could not help myself but start going to gym. And when I do not want to go (every time), I still do because it is becoming a regular habit. With each after-work gym trip, my brain learns the act of going to the gym and reinforces it as a habit (I just made this neurological process up, but that is how I feel it happen). The more I go, the more likely I am to continue going. Every trip counts.
My Habit That Was Adapted
Curiously enough, I also made her stop spending so much money on clothes, open a Roth IRA and cut back on morning Starbucks. God, I love strong Pareto efficient exchanges.
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