A Little Inspiration from a Friend (and Humans of New York)

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

For the past five years, I’ve had a weekly checkin with my friend, Kate Wing. It has been one of the most valuable professional practices I’ve ever done. It’s equal parts peer learning and coaching, but it feels like I’m just chatting with my friend regularly (which is exactly what we’re doing)!

Yesterday was one of those days when I just needed to vent. I’ve been frustrated with my perceived lack of impact and my ongoing failures, which have been wearing on me. Kate mostly listened. Later in the evening, she forwarded this Humans of New York Story via Instagram:

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“When I was younger, I had dreams of discovering something big. I’m a historian. I specialize in the end of the Roman Empire. And I always wanted to uncover something flashy and exciting that would fascinate people. I don’t mean that I’d actually dig something out of the ground. I’m more of a bookworm. I imagined myself in a reading room of the National Library, stumbling across something that others had overlooked. But it never happened. I’m 54 now. I’m slowing down a bit. And looking back– I don’t think I was ever a pioneer in anything I did. I grew to realize that knowledge is a community, and my role would be to add a tiny grain of rice to the pile. But that was still exciting for me. Learning new things was the biggest passion of my life. It was only frustrating when I tried to share that knowledge. I had to accept that my passion isn’t universal, and in the end my work might only benefit a few people. But that’s OK. A few months ago I received a call from a teacher in Italy. She told me that she’d read all my works. And that she agreed with my interpretations. And that she planned to incorporate them into her own work. It was a wonderful feeling to know that my books weren’t just gathering dust in a library somewhere. And that even if I didn’t blaze a path, I helped widen it for others” (Madrid, Spain)

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I’m very thankful to have friends and colleagues like Kate who share little bits of wisdom like this when I most need them.

Jeff Bezos on Wandering, Experimenting, and Scale

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Jeff Bezos’s 2018 letter to shareholders is required reading, as usual. Here are some gems:

On wandering vs efficiency:

Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering.

On product development and listening to the customer vs inventing on their behalf:

Much of what we build at AWS is based on listening to customers. It’s critical to ask customers what they want, listen carefully to their answers, and figure out a plan to provide it thoughtfully and quickly (speed matters in business!). No business could thrive without that kind of customer obsession. But it’s also not enough. The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don’t know to ask for. We must invent on their behalf. We have to tap into our own inner imagination about what’s possible.

AWS itself – as a whole – is an example. No one asked for AWS. No one. Turns out the world was in fact ready and hungry for an offering like AWS but didn’t know it. We had a hunch, followed our curiosity, took the necessary financial risks, and began building – reworking, experimenting, and iterating countless times as we proceeded.

Ross Mayfield’s tweet on this is also worth noting:

On scaling and failed experiments:

As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures. Of course, we won’t undertake such experiments cavalierly. We will work hard to make them good bets, but not all good bets will ultimately pay out. This kind of large-scale risk taking is part of the service we as a large company can provide to our customers and to society. The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.

Lessons from my Zen Dentist

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I’ve been seeing my dentist, Dr. Robert Ho, for about ten years now. He’s in my neighborhood, he teaches at UCSF, and he takes great care of my teeth. I might be the only person in the world who looks forward to seeing his dentist. He is a craftsman, and for that reason alone, I value him. He also tells engaging stories and dispenses warm, timely wisdom every time I see him. I’ve taken to calling him my Zen dentist.

At today’s session, he told me that he was feeling stressed about a recognition he had recently received from his peers that would require him to give a five-minute speech in front of 500 people. In classic fashion, he wanted to express his gratitude while also deflecting attention. As he skillfully cleaned my teeth, he asked me if he could share what he was thinking of saying and get my feedback. My mouth was full of dental implements, but I did my best to nod enthusiastically.

He proceeded to tell two stories about past patients that almost brought me to tears. I doubt I have much of a dental following, but I’m going to refrain from retelling his stories here so as not to inadvertently steal his thunder. I’ll just share his punchline:

My mentor always used to say that if you take care of people, you’ll always have food on your table. That’s what this business is about: Taking care of people.

I’m feeling great appreciation right now for all the people in my life who take care of me (including Dr. Ho). Reflecting on how I can do more of that in my own work and life.

Quote Investigator to the Rescue!

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

At the end of last year, I received a Christmas card from a friend with this lovely quote attributed to the great writer and thinker, James Baldwin:

Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

As is my practice with quotes that I like, I did a quick search to see if I could confirm the source, and I came up empty. I saw this quote attributed to Baldwin hundreds of times with nary a citation. I then checked Wikiquote, which is invaluable for rooting out misattributed quotes, but had no luck there either.

Usually, at this point, I assume that the quote is misattributed, and I stop looking. But just a few weeks earlier, my friend, Kate, who knows about my hangup with misattributed quotes, sent me a link to Garson O’Toole’s website, the “Quote Investigator,” who “diligently seeks the truth about quotations.” I loved his website, and while it looked like he received more requests than he could handle, I decided to ask him for help on a whim.

Over two months had passed, and I had long figured that he had been too busy to respond. Then, this morning, to my surprise, I received an email from him! He had researched my request and had published his answer! In short, Garson was unable to find any evidence that James Baldwin said it. However, Garson’s story of the trail he followed was just as interesting. I’d encourage folks to read the whole story.

The virality of today’s Internet tools has its costs, as we’re recognizing more and more these days. But these same tools offer ways to counter to these problems… should we decide to leverage them (as Mike Caulfield passionately reminds us to do). I’m grateful for folks like Garson, and I’m grateful that the Internet — along with a good dose of real-life social connections — enabled me to find him. Seeing his research made my morning!