Pursuing Passion

There is nothing more refreshing that talking to people who are passionate about something. While it would be great if everyone we meet fell into this category, the reality is that most people are less "passionate about something" and more "blah, about everything."

When I meet someone for the first time, I'm going to stop leading with predictable boring questions like "where are you from" and "what do you do." Instead I'm going to start asking "what are you crazy passionate about and how does that passion drive decisions you make?" I think understanding someone's passions and dreams can tell you a lot more about them than knowing where they happened to have been born or for which company they push paper.

It is funny that "dreams" don't show in social networks. They ask you, what is your favorite movie, what is your favorite book, etc. Most of us tend to provide run of the mill answers to these rather "blah" questions. How interesting/unique do you seem when you are one of 10 million people on Facebook that "like rap" or "enjoy hanging out with friends."

I think asking people something a little deeper like "if you could do anything, what would you do," "if you could change the ending of something that has happened in the world, what event would you change," "if you could go anywhere, where would you go," "if you could spend every moment of every day doing something, what would it be." I think answers to these questions would give other's a much deeper insight into who we are, what drives us and what we dream about. Answering these questions might actually require an ounce of thought.

This idea of "pursuing passion" begs the question: why do we do what we do? If we are to devote so much energy and time of our lives to a job, shouldn't there be passion involved. Sometimes their are circumstances that make working a job where there is no passion necessary, but more times than not I think other things drive these decisions (fear, social expectations, etc).

One of the things I've done a lot of following my move to Silicon Valley is meet with a lot of entrepreneurs. The great thing about entrepreneurs is that many of them are truly passionate about what they are doing. Their passion is not just a hobby or something they spend 1hr a day one, rather it is something that they are throwing themselves into, financially and physically. I don't always agree about how great someone's idea is, but this willingness to pursue a passion without hesitation is a rare quality that is contagious.

I guess the whole point of this post is that we are all interested in something but very few people seem to be outwardly passionate about anything. I want to do a better job myself of pursuing things I'm passionate about and would love to meet more people doing the same along the way. Before I can ask someone else, I should really ask myself "what am I crazy passionate about and how does that drive decisions I make."

Why Chinese Entrepreneurs Rock!!

On a recent trip to Thailand, I was reminded over and over again why Chinese entrepreneurs or even just businesspeople in general, rock. I spent the May Holiday (essentially Labor Day in China) running around the island of Phuket just off the coast of Thailand. I was doing everything one would expect in such as locale: jet skiing in the ocean, island hopping (yes, I did see the location where The Beach was filmed, see the attached picture), snorkeling, getting buried in sand, buying some great T-shirts, drinking pinnacaladas, getting sun burned, eating great Thai food and just being a bum. My only regret was missing the opportunity to see a Thai boxing match and riding the token elephant, but that is what second trips are for. I really questioned whether or not it made sense to return to the chaos.

We can all agree Thailand is the quintessential tropical location. It rains almost every afternoon in Thailand. During the last night of my vacation, the rain forgot to stop and continued on into the night. It must have rained, and rained hard, for 8 hours straight. The water level in the street rose to my mid-calf. I wasn't afraid of melting, actually I rather enjoy the warm rain in Southeast Asia; I just didn't want to be drenched from head to toe when I went to eat dinner or into a shop to buy something. The toe part of that equation was already a lost cause, so I had only my head to keep above water. So, doing what I always do when it rains in China, I looked for the wave of people that suddenly appear on the street hawking umbrellas from $1 the second precipitation begins to fall. In Thailand, these people were nowhere to be found.

Maybe that one instance was an anomaly and not representative of how things usually are, but I was thinking to myself the whole time how this would never happen in China. In China, there would be 5 people standing in front of me with boat loads of umbrellas of every color imaginable undercutting each other with price wars to sway me in their direction. Maybe this simple example is a microcosm of why the Chinese economy continues to churn and grow at torrid rates year after year. Chinese entrepreneurs are enterprising people that look for opportunities at every turn.

In another example, I was walking through the shops on the beach just wasting time and money. I noticed some really cool paintings that looked very Thai to me, of Buddas and the like. I really wanted to buy one to put in my apartment, so I asked the shop owner about the price. He said, 7000 Baht (~$200 USD), without flinching. I laughed but he argued the merits of the price with me, reminding me over and over again the paintings were done by hand. I thought, "I can find something ever similar to that in China for 1/10th of the cost," so I politely told the guy I would think about it. He just let me walk out the door.

I could see they were actually doing the paintings in the shop, but, oddly, I saw the same paintings in shop after shop after shop. I wanted to know how he was getting at the $200 price, so I indiscreetly asked one of the guys doing the paintings how long it took him to do one. He said 2-3 days. I returned to the shop owner, wanting to judge his honesty, and asked him the same question. He answered "one week." So, not wanting to buy from that guy, I moved on.

I returned to a shop I had visited the day before where a Nepali girl (most of the store employees were from Nepal, Burma and India) had waited on me. She was there again, and I asked her about the price of the painting. The night before she had said 3000 Bhat, which was looking more and more like a reasonable price after a bit of market research. I told her if she came down to 2500 Bhat (~$71 USD), I would buy it. She used her cell phone to call her boss and came back to me with a down face. She told me her boss would only come down to 2800 Bhat. Realizing this was only the beginning of the negotiation and that I needed to talk with the decision maker, I asked her to call her boss back and let me speak to him. She did, and I worked him down to 2500 Bhat. When we were packaging the painting up for the trip back to China, knowing all of these paintings had to come from the same source, I asked her what her boss's cost was. Her best guess was 2000 Bhat. I could live with them making an 800 Bhat profit. I walked passed the first store owner and just lifted the packaged painting up. He knew I had bought elsewhere. I again thought to myself, a Chinese entrepreneur never would have let me walk out of his store without a heated negotiation. I guess they can afford to be more choosy in Thailand.