Some people are happy with small accomplishments but do not derive too much more joy from bigger accomplishments. For this post, I will call these people steppers.

Then there are others who don’t really care about small accomplishments but are smitten with big accomplishments. I will call these people leapers.

Steppers are happy completing small tasks and making a small difference everyday. Leapers get frustrated with the slowness of change and keep wishing to make drastic changes.

Steppers can get caught in a never-ending cycle of meaningless work that goes nowhere but provides a small sense of completion. Imagine an employee who is happy cleaning his desk everyday, clearing his inbox, and dealing with paperwork but doesn’t really get anything done. The infinite stepper loop.

Leapers can get caught in big dreams without ever getting there, because big accomplishments are a compilation of small steps. I’m sure we’ve all had friends who talked big but couldn’t get anything done to get closer to the goal.

The challenge isn’t to be one or the other, or to be somewhere in the middle, but to recognize your own characteristic and find the right people to work with. Leapers and steppers need each other to get things done. Having too much of one or the other in a company could be detrimental. The more famous entrepreneurs are probably leapers, but they all needed their stepper sidekicks to be where they are today. The true measure of a visionary isn’t necessarily the vision itself, but his or her ability to get the right people working on the vision. Steve Jobs was an amazing leaper who had thousands of steppers believing in him. Does Tim Cook feel more like a stepper to anyone else?

Certain jobs are better suited for leapers vs steppers. Leapers need to be working on something new so that they can feel that they are creating big changes in the world. Steppers can be happy working in situations where the job can feel repetitive at times. Running a restaurant, working in a hospital, and being a teacher are all jobs better suited for steppers. In a company, steppers are more likely to be accountants or HR while leapers are more likely to be in R&D, strategy, or design.

Do you believe in this view of the world? And if so, are you more of a leaper or a stepper?

As a result, people in this situation end up making a lot of purchases without being able to give too much thought to each item they buy. Ikea, carrying almost everything for the home at very reasonable price points, becomes the ideal shopping ground for comfort-desperate new apartment renters. In the mean while, speciality stores and custom furniture stores lose out.

The solution? A temporary furniture company.

There are some companies out there that provide temporary furnitures, but they are intended for people on temporary assignments and as a result, relatively high quality and expensive. The kinds of temporary furniture I’m imagining are the cheapest possible alternatives to achieve a minimal comfort level so that people can spend a little bit more time trying to find the right furniture for them (looking for furniture mr. right, not furniture mr. right-now). These would be plastic foldout chairs and tables, inflatable mattresses, even inflatable sofas. Style and design doesn’t matter, it’s all about reaching the minimum functionality (Imagine the cheapest furnitures you can buy at Walmart).

I’d imagine the cost for such a service would be higher for the delivery and removal than the actual furnitures themselves, so the price structure could be set-up in a way to not discourage longterm rental (higher base fee, lower weekly/monthly fees).

While the desirability of such a service is easy to argue, I wonder if there is a business case here that could be financially viable. This will most likely only work in areas with high population density and high traffic of people movement, like the Bay Area or New York City. Even then, will there be enough demand for such a service? How would one advertise something like this that has never existed before?

This is another one of those ideas that I like but don’t feel strongly enough to act on. If anyone wants to take it over, start a company, I would be delighted as I would have loved to use something like this when I first moved to Frankfurt.

[T]he internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter. If you don’t know how to use it, or don’t have the background to ask the right questions, you’ll end up with a head full of nonsense. But if you do know how to use it, it’s an endless wealth of information. Just as globalization and de-unionization have been major drivers of the growth of income inequality over the past few decades, the internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality. Caveat emptor.

I couldn’t agree more.

Thinking more on the subject, I’ve realized that an introduction of any kind of tool will result in some kind of polarization. The advent of writing separated those who are literate from those who aren’t, the invention of the automobile separated those who could drive and those who couldn’t, and the proliferation of information will separate those who can deal with it from those who can’t.

The issue here is not just digital literacy either; it’s how people use the tool itself. Like most media, it’s easy to get caught up in entertaining but mindless content. Websites are battling for people’s attention and clicks to maximize their ad revenue by throwing up shock articles and other assorted crap. It’s easy to get caught up in celebrity gossip and fanboy blogs while ignoring harder to digest but higher production content.

The reason that TVs have such a bad reputation these days is that they’re full of what people consider crap. However, TVs as a tool isn’t inherently bad. Use it correctly and access a wealth of timely information.

This of course does not mean that we should dispense the tools we’ve created. Instead, we need to do with the internet what we’ve done with all the major tools in the past: teach people. We need to teach people how to navigate the swarms of information available online, evaluate it, and make sense of it. My memory of middle school and high school research projects revolved around books which had a minimum level of inherent authority. Now that anyone can put up anything online, people need to be taught how to gather the relevant information and present it accurately. While the information savvy have grokked this naturally, I worry that we will be leaving behind a lot of people who aren’t fortunate enough to have a good mentor or be gifted.

What we should absolutely not be doing is limiting people’s access like banning Wikipedia from schools.

Style and delivery inspired by the always brilliant xkcd.

I had to change one wall hanging clock, two appliances, three standing clocks, and four watches. I also have three automatically adjusting time pieces (laptop, iPhone, iPod).

In Germany, stability of housing is so cherished that moving is an incredibly difficult and expensive proposition. Typical agency fees are two months rent plus tax and with the security deposit being three months rent, one needs six months of rent before moving into an apartment. Furthermore, furnished apartments are rare and unfurnished apartments don’t include closets, lighting, or sometimes even kitchens.

Where the kitchen is supposed to go in a German apartment

New tenants are expected to move in with their own kitchens or build a new one with everything including the kitchen sink. You can imagine that Ikea advertises their kitchen section heavily in Germany.

If one wants to move out, by law the landlord must be given a three-month notice (this can be circumvented if the old tenants find new tenants that the landlord agrees on). I find that in Europe, laws really do reflect the values that people have, and this is another example.

For me, I’ve found an apartment with a kitchen, but I still had to buy over half-ton of furniture.

Recently I came to the realization that almost everyone answers the question “what do you do?” with their job description. I understand that this is the social norm, but when did our jobs become the most important element of what we do?

Interestingly enough, when I tried to answer this question without properly preparing my response and omitting my profession, I sounded unemployed. Luckily, on my blog, I can write and edit as much as I want.

So what am I doing now?

I am still living the adventure. When I was in high school, college, graduate school (part 1), I believed that there was some kind of set life path ahead of me because until that point in life, the next phases of life were fairly well defined. Now that I’m beyond that point, everything is so wide open, and scary as it is, I am navigating the nightscape with a very dim flashlight.

I am exploring, both literally and metaphorically, traveling the world and finding new experiences, figuring out what I am good at and what I like (and the intersection of the two), trying to understand how things work in this ever changing wicked world.

I am settling into Germany, making new friends and finding people I can trust or rely on, finding an awesome Frisbee team to play with, understanding the culture although that’s happening slower than I thought (I spoke much more French after eight months in Paris than I speak German now). I am also settling into my new job, and not surprisingly, the biggest challenges are not the ones I previously imagined.

So what am I doing for my job?

One year ago exactly on this day, I was in Frankfurt for a meeting with Panasonic to discuss the projects I was working on as a consultant. Before the day was over, they made me a job offer to join them once my contract in Paris was over. Having seen the limits of what I can do in my previous job in Paris, and after much painful deliberation, I decided to accept the job and hop on the train to the fifth country that I would live in.

I now work as a concept developer for Panasonic R&D Center Germany. I did not get a written job description like my previous two jobs (design instructor in Paris, executive director at Stanford) and I’m trying to figure out in the ambiguity what must be done to achieve the goals we want to accomplish. It’s not directly in line with what I did in Paris or learned at Stanford, but it’s very much related.

The keen or Japanese reader probably noticed that one year ago was also Japan’s greatest catastrophe since World War II. Like most people outside of Japan, I didn’t find out about the extent of the damage until well after the earthquake and the tsunami. Nevertheless, 3-11-11 will be a day I will always remember.

It’s been two years since I wrote my previous installment of “What am I doing?“, I wonder when I will write my next one.

What are you doing?

Small idea inspired by my recent travels.

We often consider hoteling to be associated with a physical location, the hotel, and it’s related services. We rarely think of hoteling to go beyond what is offered at the hotel itself. Why not? After all, hospitality should have no boundaries.

So what if hotel guests were given access to airport lounges in the city they visited? This could be the hotel’s own lounge or more likely lounges of partner airlines. I could imagine this as a nice differentiator for business travelers who aren’t picking hotels with their own money.

In an age when airline margins are razor thin due to increased competition and rising fuel prices, this might be a nice side income for them.

And I think we’ve reached rock bottom on our collective attention span.

Read/scan every email (directed at you)

If people are sending you an e-mail they are doing it for a reason: they want you to know something. While you shouldn’t have to memorize the content line-by-line, you should know what’s in them so that you can follow the conversation and stay up to date. If you can’t do this, you might want to consider getting a secretary or changing your work process so that you aren’t in the middle of all this e-mail traffic.

Know how to retrieve anything that came in

Or also known as the “never ever ask someone to resend you an e-mail you already received” rule.

There are many e-mail storage paradigms from folders to large inboxes to inbox zero. Whatever works for you is fine, but make sure that you can get back  to any e-mail that you received.

Use appropriate subjects and thread accordingly

Having descriptive and accurate subject lines allows the recipient to perform rule 2, above, much easier. If you are starting a new topic, create a new e-mail thread rather than using an old thread (even if it requires copying and pasting multiple e-mail addresses from the old thread). Use descriptive subject lines rather than ones like “Hello” or “Meeting” and spell correctly so it’s easier to search for them, and never send an e-mail with a blank subject line.

There are many more guidelines that I follow in writing professional e-mails but those are more my personal preferences rather than something I think everyone should follow. Do you have any rules that you follow?

I always felt that the strongest advantage I have in teaching is that I have empathy for the students. Being 28, I can still relate to what the students are thinking and how the students are feeling. It was only few years ago that I was a graduate student at Stanford University learning design, and only a decade ago when I was a freshman in university.

Recently, however, I feel like I’m starting to lose that empathy. I still remember how it felt as a student, trying to optimize my grade by figuring out what exactly the professor wanted, trying to find the most popular and best party on campus next weekend, and trying to get an internship in the most reputable and famous companies and research labs. However, these days, I’m starting to forget the feeling as I sit amidst all the student during lunch time.

Morbid or not, as I age, I like to use the metaphor that I keep dying over and over, only to be replaced by a slightly different me. Who I was ten years ago is different from who I am today will be different from who I will be in ten years.

Is it possible to keep that empathy for your past self forever without it being degraded? I no longer have empathy for myself when I was a kid living in a foreign country for the first time, being homesick and trying (and often failing) at making new friends.

If such empathy can’t be kept, there are serious implications for design. If we are going to design something for a certain age group, we need people from those age group to be involved in the design. If we are making decisions that affect everyone, we need people from every age group to be involved. I always find it a shame that in most countries, politicians are almost always over forty, and often over fifty. If politics is going to be for everyone, we need every kind of people represented as well.

Getting back to my original point, how do we keep that empathy for those who we are no longer and not fall into the trap of memory bias?