randomness

The danger of “good enough”

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I think often about how the struggles we face in life shape how we live it.

I struggled a lot when I was much younger with finding a job and finding my niche. Of course this was depressing, confidence-shaking and worrisome. This has turned me into a workaholic machine, someone who cannot say no or create a good work-life balance (I’m getting there), someone who is always at the edge of paranoid, looking for the “writing on the wall” about corporate instability or shakeups and always prepared for these things. It means that I am always ready, never blindsided and know – thanks to the long struggle – that I am always going to land on my feet.

I am thankful for that. And thankful for where I have landed.

But I also feel thankful now for the struggle. I consider the question frequently now: What if, years ago, I had found an ‘Oh, I guess I can live with this’ existence/job and had gotten stuck where I was? And then never realized the bigger dreams or followed the more interesting and challenging path(s) I followed, such as moving far away and looking for freedom in everything I do?

It is the struggle that propels me forward – both because and in spite of the discomfort.

Decisions

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Sometimes decisions are made for you. Not in the sense that you have no control. More that you turn a decision over and over in your mind and can’t decide. Then push comes to shove, and your decision-making is nearly done for you. In my case, the decision I have long wanted to make appears to be the only right decision. It fills me with peace. Once I accepted this and let go of the nagging doubt, a lot of other pieces that had been up in the air started to fall into place.

The Terrika phenomenon

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When I was back in the US during my last holiday I became obsessed with eating Cheerios. In my adolescence, I had a big Corn Flakes habit and could have eaten them for every meal. I can get Corn Flakes in Sweden but not normal Cheerios. Once I got my hands on a giant box of the most bland of oat Os in the world, I ate them from bowls my mom has had since … probably before I was born. In junior high school my then best friend and I used to go to my house for lunch and eat ramen (chicken sesame) in these bowls, which we called “pig bowls”.

I had not really thought of the pig bowls in a very long time. I think about this friend, Terra, often. We have not talked in almost 20 years. She disappeared after we had grown apart, as friends do, but our past friendship makes up so many of my most vivid memories that it’s hard not to think of her for the smallest of reasons. The pig bowls, being back in the US to visit, watching the show House (because T and I saw Dead Poet’s Society together in June 1989, and Robert Sean Leonard – one of House’s supporting characters – and it was a very memorable day), or bumping into people from school on Facebook – people who ask me how Terra is doing since we were like, according to some of the biggest assholes we went to school with, one inseparable entity – the Terrika.

Out with the old

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Finally a new year is upon us. I write “finally” even though 2015 could not have gone faster. It feels like this time last year was just last week.

I have written enough “end-of-year” recaps. Don’t feel like writing more “reflections”. I have come to hate the word “reflections” or any variation of it, “I reflected”, “I had a reflection”. It comes up constantly in corporate workshops, and it has lost all meaning.

It is not that you or I should not reflect. Just… keep doing it continually and consistently, all the time. A new year is as good a time as any to take stock, but why only then?

Happy new year. Await instructions… or people bring me some coffee. Thanks!

¡Felix navidad!

pinata
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Thanks to the best-gift-ever of a piñata and a strange hankering for Mexican food, I will have a pseudo Mexican Christmas.

I hope everyone’s holidays are grand. And let’s sincerely hope that 2016 is a better – a much better – year than 2015.

Online shopping, reality and speed – what is important in the customer experience?

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E-commerce opportunities have revolutionized modern life. We don’t have to go anywhere or actively search for anything, going from store to store seeking out the one needed, elusive item. And rarities? Forget it. You can find it online with a little bit of attentive searching. The time-consuming hunt, the trying to find something out-of-print or a song with just a lyric like we did in the old days – it’s nothing now. And maybe we lose that sense of accomplishment and the appreciation of having something simply because of the work we had to do to get it. (The same principles were at work in my early refusal to get email – I wanted my paper-and-pen penfriend world to remain the same… rare, personal and full of anticipation.)

And while online shopping has certainly made my life richer (as stupid as that sounds), I recognize that the in-person, “instant gratification” retail shopping experience also is not going away. People want to feel, see, taste, touch, hear everything and experience something tactile, particularly in trying on clothes and the like, but at the same time, online shopping means you’re no longer limited to what you can find in a local shop or the mall or something. And that’s why I love it – I hate shopping in person.

How are some of the biggest e-commerce giants tapping into massive troves of data on shoppers’ habits and preferences to tailor and curate in-store shopping experiences and in turn, at the same time, drive shoppers back to the e-commerce platform?

Amazon.com’s new flagship store experiment is a case study in doing exactly this. When I read the Vox article about this store I was as perplexed as the writer initially had been. Why would the entity that pretty much singlehandedly made e-commerce a thing move back to brick-and-mortar? I never in a million years imagined that I would see this dubious store for myself, and yet the very same day as I read the article, I ended up at University Village in Seattle and went in the store. Nothing impressive, nothing that would make me want to go back. And I don’t need in-person employees to offer to help me, only to tell me, “Well, you can buy that online… on Amazon.” DUH! It seems like a really expensive experience to create that can only benefit a limited number of people, if it really “benefits” anyone at all.

I recently watched Aziz Ansari’s Netflix sitcom Master of None, and he lamented the horror of going online to try to replace a beloved pair of shoes only to find that they were out of stock – so he had to (insert exasperated tone here) actually go out to find and buy them in person. “Who has time for that?”

Precisely.

baubles, babble, bubbles and liquidation

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Another early-to-bed, who-knows-when-to-rise Friday sliding into Saturday. Finally watching the accumulated episodes of season 2 of Fargo. I’m liking it, but every season has its actor who needs more time and training with a dialect coach (this time it’s Jeffrey Donovan and Kirsten Dunst, who are both overdoing it, and last year it was Martin Freeman, at least the first few episodes. For him, there was a better excuse).

The day was full of work and phone calls and annoying things like the engine on my not-old-enough-to-give-out treadmill blowing out, which also tripped the breaker for the entire house. Disappointing, and worthy of complaint.

But there were nice things, even if they weren’t earth shattering. Chains of events that unfolded in a funny way… I saw a recipe that is basically a “nest” of julienned sweet potato hashbrowns into which you break eggs and let them cook, sent it to Mr Firewall (who is obsessed with sweet potatoes), and when he joked that he’d need a bigger pan (paraphrasing Chief Brody, of course) I realized I could use this unused Tesco voucher to get him a new pan. When I signed in on Tesco’s website, I found that I had even more vouchers than I thought. And then was able to double the value with some kind of voucher “boosts” and got 10 GBP off and ended up spending a total of 10 GBP for 60 GBP worth of merchandise).

Topping off the good stuff, I had good news that my intervention/assistance led to someone getting an unexpected job interview. If anything, that turned my day around. Just in time for bed.