</2011> <2012>
2011 ended a couple of days ago, and I think it’s been one of my favorite years yet! This year I went all over Spain from quaint towns to big cities, visited the countryside in Portugal, worked on a farm in Costa Rica, lived in New York City during the muggy month of August, snorkeled in Hawaii, and ended the year in rainy Portland. It was a year of risk-taking, perseverance, inspiration, and change… the best year of my life.
I quit my soulless job where I got itchy fingers every day, helped to start a company that will change the world for the better, and worked with the loves of my life. In the face of dark days and uncertainty, renting my place on Airbnb and the support of loved ones gave me the strength to do what I love. I am forever indebted. I developed a passion for good design, discovering new things, and documenting life.
Over the course of the year, though, I got too caught up in being busy and neglected my health. 2012 will be a more holistic year - the happiest, healthiest, and most productive yet. After all, those things all go hand in hand.
Steve Jobs Biography
I finished the Steve Jobs biography on my flight back from Hawaii but have been procrastinating about writing my thoughts down until now. I’m currently in a cute French patisserie in Portland sipping on a variety of dessert wines. The biography is a great feat, delving into the life of such a colossal figure in business and history, whose impact has shaped the present and future of how we live.
Defining the personal computing experience, designing innovative user interfaces, giving a lifeline to the music industry, modernizing animation, emphasizing damned good design, shaping the impact technology has in our everyday lives, and inspiring entrepreneurs everywhere. I really appreciated the humanized view of a seemingly perfect being; he was acerbic, insensitive, unwavering in his opinions, oftentimes impractical, and emotionally immature. But that also pushed Apple and technology to where it is today, creating a sustainable company culture and some of the best products of all time.
Companies that have lost focus should refer to his usability and design perspective as an anchor in everything they do. Simplicity, unwavering focus, and relentless perfectionism. He rescued Apple from the brink of destruction, plagued by agency problems that are so common when great companies fall into the hands of managers with the wrong motivations. His ego and sense of ownership made it the most valuable company in the world - one of the few companies to create truly innovative products.
He inspires you to be relentless, disregard the status quo, and strive to be insanely great. His legacy serves as a constant reminder in the products we all use in every day of our lives. Think different. Most importantly, he taught us the importance of having a vision in whatever you create. Founders who don’t aspire to change the world for the better start short-lived companies and are irresponsible, getting caught up in pleasing investors or sacrificing integrity of product for profit. Product and profit are seemingly similar motivations but end up being vastly different in informing the actions of a company.
We need better founders in this world. Thank you, Steve Jobs, for being one of the best. “He who is not busy being born in busy dying” - Bob Dylan.
Over the past few days, the techsphere has been in quite a tizzy over women “doing” startups. First Penelope Trunk brought up the fact that women don’t want to run startups because they’d rather have children. Astute observation, Sherlock - I bet that most women don’t want to go live on a farm either. While it’s true that most women in the world would favor having children to working 100-hour work weeks on a venture that may or may not be successful, it’s also true that most people in this world would not want to run a startup.
It takes a healthy appetite for risk, a perhaps unhealthy perception of work/life balance, and a little bit of crazy to start a company. A startup founder is an anomaly in the global population (less than 1% probably), so sweeping generalizations in social and evolutionary psychology should not be applied. In fact, the human species would be screwed if most women or people in general wanted to start startups.
Just because you’ve come to some conclusion about what most people want in life, you shouldn’t go around telling women to do startups or not do startups. People should just do whatever they want and whatever makes them feel alive. What is true is that women who want to start startups have the odds stacked against them. There are fewer female role models, venture capital is still very much a boys’ club, and technical competency in women is immediately questioned.
You can’t blame anyone for this, though, because investing is all about pattern recognition and chemistry. The general landscape needs to change, and women who are starting companies are slowly but surely pushing this change. So here is to beautiful, strong, smart women “doing” startups. Goodness, I hate that phrase.
And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart,
even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection,
even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy,
even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
And to know that all the blessed dead
are standing about you and watching.
Work is love made visible.
- Kahlil Gibran
The world with Vayable in five years. People will not be afraid to follow their passions, for passion will be the source of stability in life. There are too many things that are mediocre in this world, in life. Love should not be one of them. Work is love.
This video hits it right on the head. When I first found out about Occupy Wall Street, like so many others, I kind of scoffed thinking that these people were being absurd and sitting around complaining about things but not coming up with solutions. Maybe it didn’t set out to be this way, but it’s so much deeper than that.
It’s about empowerment, inspiration, and radical inclusiveness. It’s about taking control of your destiny and gaining the confidence to live the way you want to live. It’s about being bold, recognizing established norms, and actively shirking them. It’s about questioning the way things are and changing the rules that everyone plays by.
Some might say that these intangible things won’t change the world, but a shift in attitude and perception can make all the difference. The constraints and expectations placed upon us, by society and ourselves, are partially what stop us from achieving full human potential. This sense of potential is not necessarily a race to the top but takes on more of a community-oriented model… one of love. By appreciating the gifts that everyone has, we are moving away from an economy of give and take to an economy of give and give.
This Movement has a life of its own, bigger than you or me, resonating and reaching far beyond a single moment in time. This Movement will change our perception of our own potential, which will in turn change the world. At Vayable, we think this is so important that we are participating in Occupy Oakland.
Explorations in Culture: A Monthly Column
Cross-posed from the Vayable blog!
Over the last couple of weeks, all of us at Vayable talked about starting our own monthly columns in the Vayablog, and I’m kicking mine off with this post! We thought about what personally motivates all of us to work on Vayable, and a common theme was “keeping culture alive.” That is at the heart of Vayable, and everyone had a travel experience that made them realize just how important that is.
Even though I experienced the effects that tourism has on culture before, my real wakeup call was when I went to Manuel Antonio in Costa Rica earlier this year. When I was there, it was almost like Disneyland. The city was sprinkled with hamburger stands, pizza joints, restaurants that were more like Red Lobster than anything else, and places that sold daiquiris on the beach. Whenever I spoke to someone in Spanish, they would most definitely respond in in English, and sometimes there wasn’t even a Spanish version of the menu at the places I went to.
To get a cheap and delicious gallo pinto or ceviche, you had to trek to the nearby town that wasn’t nearly as nice. It was so odd to me that you had to downgrade in order to get a better experience and eat more delicious food. In that town, I met a couple of locals that didn’t speak English but were trying to learn because, according to them, you have to fit in with the tourists to get a decent paying job in there. On Facebook I uploaded a bunch of gorgeous photos from my time there and called it “Manuel Antonio, a soulless dream.” There were rain forests that fed into the ocean and some of the most beautiful sunsets I’d ever seen in my life, but it didn’t have to be such a culturally vapid experience. Locals shouldn’t have to change in order to accomodate us.
As travelers, we want to be able to have access to amazing things but also preserve the integrity of local culture. We don’t want to trample on it. We want to tread lightly, respect the culture that exists, and experience it for ourselves. That is why we travel. I’m passionate about movements of people, the influences that the past has on the present, and how things came to be the way they are. From the Lower East Side of Manhattan to that tucked away village in Peru, each month I’ll profile one specific part of culture that is unseen from the surface yet leaves traces in the cities that we think we know well.
Stay tuned!
One View of the Homeless Tour
It’s a pretty bad review, to say the very least, but I’m struggling to understand what’s so bad about a homeless person giving a tour that portrays the social and economic issues related to poverty. Our site is a platform for anyone to share anything compelling that they know with others. This includes wine somaliers, chefs, historians, street artists, entrepreneurs, but it also includes homeless people.
Their special knowledge includes the complex, interdependent, pervasive issues that face thousands of people every day as well as the services that can provide some relief. A social worker or a sociologist could give the same tour, but in this case it just happens to be a homeless person. It’s almost as if these people criticizing the idea think that he does not have free will or he is not capable of making smart decisions about what to do with his time, the first of which is dehumanizing and the second of which is belittling.
Maybe it’s because they perceive that homeless people need money more than any other type of person, so they are forced into it by necessity to earn money. But everyone has complete flexibility to charge however much they want and decide on the bookings they want to accept. And let’s face it, giving tours is not the worst way people can earn a bit of money. Even if he gets out of homelessness, he would still be qualified to give the tour because he still has the same knowledge and set of highly relevant life experiences.
Even though Vayable doesn’t take a cut from these tours, this is not meant to be voluntourism or social services. This is simply bringing together one person who wants to learn about something with another person who has that knowledge. I highly doubt that anyone would bat an eyelash if a gay person were to give a tour of life in the Castro. It’s interesting that this has struck a chord so quickly and deeply. This is an fascinating case study on human psychology and perceptions.
As noted, in the side bar, my opinions are my own and should not be viewed as representing my company.
I recently answered my first non-trolling, vaguely helpful answer on Quora in a long time about what it’s like to be homeless in San Francisco:
I’ve never been homeless, personally, but I do know quite a few homeless people from volunteering and interacting with them extensively through work. A lot of people are homeless for a variety of reasons: mental illness, drug addiction, disability, youthful naivety, troubled childhoods, persecution for sexual orientation (oftentimes the case for homeless teens that flee to SF), etc. There is no one answer for this, and you won’t really hear the same story more than once.
I’m not going to pretend that I can answer this question with any sort of authority and am only brushing the tip of the iceberg with some general sentiments and common threads. Being homeless is a lonely, emotionally taxing experience. Even though there is tenderness and compassion around every corner in the Tenderloin (you can’t go a block without finding multiple homeless service organizations with incredibly friendly people with beautiful souls), you still feel hopeless because trying to get out of homelessness seems so daunting.
Homeless people come from all over the state (and maybe even the country) to San Francisco because it has some of the best charitable organizations. Even if you go to a place that provides various helpful services, they can’t guarantee stability and oftentimes you have to go back and face the stark reality of the streets. Homeless shelters can offer a refuge for up to three months, but after that you have to re-apply, and there’s a long waiting list. If you live in a homeless shelter, there are usually significant constraints on free will like curfews that don’t allow you to go out past 8 PM.
If you know where to go and are diligent about the service hours, no one in this city will go hungry. There are tons of soup kitchens, Glide Foundation being a great one, that provide three meals a day and rarely turn anyone away. The food looks and smells unappetizing, but at least you get fed. Healthy San Francisco provides healthcare to the poor, but it doesn’t include vision and dental. Sometimes people will sell the food they get from shelters for money to buy their medications.
There can be really nice people, but in the end, it’s everyone for himself. There are drug dealers around every corner, and everyone in the community knows who they are. Many homeless people have kind of lost hope in trying to get out of it. It’s hard to get a job because they might seem dirty or mentally unstable to potential employers. They fall into a sort of daily rhythm and end up dragging their possessions from shelters to doorsteps to secluded street corners to even the steps of Civic Center Plaza every night.
A homeless friend of mine offers a tour through my company, but everything I say here is purely my opinion and does not in any way represent Vayable.
this side of anguish
This week I had the inspiring, humbling, and heartbreaking opportunity to get to know a side of San Francisco that almost seven thousand people live everyday yet most people never quite take the time to understand. In my search for someone (I thought most likely a social worker or volunteer) to educate travelers and locals about what it’s like to be homeless on Vayable, I found a new friend and met an amazing community of people.
When I went to the Coalition on Homelessness to get general information, the guy sitting behind the desk was someone I knew from Neighborhood Court adjudication training! We laughed for a bit about how random it was to see each other again, and he gave me some resources on homeless shelters. There was a homeless woman, Nan, standing around who gave me tips on specific people to talk to, told me about the friendly shelters to approach, and had great ideas about things for explorers to see like Curry Without Worry.
Everyone I talked to was willing to take time and bend over backwards to help me. This is when you know it’s bigger than you. Thousands of people suffer every day from the chronic, interconnected issues that plague generation after generation. So many people care deeply about homelessness, but so many more people are too busy to learn, never venture into the seedy parts of town, or prefer to simply ignore the issue.
On Friday, I volunteered at the GLIDE Foundation soup kitchen so that I could meet people working on these issues and come a bit closer to understanding it myself. I worked the assembly line, putting forks and napkins on trays, as hundreds of people poured into the dining hall for a meal. Everyone was friendly and had intriguing stories, and some people were simply downright hilarious. It turns out that no one will actually go hungry in this town if they know where their resources are. Soup kitchens are aplenty in the Tenderloin, and they don’t ever turn people away. The food, though, seems somewhat to be desired. It also turns out that many of their volunteers are also homeless.
Through this, I met Milton, our newest guide. He is an imaginative, vibrant, and genuine fellow who lives at a homeless shelter and volunteers at GLIDE pretty much every day. His personal story is interesting, to say the least, but he has an insightful perspective on the homeless community that you simply can’t find anywhere else. The next day, he took me and the team around the Tenderloin, where he told us about the stories, tender facets of hope, and living nightmare that plagues so many.
Now, we keep in touch pretty much every day, and I’m definitely going to stay heavily involved in this community. “You’re welcome any time,” the people at GLIDE told me. If only most people were even a fraction as understanding, accepting, and open-minded to those in need. After all, for better or for worse, we’re all in it together.
using the cognitive surplus to connect people
Over the last few days, I was at The Economist’s ideas conference, where a common thread was about utilizing the cognitive surplus to collaborate and change the world. Coined by Clay Shirky, the cognitive surplus is the free time the world has, that they otherwise spend watching television, to contribute to projects, share knowledge, and be creative. In the world, humans watch over one trillion hours of television a year. In America alone, we watch about 200 billion hours of television.
All the content on Wikipedia was created with less than one tenth of one percent of that amount of time. If you measure time in hours that Americans watch television per year, it only took half a year to write all the articles and comments on the entire internet. Why are we spending such a huge amount of time (by any standards of materiality) on such a passive activity?
People have had lots of free time for as long as there’s been the industrialized world. But that free time has mainly been something to be used up rather than used, especially in postwar America, with the rise of suburbanization and long commutes. Suddenly we no longer lived in tight-knit communities and therefore we spent less time interacting face-to-face. As a result, we ended up spending the bulk of our free time watching television. - Shirky in Wired.
Oftentimes, people think that they don’t have free time to participate in projects, meet others, and do new things, but it’s just all about how you allocate the time that you do have. I know that Shirky is a fan of using principles of generosity to encourage people to altruistically contribute content on the internet, but it’s bigger than that. With 2 billion people online throughout the world out of 4.5 billion adults in total, the cognitive surplus can also be utilized to connect people to disrupt traditional industries (like the travel industry) that take advantage of the fact people were not able to connect with one another.
It’s about reducing income inequality, giving people access, and empowering people (rather than corporate entities) everywhere to shape their own communities and lifestyles. So start devoting those hours in front of the television to connecting with someone new and sharing your insights with them!
everyone needs some medicine for their melancholy
Medicine for Melancholy is a portrait of San Francisco that highlights all sorts of socioeconomic and racial tensions embodied by a short-lived love story between a boy and a girl. Micah (Wyatt Cenac) is a fairly one-dimensional person that was born and raised in the city and describes himself with one word: “black.” Joanne (Tracey Heggins) is an African American woman that identifies with the yuppie and indie subcultures; she prints screen tees, lives with her white boyfriend in the Marina, and is in the middle of a quarter life crisis. After they sleep together at a party, it’s seemingly unclear why Micah is so eager to get to know her. Maybe he wants her to get back to her roots, educate her about their shared culture, or turn her away from what in his view is her desire to assimilate into white culture. Even more bewildering is her subsequent acquiescence to his persistence as she eventually takes a liking to him and allows him to share the day with her.
In the end, despite the density of the city, it becomes obvious that everyone is just lonely and broken. He is trying to mend his broken heart as he lives in a city that he both loves and hates. She might feel trapped in the silk coffin of her unfulfilling relationship as she strives to find herself yet is unable to break free and become financially independent. Even though she insists that people should be perceived as individuals, perhaps she also feels a sense of guilt about not being able to identify with her cultural roots. Maybe that is why she is intrigued by and curious about him. They don’t speak a lot, but there seems to be a mutual understanding and tacit acceptance of differences. No one is judged to be better or worse by being who they are; people are merely different, and everyone feels the weight of their lifestyle choices and worldviews. The movie seems to be filmed through a beautiful dream-like filter that mutes out most colors except for some reds. The “medicine” for their mutual melancholy is a bit of escapism, the meeting of two disparate worlds, before they go back to reality.
The movie does a good job of reminding you about the nuances of society, showing the effects of urban issues like gentrification, and making you feel an immense sense of yuppie guilt. Just remember that inner city residents shop at Rainbow Grocery, sell kombucha, and take cabs everywhere too! All kidding aside, gentrification is an increasingly concerning problem that a lot of people complain about, but no one (including me) really has a good solution for. A lot of people yell it out as a hollow argument against certain issues like the San Francisco tax exemption for companies that move into the Tenderloin. Even though there are a lot of things wrong with the Tenderloin, leaving the district to “benign neglect,” as coined by Daniel Moynihan, is just not the solution. This really poignant article by Randy Shaw delineates the development and characteristics of boroughs that have been gentrified in the past.
The Uptown Tenderloin has remarkably few ownership housing units… Virtually all of the Uptown Tenderloin’s buildings substantially exceed the six-unit maximum allowed for condo conversions. And because nonprofits like TNDC seized upon vacant lots that were put up for sale, there are no large opportunity sites for large condo developments in the future. Further, no gentrified neighborhood includes, as the Uptown Tenderloin does, thousands of SRO units whose conversion or demolition is prohibited. Single rooms lacking kitchens do not attract the urban gentry, and instead provide a refuge for low-income residents priced out of neighborhoods lacking such low cost housing (San Francisco’s Chinatown also has resisted gentrification due to its many SRO’s).
Contrary to what some believe, no neighborhood in the United States has been gentrified through the gradual, voluntary departures of working class tenants and the opening up of their units to more affluent residents capable of paying higher rents. Such a process is instead a product of a neighborhood already gentrifying, which occurs through creating significant homeownership opportunities in previously rental areas, undergoing the physical transformation of the pre-gentrified space through new development, demolition or substantial upgrading of existing units, and by the absence of tenant legal protections against displacement. The Uptown Tenderloin offers an extraordinarily rare opportunity for the urban poor and working class to live in a highly desirable neighborhood without fear of gentrification. It is a community that won its hard-fought battle against gentrification, yet its residents still await many of the fruits of victory.
Perhaps Twitter and other high tech companies moving into the Tenderloin will help to clean it up and attract opportunities for small businesses establish themselves and grow, providing jobs to people who provide services that support larger players in the economy. It’s inevitable that the cost of living will go up with businesses that cater to high-income patrons opening up, and I guess no one can know what will happen, but hopefully not too many people will be displaced. A good way to supplement your income, brought to you by one of the high tech companies that is around the Uptown Tenderloin district, is to use Airbnb to rent out part of your apartment. Each month, I pretty much pay for all my rent with the money I earn from the service, and it’s also a great way to meet people! With an improved surrounding environment, perhaps the Tenderloin will also become a more desirable place to stay in for tourists, allowing residents to have a chunk of that lucrative tourism industry ;).
on neighborhood courts and adjudicating
Last night, I went to the Hall of Justice in San Francisco to attend a meeting at the District Attorney’s office about being a volunteer neighborhood court adjudicator. Being funemployed is prime time to be starting things that I’ve always wanted to do but didn’t think I had time to do: learning to play the guitar, training for a marathon, and doing more volunteer work. No, I have not started to look for a job yet. Ha. Now this “Hall of Justice” name makes it sound like this building should be awe-inspiring and grand, maybe like the Armory, but it’s actually a soul-sucking, uncomely, gray block with security guards that run you through a metal detector, elevators that make you think you’re going to some dungeon cell, and sterile white walls and floors. Maybe their design principle is like that of cathedral builders – to evoke fear and to make you feel slightly uncomfortable – because justice is about to be served, motherfuckers.
The new neighborhood courts program is a group of volunteer community panels that resolve infractions and some misdemeanors through restorative justice. I like this approach because they identify that there are root causes to why people commit crimes that are “neighborhood problems” and aim to make everyone’s lives, from the victims to the “offenders” to the residents of the community, better. Some cases that will go through this court are sit/lie infractions, drug possession charges, graffiti / vandalism (an offense that I am probably all too lenient on), theft, disorderly conduct, and so on. A lot of the time, we make judgments about how cities should be designed and how we can resolve issues like poverty and homelessness, but oftentimes we don’t really understand why things are the way they are or what people actually go through. I’m participating in an attempt to gain understanding of the nitty gritty of why shit goes down the way it does.
At face value, it’s really a way to reduce the caseload from the District Attorney’s office and to make punishment swift and certain (because a lot of the time these cases languish in a gargantuan pile of paperwork), but it’s also really an extension of democracy for those who care enough to participate. They are bringing in people who live in the neighborhood to hear cases in their own neighborhoods. I was really upset when the sit/lie proposition passed, and this is a way to really influence the actual execution of the law. If you really care about something, and your “side” doesn’t win, it’s not the end of it. You can still do things to influence the way things are done. Looking around in the room last night, my boyfriend and I were by far the youngest, and perhaps most liberal, participants.
If you want to participate, it’s not too late! The training is on Saturday, and there will be more training sessions later, so you should contact me for details!
