Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

In real life, I am not fond of salespeople. When I receive an unsolicited sales call, I tend not to pick up. If it is from someone I do not know in real life, I would block the phone number. When I receive sales emails and text messages, I largely ignore them. I would like to have control over how, when, and about what topics I speak to others, on my own terms. Being rushed, or worst yet, manipulated, to make a decision will likely lead to increased skepticism and a greater possibility of a "no." My feelings about sales have been so strong that I assume that others largely have the same attitude.

For many companies, managing staff performance has become more systematized as the organization expands and becomes more complex. A system of KPIs, individual contributions to company targets, and regular meetings with managers ensure some sort of standardization as to how each employee is measured against their peers and the expectations of their roles. To ensure objectivity and trackability, the performance targets are often quantified in easily comprehensible and comparable ways. 

The railway station was certainly a nondescript one. A little hallway straddling the railway leads to a flight of stairs opening up to a small traffic circle. Besides the station itself, there is a small park and a few late-night eateries and bank outlets. Nothing out of the ordinary for a very provincial town a good half an hour away by the slow train from the nearest big city. However, on the curbside is a small bus stand, equally nondescript, that advertises a once-every-half-an-hour service to an outlet mall on the outskirts of this nondescript town. That's where I met the Taiwanese couple.

People have stereotypes about other countries. These stereotypes help people make sense of countries they have no first experience interacting with. It can be exhausting to navigate the almost endless nuances of sociocultural, political, and economic differences. Shorthand labels, however crude and oversimplifying they may be, provide, at times, practical starting points for people to build knowledge of a topic that they have little background in. For those who are emigrating to another country or coming into contact with people of another nationality for the first time, having a starting point is certainly better than not having one.

The father was quite dismissive. And this is after more than an hour of conversation concerning the student's situation, peppered with specifics of what classes to take, what extracurricular activities to undertake, and how to prioritize many tasks related to applying to overseas universities. While it is never certain what others mean when they say certain things, my approaching the conversation as an advisor of university admission matters and overall time management needs certainly did not leave as strong of an impression as the fact that I am ultimately attempting to sell something.

It has been a little over two months since I officially switched over to a new job . The position involves daily communication with various students dreaming of going to top schools around the world, as well as their often anxious parents, with the ultimate aim of selling consulting services that improve every aspect of their university applications. The first weeks on the job have been about learning the different services on offer, what would be enticing and persuasive from the perspective of potential clients, and how to verbalize the benefits our services ultimately provide.

In his manifesto for sales in the internet age, Daniel Pink declares that the wealth of information the internet has put in the hands of the average netizen has revolutionized the relationship between salespersons and their potential clients. With netizens now able to find minute details of any product or service, their alternatives, and user reviews, salespersons no longer have exclusive command of information relevant to what they are selling. The resulting erosion of information asymmetry has made it difficult for salespersons to sweet-talk clients into paying higher prices for subpar offerings.

Being a mother means doing whatever you can to protect your child from physical and mental harm. Being a top-level investigative journalist means doing whatever you can to find out and expose the truth. Both often involve going to extremes to achieve intended goals, often at the expense of the very safety and sanity of the undertakers. Yet, the fact that so many are involved in these crafts signal that motivation for continuing in them go beyond personal gains.

This blog started in 2010 to chart my life out of four tumultuous years as a student at Yale University. Those four years were at times traumatizing and left me with emotional scars that, at times, led me to conclude the very worth of going to Yale in the first place. The struggles of not only classes at a high level, but the social expectations of Yale students all being future leaders, lead to pressures to succeed in professional and academic ways that many, including myself, were not mentally prepared for. Some students excelled in such pressurized environments, while many others lost their ways.

It has been more than 16 years since I graduated high school. Many memories of my old days as a public school student in San Diego are fading, not the least because I have practically never lived in the city since graduation. But a recent request to summarize some tips on how I managed to get from a no-name high school to Yale has triggered a need for me to do a relatively rare self-reflection on my four years. It is not an easy one since so many other things that happened in my life since 2006 have been much more memorable and noteworthy than anything I've done back then.

In the age of COVID-19, finding a romantic partner is no longer a niche activity. Starting with Tinder, dating apps gradually went from a novelty for digital natives, to a commonly accepted way to meet strangers, supercharged by various physical distancing guidelines during the pandemic that restricted changes for real-life encounters in physical events. While social desirability bias means precise data for prevalence remains unavailable, anecdotal evidence shows that many youngsters now see dating apps as the primary method to go beyond their immediate social circles in the quest for love. With their increasing popularity, dating apps have induced their own sense of fatigue among both newcomers and long-time users. The ease of expressing affection and initiating conversations with new people means that the cost of acquiring new opportunities for dates is drastically reduced. As a result, the value of each opportunity is decreased in relative terms. After all, if it is so easy to meet

You have seen the advertisements. "A job that you look forward to a Monday!" "We are a workplace filled with passion!" "Grow together...toward the same goal!" Every job advertisement seems to beckon potential new hires with the promise of motivation to do the job. And recruiters, consultants, and each college professors seem to agree with the passion-centered outlook. They encourage individuals to seek out jobs that prioritize personal growth through enjoying the job and the relevant learning process, over salary, stability, work-life balance, and other operational knick-knacks.

Doing sales to potential clients has never been my strong suit. Fresh out of undergrad, I used to work in sales for the Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten, where I truly struggled with the high-pressure tactics and the rigorous performance evaluation based on KPIs. It was no wonder that I left Rakuten less than a year after I happily joined the firm, directionless and somewhat traumatized by the experience doing sales for the firm. Ever seen then, all of my jobs have been "back office," handling operations and content creation with no direct interaction with end clients.

虽说我常常以“三种语言同样流利”自居，中文绝对不能说是我的强项。自从五岁离开中国后，我的中文教育大部分都是通过阅读不同教材自学，加上在家里随便讲讲。除了几个月在台湾的工作，以及大学假期在北京和上海的实习，我从不成在完全说中文的环境里长久居住。

Two days ago, I officially entered the 34th year of my existence. As it was a weekday, there was little in terms of celebrations, with the day marked by work as usual, and the night marked by preparations for the next day. Thankfully, as a married man living with my wife, I was not alone for my birthday. Despite her usual working-until-late schedule, she celebrated the occasion with me with some late-night food and watching YouTube videos. Given the circumstances of my life in Chiba, the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, and another workday the day after, I could not have asked for a better low-key celebration.

Jobs tend to be very hands-on. Employees are required to actively work on various projects, and the success of the projects is based on the output that is delivered to the clients. Creating the output requires employees to get their hands dirty, chipping away at a list of tasks for completing the project, and communicating with team members to coordinate the splitting up of tasks. No one gets to simply sit around and read without producing anything. Passiveness at work is, to put simply, not a job description of any productive employee.

It is a bit surreal to watch the news about record-breaking temperatures in Europe from a hotel room in eastern Hokkaido. While parts of the UK and France are suffering their first-ever 40C weather in history, the northern island of Japan is still in the cool mid-20s, made chillier with frequent rains and winds, and untempered by the high humidity of the country's more southerly regions that draw up the wet-bulb temperature to uncomfortable levels. There is much to complain about the inconvenience of a rural backwater like eastern Hokkaido, but the summer temperature surely is not one of them.

There are many downsides to remote work. The lack of camaraderie developed over small talk with coworkers, the lack of a group setting that stimulates creativity and concentration, the lack of clear division between professional and private lives...But suppose there is one consistent positive for remote work. In that case, it is the ability to get peace and quiet when necessary, for meetings, working alone on urgent tasks, or simply avoiding toxic people that ruin cordial workplace atmospheres. For those who enjoy getting things done without being interrupted, working from a home office can be a godsend at such times.

The tech industry, as it has with many other fields, has revolutionized the process of mating for the younger generation. Ease-to-use dating apps, led by pioneers like Tinder, have now proliferated, with each service increasingly targeting niche markets, based on socio-cultural backgrounds, sexual orientation, shared interests, geography, and lifestyle. Better user interfaces have been accompanied by better algorithms. Automation takes over the painful process of deciding who are potentially suitable matches among an almost endless stream of candidates when so little firsthand information is available about them.

Financial districts are some of the most sanitized neighborhoods in any city. Filled with skyscrapers and men in matching suits, they are marked by an atmosphere of seriousness associated with important business during weekdays and the complete absence of life on the weekends. Visitors gawk at the beautiful constructions of modernity but rarely would one find oneself at home in these neighborhoods. After all, they are defined as living but toiling.