This is a story about how great customer service and trust in your consumers can get you a long way.

I went to the Chelsea Market for the first time a few weeks ago.  My roommate at the time is a huge foodie, and we decided to explore together.

While wandering around the market, a guy (Jon) had a table near the basket shop and asked us to sample his hot sauce.  For those of you who don’t know me, I’m obsessed with spicy food and am always looking for new hot sauce.  So I said yes.  The sauce was pretty good; beyond just spice, it also had flavor. I casually asked if this was his spiciest variety.  He said no, I don’t have any on hand.

More importantly, Jon said, “If you give me your address, I’ll mail you a bottle of our habenero sauce and you can pay me back later.”

“Sure.” I’m only living in NYU dorms for the summer, so giving him my address was a fairly small risk.  Besides, he’s a nice guy, and even if he turned out to be a bit nuts, we have security guards for a reason. If he didn’t send it to me, no big deal.

I gave him my mailing address and completely forgot about the whole incident.

A few weeks later, I checked my mailbox and was completely surprised that this random guy had trusted me and sent me a bottle of his habenero sauce.  It would have been easy of me to ignore his invoice, enjoy the hot sauce, and forget about it.  I mean, I’m moving in a few weeks.  What was he going to do?

I didn’t.  I emailed him back and asked how to best pay for it.  A quick transaction later, and I was happily enjoying my bottle, guilt-free.

But this is an unbelievable story.  Of course, I told my friends (and am telling you now).  What are the chances in the one of the most jaded cities in the world that one stranger would trust another and really put himself & his product out there?

So here’s some free publicity for you.  Thanks for the hot sauce and for the story.  Best of luck in your endeavors!

Jon, thank you so much for the hot sauce. If you would like me to remove your contact information from this blog, please let me know, and I'd be happy to do so.

via Flickr, photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aloshbennett/619307160/

There’s this pressure, maybe mostly self-induced, that says I have to have everything.  Everything being the cliche of great career, great friends, amazing boyfriend/girlfriend, a wonderful family, etc.  But do I need to ‘have it all’ in order to be successful?  Do I even want it all?

A little background.  I just finished my first year of MBA at McCombs at University of Texas (hook’em horns!).  My internship is going fabulously: I love where I work, with whom I’m working, and what projects I’m accomplishing. There’s still one more MBA year to go, and although a year seems long, recruiting is already starting.  Already, friends and family are asking where I’m going next in life.

Career-wise, I think I have a great grasp.

• Marketing: I just spent 5 minutes starring past a fruit cart to analyze the ad behind it.  Oh, wow, the perfect splash of cider behind the product bottle must have taken hours to set up an shoot.  I wonder if the brand manager was on the photo shoot.  They’re making a really bold statement; this isn’t how we normally think of cider.  How are they trying to position themselves? What’s their reach?  Only urban channel strategy or nationwide?
• Technology: About half hour ago, I completely lost my train of thought and couldn’t keep my attention on a really important meeting because I got an invite to Photovine.  ‘Nough said.
• Consumer Packaged Goods: I’m spending half my summer nerding out over plastic varieties and couldn’t be happier.  I spent a good chuck of lunch with my intern buddy talking about the taste spectrum of a Magnum ice cream bar and how we should do consumer testing on the process of lavishing over a Magnum.  (Definitely got the “girl, you crazy” look.)  I mean seriously, was I made for this or what?

Answer: working in CPG in a marketing capacity with a fair mix of digital.  Got it.

.

Family and kids and stuff?… Looking put together and feminine?… Um, I have boobs; does that count?  That’s where I’m completely lost.

There are too many people on the earth already.  Do I really need give birth to feel like I’m success (I left out the article on purpose) or have experienced life to the fullest?  Aren’t some people just not meant to have kids?  I can think of so many ways I’m going to fuck up my imaginary child.  If I don’t have a child when I’m still young, will I regret it when I can’t anymore?  Are children really about love and joy, or is there a tinge of “OMG, someone has to take care of me when I’m old and senile”?

No idea.  Maybe I’ll find someone and immediately develop an urge to procreate. Maybe.

.

I wonder.  What does success mean to other women?

I’m fat. Sure, technically, I’m the US average.  So many people/friends think that I’m “not that fat” or “beautiful just the way that I am.”  But I’m fat.

It’s every day.  Every person.  Fat is like race or gender or any other physical difference discrimination, except that no one polices discrimination on weight.  No matter what you think.  You, and very much I, judge people based on their appearance. And I get judged for being fat all the time.  It’s harder to find someone who is attracted to me physically.  Certain classmates don’t even make an attempt to introduce themselves, much less care about who I am.  Going out drinking and being hit on is a rarity at most.  Even your guy friends would never put you under the same consideration set.  And no matter how much people tell you fake it and have confidence, it’s all about confidence and how you carry yourself… it’s not so simple. It’s not true.  You will always eliminate a huge subset of people because you’re fat and because they judge you on your fatness.

I feel like I get faced with judgment all the time.  I fear walking to my table at a restaurant because I’m afraid I won’t fit between the chairs.  I don’t even hit on hot guys because they’re way out of my league and would never notice me anyway.  There’s so much make-up and manipulation that has to happen with each outing and each photo app, not to get my “best side” but to get my “not fat side.”  I’m bombarded with others and me judging myself.  I feel disgusting and unpretty and not-worthwhile.

Yes, the reasoning can be made that you can never not be black or not be asian.  You can lose weight.  But it’s not as easy as people make it sound.  Additionally, it makes the whole self-esteem part worse.  I get judged and judge myself not only because I’m fat but also because I could technically lose the weight and not have to deal with the issue.

But why can’t I be okay the way that I am?  How much differently would I perceive the world, if I felt like I actually belong?  Is it just my fat or is it something in my personality that just isn’t cool enough? I don’t know.

I just want to be accepted.  I just want to be able to feel beautiful, truly beautiful.  Inside and out.  And I don’t know if anyone will ever love me being the way that I am.  If I’ll be okay with the fact that they may have “settled” for someone who’s fat because I’ll never know.  If I can love me for the way that I am.

UPDATE: my friend just sent me this link.  It’s not just me talking nonsense.  Fat people get paid less. Linkie

My awesome second year friend cooked this Friday and made pork chops with Coca-Cola (much like beer and meat but Coke is so much sweeter).  The image above is her creation.  Inspired by the deliciousness of the meal and the simple yet scrumptious recipe, I decided to embark on my own trial.

Here’s the basic recipe (since it’s not mine, please email me if you’re going to use it and I will let you know where to mail the royalties… ):

1. Add olive oil to a pot.  Here, I used a wok, but I think a proper stew pot would be best.  Medium heat.
2. Dice some garlic (I used about 4 cloves) and throw it in the pot.  Allow garlic to brown nicely.
3. Season the pork chops (thick = better) with Adobo.  It’s a sort of Puerto Rican All Spice as was described to me.  Use about the same amount as you would normally to salt/pepper the meat.
4. Sear both sides lightly in the pot with the garlic.  Add sliced onions.  I added 1 onion per pork chop, but it’s really up to you; 1 onion for every 2 pork chops should suffice.
5. Fill the pot with enough Coca-Cola to fill cover the pork chops.
6. Simmer on medium for about 45 min to an hour, or until the liquid evaporates and leaves you with a nice sugary coat.
7. EAT!

Done!  I got some studying done while waiting… okay, that’s a lie.  I did, however, wash all my dishes and cook pasta and a tomato/egg dish.  Super easy recipe that I can’t wait to show-off during my next small dinner.

This is the simmering process.  You can see that as the meat cooks, it doesn’t turn dark right away but will slowly darken as the Coca-Cola evaporates.

Finished dish!

Maybe I’ve been watching too much Anthony Bourdain during my 3 days of delirium and fits of sleep.  I’m feeling sarcastic and sentimental.  One thing’s for sure, I’d given a lot to this MBA program, and what I’ve forgotten is myself.

Despite all reasons to not eat well and not go to the gym and not sleep for more than 5 hours at a time, I need to stop.  I need to start taking care of myself before I do anything else.  In the past three months, I’ve gotten sick 3 times already, and my body’s starting to get weary.  Have I told you that I’m only 26?  Man, how would I have ever gotten myself through even the first half of the first semester if I were married, or worse, had a child?  I seriously don’t know how my classmates do it.  I have so much respect for them.

So as I’m chalked full of chemicals both Western and Chinese, I’m vowing to start gyming more and to forget everything that I have to do and start first with myself.

• Officially a McCombs MBA Blogger.  I’m one of six in my year of bloggers!
• Marketing Fellows.  I’m definitely passionate about marketing and the way that successful products and marketing campaigns can change the way that people use products and see themselves.  For that reason, I’m so excited to be invited to join Marketing Fellows.  Marketing Fellows is an organization (group of 20 or so students) who are sponsored by the CCIMS at McCombs. I get to work on a practicum (consulting project in a team for a company led by a McCombs professor), talk with industry experts, and change the marketing curriculum offered at McCombs.
• I’m the point of contact for the logistic committee of the Women in Business Leadership Conference as part of the Graduate Women in Business group.  It’s the 10th anniversary edition, and we have some great speakers and far exceeded our expectation of attendance and local community involvement.
• I was chosen to be on the Adobe MBA Plus project.  MBA Plus is special to McCombs, and we can source projects with companies to do all sorts of real-world, hands-on consulting work.  Mums the word on the topic but super stoked to be on an awesome team.
• I got to attend Reaching Out MBA Conference in LA.  Firstly, I LOVE LA, and secondly, the Conference was spectacular.  ROMBA was intimate, a great chance to actually have conversations with recruiters, and meet some awesome people.
• Unlike undergrad, my GPA is still above a 3.0, and although I’m super busy with everything else, my priority is focus on classes and work with my professors.
• So far, this semester, I’ve been in 3 states and will be in at least one other before the end.  Also, next semester I get to go on a Global Connections trip.  It’s a class you take, where you intensely learn about the business, culture, and political influences in a region before visiting the area during spring break.  I can FINALLY say… Argentina, here I come!

All in all, I couldn’t be having a better time.  Sure, I’m a little high on caffeine (learning on to make the perfect chai) at the moment.  Yes, I’m lacking proper rest.  But I’m pleased to be so involved and so hectic.  Knock on wood that the rest of my two years are just as amazing.

I’m 25, single, and contemplating the notion of marriage.  Is it something I really want or just another thing I should be doing at my age?  Do I really want want it or is it just because so many of my immediate friends are coupled?  If I meet that super-lucky someone, do I mean forever forever?  Or we’ll try our best but really we live like 50% longer than back in the olden days (what era am I referring to?  no idea), and we may end up growing into two completely different individuals who have nothing in common and at that point, we may mutually agree that we’ve loved and it was awesome, but now I really want to do something else?

And that got me to thinking about 2 things: 1) I’m Chinese, so it’s highly likely that even 50 years ago, I might be suited for an arranged marriage, and 2) even pre-airline/pre-personal car/heck, even pre-online dating era, it would be hard to get around, so even with choice, I’d be limited in who I date.

But is that necessarily a bad thing?  The lack of choice that is.

Sure, steamy 3 hours, your boyfriend’s bored to tears Victorian era movies wax of forbidden romance and the unhappy arranged marriage birthed from business deals.  Those aren’t reliable, are they?  It hasn’t been until recently that art really started to capture the lives of normal, non-elite/rich folk.  When I say ‘recently,’ I mean late 1800s?

I bet most people were happy in their marriages.  Different criteria; I’m sure women back then didn’t always assume that their husbands would be the end-all, be-all of friendship, love, companionship, & passion.  The divorce rate, due to religion & social stigma, was much lower.  This is completely a wild guess, but arranged marriages don’t sound that awful to me.  If you’re stuck in a situation, you’re going to make it work.

Isn’t the prospect of too much choice in marriage bad?  You’ll almost never find someone who’s exactly perfect for you.  And with 400 million people on Facebook, that’s at least 400 million people with internet connections and at most a 20 hour flight from you.

But if you’re forced to settled (that has an awful connotation but is it really that bad?), you’d probably be ok with Dick, James, or Bob.

In our way of thinking, perfection and good are nowhere close.  The big differentiating factor is not the relationship of perfect to good but expectation to reality.  We want perfect, and we’re likely to get pretty awesome but not quite there (I mean even Mary Poppins was ‘only’ “almost perfect in every way”).  Back in the day, the expectations were more likely pretty decent guy, who’s responsible, non-abusive, and gave you some damned space, and that’s probably what you got.

So maybe I should just lower my expectations?  Is Dan Gilbert really just trying to get laid?  Lol I’m not sure and no respectively.

Interesting exercise in paradigm shifts though.

This is a 20 min (21:20) by Dan Gilbert called “Why are we happy?” based on his book Stumbling on Happiness.  [Given how we waste so much of our time, this is a precious 20 minutes indeed.]

Dan talks about choice and the concept of synthetic happiness.  Synthetic happiness is when we didn’t get what we want.  Here’s an example I just made up:

You’re at a ice cream parlor and ask the server which ice cream to get (let’s pretend you can’t try them).  The guy recommends peach or pecan.  You pick the pecan but are wondering what the peach tasted like.  You’re happiness level is influx because you’re doubting your choice.  On the other hand, you ask the guy the same question, and he says peach or pecan but we’re out of peach.  Well, you say, get me the pecan then, you eat the ice cream, and you think, hmmmm… that was pretty darn good.

We learn in marketing that there is a balance between giving people choices & giving people too many choices, and there is an optimal number of choices but we can’t always control the market… or platforms.  What immediately came to mind, especially because I work in the social gaming industry is this:

Compared to the number of games on the iPhone, there are far less choices on Facebook, both in terms of genres & choices in each genre.  Giving people a select number of choices, it’s easier for them to choose.  Facebook has the top 20 games (you can go down by genre if you like, but I’m guessing most people don’t).  However, iPhone gives users top 25 and 50 in each genre.  That’s 19 subcategories under gaming and 20 if you count the “all games” category.  Holy smokes.

Is there a correlation between the limitation of choice and how much game developers are making/users are spending?  Zynga was valued at over $3 billion this year.  Playfish was bought for ~$400 million.  Playdom’s last valuation (in November, aka eons ago in interweb time) $260 million.  Top iPhone developers?  Confession: I don’t know.  I’m taking an educated guess in that none of the iPhone devs are getting such an astonishing valuation.

Yes, lots of factors play into this analogy, and I’m completely over-simplifying things.  But that doesn’t mean that I’m wrong.  The influx of choice is a major determining factor in how popular a game stays, how well it monetizes, and how many downloads.  [It's one of the reasons, the majority of iPhone games have such a short shelf life; they're constantly being replaced.]

Okay, we’ve looked at ice cream.  We’ve looked at gaming.  Let’s zoom out.  To life.

This thought leads to my bold statement: if a poll was taken of the self-described happiness level of people in China and people in the US, I bet more China would have a higher happiness rating (and as it continues to expand, that rating will slowly drop down to meet that the United States).

Why?  There are fewer choices in China (well, not in current Chinese cities but on average).  In types of food.  Politics.  Parking spots, if you’re one of the rising middle class with a car (horrible idea).

Because, in sum, there are less choices to be made, there’s also less buyer’s remorse.  The absence of this increases the overall happiness quotient.

.

So. Without physical limitations to our choices, is there a way to artificially create boundaries in our lives that will help increase our ability to control our own happiness?  Do you believe choice is the evil villain in the pursuit of happiness?

and here’s what I got:

YAY!!!

Oh, and I LOVE the loseit.com iPhone app.  It allows me to add all the food that I’ve eaten, keep track of my weight on a cool chart, and add exercise.  I’m hoping more people use it, so that they can put out an update with more programmed in foods.

[So basically, you select the food you eat by adding food, but some stuff, i.e. Odwalla, isn't included.  You can add it by putting in custom foods and putting in recipes, which calculates your nutrition information.  But it's a lot easier to just search for it.  So I'm hoping they will put out an update soon.   It does remember the custom foods you add, which makes it super easy to add things, i.e. Honest Tea, if you've put it in once.]