Went to Emporium in SF today

My friend got hit in the head by an errant basketball, then it ricocheted off her head and hit my other friend, her boyfriend, in the face / eye socket.

I dressed up as a black cape for Halloween.

Most of the bars in Haight and Cole Valley were dead. 

Finally going to the pool today

I miss swimming! Hard to get out there because there's a lack of pools in the Bay Area, and it's cold outside!!

Procrastinating lately (from Oct 13)

Been procrastinating lately lol… I will get work done today. Hold me accountable!

Boston progress

 Yeah, the move to Boston is taking some time, mostly because I have been stymied in my productivity by some sleep issues. But I made a great connect at a virtual conference today that totally would help me get a great start to a social life in Boston, so I definitely am a little bit more optimistic about this move.

I'm out here in the Bay Area and both today and yesterday two different friends cancelled on my for dinner plans. Fortunately yesterday I still way able to get dinner with my best friend instead. So a great save. I love my best friend. Anyway. I think this really speaks to the fact that for some reason the people in my circles in the Bay Area simply don't invest enough time in friendships, and that's a tragedy. Honestly I think a lot of people have gotten into the habit of avoiding other people after COVID. That's partly to blame. So yeah, I definitely need to uproot and go to Boston. Or New York. Something. Thanks for reading.

Parsnip improvements

 1. Feedback on how the dish went after cooking it

1.5. Intelligent responses to how you screwed up and how you can do it better

2. Spreadsheet-like scientific tracking of repeating this dish and what variables go into it and how you'd rate the dish until you get improvement

3. Way to record new dishes to preserve mom / grandma's tradition

Tried Metamucil for the first time

 Eh

Keoni's salmon recipe

Cubed salmon

Garlic

Asparagus

Salt/pepper

Hoissan sauce

Jasmine rice

1. Cook cubed salmon thoroughly

2. Remove cooked salmon and put asparagus in with salt and pepper in the salmon juice. Add some garlic at the end but don’t burn the garlic

3. Then put the salmon back in and steep in Hoissan sauce

Welcome to my cooking blog

    My mother is exceptional at cooking food. Most people are cooks; she is a chef.

    I didn't fully realize or perhaps internalize this until I went out into the real world and discovered that everyone else tries to cook, because they have to, in the same way that everyone knows how to drive because they have to. But they aren't actually good at it. They're ass at it. My mom is amazing at it.

    My mom is skilled in a tremendous number of different cuisines, and she can basically whip up any Eastern or Western dish. I've noticed that my mom has such a deep well of intuition built from experience that she just "does the thing" when she cooks, and often can't articulate why her sense is correct.

    I've also been reluctant to learn how to cook for a long time, much longer than my other friends, particularly because my mom is so good at cooking that there was never an incentive to learn how to cook. Turns out everyone else started learning how to cook in ~high school because their parents' cooking sucks.

    Neither of my sisters seem particularly eager to become as world-class in cooking as my mom. I think that's why a life goal of mine is to become as great of a chef as my mom, even though the only thing I know how to cook today is eggs (that dry or break), oatmeal, and tofu (fun fact the tofu is already cooked). Derr. But I think someone should preserve the recipes and traditions of my mom. And my grandma, whose Asian dishes are really quite remarkable. It would be weird if my mom's experience failed to pass to the next generation.

    The reason I know my mom is good and I'm not just biased or imprinted to what I ate growing up is because 1) the flavor profile, texture, and presentation that my mom does is objectively superior to others; 2) outsiders to the house (friends) will often remark how amazing my mom is at cooking.  

    Every year during Asian New Year (lol) my mom leaves out an offering to "the Kitchen God," to say thanks for nourishing our home. Yeah, honestly, thanks Kitchen God, for making my mom badass. But also hopefully this speaks to the extent to which we take cooking seriously in my childhood home. 

    I'm starting out as a runt of the litter in terms of learning how to cook, but because of my underdog status I intend to overcompensate and become exceptional at cooking. So I'm going to start blogging my progress here. The only way to surpass all of the median home cookers is through deliberate practice, so hopefully this blog will keep me accountable. I have so much to learn.

On sales (2019?)

 > do you think that when talking to potential users you should already be trying to close the sale?

Yes. Before going in to meet anyone you need to have a “hunch” or hypothesis beforehand that you have a solution to a problem they have. When you go in you need the mindset that by the end of the meeting you will close the sale with them. And if you don’t close the sale or at least push them to the next step then you have failed. 

Otherwise, your conversation with them will go on aimless tangents without a focused goal and you also can’t hold yourself accountable. What I mean by that is that it’s easy to “interview” someone: you just passively stare at them and write down whatever they say. You can feel like you did a lot of productive work and pat yourself on the back without actually having done anything. But to “sell” to someone requires that you genuinely push yourself in the moment because it’s hard as hell. 

It’s important to note here that selling does *not* mean arguing with the customer, it does *not* mean manipulating the person into buying something that doesn’t help them, and it does *not* mean not listening to the customer. People who don’t actually know how sales works will assume this is how it works from stereotypes or from salespeople who actually suck at their jobs.

In fact it’s the opposite. Good sales requires extreme skills in listening and empathy. God-like skills. Because you almost literally have to transplant yourself into someone else’s life to 0. Warm up to them and get in their side, then 1. understand exactly their problem (emotionally and in THEIR terminology/mental heuristics, NOT yours), then 2. assess with a clear mind what is the best solution for them and objectively whether your solution is a right fit, and finally 3. communicate the knowledge in your head to their head in a language that matches their head. This requires much more interaction and engagement on your part than if you just sit back and “interview.”

The reason you need to have a hunch or hypothesis or a “prior” is because you need to bring your original thinking to the table. The customer you will interact with is on ‘automatic thinking mode’ when they think about their problems and life in general, not ‘creative thinking mode.’ You *cannot* ask the user for solutions or “What do you want?” outright because they will default to unoriginal solutions or most likely a cynicism of ‘I don’t know and everything sucks and there’s no solution possible ever because I’ve checked.’ They deliberately cannot see solutions on their own because they have mentally shut themselves off from their problem in order to get on with their life. 

They have come to accept their problem so much they might have even forgotten that they had that problem. So if you showed up to a meeting and just said, “So tell me about your problems,” they won’t even remember to tell you about the important problem X that they’re having because it’s too painful to remember. But if you showed up to a meeting and said, “We’re working on helping people with problem X. So tell me about your problems,” then they remember their problem and can open up to you about it. 

Moreover, sales breaks through the politeness firewall that everyone puts up. If you propose an idea to someone, they’ll tell you “Yes I love this” because they are being polite. Even if they are trying to be as honest as possible there is still a subconscious politeness filter. When you sell something to someone it’s the ultimate moment of truth as to whether this actually solves their problem. If it does then they’ll be insisting to pull out $100 from their wallet right now because they’re in such need. If they aren’t then it’s not what this person needs. If you think about how smart of a shopper you are in that you are always trying to avoid being fooled into buying something that is a scam, then you can extrapolate this mentality to everyone and therefore understand how hard it is to close a sale. 

Finally, even if your original hypothesis seemed great in your head but turned out to be shit in reality, the fact that you will feel hungry to close a sale will force you to continue exploring new avenues of how you can help this particular person. Note this only applies when you don’t already have a validated product. If you *do* have a validated product, you should still be helpful to this person 100%, even if you don’t stand to make any money (as you should do with all sales)—but you don’t have to close a sale. You instead need to focus on finding more of the right target segment whose needs fit your validated solution.

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Sales is being pushed properly when it’s as painful as doing engineering. If sales is less painful than engineering that’s because people are giving up too easily 

Replace ‘painful’ with ‘skillful’ if you want

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As a mantra, I would say that the salesperson should always be doing a shit ton of work before the engineer even starts. If the engineer is actually any good, they ought to stab you if you make them create something that ends up being useless because their labor is so valuable. If they are blindly willing to make shit for you that’s because you have an engineer who isn’t actually good and you have been warned.

Trump’s That’s So Raven moment

 I dunno if anyone else has seen That’s So Raven or any plotline cliché where the main characters see the future and try to change it, only for their behavior to enact the inevitable prophecy itself (it’s self-fulfilling), but:

I feel like the Trump administration’s initial response to the pandemic was a huge That’s So Raven moment:

2019 - the economy has been doing quite well for some time that the media starts promulgating baseless fears that we’re due for a recession 

2019 - Trump administration downplays the initial reaction to COVID because they fear reacting will make the stock market go down, which will be bad for Trump’s re-election. In their goldfish view they are too concerned with this presupposed inbound “recession” 

2020 - Because the US does not intervene to stop COVID (a role they usually play; see Ebola), COVID takes over the world and the economy goes to shit anyway. As a result Trump loses the election. 

2022 - now the economy makes no sense 

Maybe the more parsimonious view is that the Trump administration is completely stupid, and none of this actually was in their mind, and I’ll take that view as well I guess 🤷