The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work, and Travel

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As a new feature on The Art of Nonconformity site, I’ll be posting profiles of individuals, companies, and non-profit organizations that have chosen alternative paths in pursuit of their goals. We’ll have at least one of these interview features a month, and the first profile is with Tony Hsieh, CEO of online retailer Zappos.com.

I first heard Tony speak at a conference a few weeks ago in Los Angeles. Tony talked about building a $1 billion company entirely around a phenomenal customer service experience. Lots of companies talk about service, Tony told us during his keynote address, but they don’t really mean it.

At Zappos, the company has become profitable selling shoes online, something that many people never thought would be possible. They have done this despite providing a 365-day return policy and free shipping both ways for customers.

Zappos also provides five weeks of training for every employee in both Las Vegas (the headquarters) and Kentucky (the main warehouse), even employees who perform manual labor or answer the phone. The key objective in all of this is to build a common culture with a genuine focus on customer service above everything else.

Pizza Delivery from the Shoe Store

One time, Tony said at the conference, he and some friends were out of town somewhere at 3:00 a.m. and they wanted pizza. Room service at their hotel had closed, so one of his friends suggested they call up Zappos to see how they could help. Okay, said Tony as the group dialed up the company’s 24/7 customer support line and put a rep on speakerphone. Without saying who was in the room, one of the guys told the rep that they were hungry and didn’t know what to do.

The rep put them on hold for two minutes, and when she came back, she had a list of nearby pizza places that were still open. “We’re happy to help any way we can,” she said.

I thought that was a pretty amazing story. When I travel in the U.S. these days, by comparison, I’m just happy if the airlines allow me to fly on the ticket I’ve already paid for, and if I can get a seat with decent leg room, I’m thrilled. I worry that the TSA will make a new rule preventing laptops from going on planes (you never know) and that wherever I’m staying hasn’t lost my reservation.

In other words, I live in fear of the same companies and people I pay money to, including the TSA since they are funded by taxpayers. Tony did mention that some of his loyal customer base requested that Zappos start an airline one day to sort out some of those travel problems. He says he’s thinking about it.

(By the way, Tony also asked us to please not call Zappos to order pizza, because that’s really not what they’d like to work on most days.)

***

I tracked down Tony last week and asked him a few more questions about the service-is-everything model. Here’s what he had to say:

Why not just sell stuff? Isn’t customer service overrated these days?

“Zappos.com isn’t trying to be all things to everyone. Zappos is for customers that value great customer service, including 24/7 customer service, fast shipping, free shipping both ways, and 365-day return policy. Zappos is not the place for price-sensitive customers. However, we do have another site that is separately branded called 6pm.com, which is catered towards the price-sensitive customer.

For me personally, in general I value customer service over lower prices, so the bet was there are other people that do as well. For Zappos.com, we believe that there is a large enough market for people that value great customer service.”

Selling shoes sounds pretty boring compared to what a lot of other dot-coms do. What attracted you and other early arrivals to the company?

“In 1999, the overall footwear market in the US was $40 billion, and 5% of that was being done by mail order catalogs ($2 billion). We believed that online sales would eventually surpass that.”

Aside from checking on pizza delivery options for jet-lagged customers, can you provide a short example of what you would define as exemplary service?

“All of our reps are trained so that when a customer is looking for a specific pair of shoes, if we’re out of stock (for example, we don’t have their size or are sold out of the entire style), they will look on at least three competitor web sites and refer the customer to that competitor if they find the shoe the customer is looking for.”

***

I appreciated hearing from Tony, both at the conference and in this interview. I tend to be fairly skeptical when large companies claim that customer service is one of their primary objectives. Whether they admit it or not, I think that most large companies view customer service as something that needs to be managed by employees so that the executives can focus on “more important things.”

But Zappos may be a good example of an exception to the rule of service as an afterthought, perhaps because they have taken steps to ensure the culture of a small company as they scaled up to the $1 billion point.

Or maybe it’s something else. What do you think?

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Photo credit: Elbeardo

This is a lesson on how to look absolutely ridiculous in front of a crowd of strangers, and how to recover as gracefully as possible. Well, let’s clarify that a bit: the first part is easy, since I am constantly making stupid mistakes all over the world and trying to minimize the embarrassment. I have no shortage of experience in the dumb-things-I’ve-done-in-random-countries department.

The second part of the lesson is more important: how to recover from your own Most Embarrassing Moment. Anyone can do stupid things, as I tell myself pretty much every time I travel and get lost somewhere. It’s the brave ones who are able to recover.

I decided to tell this story because I was talking to a friend the other day who recently had her own Most Embarrassing Moment. I told her this story, and she smiled a little. You know who you are.

So, enough procrastinating. Here you have it – how to look like a complete idiot in a foreign setting.

The setting for my Most Embarrassing Moment was Singapore.

I arrived in the city state of Singapore from Bangkok after visiting Burma (Myanmar) for several days. The trip to Burma was good—I’ll write about it at some point later.

It terms of price, Singapore is a mid-ranged city; it’s not super-expensive like Tokyo, but it’s not as cheap as Hong Kong either. I had booked a room at the local YMCA, which in Singapore is more like a hotel than a hostel. It was a nice room with my own shower, internet access, and free breakfast in the mornings. I spent the days wandering the city like I always do, and just as in Hong Kong, a lot of the wandering in Singapore takes place in malls and connected shopping centers.

One of these shopping centers was on Orchard Road, right outside the YMCA. I ended up there in the afternoon after taking the metro to various places around the city. I don’t always eat lunch when I’m traveling, but I almost never miss my afternoon coffee break.

There are a lot of Starbucks in Singapore—this guy can tell you exactly how many and where they are. They’re just like “home” in most places, but also serve local items. Thus I ended up at the Orchard Road Starbucks, where I looked forward to taking my coffee back over to the YMCA for an hour of reading.

I went inside, thankful for the a/c since Singapore is usually very hot. I ordered a café au lait, which for some reason is called something different in each country in the world (what’s with that, Starbucks?), and picked it up from the counter.

Then, a funny thing happened to me on the way out of the building. A glass door came out of the middle of nowhere and walked right into me.

Some of the many observers who witnessed this attack might say that I walked into the glass, but I’ll always know better. It was a fully-transparent glass door, and I swear it just appeared there all of a sudden. One moment I’m walking out of the Starbucks into the warm sunny day, and in the next moment, I’m staring at a coffee-covered glass door that came out of the sky to block my exit. My head hurt, and I dropped my bag.

At first I was in shock. What had just happened?

Then I looked down and saw my coffee on the floor, and looked up to see a glass door that wasn’t there before. I also saw a door handle, which apparently I was supposed to pull to open instead of attempting to magically walk through. Who knew?

I swear if there was someone there with a video camera that day, this incident would be all over YouTube. Thankfully, it was just me and a bunch of surprised Singaporeans. I could hear all kinds of people talking about me as I backed away from the wall of glass that had just come out of nowhere to block my exit.

“Did that guy just walk into the door?” someone said. “Oh my God,” said someone else.

Yes, it was that bad. When people could tell I was okay, they started to laugh. I looked up at them and tried to smile as I was cleaning my coffee off the floor and the brand-new glass door. As quick as I could, and as gracefully as I could—which wasn’t saying much by then—I got out of the building and walked away.

I went back across the street to the YMCA, where I drank the remaining half of my coffee that survived the accident. This café au lait is very well mixed now, I thought.

Later that night, I went back outside, and looked at my nemesis across the street. The evil glass door. Okay, I thought. It’s over now. What can I possibly learn from this?

The 5-Step Recovery Process

It goes like this. First, admit you have a problem… no, not that list.

Okay, try this one:

1. Put yourself together as quickly as possible. I had a few napkins in my hand, so I used one to wipe up some of the coffee and milk that was all over the door and the floor.

2. Laugh at yourself even though it’s not funny at all. It’s really not funny when it happens to you, but if you laugh, other people will feel more free to laugh. And then it’s like they’re laughing with you, although of course they’re not.

3. Never go back to the same Starbucks. OR, you can do it this way:

4. Force yourself to go back to the same place in an effort to break the jinx. Just remember to watch out for the door!

5. Use your embarrassing moment to help someone else, such as I’m doing here. I hope it’s helpful to you on your next visit to a glass-doored coffee shop somewhere in the world.

***

I won’t be so cruel as to ask you to think about your own embarrassing moments. Instead, I’ll ask you to think about your goals for world domination (or whatever they are). Recovering from stupid mistakes is crucial to living a life of adventure, because if you set out to do great things, you’ll probably have a few big falls as well.

I tried to forget about that afternoon on Orchard Road for as long as I could. But when I heard my friend’s embarrassing story the other day, it came right back into my mind.

I expect to be back in Singapore sometime in the summer, and I’ll probably stay in the YMCA again. It does a great free breakfast. But as to whether I’ll visit the Starbucks across the street or not, I’m really not sure.

If you ever go there yourself, watch out for the glass door. And when you fall down somewhere else, brush it off and keep going.

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A couple of years ago, I was in London on a three-day layover after flying in from Africa. I had been in Sierra Leone for several months and was looking forward to walking the streets, hanging out in coffee shops, and seeing friends before heading on.

On my first night in the city, I had nothing important to do, so I took the underground down to Trafalgar Square. I bought a takeaway curry meal for dinner and ate about half of it on a park bench. Then I went walking down Oxford Street for about 15 blocks in search of the nearest Borders bookstore where I hoped to spend the rest of the evening reading books and drinking coffee. I kept the rest of my dinner box with me, because I thought I might run into a homeless person who would appreciate some food. After walking 10 blocks, I hadn’t met anyone and began to feel silly about carrying around half a box of vegetable curry, so I finally threw it away.

Sure enough, two blocks later, I came by a panhandler who was sitting beside an ATM (a convenient location, I thought) asking people for spare change as they walked by. I felt bad about throwing away the rest of my dinner, so I decided to see if I could do something else to help.

I asked his permission to sit down and chat. “John” welcomed me and told me his story. Years ago, he had been a successful tradesman but had fallen on hard times, went through a divorce, and so on. If you talk with homeless people in most major cities throughout the world, you’ll often hear similar stories. Sometimes they’re true and often they’re not, but I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter that much. For whatever reason, most people hanging out on the streets all day really don’t have a regular place to live.

How To Give $17 and Lose $17 More

I talked with John for ten minutes, and his story was growing crazier by the minute. The climax came when he told me that six months ago, he was at this same ATM station when a woman was being robbed. John tried to defend her, but was hurt in the process. The police came and arrested him because the mystery attacker had fled the scene.

At this point I interrupted him. “Look,” I said. “I’ll give you some money for dinner, but you don’t have to lie to me. Do you really expect me to believe you?”

John kept insisting that the story was true, and I may have even started to believe him. “What has he got to lose?” I thought. Perhaps I was feeling especially generous after coming out of Africa for the first time in months, but I gave him £10, which was about $17 at the time. John was very thankful.

I let my guard down a few minutes later when John’s face brightened and he said, “Hey, I get a lot of coins from people and they’re heavy to carry around all the time. Would you mind exchanging these coins for a ten-pound note?”

I looked at a paper cup in his hand, which was indeed filled with heavy English coins. I gave him the note. John put it in his pocket and stood up. “I’m just going to the washroom down the street,” he told me. “Can you watch my stuff for me?”

He took his backpack with him but left his coat, a box of crackers, and another bag with me. As he walked off I realized that he had taken the cup of coins with him too. I was alarmed for a moment, but then I remembered the stuff that he had left in my care.

“That’s a clever trick,” I thought. “I bet he’s thinking that I’ll forget to ask him for the coins when he comes back. He is coming back, right?” I looked at his things beside me and felt relieved again. What kind of guy would leave his stuff behind and never return?

Well, I waited for John for ten minutes. Then I waited another five minutes. The whole time, people kept walking by, trying not to make eye contact with me as I sat beside the ATM with a homeless guy’s stuff. I felt incredibly uncomfortable. One guy actually said, “Good evening” to me, and I rushed to explain myself.

“Oh, hi. I’m not really sitting here. I mean, I’m just waiting for my friend John. You know John? He, uh, works here sometimes.” The man walked on and I grew even more anxious. Around that time, I decided to go through John’s things to see what I was faithfully looking after.

Upon Realizing I Would Never See My $17 Again

To my surprise, I found that the bag he left behind was full of trash. The cracker box was empty. The coat, which I had earlier assumed would never be discarded, was old, tattered, and dirty. That morning I had browsed through a charity shop where I saw dozens of old coats for five pounds or less.

And I realized what I should have known from the beginning—John was gone, and he had taken almost $17 from me, in addition to the $17 that I willingly gave him, and he wasn’t planning on coming back.

I felt incredibly angry and embarrassed. Wasn’t I a Very Experienced Traveler? Don’t I know how to talk to homeless people in a place like London? How can I go traveling all over Africa, deflecting bribe requests from corrupt officials and staying out of trouble, only to end up losing $17 the first day I get back to Europe?

I was determined to not let John get the better of me. After all, I reasoned, he has to come back sometime. He’s probably going to wait half an hour and then return, thinking that I’ve given up. I’ll show him, I thought.

“Nice try, John,” I imagined myself saying. “You put on a good effort, but I want my ten pounds back right now.”

I sat there for another twenty minutes, looking at the ground and getting more and more angry. I didn’t want to admit the truth to myself—John wasn’t coming back. Whether I admitted it or not, though, it was true.

Anger and Resentment

I finally left the ATM in disgust. I couldn’t figure out who I was the most upset at—John or myself. There must be some good reason for this, I kept thinking. Maybe I’ll run into John at the Borders tonight and I can confront him then.

“Who bought you that hot chocolate? Who paid the extra thirty pence for the whipped cream on top?”

After walking around the London streets for another half-hour, I made it to the Borders I had set out to find a long time ago. John wasn’t at the café inside. I didn’t see him later that night as I rode the underground back to my guesthouse, and I didn’t see him two mornings later as I left London for another city.

Life requires you to take risks. When you take risks, sometimes you lose. Is it worth it to you?

Was it worth it to me that night?

Resolution

I thought about calling this essay, “How To Lose $34 in London,” but I realized that losing the $34 was easy. The hard part was learning to let go of the money long after it had left my pocket.

Whether by his own fault or through the fault of others, John was homeless. While I went around sleeping in hotel rooms or on the couches of friends, John went from shelter to shelter. Given the choice, would I trade places with John for even one day? The idea is laughable—I could hardly manage to sit on the sidewalk by the London ATM for 30 minutes, knowing that the people passing by thought I was homeless. Yet, some part of me that night was resentful of John and wished that I could be in his place with the $34.

***

I have a friend, Marie, who works with the homeless in Seattle. One night she came over to talk to us about her recommendations for how we should respond to the many transient people in our city. One thing that Marie said made a big impression on me.

“You can give money if you want,” she told us. “But once you give it, let it go. Don’t expect a miracle, because many people on the streets are not ready to change their situations. But at the same time, there’s nothing wrong with helping someone get dinner or a place to stay.”

I liked that approach. Do what you can do to help, and then let it go. Live your life, help others, and don’t stress out when something doesn’t work the way you expected it would. You can still go to Borders and read books at the café.

John, if you’re out there, I can’t really say “thanks” for taking my money. I’m still a little mad about it. But I appreciate the lessons I learned through my mistake and your chicanery. I’ve probably been thinking about this long after you’ve forgotten it, so it’s time for me to let it go too.

I hope you got another coat from the charity shop.

I hope you won’t be falsely arrested for fending off robbers at the ATM again.

I hope you enjoyed the hot chocolate that I imagined my money being spent on.

Take care, John, and everyone else out there in London and beyond.

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I finally broke down and joined part of the social networking revolution. I’m officially no longer behind the rest of the world, at least in one aspect: I’ve been using Twitter on a trial basis for a while now, and I’ve decided I really like it.

See, I’ve never used Myspace… or Facebook… and hardware-wise, I don’t have a Blackberry or an expensive MacBook laptop. I just have Gmail, a $3 Skype microphone I bought in Belgrade last year, and a $500 Dell laptop that does everything I need.

But contrary to expensive gear and other social networks, I think I’ll stick with Twitter for a while, and I think it will grow as other sites like Facebook and MySpace slow down.

My first impressions of the whole concept were probably the same as those from most initial skeptics: “What, I’m supposed to post what I’m doing at this very minute? To begin with, I don’t like the idea of telling a community of random people what I’m doing every day, and further, why would anyone be interested in the trivial details of my life?”

But as I learned, sharing trivial life details is far from the only use of Twitter, and the whole service grows on you as you use it and become part of a community that is not random at all.

Sure, you can use Twitter to tell everyone what you ate for breakfast and what TV shows you’re watching. But some people are using the service to conduct polls, promote their latest blog posts, and schedule meetings. Several people have said that they now use it more than Facebook or any other service.

Work, Travel, and Accessibility

The growing trend of Twitter et al reflects the shift in life and work that has been occurring since the widespread saturation of internet use. I talk to people all over the world every day. If I need some programming or translation work done, I can head over to Elance and have 12 bids from Bangalore on my project within 4 hours.

Although I always like to point out that life hasn’t changed that much for a lot of people in the poorest countries, the rest of us truly live in a different world now. It’s not necessarily good or bad; it’s just reality.

A couple of years ago I flew from Copenhagen to Chicago on SAS Airlines. The plane offered wi-fi access to all passengers, and because they were promoting the new service, the first 15 minutes were free. I logged on and sent a few messages out to friends. “I’m writing you from 34,000 feet over the Atlantic!” I told them excitedly.

One of them wrote back to say that she didn’t like the idea of internet in the skies. “It’s the last refuge of being disconnected from the world,” she said.

I saw her point, and the service from Boeing is now discontinued, but it’s just a matter of time until it becomes common to be in touch with everyone from the last frontiers of being inaccessible. When that time comes, we can look back in lament and talk about the days when we could count on being out of pocket at least from the time the captain told us to turn off all portable electronic devices.

But change is the only constant characteristic of advancement. If you want to ignore the world, you can always turn off your computer and phone whether you’re on the plane or anywhere else. You don’t have to answer your phone if you don’t want to, and no one says you have to check your email ten times a day.

The burden is increasingly on us to plan our own lives free of external restraint. Personal responsibility is a scary thing, but if you harness it well, you can have a tremendous impact on the world.

So despite my disinterest in other social networks, here I am on Twitter. Come and say hello if you’re a user.

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Photo credit: Selva

One of my favorite poems deals with the subject of accomplishing much in life and then not having anything to show for it afterwards. It’s called Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the text is below:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

The skillful use of rhyme and meter is better explained here (and it is truly impressive). I’m more concerned with the message that Ozymandias, through Percy Shelley, leaves us with.

Is it possible to gain so much and have so little to show for it?

Shelley’s poem illustrates a scenario even worse than the old “gain the world but lose your soul” proverb, because regardless of what came of Ozymandias’ soul, he wasn’t even able to hold onto the world. Instead, he was left with nothing at all.

Many of us are busy building monuments just like Ozymandias. Our monuments are often made of material things—cars, houses, bank account balances. While we probably do need some money to do many of the things we like to do, it’s easy to see how a monument to money will be ultimately unfulfilling.

If not money, many of us are building monuments of power. The perfect career will bring us access to more perceived power, so we spend years training in a modern-day apprenticeship program (college) to become accredited to an exclusive guild. For example, several of my law school friends are graduating this year. One of them told me recently, “I’m more scared than ever that I’m going to join the kind of practice that I said I never would. That I’ll just to be a normal lawyer slave like everyone else in our class.”

I told her it was good she was scared. Once you stop being afraid, I said, that’s when you know you’ll end up doing exactly what you were worried about.

There are other monuments you can build–my friend Gretchen Rubin has written a user’s guide to the four most common monuments—or you may have even crafted your own. They work just fine as long as you don’t think about them too carefully, but when you do, you may feel a little flat.

How To Fight Against the Ozymandias Mentality

If you look for a way out of the trap, you’ll find it in making your life count for something greater than yourself. A few suggestions are listed below. Feel free to take them or leave them as you see fit.

• Volunteer somewhere. The location isn’t that important. If you have no idea where to get started, look here.

• Serve on the board of a local non-profit. This is also an exercise in volunteerism, but requires more responsibility. Non-profits need money and wise stewards with some basic business experience. If you can help with both of those areas, you may be a good fit for a local board.

• Set up a charitable giving trust, and make a will to ensure that your physical assets end up where you want them. That way they won’t be stuck out in the desert, waiting for a poet to come by and make fun after you’re dead.

• Check out the Death Clock. This one is admittedly a bit creepy, but there are a number of sites out there in the crazy internet world that will tell you roughly how many days, minutes, or seconds you have left to live, based on what country you live in, how overweight you are, and so on. One of them, Death-Clock.org, even has a free Myspace applet you can use to advertise your forthcoming day of death to all the other 13-year olds on Myspace. Okay, as I said, it’s bizarre. But on the other hand, any reminder that life is short is always helpful.

• Pick up the legacy project you have neglected for too long. We all have big ideas from time to time. An idea for a trip, an idea for a business venture, an idea for a book, or for something else. Think about the ones you’ve had and discarded.

One Life to Live

That’s what it all comes down to, right? Each of us has a certain amount of time on earth, and we can spend it as we choose. Each moment is precious and can not be regained.

(Thank you, by the way, for spending these moments reading my essay.)

Looking back on life towards the end, most people regret things they didn’t do much more than things they did. I worked on the outline for this project for nearly a year before I started. In the month or two before I set up the design work and started telling people about it, I really struggled with letting it come to life.

Travel has been getting more and more expensive at the same time as the U.S. dollar continues to fall around the world; there was no clear financial motive for my beginning this project; I’m not even sure what city I’ll be living in after this summer, and so on.

I had all kinds of good reasons to delay or cancel, but what pushed me over the edge of going forward was the knowledge that if I didn’t at least give this project a chance to have a life of its own, I would always regret it. So here we are, and I’m glad you’re along for the journey.

That’s my example– what’s yours? What is your neglected legacy project? What do you care deeply about that will outlast you?

Why not spend some time on that today?

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