Today in the news, Beirut is under siege and the airport is closed. I’m usually disappointed when I find out I’ve missed a party somewhere, but this situation is serious enough that I’m glad to have missed it, and I’m concerned about the people I met there.

Compared to what’s happening now, my time in Beirut was extremely uneventful. My biggest challenge was finding a place to do my laundry. I also got in trouble for taking these photos (click to enlarge), but I wasn’t told to delete them.

For those who are interested, this guy is writing an hour-by-hour account of what’s going on over there this week.

Syria

A couple of days later, I headed out to Damascus, Syria by minibus. For only $7, the three-hour trip is a bargain. I had heard rumors of an incongruous Dunkin Donuts on the Lebanese / Syrian border, and I can now confirm that the rumors are true. It is perhaps the most oddly located Dunkin Donuts in the world (I’ll keep looking elsewhere in case I’m wrong), but unfortunately our driver wasn’t interested in stopping, so I was unable to sample the local Bavarian cremes.

Along the journey, I met up with two travelers from Toronto, Jessica and Ildar. The three of us ended up hanging out in Damascus for the rest of the day and on into the evening over late-night drinks near our hostel.

Simply put, Syria is amazing. After just a few hours on my first day, I knew it was definitely going on my “Top 10 Countries” list whenever I get around to writing it. I felt completely safe at all times, was never hassled or pressured for anything, and genuinely felt welcomed by many of the people we talked to.

In the evening we visited the Umayyad Mosque, one of the oldest and most historical mosques in the world. We went at sunset and enjoyed learning about the building’s history from a local guide.

I don’t always feel this way about places I visit, but I wished I had stayed longer in Syria. It exceeded expectations that were already high, and I would love to go back sometime.

Tunisia

My last stop on the trip was Tunisia, where I stayed with the family of a Tunisian friend I know from Seattle. It was great to experience Tunisian life up close and personal. Over the course of a weekend, I saw most of the city and surrounding areas including the historical city of Carthage. I also attended the semi-finals and finals of the Tunis Open, a challenger event on the world tennis tour.

On Saturday, my new friends had arranged a Tunisian blogger meet-up at a local café. We talked about the role that Tunisian bloggers are trying to fill in the country and blogging in general.

Tunisia was the last real stop on this trip, but on the way back I traveled through Amman (again) and Rome. In Amman I went out to dinner with another friend from Seattle, and in Rome I had to sleep in the airport for a night before catching a 6:40 a.m. connecting flight.

I don’t really enjoy sleeping in airports, and in fact I try to avoid it whenever possible. But with the tremendous expense of the euro and the fact that I would have to get up at 4:00 a.m. anyway to get to the airport, it didn’t make sense to stay in a hotel. I picked a relatively quiet spot by gate B-9 and made a sleeping area with some blankets I had saved from the last flight.

I didn’t sleep much, but thankfully I wasn’t kicked out, so the next morning I was able to stumble on to the 6:40 connection to Frankfurt. By the time we got there, I was more awake and didn’t mind the 11-hour flight back to Seattle.

***

This trip involved a lot of flying and overland travel at a faster pace than I usually prefer, but it was also a lot of fun. I’m now back in Seattle for several weeks before the next trip in late June.

While I’m here I’ll be finishing up the final draft of the upcoming manifesto, “A Brief Guide to World Domination.” The manifesto will be free, 100% non-commercial, and available for everyone in mid-June.

We were mentioned in a New York Times blog last week, and the interest for the site is really picking up. More than 4,000 people have been coming by every day this week, and I’ve appreciated hearing from many of the new readers.

Thanks for following the journey!

###

If you are a Twitter user, you can also follow my real-time updates here.

***

Photo credit: Chris

Before the plane takes off for the 10 ½ hour flight to Santiago, the LAN Chile flight attendant wants to take my entire food and drink order while we’re still waiting to take off at JFK. I tell her I’ll have the pasta, but I can tell she’s waiting for something else.“Do you want bread with that?” she finally asks. Sure, OK. “Brown or white?”

“Uh, brown is fine.” Dinner is three hours away, but I need to place my order now in great detail.

This conversation goes on for a while in a mixture of Spanish and English. She asks if I’ll want breakfast in the morning, which is nine hours from now. “What kind of cereal? Café con leche or tea?”

I find it amusing that I have to order everything I want over the next 10 ½ hours before we even leave the ground. What if I want a Diet Coke in the middle of the flight—should I page the attendant again to let her know now?

***

It takes a while to get to Easter Island. Five hours from Seattle to JFK, 10 ½ to Santiago, and five more to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Thankfully, under the terms of the OneWorld Round-the-World tickets I travel with, each of these long flights counts as just one segment each, the same way that a San Francisco-L.A. flight would be one segment each.

The trick is to maximize value by taking long flights to remote places that would ordinarily be prohibitively expensive to fly to on a single ticket. Later on in this trip I’ll fly from Buenos Aires to Chicago, and then Chicago to Amman, Jordan—once again just one segment each for 10+ hours of flying each time.

So anyway, on to Easter Island.

It’s hard to write about a place like this without using the tired clichés of travel writing. Phrases like “in the middle of nowhere” and “undiscovered” and “the ends of the earth” are overused to the point of becoming trite. People who live on Easter Island don’t think of it as the middle of nowhere, and few if any places in the world remain undiscovered.

But while acknowledging all of that, I may lose the war against clichéd writing when trying to explain Easter Island. It really is a long way from anywhere else. It takes five hours to get to Chile in one direction, and six hours to Tahiti in the other. Those are the sole connections, on just one airline that has four flights a week.

The LAN Chile 767 looks enormous on the tarmac of the tiny airport. The other passengers and I descend the staircase to the ground and walk straight off onto the road. There’s no shuttle bus, and only a tiny terminal for those who have checked bags. We’ve already cleared immigration in Chile, and since I have no bags, I take a few steps from the airplane to the small parking lot.

As I walk away from the tarmac, I realize that if I were to suddenly change my mind tonight or tomorrow and want to leave, there’s no way off the island until the plane comes back from Tahiti in three days. This isn’t like my normal stopovers in places like Frankfurt or Hong Kong, with dozens of flights taking off every hour to countless world capitals.

I’m staying in a guesthouse about two miles out of the only town on the island. Each day of my trip, I walk back and forth at least twice, and the slow shuffle along half-paved roads reminds me another two-mile trek I took recently. A few weeks ago I was in L.A. for a downtown conference, and to save money I stayed at a small motel two miles away. Just as I’m doing here, I walked back and forth each morning and afternoon.

The paradox is unmistakable. Except for the Spanish language, downtown L.A. and downtown Hanga Roa don’t have much in common. There are no buildings taller than a couple of stories here on the island, and you can walk the entire town in fifteen minutes. There is one bank, which I hurry to get to for money changing since they close at 1:00 p.m. every day.

Opting out of the $30 prix fixe menu offered by my guesthouse later that evening, I head out to town in search of food on my first evening. After I ask for the menu (la carta) at a few restaurants, I realize that the guesthouse meal was not overpriced. Virtually everything on every menu starts at $20, and the restaurants don’t look that nice. At first I think I must be calculating the exchange rate wrong, but no—the local beers really are $8 and small cheese pizzas are $24. What is this, Monaco?

I end up getting a tomato and avocado sandwich for $13. I don’t like tomatoes or avocados, but it’s the cheapest thing on the menu. I decide I won’t do much eating until I get to Argentina a few days from now.

***

My tour around the island the next morning is nice. I learn more about the history of the island, better recounted by Wikipedia than by me here. I visit the mysterious row of 15 moal and stand in front of them for a while. I go to the quarry where the moai were carved. My guide tells me about another moai nicknamed “the traveler” because he was sent to Japan on a publicity tour a few years ago.

The traveler, what a great name. I decide I should have a photo in front of him, and my guide offers to help. While he is taking the picture, I’m wondering if he knows what he’s doing, since he’s pointing the camera away from the traveler moai. He smiles and gives back the camera, which contains all of me and only the very edge of the moai I wanted to be seen with.

Oh well. It’s kind of funny.

I ask if there’s a prison on the island, and my guide laughs. “We have a jail,” he says, “but we call it ‘the university.’” The few prisoners are allowed out to go fishing during the day, and the one guard leaves at night without locking up. There isn’t much crime here to begin with, and when someone is sent to jail, there’s no where to escape to.

***

Back to the undiscovered part. Here is the thing I’ve realized about hanging out in far away places: they may not be undiscovered in the broad sense, but to any single traveler, they are in fact undiscovered until you see it for yourself.

I realize further on one of my walks to town that even among people who have traveled a fair amount, the overwhelming majority of them almost never come to places like Easter Island. This, for me, is one of the things about long trips to these far away places sometimes known as the ends of the earth—I can walk on this island that most people never give a moment’s thought to, and I can look up at the stars that I have never seen from this part of the planet. I can observe how people live their lives, and here on Easter Island, they live their lives in a hybrid Latin American / Polynesian culture.

Another thing I realize as I write these notes after coming back from town my second evening:

I will never come here again.

OK, it is technically possible that one day I could return. But it’s very unlikely; in fact, the idea seems implausible. This is the kind of place you visit just once. Even though I don’t love it here, the realization that I will likely never return makes me a little sad.

I remind myself that I have one life to live. This is my sole chance to visit this remote island, and I’d better appreciate it while I have it.

***

Over the next few days, I go back to Chile, then to Buenos Aires for a couple of nights, and then another couple of nights across the water in Montevideo, Uruguay. At the end of the time, I take a bus back to Colonia (two and a half hours), a ferry to Buenos Aires (one hour), and a taxi to Ezeiza International Airport. I’ve cut it fairly close due to misreading my flight time when I booked the ticket a week ago, but in the end I make it with twenty minutes to spare by the time I check in.

I fly out to Chicago overnight, and after hanging out in the Belmont neighborhood for my transit day, I take another overnight flight to Amman, Jordan, and then a quick late-night connection to Beirut, Lebanon. After all the flying, I’m back in the Middle East for the first time in a year, and the second half of the trip begins.

PART TWO – Lebanon, Syria, and Tunisia

###

Even on the path to your ideal world, things don’t always go the way you would like them to. All of us learn of bad news from time to time. The stock market will crash, or an expected job opportunity will disappear. Something that has always been easy suddenly becomes hard.

It happens all the time, and it helps to be prepared to deal with challenges before they arrive. Asking yourself the following questions will help you refocus and know how to move forward when something isn’t going the way you wish it was.

Where is my security?

This is a good time to realize that your security should not be in tangible things. If your security is money, you will always be threatened by the possibility of losing it. You will likely not be satisfied with the amount of money you have, and your emotions may be affected by the fluctuations of your bank account.

A better security lies in knowing who you are and what you want to do in life. Therefore, the next important question gets at those answers.

Where is my identity?

Who are you? What are you here for? What do you want to do, ultimately? Your identity should shape everything about you—how you spend your time, your work, your priorities, and everything else. Check out the books Finding Your Own North Star and Wishcraft for some good life planning ideas.

If you already have a good idea of who you are, now is a good time to remind yourself of that image. If you can center in on what’s important to you in the midst of bad news, and that image brings you comfort, you know you’re doing something right. Hard times will pass, but your “north star” will still be there.

Can I change the terms of this situation?

There are two kinds of challenges: those where you can take action to remedy the situation, and those where you are relatively powerless. It’s always good to know which kind of challenge you are facing. If you can influence the situation for the better, you can then make a plan for change. If you can’t, then you can move to a plan for acceptance of the bad news.

If the stock market crashes, you probably can’t fix that yourself. But you can change your investment strategy, get out of the stock market altogether, decide to be a true long-term investor and not worry about it, or do any number of other things to change the terms of the situation.

Who else is affected by this situation?

You are usually not the only one affected when something in your life goes off track. Make a mental list of who else is dealing with the effects of bad news. If you really can’t change the terms of the situation, maybe you can at least help someone else. This is especially important when the event that caused you hardship is completely out of your hands. The bad news may be out of your hands, but if other people are also affected, you can probably do something to help them.

***

Every morning I ask myself two questions:

1) How am I feeling?
2) What do I want?

I sometimes use these as journal prompts, and sometimes I just think about them briefly while writing out my projects and tasks for the day. I find that by asking myself the questions, it causes me to realize things that were not actively on my mind before I started.

I often want productivity. I want to get things done, and move ahead on projects. In those cases, the answer to my “What do I want?” question involves making a list of what I want to accomplish. I base this list on the two or three most important projects on my mind that day, and I find that if I am able to complete them or at least make good progress during the day, I’ll feel better later.

Sometimes I want something completely different, and by thinking about these questions, I may realize that I don’t feel very productive. I may need to rest, or exercise, or go to the coffee shop. I may need to spend more time reading and journaling.

When the world isn’t going your way, recognize that it’s usually a temporary state. Getting through it and back on track to your ideal world may not be easy, but if you’ve set big goals for yourself (along with goals that involve helping others), you can usually make it happen. Others are counting on you.

And you owe it to yourself, too.

###

I still make a lot of mistakes everywhere I go, but I try to learn from each of them. Here’s a short list of things I wish I knew before I started my routine of extensive overseas travel, especially in countries in Africa, South Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America that are not part of the tourist circuit.

Healthcare

1. You can legally buy safe medicine, including prescription drugs, for very little money overseas. When in Africa or Asia, I stock up on anti-malarials that cost $5 a day in Seattle. On location, it’s more like $1 for a 10-day supply.

2. The best healthcare is not in the U.S., Canada, or the U.K. The best healthcare is in places like Thailand and Costa Rica; that’s why the practice of medical tourism will continue to surge as both travel and overseas healthcare become more accessible.

Money

3. Take a lot of cash with you, and make sure the bills are new and have no writing on them. If you go to a place that accepts credit cards, then you can just redeposit the cash when you get home. It is far worse to end up short of cash with no credit card option.

4. If you do use your credit card, check the online statement at least once a week while traveling to make sure there are no fraudulent charges. Keep all your receipts, especially for large purchases such as hotel stays, and compare the amounts charged when you get back.

5. When you exchange money, hang on to the receipt you get until you’ve left the country. Once in a great while, someone at the airport will want to see proof of all your foreign exchanges.

6. The U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s currency. (In fact, some currency exchange shops will no longer accept dollars!) Travel with a stock of Euros to complement your dollars. The exceptions to this rule include some countries in Africa and Latin America that still use the dollar as their primary currency, and any country that has had a recent war.

Taxis

7. Hire a taxi outside the airport, not from the guys who approach you inside as you’re walking out. Even better, walk further outside the airport to where the taxis pull in, and you’ll get a better deal because the driver won’t have to pay the entrance fee.

8. Never assume that your taxi driver knows where your destination is. Double-check and get him to ask someone before you go if there’s any doubt.

9. The universal rule of taxi haggling, for both driver and passenger, is that once both sides agree on a fare before setting off, neither side can reopen negotiations once you’re en route. You should not try to get a better deal nor should you accept any increase in the fare from the driver after the journey has started.

10. If you have a dispute with a taxi driver and you think you are being taken advantage of, offer to call the police and have them settle it. Many taxi drivers are scared of the police, and often for good reason (see below). If they are being dishonest and you mention the police, they will quickly back down. On the other hand, if they continue to press their claim, they may be right and you’ll need to pay more.

Safety

11. The police are not always your friends. Sad but true—in a lot of places in the world, the services of the police are sold to the highest bidder. Therefore, if you can pay them, they may turn out to be your friends… but in other cases, they may actually be the least trustworthy people in the country. Don’t be afraid, just be aware.

12. When you feel pressured beyond your comfort level by someone who tries to follow you, be polite but increasingly firm. Don’t string anyone along out of guilt—tell them you don’t want their help, and move on. If they keep following you, tell them to stop.

13. When it comes to visas (and all immigration issues), your experience will vary from place to place. The rules are flexible in most places, and sometimes they will work in your favor and sometimes they will work against you.

Planes, Trains, and Buses

14. All plane tickets are changeable no matter what is written on them, and any fees for changing can be waived with the right airline agent. You have a few options for making this happen: a) Hang up and call back to try with someone else, b) Call the Premium Traveler line or ask at an airline lounge, or c) Offer a “tip” at the airline counter (do this at your own risk).

15. Round-the-World tickets are the best bargains for extensive international travel. I use and recommend both the Star Alliance and the OneWorld products. Each have their advantages. SkyTeam also has a Round-the-World product, but it’s not nearly as good as the other two.

16. Most people flying Business Class are not paying full-fare. A high percentage of them on most flights are using awards tickets, special tickets, or have upgraded from Economy. Flying in premium cabins can help you in more ways than just being comfortable on long flights, because the tickets can almost always be changed or refunded without penalty. You’ll also get to hang out in airline lounges and get priority treatment, which may become very useful when you need to get in or out of somewhere fast. First Class is nice too, but the difference between First and Business is rarely as great as the difference between Business and Economy.

17. In some places, buses are better than trains for overland travel… in other places, trains are better than buses. Check out the options before you go to make the best decision for each place.

Culture

18. The concept of personal space means very different things in different countries. You kind of have to get used to that.

19. Like it or not, you have to be somewhat tolerant of smoking. There are lots of places in the world that haven’t picked up on the Western anti-smoking crusade. If this is hard for you to accept, you’ll likely be frustrated.

20. Unless you can be very discreet, never take photos of people without asking. Don’t be surprised if they say no, because many cultures are not comfortable with strangers taking photos of them all the time. If they do say yes, you may find yourselves indebted to them for a gift or other favor.

21. Never touch members of the opposite sex. This includes sitting next to them on buses and trains—you’ll often be shuffled around to ensure that you only sit next to people of the same sex, although you’ll also usually be given the best seat.

22. Don’t point your feet at people or touch anyone on the head. In several cultures, this is disrespectful or otherwise inappropriate.

23. Be careful with all hand gestures, including the “thumbs-up” sign and the “a-OK” sign. Both of these are highly provocative in some places.

24. Never make promises you don’t intend to keep. Don’t tell vendors you’ll buy from them tomorrow, don’t offer to help anyone visit your country, don’t say you’ll write to someone later if you won’t really do it, and so on.

25. Most important: don’t be a colonialist. Be careful about calling people “locals.” Don’t assume that your culture is superior. People are not stupid just because they don’t speak English or think like you do.

Politics

26. Be prepared to represent your country, whether you care about politics or not. For better or worse, many people will expect you to know a lot about politics in your home country and how governmental decisions in one country affect the lives of people thousands of miles away. Don’t say you’re from Canada unless you really are.

27. Always point out that a government’s actions and the beliefs of an individual (e.g., yourself) are not always the same. Most people understand this and some will even say the same thing without prompting, but it’s usually a good reminder to put forward.

28. No matter who you are talking to, never say anything negative about the government of the country you are in. Many rogue states, from Zimbabwe to Iran to North Korea, employ English-speaking spies who will deliberately try to incite foreign visitors into saying something incriminating. (I’m not making this up. In Guinea I was followed by the Secret Service everywhere I went. A friend of mine went to North Korea and found an extensive tape recording system in his hotel room.)

***

Lastly, remember that there are not many “undiscovered” places left in the world. Focus on the places that are undiscovered to you and you won’t go wrong.

Obviously, each place you go to will offer unique challenges, but following this list will get you off to a good start. Above all, don’t forget the cardinal rule of traveling—pack light. You really don’t need all the extra stuff.

Feel free to add your own advice or tips in the comments section.

###

This month’s Site Update takes place from Damascus, Syria, where I’ve just arrived after traveling overland from Lebanon. Yes, I think that sentence is pretty cool. All is well over here, and I’ll write about the trip soon.

Each month I look back at what’s happened with ChrisGuillebeau.com in the previous month. If you’ve missed some articles, you can catch up in this update.

Writing

LIFE – I wrote about How To Respond to Critics, The Plan of Attack, Nothing Beside Remains, and How To Fall Down and Get Back Up Again.

WORK – I wrote about the question, Will Financial Success Follow You If Do What You Love? and then asked a few great writers to share their responses in a blogger roundup. I also wrote about The Flip Side to Entrepreneurship and Freedom and Social Networking with Twitter.

TRAVEL – I wrote about How and Why I Travel (Parts I and II), Observations from the World’s Ultimate Airport Lounge, and 35 Minutes of Homelessness in Central London.

PROFILES – The new “Profiles in Nonconformity” series debuted this month with an interview with Tony Hsieh, CEO of the unconventional retailer Zappos.com. More profiles will be coming each month.

Gratefulness

I went to Easter Island a couple of weeks ago and now I’m in the Middle East. My OneWorld Round-the-World trip is halfway done, and I’ve really appreciated the chance to travel so much.

I did an interview with TravelBlogs and enjoyed the thoughtful questions they asked.

It was encouraging to see so many blogging friends and mentors participate in the first roundup response. Thanks again, guys.

Lastly, many readers wrote in to say that they are enjoying the site. Your comments mean the world to me—please keep reading and writing.

What’s Coming Next

I’ll be back in Seattle on May 7th, and I’m staying for a while this time. While I’m home I’ll be finishing the writing for my upcoming manifesto, “A Brief Guide to World Domination.” If all goes as planned, we should be ready to distribute this free PDF report to a broader audience by mid-June.

When I get closer to completing the manifesto, I’ll need your help. Stay tuned for details.

Essays

The thrice-weekly essays will continue to be posted each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. This month I’ll write about the following topics, among others:

• 28 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Traveling
• Questions to Ask when the World Isn’t Going Your Way
• How To Retire the Day after Tomorrow
• Trip Reports from Costa Rica and Benin

I hope you enjoy my writing, and I always welcome your feedback.

Audience Participation

You can participate in the development of this project in several ways:

Join my newsletter announcement list or add me to your RSS reader.

Follow my real-time updates on Twitter.

Leave a comment at the bottom of any essay. I haven’t actively promoted the “comments” section in the posts yet, but it will be upgraded in the near future and all previous comments will be retained. Feel free to share your comments and include a link back to your own site if you have one.

Send other feedback through my contact form.

Tell your friends, or tell the world by voting for my writing at Digg, StumbleUpon, or other social networking sites.

I appreciate the time you spend here. Don’t forget to change the world the way you think it needs to be changed.

-CG

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?

###

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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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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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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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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