Thriving at the intersection of "it's hard, but it feels so damn right"

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A simple thought on how to think about whether you are at the right spot in your life. 

I was on the phone with my friend Matt the other day who is in LA hustling on his start-up. He was sharing how hard things are, that he barely gets to be social, and that it feels like a massive roller coaster day in and out – yet also how right it feels what he was doing. 

I was fully able to empathize with him because my situation wasn’t any different. Living a life between continents and in unknown cultures is really hard. It comes with a lot of loneliness, setbacks, unfamiliarity and self-doubt. Yet in spite of all this hardship, it still feels 100% right. 

Both Matt and my situation made me thing about this intersection of doing something that is really hard, but where you are able to bear that hardship because it feels so damn right. It’s this feeling of not wanting to be in any other place, not wanting to do anything else. It’s almost as if that hardship wasn’t taking away your energy, but it was fueling you. Being at that intersection is like the moment when your sail and the wind are aligned: you gain speed, you move ahead, you become unstoppable, nothing seems impossible, everything starts to make sense. 

Are you at that intersection? What would it take to get there for you? 

In my opinion, you don't get to that intersection by going towards what is hard. Just throwing yourself at hard things doesn't instantly make things feel right. But you ought to go towards what feels right. Often times, the "what feels right" is what is hard. It's those things that we normally shy away from because of all sorts of blockers we have (risk-averseness, fear of failure, judgement of other people, etc). Yet once you defy those blockers and walk towards the "what feels right" you might find yourself at that intersection sooner before you know it. 

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Investing in your differences to become unique

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Up until the age of 20, I had never lived outside of Germany where I was born. I had visited many countries, but had never lived in them. So during all the years growing up in Germany, my life was often about trying to “fit in.” Assimilation was my agenda, denouncing my differences was my goal. I was never in full denial of my Iranian identity, yet I certainly sought to find acceptance by trying to be more like the people around me. 

A turning point for me then was the first time I got to go abroad. In 2008 I went to Buenos Aires to study, and being there had a profound impact on me. The people I met found it fascinating that I was a Spanish-speaking, Persian-looking, German citizen. People wanted to be friends with me. During my time in Argentina, I realized for the first time in my life that being different wasn’t a bad thing, it was a great thing. That’s when I decided to not be in denial of my differences anymore, but to invest in being different. 

I realized that the more different I was, the more unique I was becoming. 

This, was a paradigm shift in my thinking. And it was the trigger that led me to make many of my life decisions. That’s why I invested in languages, traveled as much and far as I could, restlessly moved around the world, and continuously challenged myself to learn new skills (my ritual question here “when was the last time you did something new for the first time?” Don’t have an answer to it? Then it’s time to pick up something new). I made the world my playground, and pursued things that would add richness to my character. 

I am sharing this, hoping to encourage others – especially younger people – to not only fully own the parts of their identities that are different, but to also invest in all the parts of their lives that will allow them to be even more different. After all, why fit in if you can stand out? Why be one of many if you could be unique? Why follow others if you can be a trailblazer? 

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China Musings #10: Shanghai vs. Beijing

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Ever since I embarked on my journey to China, I got to spend a lot of time in between Beijing and Shanghai. With about ~24M citizens, each of these cities is about the size of Australia. Yet the cities couldn’t be more different from another in their character and vibe. The following is my take on Beijing and Shanghai based on experiences I have had this past year. 

Beijing – think of it as the ultimate Chinese city. With all government offices located there, it is the seat of power and politics. It’s also all about culture and history: the city has an extremely long and glorious history with Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, The Great Wall and The Summer Palace. Beijing people live and love the history of their ancient city and are kind of set in their ways and lifestyles. They have almost an imperial love and facility with bureaucracy, politics and process. Because of that, Beijing people are people of the past and it’s “old money” that rules – also, it’s a city of relationships more than anything. With the best universities located in Beijing (think of Stanford, Harvard, etc. being in the same city), there is a massive output of talent and with that, entrepreneurship and start-ups. 

Shanghai – the ultimate cosmopolitan city. In a culture which stresses thousand years of continuous history, Shanghai is an aberration among Chinese cities. Development occurred almost entirely within the past 150 years from fishing village to a global modern city. Shanghai people love modernity and are proud of their rapid ascent. They adopt and embrace the change, thus making the city a hotbed for radical ideas, fashion, and money. It’s a financial hub with ultra modern state of the art infrastructure, excellent public transportation system, a stunning skyline and endless subway lines. Consequently, Shanghai is the city of “new money” and people are rather bottom-line-oriented. 

In my experience, foreigners who go to Beijing are very serious about China (language, culture, experience), whereas the foreigners that go to Shanghai are more cosmopolitan. It’s reflected somehow in the distribution of embassies (mostly in Beijing) and MNCs (mostly in Shanghai). Further, a major difference is the layout of the cities: Beijing is landlocked, while Shanghai is adjacent to the ocean. And while Beijing is dominated by highways cutting through it (there are six “ring roads” that circle around Beijing and people refer to those roads when they share their address “I live close to 3rd ring road North East exit..”), Shanghai’s highways are elevated and thus allow for easier mobility throughout the city. 

For me personally, my time in between both cities has taught me how your surroundings can bring out different sides of you. I feel different when I am in Shanghai compared to when I am in Beijing – measured in energy levels, creativity, lebenslust.

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China Musings #9: Learning Chinese

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Learning Chinese is by far the hardest thing I have ever done. There is no alternative to rote learning – spending hours and hours writing the same character over and over again. For an English speaker learning French, there are prompts. “Police” becomes ‘police,’ and ‘garden’ becomes ‘jardin.’ But a foreigner has no such guide into Chinese. Police is ‘jingcha’ and garden becomes ‘huayuan.’ And for every word, you have to learn various components: character, tone, sound and grammar (or lack thereof).

CHARACTERS – Chinese characters are core to the language and provide a rich link with the past. The characters represent complete ideas rather than just sounds, like letters. Pronunciation of Chinese words might change over the centuries, but the written character remains unchanged. The character for ‘fragrant’ may be pronounced ‘xiang,’ ‘heung,’ or ‘hong,’ but the character always means ‘fragrant.’ Characters keep history alive as they remain recognizable across thousands of years.

TONES – The pitch of each word affects its meaning. ‘Mai’ for instance, with a falling tone, means ‘to sell.’ But ‘mai’ with first a low falling and then a rising tone means precisely the opposite, ‘to buy.’ Even Chinese people find it confusing. At the Shanghai Stock Exchange brokers use slang to make sure to not mix up buy and sell words. There are four tones in Mandarin (and nine in Cantonese), so imagine how much difficulty this adds.

SOUND – Many words sound exactly the same or confusingly similar. Often Chinese people have to go to great lengths to define a character taken out of context. For example, it would be perfectly normal for someone to introduce himself with “Hello, I am Li – that’s the ‘li’ with the sign for tree on top and a seed underneath” or “Hi, I am Mrs. Wang – that’s the ‘wang’ used in ‘boundless oceans’ not the one that means ‘king.’”

GRAMMAR – The link in China between daily language and the past is strengthened further by a lack of tenses. “Mao Zedong is a good leader” and “Mao Zedong was a good leader” are not distinguished. Things that in our language are extinct, remain alive in Chinese. Imagine the confusion when you want to order boiled water (past tense; to make sure it’s clean), but then get boiling water (because it’s hard to express the past tense). Without the separation in language or thought between what ‘was’ and what ‘is,’ China’s past seems to merge into its present.

Chinese language is extremely sophisticated, representative of its rich history and profoundly tied to Chinese identity. Being part of that exclusive five-thousand-year-old club gives the Chinese a sense of separateness and self-esteem. It can occasionally develop into a sense of superiority, but no more than anywhere else. The language provides a permanent rigid connection to a past, while the society is changing and adapting at a pace never seen before.

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China Musings #8: How Didi took over Uber China

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To most, ride-hailing company Didi is known as “the Uber of China,” a description that conveys the notion of Didi being a mere copycat of Uber. Yet the first time I felt that there was real innovation coming out of China, was the day I got to visit both companies back-to-back.

This was two years ago, and I remember starting the day feeling disdainful towards Didi, “the copycat,” yet sympathetic towards Uber China, “the original.” By the end of the day, my emotions had completely flip-flopped: I was deeply impressed by how Didi was building a ride-hailing experience with the Chinese user in mind, but doubtful about how Uber was trying to take a proven US product and push it into the Chinese market.

As so often, any company’s ability to succeed internationally largely depends on the degree to which they empathize with the needs of the local users. Take Beijing for a example, with 22M citizens it’s among the world’s ten most congested cities (8 Chinese cities in the top 20). From 2002 to 2017, in just 15 years, the number of cars quadrupled (!) from 1.5M to 6M, leading to a wide range of regulations (limited supply of vehicle licenses, exorbitant prices, long wait times, certain days you are not allowed to drive, etc.).

During their war with Uber China, Didi had launched a total of six or seven different services, ranging from carpooling and car rental to inter-city buses – all services that were addressing the actual transportation needs of the Chinese beyond just ride-sharing and thus giving them a perceived and actual edge. Even Didi’s name was empathetic towards the commuting pain that locals felt: in Mandarin it means “beep beep,” like a honking car (note: it also means “little brother”).

Now the truth is that there were other factors at play like for example that Didi was a homegrown company. For Uber, burning $2B in China was a big deal, yet for Didi (and for their investors TenCent and Alibaba), spending $2B to win at home was nothing. For Uber, China was a big opportunity, for Didi it was life or death.

In the end, Didi beat Uber China, and acquired their China business in exchange for $1B and a stake of 17.7%. Since then, Didi has grown to 400M registered users and 4M drivers, and delivers 25M rides a day in 400+ Chinese cities – roughly TWICE as many as Uber and all the other global sharing apps COMBINED. The acquisition further cemented Didi as the planet’s most valuable startup (for now), with a $56B valuation, speeding past Uber, whose most recent round saw its worth fall to just $48B.

Despite Uber’s stake in Didi, the two companies are in a fierce battle on global stage. Didi’s recent acquisition of 99 Taxis in Latin America was a provocation of Uber whose two largest markets are Mexico City and São Paulo. While still loss-making in China, Didi is poised to enter this battle with about $20B raised (more money than any VC-backed startup ever) and cash reserves of $12B.

A personal anecdote: our meeting with Uber China started with their off-the-shelf “from bits to atoms” PR story, and then ended with a picture of four women in miniskirts advertising open roles on their team. What actually did arouse us (non-sexually) was seeing CEO Travis continuously run back and forth hectically. About 18 months later, during my interview with Ofo, its co-founder asked me how Ofo can be successful outside of China, to which I responded with a lot of the aforementioned empathy points while also trashing Uber China. Clearly I had not done my homework, because he was actually an ex-Uber China employee and considered the “rising star” of the organization. He still hired me and we both found out later that he was actually supposed to host us at Uber China that day, but that Travis was in town and had pulled him into meetings.

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China Musings #7: Dealing with Pollution

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The first time I experienced the infamous Beijing pollution was during a 2-day layover on my way to North Korea. As we were were leaving Beijing, I remember asking a classmate who had previously lived in Beijing: “if you knew today that those four years of living here were going to shorten your life expectancy by 6 months, would you still do it?” The question led to a lively discussion as we were headed to the airport, yet we never really reached a conclusion.

Little did I know that two years later I would find myself asking the very same question as I go in and out of Beijing. While the overall situation in China has become better (NYT: Four Years After Declaring War on Pollution, China Is Winning – https://nyti.ms/2GhlOll), Beijing still far from being a welcoming and easy place to live – environmentally speaking.

The picture is from two weeks ago during a sandstorm when AQI levels hit 1,200 – which is ranked hazardous (the “green zone” is anything under 50). Eye infected, lungs filled with dust, and just generally feeling shitty. Now I wasn’t going to write a rant about the pollution, but I wanted to share the ways how I have seen people adapt and become creative around this issue. A few anecdotes from my many visits:

  • There is a brewery in Beijing that offers a discount on one of their beers depending on how high the AQI level is (the more polluted, the higher the discount).
  • I have seen real estate agents offer air purifiers as a way to rent out their properties: “rent this unit and get a complementary XiaoMi air purifier!”
  • There are plenty of bars and restaurants that advertise with "we have clean and purified air!" on their internet listings as a way to attract costumers.
  • The company I work for recently launched a new line of merchandise products... among them a branded respiratory mask (apparently some restaurant chains sell branded masks too).
  • Our employee kitchens have respiratory masks stocked right among all the snacks and drinks (...Snickers, potato chips, respiratory masks....). Ours cost, but other companies offer them as free perks.
  • Just as you would expect, some beauty brands have released entire pollution-dedicated product lines like face masks or "Anti-Pollution Emulsion."

While I still don't know the answer to the question I asked my classmate back then, I remain naively optimistic about the regenerative capabilities of my lungs.

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China Musings #5: The Starbucks Success Story

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In a country in which so much feels foreign, Starbucks has surprisingly turned out to be one of the few places I feel … home. The look and feel is familiar, the menu is well-tested, and the music could be from my own Spotify – it’s my oasis amidst an ocean of uncertainty.

After hearing about the opening of the world’s largest Starbucks store in Shanghai, I put it high on my to-do list (see the pic below). It is a 29,000 square-foot temple staffed by 400 employees – it comes with its own bakery, roastery, augmented reality program, 100+ drink options (including nitrogen-infused tea) and to no surprise, crazy-long lines. This one store alone makes 15x the revenue of the average US store.

Now Starbucks’s story in China is truly one-of-a kind. While other brands had to often retreat (Google pulling its servers, Coke closing its bottling unit, McDonalds selling its business and licensing its brand), Starbucks is one of the few American companies that got China right – by understanding the importance of building long-term relationships, working with the government, and investing heavily.

To give you an idea, every 15 hours Starbucks is opening a new store in China. It has already 3,000 stores in 130+ cities and is planning to open another (!) 5,000 stores over the next four years – creating 10,000 jobs every year. In Shanghai alone there are 600 Starbucks stores, which is 2x of what New York has.

What is so remarkable is the long-term mindset that Starbucks applied to China. The journey started some 20 years ago and had the seemingly insurmountable task of bringing coffee culture to a country famous for its tea.

Over the years, Starbucks has invested heavily, paid significantly higher wages than competitors, offering housing allowances, health care benefits, extending its employee ownership benefits to Chinese workers, and offering critical illness injuries to the parents of their employees. Starbucks is further discussing with the Chinese government the prospect of turning coffee from the Yunnan province into a global coffee brand.

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