I’m coming back to California after working in Vietnam as a business consultant for the last eight months, and I thought I would use the transition as an opportunity to keep in touch, and share what I’ve learned.

This is the consolidated story of my experience. Why I went to Vietnam, what I did there, and why I’m coming back. In it I talk about how to find work and opportunity abroad, and what business is really like in an emerging market. I share some unexpected lessons that I’ve learned about traveling and about myself. If you’re ever tempted to run away and start a new life, some of this might be really helpful, or it might change your mind.

It would really mean a lot to me if you’d read it (when you have some time, it’s super long) and get back to me with your thoughts and feedback.

- Dangerous Ideas -

Often, while studying it, I worried that economics might be boring. Actually, it turns out that economic ideas can be extremely dangerous. The idea that an investor can increase returns by moving around the risk almost destroyed the world economy. Now financial models are being called weapons of mass destruction. Not bad.

For me the most dangerous idea I ever learned studying economics was the concept of “opportunity cost”. Opportunity cost is the realization that the true cost of something is not its price, but rather the value of what you could have had instead. An investment was only a good investment to the extent that it made more money than the next best thing. To spend a day shopping for a $30 pair of shoes costs you not only your money, but also a day that could have been spent swimming, or reading, or whatever. And for me that’s a big whatever.

I was very lucky to be born into the time, place, and situation that I was. I have never been called on to provide for my family, or defend my country, or really do anything for anyone but myself. A California style childhood of loving family and nurturing teachers has assured me that my opportunities in life are limitless and my only responsibility to the world is my own happiness. I can do anything I want with my life. Sounds good right? Except for the opportunity cost.

It turns out every hour I spend cleaning my toenails is an hour that I’m not climbing mountains, making friends, or founding companies. With infinite opportunity, every choice I make is suddenly infinitely expensive. Stupid economics.

Wait, wait, relax. That’s ok. My only goal is to be happy. A trivial luxury compared to most people’s lot in life. Frosting on the cake. Simple, right?

I wish. As if studying economics wasn’t bad enough, I had to completely cripple my ability to function in life by also studying some philosophy (not a lot, just barely enough to be annoying).

It turns out, that at some point back in Greece all these damn philosophers got together and decided that happiness is a rather silly concept, a temporary state, like being sleepy or gassy. So they came up with a much more robust version of happiness called eudaimonia.

When Doctor Kevorkian kills some someone who’s in pain, it’s called euthanasia, which roughly means “a good death”. Eudaimonia, alternatively, means a good life. And what did Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle decide a good life was? According to my philosophy 101 class, it’s human flourishing, virtue, living up to your full potential, fulfilling your opportunity in the world. Crap.

So I can’t just be childishly happy, that’s stupid. I have huge opportunity and I have to fulfill it. I have to be Jack Kerouac. I have to be Bill Gates. I have to be Siddhartha.

So, naturally, I moved to Vietnam to become a business consultant.

- Wait.. What? Why Vietnam? Why Business Consulting? -

Last June I graduated from UCSB with my degree in Business/Economics and Technology Entrepreneurship. It was finally time for the “real world”, whatever that is. I think it might have something to do with paying my own rent.

At the time I was working on two business projects, an art licensing and poster retailing company called PostersforHumans.com, and a clean tech materials startup called Nitride Solutions. Neither project was going anywhere in a hurry. Nitride Solutions was having trouble convincing Venture Capitalists to invest. My role in the company was shrinking and my attention was elsewhere. Poster retailing was barely breaking even, and publishers weren’t on board with our vision of promoting independent artists. Neither of these ventures was going to be paying any rent any time soon. So, by my definition, neither of them counted as the real world.

Furthermore, I didn’t want to stay in Santa Barbara. After graduating I saw many of my friends transform into zombie shadows of their former selves. I call them “Happy Hour People”, because I now only see them at some stupid bar during happy hour. Friends whose formerly rich and interesting lives as students are now reduced to sitting in their entry level accounting jobs, staring at excel and slowly counting down the minutes until 5pm Friday evening when they can finally go meet with the other happy hour zombies to drink mildly discounted beer and complain about work. They called this the real world, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I had a great thing going in Santa Barbara, but I  needed a fresh start. Rather than cling the scraps of my college life I wanted to face adulthood head on. I had enough money saved up to do something cool. Everyone agreed that I should carpe my diem while I had the chance.

I have had some opportunities to travel before, summers backpacking around Europe and the usual tourist clichés. I no longer believe in the value of seeing the world from a train window, letting your guide book lead you from hostel to temple to cafe to museum, taking pictures of yourself standing in front of old stuff. I wanted a real experience. I wanted to go to one place and really get involved with something, really let it sink in. And I didn’t feel like graduating from college deserved a vacation, I wanted something that I could put on my resume.

So I packed my suitcase, printed some business cards that said “David Pricco – Business Development Consultant” on them, and bought a one way ticket to Hanoi, Vietnam.

I chose Hanoi because I had briefly studied abroad there four years ago and had really liked it. It was a cheap, tropical city with a good balance of traditional and modern elements. Despite the economic apocalypse, Vietnam still had strong positive GDP growth projections, and the beginnings of Startup and Venture Capital scene. Plus I figured if I didn’t find anything there I would move on to Singapore, Malaysia, Bangkok, or wherever. I didn’t have any contacts or any Vietnamese language skills, but I ended up staying in Hanoi and building a whole new life there.

I chose to be a consultant because I knew that I didn’t want to start a full entrepreneurial venture. I had already been down that road and I knew how much of a commitment starting a new business was. Doing it in Vietnam probably would have tied me to the place for a few years at least. Actually, the main reason I became a consultant is that you can’t write “unemployed” on your business card. My real goal was just to find a job, and handing someone a business card is a better introduction than handing them a resume. Besides, I figured if someone actually hired me as a consultant in the mean time, it would certainly be a step in the right direction.

- What I learned about networking and finding work abroad -

The funny thing is that back in school I would always get mad when someone told me they wanted to be a consultant after graduation. I insisted that consulting itself, is not a job. It’s an employment relationship. It just means you’re around temporarily, that you’re billing by the hour, and that you don’t get any health insurance. I always demanded to know what people were actually going to do, and no one ever really had an answer. Now it was my turn to not have an answer either.

I moved into a cheap hotel and bought a map of the city. I found a tailor and had a suit made. I bookmarked all the websites for the various business groups in town and started going to business events and conferences to network.

After a while I figured out that sitting next to high powered global executives at business conferences, chatting, trading business cards, and sending follow-up emails is not a particularly effective method of getting a job. No one really gives a damn about you, and usually the important people in a company aren’t involved in hiring for entry level positions. Big companies have HR departments and systems in place for finding new employees, they don’t just hire random folks because they sat next to the CEO at some conference. I was just a business groupie (lamest vacation ever).

Eventually I found that the key to networking with more senior executive director types was to meet them in a non-business context, like a cultural or charity event. My first consulting contract came as a result of a charity event that I had volunteered to be the photographer for. It was a bike race. I motorbiked out in front of the cyclists, squatted on the ground, and got shots of them rushing past markets and cows and temples. It was a lot of fun. At the after-party I gorged myself on free snacks and idly chatted with whoever was within 5 feet of the food table. Somehow I ended up talking about my experience with business plans, and pretty soon I had a consulting gig helping write the business plan for a health communications NGO that was applying for its next round of funding. I wasn’t even wearing my suit.

I worked on that for two months, and did a really good job, I think. At the end I didn’t know how much to bill for. I went online and found a bunch of calculators that let you add up all of your living expenses, and your equivalent annual salary to figure out your billable rate. If I tweaked all the numbers in my favor I barely hit $25 an hour. So I asked for that salary to see if I could get away with it. I charged $950 total, and they went for it. I was now officially a professional business consultant.

I learned that it was actually much more effective to network within your own peer group. People my age or other recent arrivals were a lot more willing to talk, had more time for followups, and were much more sympathetic to the challenge of getting a foot in the door. Finally, I ended up getting a full time job as a “Strategic Consultant” at a major Vietnamese financial firm. I got the job through two buddies my own age with similar interests and disposition. I had met them through the normal process of making friends, rather than by actively “networking”. They happened to live right next to me, and happened to have a position open at their company.

My new job was to work on various projects in the company, help get brokerage services up to international best practices, help with research and English language marketing, and to work with my friends to create the companies new strategic consulting division: Management Solutions. (pro-tip: businesses with “solutions” in their name don’t know what the hell they’re doing)

The idea behind the consulting division was helping the many Vietnamese companies were born during the huge business boom in 2006 and 2007. During this time foreign investment poured into Vietnam, and businesses were able to prosper doing almost anything, often without much of a plan. Now business was tough, companies needed good research, planning, and outside expertise. We spent the next few months convincing our board to approve the new division, writing our copy, making our logo, creating marketing material, researching common business problems in Vietnam, and building a network of other consulting allies that we could call in to collaborate on projects. We even got a budget to hire another four people and pretty soon I was on the other side of the table, reading resumes and conducting interviews with people way more experienced than me.

We were interviewing Harvard, Princeton, University of Chicago, and IIT grads, people with experience in Merrill Lynch and the World Bank. It almost didn’t seem fair. Doing the interviews was enlightening. I quickly realized that I had screwed up a couple of my own earlier opportunities by not being able to properly answer the simple interview question: “What can you do for me?”

I read a lot of business news and business books, so I like talking about business. A few times early on, some poor business guy would take enough pity on my attempt at networking to meet for coffee. When this happened I would start ranting and raving about my insights into their industry, clever things similar companies have done, and the sorts of problems I supposed they were facing. Eventually they would stop me, knowing that my grand purpose in all this noise and fury was to get a job, and give me a chance to pitch myself by asking me what I could do for them if they hired me. I never really have an answer ready, I usually just explained that I had a lot of business skills and was happy to do whatever. I figured they should know what to do with me. But of course I wasn’t applying to a defined job in a traditional way. What I should have said is that I could do some research into the best practices of their competitors, help them improve their website, do some online marketing, do some analysis of cost and sales data and help them figure out how their different business segments are doing. I should have spent some time thinking about this stuff before meeting them. Next time I’ll know better.

Once you master these soft networking and interview skills It’s amazing the kind of work/trouble you can get yourself into.

- What I learned about doing business in Vietnam -

Soon after getting this new job I moved into a new house with my friends Kris, Joe, and Jon. Combined, we were the only foreigners in our company. We were all early twenty-something American recent college grads with a strong interest in business and a similar short term strategy for getting the most out of life. While I was busy building this consulting division one powerpoint stack at a time, Kris and Joe were building databases of stock prices and running regressions to pull out trends, writing reports and giving talks about the economy, getting interviewed on TV about investment strategy, and advising on bond issuances. Jon was upstairs advising our fund management company, sitting in on investor meetings, brainstorming ideas for new funds, and other stuff that 22 and 23 year olds would not get to do at home. We all got motorbikes. We had a big fancy house down a crazy ancient alleyway near our work. We had food delivered every night and hired two maids to come three times a week. Little old ladies sold fruit in front of our gate in the mornings, and crazy loud frogs kept us up all night. I was making $1000 a month. My rent was $150 a month, my motorbike was $50 a month, and eating out for every meal was costing about $8 a day. Life was absurd.

Some of that excitement was canceled out by how ungodly boring Vietnamese businesses are. I’m used to California where every business is some high tech organic web2.0 paradigm shift startup disrupting a new industry with a breakthrough product and a quirky name. In Vietnam, on the other hand, there are two ways of naming a business. Half the businesses here are some combination of place, product, number, and “Joint Stock Company”. Duc Thanh Wood Processing Joint Stock Company, and Construction and Investment J.S.C. no 492 are two of our clients. The other half are Vina+product, including Vinamilk and Vinaphone. These businesses all make normal stuff in normal ways, and sell it domestically. Most industries have one or two leading companies that compete more by buddying up with customers than by worrying about improving products and methods.

In school I had learned a lot about the sorts of companies that Venture Capitalists invest in. I figured where there are Venture Capitalists there would also be interesting startups. While there are two Venture Capital funds in Vietnam, offshoots of IDG and DFJ, their portfolio companies are all just localized versions of established US web2.0 models. Vietnamese websites are able to quickly build their user base, but don’t have the supporting local advertising or online retail industries to properly monetize. As far as I know, between these two fund’s combined 40+ Vietnamese portfolio companies there is only one company, Vinagame, which has been profitable. I think it will still be a while before we more innovative startups coming out of places like Vietnam.

As we got the new consulting division off the ground we were forced to confront certain… realities. We were three inexperienced white kids armed with only our undergraduate degrees, excel, powerpoint, and a bloomberg terminal. We were operating in an environment in which business decisions are usually based on the whims of the boss, deals are made according to who was friends with who, and everything happens very, very slowly. We’ve pitched our services to a few companies, and they showed some interest, but none of it has led to anything yet.

Despite all the conferences and books and reports about how Vietnam is poised to be the next “Asian tiger” economy like Taiwan or South Korea, doing business here is a disaster, a slow motion train wreck, and no one’s really interested in fixing it. The Vietnamese stock market is a good illustration of this. Part of our work is writing research reports on publicly traded Vietnamese companies. Our firm makes its money from brokerage. Since all brokers do pretty much the same thing, we try to differentiate ourselves from our competitors by offering better research. So we run discounted cash flow models, do industry analysis and projections, interview management, and make these big fat beautiful reports of everything there is to know about this or that Vietnamese company. We recently flew down to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and pitched these reports to a dozen different investment funds. But it was all just a big waste of time.

Why? The Vietnamese stock market moves up and down in one giant blob, completely independent of the actual performance of its companies. We found one publicly traded company that runs a cable car up to a pagoda on some holy mountain in the south.This company is completely detached from the rest of the Vietnamese economy. Every year thousands of people come to pay their respects at the temple during lunar new year, and they certainly don’t base their decision on their expectations of future GDP growth. Yet this company has a beta of 1, which means its stock price fluctuates in perfect lock-step with the rest of the stock market. It’s stock price goes up and down right along with the cell phone providers and construction consortiums. Another company, a cotton producer, is such a disaster that they have a negative profit margin, and 100 times more debt than money to pay it. They can’t even get their shareholders to meet to liquidate the company. Yet, on a good market day recently their stock price hit its daily trading ceiling.

In the US you could make a fortune if you spotted these sort of inconsistencies, because you could rely on the prices to eventually correct themselves. But here a savvy investor has no advantage. The market soars when an upbeat article in the economist causes some huge fund manager in New York to slightly increase their portfolio’s exposure to emerging markets. The market tanks when the Vietnamese investors suddenly get excited about gold and pull all their money out of equities. Yet all these fund managers are sitting in their fancy offices in Ho Chi Minh City, going through the motions of raising capital, allocating investment, and collecting their fees. It’s a joke. All the ideas we learned about in school require some consensus to work. You can’t be the only one in the room with your way of thinking. If you tried to drive down the street in Hanoi using the same traffic rules as at home, you’d never move a mile.

This isn’t to say anything bad about Vietnamese people. They’re incredibly flexible and have amazing abilities to work together and improvise. This business stuff is just all very new here. With developing infrastructure, education, and legal systems, business in Vietnam will truly thrive one day. But for now, it’s foolish to bring over a bunch of standard Western business models and systems and pretend they work in such a different environment.

And this explanation implies that we even had those models to offer. Recently at a conference we made friends with two guys from Deloitte (a big famous international accounting firm) that were also setting up a similar consulting division in Hanoi. They invited us over to their office, patiently gave us all sorts of helpful advice about consulting, showed us their database of research, case studies, templates, the full materials from thousands of completed consulting contracts, and their worldwide network of experts and underlings to do their bidding. They had decades of experience doing business in tough markets. Their business cards said consultant, just like ours, but we were definitely operating on completely different levels. We were essentially the “Vietnam” of business consultants, a lot of big ideas, but not much experience or planning to back them up.

After six months of this I reached a point where I realized none of it was going anywhere any time soon. I could either finish my projects and neatly wrap up my time now, just as the new hires were arriving. Or, I could dig in, get back to networking and pitching, and really dedicate myself to this for the long term. I chose the former. Screw it. I’m going home.

- What I learned about traveling and living abroad -

When I arrived in Hanoi I was still somewhat under the impression that the key to being a good traveler was to blend in with the locals, live off a few dollars a day, walk the streets and explore the alleys hunting for street food. That, I figured, is what set us true travelers apart from the loud, awful, fat, sunburned tourists waiting in line for their overpriced buffet. I was a travel snob.

After a month or two of hanging out in weird food markets and visiting temples and pagodas I realized that not only am I not Vietnamese, I’m not a little old lady, or a monk either. And if I were Vietnamese I wouldn’t be hanging out in stinky alleys eating gross street food. Living that way is just a silly indulgent fantasy, pretending to be poor and ethnic with none of the hardship. Instead I learned to embrace the life of the expatriate. I found all the local cafes and restaurants that expats go to, not because they’re ethnically authentic quaint little secrets, but because they’re good, and because it’s nice to hang out with other expats. I found a nice swimming pool and a cool arty movie theater. I learned to go out without a backpack, or a water bottle, or a notebook, or any other silly tourist/traveler junk.

I made a pretty decent life for myself out here. It’s really no big deal living in a foreign city. You can easily learn enough of any language to order food or direct a taxi, and most any big city will have enough English speakers to build a good social life. I’m lucky that these two guys in Hanoi, Tom and Elliott, made a really good expat info website called the New Hanoian. Everyone gets the idea to make one of these websites once in a while. They spring up all the time, and usually wither away in a few months after failing to solve the chicken and egg style problem of building both content and users early on. The New Hanoian worked because Tom and Elliott were on the ground everyday, getting people to use the site, and helping to add all all the info for restaurants and bars themselves. They personally programmed the hell out of it too. They managed to build in maps, different languages, and a Q&A section. Now, after a few years of development, you can rely on the site for information about almost everything you need in Hanoi. Expat businesses live or die according to their rating on the New Hanoian, and because of that accountability, are probably a lot better than they would otherwise be.

At first I was frustrated that all expats seemingly ever wanted to do was go out to restaurants and bars. I don’t really like bars, and I got sick of hanging out in restaurants. But after a while I began to discover little pockets of culture, small groups of people that have gotten together to pursue mutual hobbies in their free time. My housemate Jon is a rock climber. He found a subculture of French rock climbers that all hang out on a little rock wall set up in the rooftop laundry room of this one guy’s place. Some of my other friends here set up a DJ collective, they play dubstep and arrange big events at the two or three decent clubs in town. One of my buddies even organizes weekly ultimate frisbee games.

If I had to classify myself socially, I would have to say that I’m a hippie/nerd. Eventually I found a local stash of funky hippie brethren. They live in crazy old houses, make yummy salads out of organic mint, sit on the floor, hang out, drink tea, play drums, talk about crystals, and rarely feel the need to go to bars or restaurants. I even managed to put together my own little band of fellow nerds to play StarCraft and watch Star Trek with after work. Sometimes the new friends I’ve made remind me so much of this or that friend back home that I’m sad they’ll probably never meet. New cities are very lonely at first, but if you work at it, you can either find or make your scene.

The flip side of becoming this integrated is that as time passes, being in a foreign place becomes less and less magical. The novelty wears off. It all becomes ordinary. Your quirky part of town just becomes the normal background of your commute.

A few times, when I met with long term businessy expats, I would get asked how long I planned to stay, and half jokingly pressured to settle down and find a Vietnamese girlfriend. The real expats saw right through me. They knew I wasn’t one of them, I was just a half-pat. I was just like all the other twenty-somethings that float through Hanoi to teach English or intern at some NGO and “find themselves” for a year. They knew it wasn’t really worth their time to buddy up with me too much, because sooner or later I would miss home and fly back.

They were right.

- What I learned about  life -

Coming out here was an attempt at optimizing my time, my effort, and my savings. I was trying to optimize the next step of my life according to what I thought was important.

Studying economics primarily involved learning how to take complex real world situations, reduce them to equations and graphs, and then use calculus to find the highest point, the optimum. After years of that it’s impossible not to try and apply the same framework to your own life, even if subconsciously, to imagine some ideal ratio of fun/sleep/love/money/health/travel/food/work and to constantly update your plan for getting there.

I’m finally starting to realize that you can’t optimize life like this. It’s too abstract, or maybe in some ways not abstract enough. Furiously thinking about it renders the whole point moot anyway as you’re not even mentally there to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Instead of living in the moment, you’re too busy optimizing the next thing, or at least I find that I usually am.

During school we had these standard definitions of “doing well”, like going to a good university and getting good grades. We knew when it was time to try harder, and when we could relax. We don’t have that any more, and making important life decisions is a lot harder.

It’s a cliche but I’m really trying to “live in the moment” and not always worry so much about what to do.

- What I learned about myself -

When deciding to come to Vietnam I was afraid to leave the safety and comfort of California, but I was more afraid to stay and miss out on an opportunity to travel and challenge myself. I figured this was the optimal choice. I put a high premium on leading an interesting life, and I thought I was pretty damn interesting for coming out here. I felt special and exciting. But recently I’ve realized I’m actually really just a typical American, and that thinking I’m so damn special is a big part of that.

Here in Hanoi I’ve got about a dozen American friends and acquaintances my age, and about a dozen other European or Australian friends and acquaintances my age. If you ask the Euros or Aussies what they’re doing here and why, they’ll mostly sort of shrug their shoulders and explain that they’re just doing their thing. They’ve got a good English teaching job, and life is easy and nice. Most of them stay in Hanoi for a couple of years.

Americans, on the other hand, what a bunch of silly people we are. Every one of my American friends either works for an NGO, doing traffic safety or health communications or protecting the environment, or they’re working in finance or economic research, investing money and crunching numbers. We’re all either trying to save the world or take it over. We’re all writers and we’re all photographers too. We all have some big story about what we’re doing with our lives and why we’re in Hanoi, and we have hundreds of quasi-artsy photos to prove to our friends on facebook how much fun it is. Few of us last even a year out here before we move on to our next big opportunity to be even more special and exciting. We are completely absurd.

More than just an American, I’ve also realized how much of a Californian I am. My other American friends here can’t understand why I prefer to spend my vacations just hanging out in one place instead of furiously motorbiking across the country, and why I’m willing to spend more money than I need to on fancy lunches and daily fruit smoothies. The three other Californians I’ve met in my time out here clicked as friends right away. I miss California and I can’t wait to go home.

And just as I was originally afraid to leave the comfort of home to try my luck in Vietnam eight months ago, I’m now afraid to leave the comfort of Hanoi for yet another uncertain future. I’m afraid of missing out on everything that will continue here without me. Everyone who leaves Hanoi for a wedding or something returns with reports of economic desolation in the wasteland of the outside world. Back at home, where all this started, going to Vietnam was my plan B. Now in Vietnam going back home has been my plan B. After this I’m out of plan Bs, and maybe it’s for the best, as having a plan B is dangerous.

I’ve worked on three major business projects in the last year: Nitride Solutions, PostersforHumans.com, and now the consulting division. I’ve bailed out on all of them. Each time I’ve gone with my plan B, and I’m not sure if those were the right choices. They were easy enough to justify at the time. All three projects had slowed down when the demand we were expecting never materialized. But that’s only half the story. All three times I got lazy, and stopped trying. I approached each project with a burst of energy and enthusiasm, but soon my effort was waning and I was looking over my shoulder for something else to do.  It’s only my first year out of college and still very easy for me to say “it’s just not for me”, and no one really expects me to build a financially successful business anyway. Still, I feel like next time I really need to see things through instead of running away.

I rely hugely on my friends. Growing up, my mom and I were our entire family in this country, and for some long awkward teenage years I was horrifically unpopular at school. Since then I’ve always made a massive effort to be social and maintain relationships. Besides companionship and fun, I’ve relied on these relationships to find work, housing, and opportunity. Here in Vietnam I got my job and my house through my friends, and when I get back home I plan to crash at a friend’s place back in Santa Barbara and hopefully get some part-time work with a friend doing computer repair.

But as a young person what you can get through cronyism is limited. Friends can help you find opportunities, but you need to fulfill them for yourself. Being social is a lot more fun than actually working, and the illusion that it’s just as useful is a dangerous one. I need to learn how to work hard, stick with a project, and achieve things for myself.

- moving on -

As a whole, my experience in Vietnam was fantastic. I found the interesting work opportunities I was looking for, went on fun adventures, learned a lot, and made some amazing new friends. The eight months ended up costing me about $5000 net, including a week on a tropical island with a girlfriend for new year, another week motorbiking around thailand with a buddy over Vietnamese new year, having two suits tailored, and a lot of expenses that were foolish and avoidable in retrospect (including a chinese knockoff iphone). I think it would have taken me another eight months of work to break even on the trip.

Moving on now is bittersweet, going home yet leaving so much behind. It includes the recognition that I have spent not only my money here, but also my time. I have grown older out here. The great sadness of growing older is seeing your opportunities disappear as you choose one path at the expense of others. You can change your mind, and you can change your plan, but you can’t stop time. One way or another you’ll end up doing something, that something will be “the real world”, and it will probably involve doing some hard work.

But don’t despair! I’ve discovered an up-side!

Sharing this story is part of an effort to shift my narcissism from photography to writing. I used to take photos of everything I did. I wanted to prove to myself and to the rest of the world that I had been there and done that. That I wasn’t still sitting alone at home like the awkward kid I was in middle school. Recently, I looked through some old photos of myself from early college and I was so embarrassed. What an asshole I was, making some stupid face at some stupid girl at some stupid party. I can’t believe the things that I thought were important to photograph. My intentions were so shallow and obvious. At the time I thought I would treasure these memories, but now I hardly identify with the person I see in the photos.

Maybe years from now, I’ll re-read this, and I won’t lament the tragedy of all my lost possibilities and unfulfilled opportunities, and I won’t congratulate myself on my business insights either, because I’ll no longer think any of that is important. I’ll simply say to myself “well, at least I’m not that guy anymore.”

It’s been really interesting to work on an entrepreneurial project within an existing firm.

In a lot of ways it’s great. From day one you already have a fax machine, an established brand, and a pay check. You get to skip all the mundane work of actually setting up a new business entity. You have whole departments at your disposal to do your bidding. It feels so good to just send something to the marketing department and tell them to make a press release for it and send it out.  And getting an actual paycheck in the first months of a new venture is an uncommon luxury for entrepreneurs. (although it’s at the expense of equity)

Entrepreneurship within a firm isn’t a new idea, but it’s often overlooked. Macintosh started as an entrepreneurial side project at Apple and ended up becoming their main product line. Post-it’s started as an independent project at 3M that employees worked on on their own time.

I feel like right now, with the economy being what it is and all, a lot of firms with too many idle employees could really benefit by putting some of them on entrepreneurial projects.  They could be developing new projects or divisions, doing consulting or training for partner firms, figuring out how to make or do something internally that the firm used to have to buy, etc.

In a lot of ways though I miss the wild-west style of doing a real standalone startup. I find that I do a lot better work at 2 in the morning than at 8 in the morning, and I don’t think wearing a suit makes my work particularly better either. And I’m also having to get used to the idea of working on a project, emailing it off to the boss, and never hearing of any feedback or results.

The funniest part of it, which I’m completely unaccustomed to, is the dilbertesque world of office politics, inefficiencies, and paradoxes.

Some departments just don’t get along with other departments. We have an IT department who’s primary task, as far as I can tell, is figuring out which websites employees are using to goof off, and blocking them. But they block sites in a very absurd way, they block all web addresses that contain certain strings of 3 letters. For a while we couldn’t use our google spreadsheets because they had blocked the letters “ads”. (spreadsheet)

Today one of us was goofing off, and he discovered that the letters “imo” were blocked when someone’s facebook profile wouldn’t load (someone with a long silly russian name that had “imo” in it).

Probably there is some sort of Vietnamese social networking site or chat client that has “imo” somewhere in the name, perhaps a site for sharing opinions, who knows. I don’t, because I can’t load the url.

I’ve made it a minor personal quest to go yell at the IT department whenever they block websites or disable some functionality on my computer. I got my google chat functionality back by showing them that the google powered search on a Vietnamese news website had been disabled by their shennanigans. Once one of my partners had to get management approval to use his USB thumb drive.

So I sat and sat, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of any important business words that had “imo” in them. Eskimo? I needed a good reason to go mess with IT.

I tried to search online for words that contained imo, but of course my searches got blocked. So I enlisted my friends on google chat to help me out (previous victory paying off!). I found this site that lets you search for a piece of a word: http://www.onelook.com/?w=*imo*&scwo=1&sswo=1&scwo=0&sswo=0 and my girlfriend was nice enough to load it on her computer and email me the results.

Unfortunately none of these words could be reasonably related to any of my work online. I guess I might have been able to argue that I needed to search for “Vietnam antimonopoly law”, but that’s a stretch, and antimonopoly isn’t really a word.

although this part of the list does make a cool word pyramid:

135. limous
136. limousin
137. limousine
138. limousines
139. longanimous
140. magnanimous
141. magnanimously
142. magnanimousness

check that out.

Next I tried to search for Vietnamese business news that contains the letters imo by clicking through archives and doing a page search in my browser. I found this article http://www.vnbusinessnews.com/2009/01/vietnamese-kimonos-win-japanese-hearts.html which I guess must be about kimonos that are being manufactured in Vietnam and sold in Japan. Still, not very important.

So I don’t have a good reason to go yell at IT today. They win this round. Bastards.

I wonder if I were at a real startup if I would have actually been working on my work during that time instead of trying to thwart my rivals in the next room.

I can’t blame it on the suit because today was dress down friday, woo! office life!

It’s important to tell people exactly what you can do for them.

A couple of times during my informal networking style job hunt I had meetings with people who were in a position to potentially hire me.

I got these meetings by putting myself out there, networking with as many businessy people as I could, making a big deal of my interest in business, telling everyone that I was looking for a project or opportunity to get involved with, and then following up by emailing them my resume. So when someone took enough interest/pity to meet with me, it was completely removed from the normal hiring process in which you are interviewing for a clearly defined position.

I would go and chat about their business, and share my various insights on the industry, talk about related articles I had read, and talk about other businesses I knew about in Hanoi. Then I would talk about myself a bit, tell them about my background and what I was looking for in Hanoi. Eventually, a point would always come in the meeting where they would take a break from the bullshit and flat out ask me “So, if we hire you, what are you going to do for us?”

I never knew what exactly to say to this. I usually explained that I had a variety of business skills, particularly relating to my experience in startups and my economics education, and that I was excited about any opportunities to use them. This never seemed to satisfy the question, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I figured that it’s their business and they should know what to do with new employees.

But they didn’t need any new employees, they were just nice and open minded enough to spend some time listening to some kid talk about himself, and I should have had an answer ready for them.

While they might have appreciated that I had an interesting mix of abstract skills, they were trying to imagine hiring me to run around their office doing something useful, something concrete, not just sitting around basking in the aura of my own potential.

I realized that one of the big reasons the boss at my new job was excited to hire me was not my experience with startups or my education in finance, but that I thought to say that I could also work on revamping the company’s English language website.

I’m not a web designer, and I don’t aspire to be one. I feel like writing copy and working on websites is a necessary part of any small business or new project. I don’t really think my web design skills amount to much more than your average nerdy teenager. I made the websites for my last two businesses, the advanced materials company and the art licensing company, and they came out ok. But I can always tell when a company has a site that was just thrown together by an employee instead of hiring a real marketing and design firm. There’s more to a site than just a name on the top and some sections with info.

Still, I don’t think any of that mattered to my new boss. What mattered is that he saw the clear chain of events; I hire this kid, and BOOM – better website, oh and he’ll also run around and do all sorts of smart stuff for the consulting division.

In the future, when looking for ‘informal’ positions, I’m going to make it as easy as possible for people to hire me. Before I meet with a company I will think of a few potential projects that I could work on for them right away. And as a complimentary long term strategy, I’ll build more skills that are instantly applicable, not just the theoretical stuff.

My girlfriend is currently taking a grant writing class and I think that’s a great example of the perfect sort of skill for this type of situation. She doesn’t want to be a grant writer any more than I want to be a web designer. But if I ran a non-profit or NGO, and I met someone who said they had experience in grant writing, and could come in and get right to work on a grant that might bring in some new funding, I would be a lot more excited to hire them for whatever the full time position that they actually wanted was.

What I want to do is leverage all the abstract skills that I just spent 5 years of college learning. I want to direct the macro level strategy of meaningful long term projects and ventures. But if making the occasional website is my foot-in-door opportunity to do that, then I’ll do it.

So here is the expanded version of my original point: It’s important to tell people exactly what you can do for them, to think of practical projects you can start on right away, even if they aren’t the part of the job that you’re most excited about doing. So you better build up some useful skills, otherwise, good luck convincing someone to hire you just to do the abstract stuff.

I’ve been off the blog for a few weeks as I’ve been adjusting to working full time and finally finishing this business plan consulting project which has been eating up my free time.

So here’s an update:

After a lot of powerpointing we got our division approved. My two partners and I are now officially a strategic consulting team. We’re hiring four more people who will come in over the summer, and we have our work cut out for us.

We are stuck between a bit of a rock and a hard place. Large Vietnamese firms and international firms operating in Vietnam already have have a bunch of consultants from the big law firms, funds, and international consulting agencies running around. Plus, most of their staff have a lot more experience than we do. Small and medium sized Vietnamese firms on the other hand often don’t really understand what consulting is and whatever it is they don’t have much interest in paying for it.

This leaves us with a very narrow band of potential clients: up-and-coming mid sized Vietnamese firms that are hip to the idea of consulting and aspire to be a bit more up to international standards, but don’t really have the resources to pay for fancy real consultants and are willing to give a chance to a couple of white kids in their early 20s.

This all begs the question of “what exactly do we do anyway?”, and we’re still in the process of answering that for ourselves. From our point of view it’s  basically anything we can get people to pay us for and actually do a good job on.

externally the answer is going to be something like:

“[Our division] works together with top management teams, boards, and investors to create the detailed analysis, long term strategies, and practical plans needed by firms to survive and to thrive in Vietnam. We provide external, objective advice offered from an independent perspective that successful firms rely on to help direct and validate their strategy.

Our international team brings the tools and best practices used by the world’s leading organizations to tackle the specific objectives of our clients. Then, by combining the resources of Thang Long Securities and Military Bank with our network of partners, we facilitate the implementation of these new plans, ensuring that they translate into real world results.”

What I wish we could just say is “Look, if your firm is having some sort of a problem that you’re not sure how to deal with, why not let us come in and take a crack at it? We’re relatively cheap, we’re smart, and we might have a different approach than you.”

Once we get good enough at making this argument we’ll have to deal with what happens when it actually works. It’s not that we’re useless, far from it, it’s just that most of our skills are very direct and analytical. We’re good at economics, which is to say that we’re good at running big sets of numbers through excel, pulling out some key ratios, running a a couple of regressions, and figuring out what causes what.

I’ve been doing the opposite kind of research lately. I’ve just been running around and meeting with everyone who will take the time to see me at funds, law firms, commercial organizations, and every company we have any sort of relationship with, and just having lunch with people and picking their brains about business in Vietnam.

What I’m figuring out about Vietnam is that solid, reliable data to analyze and to base your decisions on is very hard to come by. Because of this, and just because of the culture, a lot of decision making is very informal. Deals get made because of who knows who and on the whims of whoever owns the company

What I’m learning is that while in a place like Vietnam, because there aren’t as many qualified people, it’s more easy to jump right into doing something at a high level. The counterbalance to that is because there is so much informality it takes a really long time to actually figure out what’s going on and how to get things done.

All of the macroeconomic reports and estimates these days are guessing that Vietnam will snap out of its economic funk around the end of 2009, which should also be right about when we can expect to really get this consulting thing off the ground, and right about when I expect to really get a good sense of how to operate in this environment.

The end of 2009 is also about the very latest possible time that I plan to be leaving Vietnam.

Still, by that time I probably will have learned a lot about informal and intuitive information gathering and how to navigate through subtle social and political constructs to get stuff done as an outsider.

I figure that will be a valuable skill set when doing business back in the developed world where everyone else is just running the numbers.

Hopefully. Or maybe I’ll just get fat.

Woo!

Until then, here’s a sneak preview of Vietnam’s hottest new strategic consulting team:

People are often confused or offended when I use the word hippie.

Some people either think the term is derogatory, or they think that hippies were something that only existed in the 60s, and that you can’t be a hippie today any more than you can be a flapper. These people haven’t spent enough time on the west coast lately.

Most of my friends in California are, as you can see, obviously hippies and I genuinely consider myself to be a hippie as well. I’ve even got some hippie buddies here in Hanoi, they do drum circles in Lenin park on Sundays.

I really can’t think of any other term to use to describe the ongoing social/cultural movement that I’ve been living in for most of my life. I don’t even like to call it a movement because it’s really not going anywhere, it’s just how a lot of people think and live. It’s more of a lifestyle philosophy.

The parts of hippie culture that resonate most with me are: the focus on a happy and healthy lifestyle, living within your means and enjoying what you have, eating well, being social, relaxing and taking it easy, being experimental and open to new ideas and cultures, being politically progressive and believing in peace and the environment, traveling, helping people, enjoying food, music, and art, but not necessarily by the same rules as the critics and experts. In short, living well.

On a Friday night, when my more mainstream friends are standing in line to see some stupid $9 movie, my hippie friends are having bonfires and potlucks, playing music and dancing, jumping in the surf at the beach or finding hot springs (or at least sneaking in to the movie through the back door).

And while a lot of people seem to have a natural tendency to forming fixed and closed off social groups,  most of the hippies I know are a lot more open minded and quick to make new friends and invite them along for the fun.

I guess if someone held a knife to my throat and demanded that I describe hippies without saying the word “hippie” I would say progressive, alternative, bohemians.

There are also some parts of hippie culture that drive me completely nuts: embarrassing and counterproductive protests, blind allegiance to all things alternative, chard. But what especially gets me is the prevalence of, and often militant belief in, poorly thought through political, metaphysical, and scientific theories. (How can someone concurrently believe in ghosts, reincarnation, and an afterlife!?)

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So what does this have to do with business? Well, they say the key to marketing is to find your niche. And many companies have targeted the hippie niche, as many hippies have a lot of money.

People often think that hippies having a lot of money is hypocritical, and to some extent it is, but it also makes perfect sense: It’s a lot easier to reject the traditional goals of career success and material wealth when you’ve grown up around a lot of wealth and you realize that big houses and fancy cars don’t really add much to the day to day quality of your life.

It also really helps if your parents pay for you to go to college. College today is hardly a full time endeavor, and my hippie ways were slowly built up over years of idle afternoons and long summer vacations. It’s hard to listen to someone explain the wonders of kombucha when you have to be at work in 15min.

In theory, hippies are supposed to reject consumerism. But some companies have created brands that really work for hippies. Two examples (out of many) are Moleskine and Nalgene.

Moleskine makes notebooks. Unlike other manufacturers they don’t sell their notebooks in the school supply isle of supermarkets and office stuff stores. They sell their product in book stores and airports, and they claim on the packaging that their notebooks are the same type as some used by Hemingway and Picasso.

Nalgene makes water bottles, another deceptively simple product. Their water bottles are very strong and were originally popular with climbers that supposedly have a problem with dropping and breaking their water bottles while climbing.

These companies have a lot of similarities. They make very high quality products. They use very subtle branding, but are definitely distinct enough to get you noticed by other fans of the brand. Most importantly though these products imply a certain lifestyle. A lifestyle where you travel around the world sketching and writing, and you spend so much of your time dangling from cliffs that dropping and shattering your water bottle is a serious concern. Normal notebooks or water bottles obviously wouldn’t stand a chance.

People love these brands. Fans have uploaded 3,169 photos of their Nalgenes and 74,755 photos of their Moleskines to flikr. There are even 49 photos that have both Moleskines and Nalgenes tagged in them, including a couple of people that decided to draw pictures of their Nalgenes in their Moleskines. (idiots)

Other hippie brands include: Dr. Bronner’s soap, Braggs Amino Acid condiment, Rainbow Sandals, and of course, Apple.

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For each of these successful brands there are a million little companies trying to catch the next wave. Many are founded by hippies that have followed their dreams and opened their own business creating something that was important to them, but a lot of them also tend to be total scams. The scams often take advantage of the hippie enthusiasm for silly pseudo-science.

So about a year ago I was hanging out with some of my hippie friends up in Homer, Alaska and I noticed a very silly bottle of water:

Since then I’ve made it a point to check out the bottled water whenever I pop into a local health food store or co-op.

“Real Water” vs. “Earth Water”…  That’s a tough choice. I guess someone figured out that hippies are especially finicky about their water.

I soon realized that the crazy bottled water market was turning into a serious arms race:

Here are some quotes from my favorites

“H20 Vortex, Activated Water: spin cycle process with ULTRA OXYGEN”

“Borba skin balance water firming contains a revolutionary cultivated bio-vitamin complex along with a scientifically designed blend of nutrients intended to promote the skin’s natural support system, helping to nourish and tone the skin. Borba skin balance water is formulated to work with your body’s chemistry to promote healthy skin. This on-the-go, skin care-infused beverage combines simplicity and nutrition with the goodness of water. It’s water with benefits”

“HiOsilver Oxygen Water: Spring Water TurbOcharged with PURE OXYGEN (TM), 6 times the oxygen (50 ppm) of ordinary water, Glass bottle retains oxygen, Made with spring water, pH 8.4, naturally alkaline, For fresh breath, No sodium”

“New studies at a leading American and European Medical University have found that there is a water that not only fully hydrates, but may also be a pure antioxidant that neutralizes free radicals in your body. That water is Penta. – Penta water is first cleaned using a state of the art purification system that removes all impurities. No other bottled water is as pure! The water then goes through the patented penta process that spins the water at high speed and pressure for 10 hours. This unique process energizes the water to be a pure antioxidant that neutralizes free radicals in your body. And, unlike many antioxidant supplements and beverages that use synthetic additives, Penta has no additives so it is fully absorbed by your body maximizing its antioxidant effects.”

“e-water: A revolution in refreshment! Full Spectrum Electrolytes with fulvic acid.Stimulates metabolism, Increases absorption of key electrolytes, scavenges heavy metals/free radicals, increases enzymatic activity”

“AQUAVYBE’S pure, smooth taste comes from a unique formula that combines natural, bio-energetic minerals from Original Himalayan Crystal Salt (TM), with quantum science, creating super-hydrating, energizing water, with naturally occurring electrolytes.”

“E2 – Electron Energized (TM) water is the most advanced water available today. Through a proprietary process, E2 water is stably enhanced in two very important ways. First it is alkalized and second it is negatively ionized. Most bottled water is acidic which according to many nutritionists is unhealthy. E2 water helps the body become more alkalized  for improved health. Second, Nearly all water is positively ionized because the water molecules have been stripped of valuable electrons. This causes the water molecules to share electrons and clump together. These clumped molecules are not easily absorbed on a cellular level. With E2, the water molecules are negatively ionized. These negatively ionized water molecules contain free electrons and unclump so that they can be absorbed quickly on a cellular level. As an added benefit, the free electrons act as an anti-oxidant to neutralize free radicals. So to truly hydrate on a cellular level, use E2 – Electron Energized (TM) water. You will taste and feel the difference! Oxidation Reduction Potential (OPR) of -50 Guaranteed!”

One water bottle brand is the clear winner of the bullshit war.

AquaHydrate: The Ultimate Hydrating Fluid! Aquahydrate is the purest, health promoting water available anywhere. Some waters are purified, some are alkaline, some have organic trace minerals, some are micro-structured, and some have proper electrolyte balance – AQUAHYDRATE has it all!”

This is like when a little kid, after being asked what he would wish for if a genie appeared, thinks to say “I wish for infinite wishes.”.

I wish for infinite water awesomeness!

Genius.

In defense of my hippie side and hippie friends, I’ve never actually seen anyone buy any of this silly water. Well, except for the Egyptian geometry one. But come on, Egyptian geometry? That’s a pretty cool thing to put in your water.

update: yes I know that people are now boycotting Nalgene in favor of Klean Kanteen on the basis that Nalgenes use toxic plastics and make restraints for animal testing. This is just the next step in a long line of trendy water holders. I remember the bygone eras of Bota Bags and Camelbaks. Like I said, hippies are finicky about their water.

So it worked.

I finally got a job.

I am the new co-director of a currently non-existent strategic consulting division at a major Vietnamese finance firm. I have a desk, my own phone extension, a new bank account with Military Bank, an extended work visa, and one week to finish a presentation of my initial financial and strategic analysis of 3 publicly traded Vietnamese companies and a plan for how to build this new department.

I got the position thanks to the help of two friends I have here (in addition to taking the time to send the company my resume, put on my suit, and come in to meet the boss). So I got it through networking, although not really the kind I was writing about. Rather it seems to have come about totally independently of most of this running around I’ve been doing. More so just the normal kind of networking where you naturally hang out with people similar to you.

It seems like luck. I happened to meet two American guys my age, with similar tastes, preferences, and tendency towards furious nerdy argument, that live about two blocks from me,  and were just put in charge of hiring some fresh meat for special projects at their finance firm. But I guess getting lucky sooner or later was the plan all along.

So now the three of us are building a plan to create a division that has to overcome a lot of challenges. First and foremost it would have to be able to offer genuine, insightful, useful, and practical advice to Vietnamese corporations. This means that we will have to have better insight into the markets, competitive dynamics, competencies, and potential for these firms than the people running them do. Then the real hard part is going to be convincing the firms to pay us to do it.

It would also have to be accepted within the complexities of interdepartmental firm politics; not taking business or power away from anyone else.

Our only tools are PowerPoint, Google, a Bloomberg terminal, our education, and our wits.

We present our analysis and our plan on Monday. If we succeed the new department we create will be our jobs. We’re bargaining to get our own office space upstairs and we might even bring in our own interns.

For me it’s really the perfect job. It will be my duty to spend all day thinking really hard about strategies I think businesses should peruse, and then to design and present them. It’s like making a cat the chief officer of finding sunny places to nap.

There’s a sad irony to all of this though. This should be triumphant success of my experiment in entrepreneurial travel which I’ve chronicled in this blog.  All this time I’ve been worrying about my suit, my business cards, my resume, and my contacts, running around, trying to find an opportunity like this. Finally I do, and after just two days of working (8 to 6 today) I feel as though everything is already changing.

I feel like my weekdays, amounting to five sevenths of my life, will simply disappear to another universe; a surreal looping indoor universe of wake, commute, work, food, sleep, repeat, occasionally interrupted by menial errands.

I worry that I won’t have the free time or extra energy to devote to my writing, my photography, or my health. I’m really scared that I might not be able to put in all the time I have been into keeping up my relationships with my family, my friends, and my girlfriend. Maybe those were all just the temporary luxuries of unemployment.

I feel like such a baby. Wah wah, I have a job. I can’t keep sleeping until noon, exploring temples all day, and playing on my laptop all night like I have been for months. Poor me. On the one hand I got exactly what I wanted. On the other I feel like I’ve fallen right into the life that I came out here to escape. (the third hand is holding a duck)

I guess it’s all relative. I’m incredibly lucky and thankful to have the opportunities that I’ve had, and it’s certainly not an appropriate time to complain about having a job, especially in finance. And maybe the simple sadness of growing older is seeing your life turn from an imagined spectrum of possibilities to one single path.

I could write more about it but I have to go to sleep. I’m tired and I have work in the morning.

I have a friend who has always been excellent at expressing complex ideas clearly. He has a background in business and politics, loves to argue about history and philosophy, and at the time I knew him he was writing the dissertation for his doctorate in ethnomusicology. A really out there guy, but smart as hell.

When he moved away to Finland (where else?) I inherited from him a book about writing which he highly recommended. The book is called Style: towards clarity and grace, written by Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb.

I’ve been carrying it around since then, for about 2 years, meaning to read it.

I finally started and it’s fantastic.

The authors explain their theory on how we experience writing and what sorts of problems cause writing to seem awkward, confusing, and unclear (or as they really like to say, turgid).

They show many subtly different ways of writing similar things and explain why some express the idea more clearly than others. They also suggest different methods for improving your writing.

A funny part of the book is in the introduction where the authors quote many previous authors that have also written about clarity. Ironically, these quotes aren’t clear at all. This shows the real difficulty in actually writing clearly, even when you’re really trying.

“The utterance of a gentleman ought to be deliberate and clear, without being measured… Simplicity should be the firm aim, after one is removed from vulgarity, and let the finer shades of accomplishment be acquired as they can be attained. In no case, however, can one who aims at turgid language, exaggerated sentiments, or pedantic utterances, lay claim to be either a man or a woman of the world. “ – James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat, 1838

Orwell couldn’t pull it off either:

“The keynote [of such a style] is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination instead of be examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the –ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un-formation.” – George Orwell from his essay “Politics and the English Language”

Even the authors of this book get caught in some serious sillyness:

“Finally, some of us write badly not because we intend to or because we never learned how, but because occasionally we seem to experience transient episodes of stylistic aphasia.”

What?

For me it was watching Obama’s inauguration speech that really solidified my current excitement about the power of clear communication. He uses all the ideas presented in this book very naturally in his speeches.

The authors start with simple sentence level issues such as expressing actions and conditions in specific verbs, adverbs or adjectives. So instead of saying “The intention of the committee is the improvement of morale.”, it would be clearer to write “The committee intends to improve morale.”. Rather than making strong rules against things like passives and nominalizations, they explain why these structures exist and when they are appropriate to use.

The book then moves on to worrying about where ideas appear within a sentence and how this placement links sentences together. The authors  continue to expand the scope of their concepts until they are discussing where in paragraphs to introduce new ideas and how to build on them, and finally how to structure whole arguments and papers.

The focus is mostly on the writing of complex or technical prose.  So while I started reading the book with the hope that it would help me in writing this blog, I find it’s actually helping much more in my ongoing work revising the business plan for the health communications company that I’m consulting for.

Here is an example sentence from the business plan I’m editing:

“In the near future (within the next 2-3 years), CCRD will continue to mainly source for contracts from programs managed by the GOV and international donors the scope and clienteles, and thus, the market share of CCRD will be expanded as a result of capacity building and increased experiences which will contribute to CCRD’s improved reputation and recognition as an unique health/development strategic communication expertise;  And its gradually entry into new markets, i.e.:”  [followed by a list of markets]

This is my best attempt at fixing it.

“CCRD’s success in expanding capacity and increasing experience have improved its reputation as a dependable source for health and development communication expertise in Vietnam. Because of this CCRD has seen an increase in both its market share, and the scope of its clients.

In the near future (the next 2-3 years), CCRD will continue to mainly source contracts from programs managed by the GoV and international donors, while also beginning to gradually expand into new markets, including: “

The real hard part is going to be when I have to boil 50 pages of that into a clear, convincing, and professional 8 page executive summary.

In my previous post I touched on the idea of running a small simple online business that was profitable enough to support leisurely living abroad.  It’s a tempting combination of lifestyle and career.

I should have disclosed that I’m not the first person to have this idea or to write about it. There is actually a book I loathe, written by an author I hate, on this very subject!

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The book is the Four Hour Workweek by author Timothy Ferriss. It was a NYT non-fiction bestseller for a little while. One reviewer on amazon.com elegantly described it as being the “8 minute abs” of business books. Not that self help style business books are often very good. My hostility toward this one is at least partially based on the fact that the book is essentially a commercially successful version of this blog.

In the book, when the author (pictured right) isn’t talking about how he became a championship judo warrior or spectacular salsa dancer, he’s explaining how you can easily lead a life of relaxation and adventure just by having a small simple online business and running it efficiently by outsourcing everything.

In his case the online business was some sort of sleazy website selling health supplements through a drop shipping company. About half a step up on the totem pole from the people that spam your email inbox with creative misspellings of Viagra.

He also shares that the key to success in business situations is to “practice picking up girls in order to build your confidence – even if you’re married”. He’s like a mix between Donald Trump and Mystery.

Living the easy life while your online business rakes in the cash is a fun fantasy, but it’s not a very realistic one.

In the real world, and the virtual one, being a reseller of a common product without adding any unique value is a tough business. Primarily because there’s already a bunch of people doing it, and they’ve been doing it for longer than you.

This situation reminds me a lot of day trading. Many of people fantasize about day trading. It seems like making money out of nothing, and the sky’s the limit. I know one day trader well and I’ve met several others. As far as I can gather day traders spend about  ten hours every day staring at financial models and performing all manner of novel analysis and voodoo on them in order to guide their trades. They all seem to be making enough money to continue day trading, but not enough to stop.

According to financial theory, making money day trading is impossible.

The theory that explains this is called the “efficient market hypothesis”. It basically states that you can’t make any money doing things like day trading because everybody else is already doing it, therefore the market prices are all essentially “correct” given all the information available, and there is no way to estimate what prices will do next, so you might as well not bother.

There’s a famous joke (amongst nerds) about this: A student and his finance professor are walking across campus together. The student sees a $20 bill on the ground and reaches to pick it up. The professor stops him and then explains that if there were really a $20 bill there someone else would have already picked it up.

This shows the obvious flaw in the efficient market explanation. If you couldn’t make any money day trading, then no one else would be trying either. If no one else were trying, the prices would no longer be “correct”, and then you would again be able to make money by day trading.

Back to the real world again: Every day large institutional investors make big trades on the stock market. Their trades leave tiny “inefficiencies” everywhere. These inefficiencies are slight differences in what the stock prices are, and what they should be if someone calculated all the available information.

The big firms don’t really bother to get these details perfect as they have high costs, a slow decision making process, and prefer to make trades in large volumes. This leaves the opportunity for the day traders. They scoop up all the inefficiencies and make money doing so.

For example a day trader might have a program checking to see if two very similar stocks are trading at abnormally different relative prices. They would then buy the low one, short the high one, and wait for the prices to converge. Alternately some day traders buy huge archives of old trade data and try to find obscure trends and relationships in it. Other day traders work on certain theories about how price movements tend to flow over time, in which patterns they go up and down. And many day traders simply wait for second fresh news comes out  so they can be the first to trade on it.

All these different strategies working together to set market prices does end up making them pretty “accurate”, most of the time.

So day trading isn’t impossible, but it’s certainly not a life of ease and luxury while your computer magically makes money for you.

I think these types of situations that I’m illustrating with online resellers and day traders can be better explained by economics.

Subjected to economic analysis, jobs like day trading or online reselling aren’t impossible; you just won’t on average make any more money doing them than you would performing any other equally difficult job. This is because you are in “perfect competition” with everyone else.

In micro-economics it is mathematically modeled that when you have a perfectly competitive product or profession that no one involved should be making much money. When suppliers are making excessive profits in the short term more competition will move in and bring profits down to “normal” in the long term. In this case “normal” means how much you would make doing anything else that required the same amount of investment, skill, and risk. And by the time there’s a best selling book written about how to do something, you can safely assume you’ve reached the long term part of the model.

If any of my professors were reading this they would be very upset with me for not drawing a bunch of graphs and using the word equilibrium. It is more complex than I’m making it out to be, but still less than economics professors like to pretend.

I think economics is still missing part of the story. These aren’t equivalent to average jobs, most of the time they’re worse and they pay worse.

You need to think about the psychology at play. These jobs are very tempting. The thought of being able to provide for yourself without even having to change out of your pajamas, and to have your whole little world right there on your screen, easy to control, is a tempting one.

It’s easy for people to picture doing these jobs. Visually you imagine that all you have to do is sit in front of your computer once in a while. So on a base level it seems like you could easily succeed at doing it. It’s the same reason why people are more worried about dying in a shark attack than from diabetes. Things that are easy to imagine seem much more likely.

There are various cognitive biases happening too. In their minds, people apply too much weight to the few success stories they hear. They also forget that old stories of success, from books written in the beginning of a new industry, are no longer applicable to the current state of the market. Again, those opportunities were scooped up by people who came before there were best selling books written about how to do it.

There are so many psychological factors that draw people to these sorts of fantasy get-rich-quick, working from home, be your own boss, sort of schemes that the labor pool is way too big, and average profits are below what you would make doing equivalent jobs.

Of course none of that applies to my small online business. Well, except it being a lot harder than I originally imagined. Oh, and the not making any money part.

(special thanks to Bryan and Ian for lecturing me in psychology every night in my living room completely against my will)

Not sure what to do with your life?

You could easily be an English teacher in a foreign country.

This is for anyone reading who is in the same situation as me; having just graduated from college and unsure what to do with yourself, but without the creepy business fetish.

I’ve mentioned it a few times already in this blog, but in case you didn’t get it; it’s REALLY easy to be an English teacher abroad.

If you can speak English, put on pants, and afford a plane ticket, you could be an English teacher in Hanoi next week.

Researching it online makes it seems like you need to go through a long an expensive process of certification. Which is to say that English teaching certification companies spend a lot more time making websites than uncertified English teachers do.

While it helps to have a certification it’s certainly not necessary. Many of the English teachers I’ve spoken to here just showed up and got a teaching job without a certificate, though sometimes their schools can be a bit unprofessional. A friend got his for $200 online at teflonline.net, but he said he never actually had to show it to anyone to get his job.

All you have to do is fly over, and start hanging out at the most popular Irish pub themed bar in town. In Hanoi you would end up at Finnegan’s. Most of the people there will be English teachers and most of them tell you that their schools are desperately hiring.

There are simply way more classes worth of kids with parents willing to pay for English lessons than there are people who bother to come over and teach.

English teachers in Hanoi make between $1500 and $2000 a month, depending on their experience, qualifications, type of school they teach at, and luck. Basic living expenses in Hanoi are about $750 a month. You can work at some schools for as little as two months at a time.

This is actually more than you would expect to make doing almost any other sort of entry level work. I have friends here who graduated from top universities and are now working at a finance firm making less than most English teachers.

Of course they get to put on their resume that they worked at a finance firm, and they don’t have to grade homework.

Still, it can be a lot of fun.

I was briefly a paid English teacher once for a small class of university students in China as part of a study abroad program. I made good friends, and I still keep in touch with a few of them.

One night, around the end of our program, I took them out and bought them a bunch of beers. Many of them had never drank before and they got completely smashed.

It was awesome

Running a business is about more than just making money.

This is an especially important thing to remind yourself when you’re not making any money.

My friend Ian and I have been running a small independent art licensing and online poster retailing business out of our garage for the last 3 years (for more info follow the “projects” link on the right). Lately we’ve been working on the annual task of sending our artists their accrued royalties from the previous year.

Our agreement with the artists is that they make a royalty of 50% of the profit from the sales and licensing of their art. As the business isn’t exactly profitable yet, their royalties this year were rather meager. So along with the check we sent out a letter thoughtfully explaining the progress made and challenges faced by the business in the last year.

We were expecting some serious grumpiness in return.

Instead we got nothing but incredible support and understanding feedback from the artists.

“I just wanted to say thanks, and I really appreciate you sharing all that with us and keeping us informed. That said, I still believe in you guys, and will continue to pass on your URL to all my friends as I’ve already been doing all this time and telling them about your mission statement. “

“i love what you guys do, whether you’re making money or not. anything I can do to help? no charge, total volunteer work.”

“You guys are saints. It’s been a real pleasure working with you”

Many of them also offered to license new art to us and one even offered to give up their royalty payment so that we could keep it to support the business.

This has really renewed our enthusiasm for the project.

What’s exciting about this business is that if we ever actually get licensing contracts with major publishers we can run the business from anywhere in the world with just a laptop and an internet connection, so long as we still have our accountant and someone to check our p.o. box for us back at home.

That was the dream all along; to have a fully digital business. We would scout out independent artists, in person and online, maintain a portfolio of high quality print ready scans and renders of their art, we would then market that portfolio to publishers, while periodically collecting the royalties from sales, and in turn sending our artists their share. Of course a key part of the plan was also that the business would make money.

What happened in reality is that publishers weren’t initially interested in licensing our art from us. So we went down a long and hard road of creating and retailing the products ourselves to prove their market viability. This involved a lot of really unpleasant work for Ian and I; dealing with printing, inventory, storage, shipping, credit card processing, sales tax, returns, website maintenance, marketing, vending, etc. The small scale we were operating at kept us always just below break-even. The whole experience was rather draining.

Now we’re preparing to make our last marketing push to the publishers. We will send them physical samples of the posters we’ve been selling along with some of our sales data to show that people actually buy the things.

I honestly don’t have very high hopes. Risk and innovation are rare in this industry, and the economic situation has further compounded the publishers’ conservative nature.

In retrospect if I could do it all over again I would have included in the team someone who actually knew something about art, and someone who had some experience in the industry.

Still, it would be a shame to have come this far and not give it one last shot. The incredible support from our artists is really the inspiration we needed to get back on track.

Wish us luck.