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 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 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

I’ve always been a snob

When I was younger I proudly displayed my Stanley Kubrick box set and insisted that I watched “films”, not “movies”. I made an effort to seek out local underground artists in my quest to become a connoisseur of “Hip Hop” while snubbing my peers for listening to “Rap”. In college I loved to take my friends to a particular restaurant in Santa Barbara that I was convinced made “traditional” Japanese food, and forbid them from ordering sushi. In short, I practice a level of snobbery that borders on just simply being a jerk.

In this same infantile spirit, I have during my trips abroad developed a conceptual distinction between “tourists” and “travelers”.

Oh how I loathe tourists! Loud fat sunburned families pouring out of air conditioned busses, with their fanny packs and money belts, clutching their video cameras, frantically waving their guidebooks and yelling at people in English about their free buffet.

Travelers are a different species entirely. To be a traveler is to calmly walk the earth, lightly packed, living off of a few dollars a day, blending in, easily befriending locals, playing with children, petting puppies, and finding remote hilltops to watch the sunset.

This distinction is of course completely absurd.

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I learned an important lesson a few years ago on a trip to Venezuela. A friend and I took an overnight bus to a town called Mérida up in the Andes Mountains, and spent about a week just sort of walking around. Our experience of the place was limited to sidewalks, bars, cafes, restaurants, and small parks. Our interaction with other people rarely went beyond ordering our food. Still, we were proud of ourselves for being “travelers”.

Eventually we got bored and our willpower wavered. We gave in and signed up for a white water rafting tour. It was tons of fun and we finally had people to talk to besides each other. Ironically it was also a more “authentic” experience. We got to stay at their camp way outside of the city, they had a local cook that made fantastic home style Venezuelan food, and the staff was able to clear up a lot of questions that had been confusing us about Venezuela.

For example everywhere we went we saw “Si” and “No” spray painted on trees, walls, rocks, mailboxes, everything. We couldn’t figure out for the life of us why some trees would be yes and others would be no. They explained to us that this was how political activism worked in Venezuela and there had recently been another Chavez election. The “Si”s and “No”s were saying yes or no to re-electing Chavez, the local equivalent of lawn signs and bumper stickers. It would have been a thorn in my mind to leave Venezuela without knowing why, and the people in the tourism company could tell us a lot more about the place than we would ever learn by just walking around.

Being back in Vietnam I’m again faced with the challenge of not being a tourist, except with a twist. I’ve discovered a new level, above traveler, in the hierarchy. Now the struggle is to be respected as an expat. An expat, short for expatriate, simply means someone that has left their home country and moved somewhere else. A human export.

In Hanoi the term is used to refer to the community of English teachers, business folk, NGO workers, volunteers, and other whities. There is a distinct expat scene and the expats make great effort to distinguish themselves from the tourists. You will never see an expat walking around in short cargo pants, tiger beer shirt, and diagonal strapped backpack, taking a picture of a street vendor. They make a point of dressing up when they go out, constantly checking their cell phones, and always being “a regular” at the places they eat, drink, and shop. This is my peer group now here in Vietnam.

Unlike the other expats though I’m not yet working full time, and by their standards I’ve only very recently arrived. I’m not ready to resign myself to the life of work, errands, and happy hour that I came to Vietnam to escape. I still want to go adventuring.

The challenge is how to adventure without being a tourist.

My solution when I start to get sick of the city has been to get one my regular motorbike drivers to take me on a…. uh… tour outside Hanoi. I have a map of the Hanoi area that has pagodas and temples marked on it, so what I’ve been doing is just pointing at a pagoda or temple and heading off for the day. I have no particular interest in Vietnamese religious sites but I figure that they tend to be situated either in the old parts of their towns or in interesting natural areas. Besides, I can’t easily communicate any other destinations.

So I’ve gone on four trips in this manner so far. Three around Hanoi and one on Phu Quoc, an island in the south of Vietnam off of the coast of Cambodia that I visited for the holidays. These are some of the photos from around Hanoi with my motorbike guy Da:

As you can see I mostly visited a bunch of temples. I was hoping to see more countryside and little old towns. The area around Hanoi is pretty bleak. largely it’s just industrial with tons of new freeway construction. The towns were primarily just simple homes and rickety little businesses built in the same concrete block style as everything else. Also all the fields were destroyed in a recent wave of massive flooding.

An unexpected bonus was that the temples are often built on craggy rocks that have natural caves that you can explore. They build little shrines inside the caves and light incense which makes for a surreal atmosphere.

In Phu Quoc my experience was a bit different.

The island is a big tourist destination, mostly for Germans and Russians. So I never really got the feeling that I was “off the beaten path”. The upside was that being on an island, or perhaps just because of the whims of my motorbike guy, we saw a much greater variation of stuff than I had around Hanoi. The drive itself was also much more scenic.

Again we went to a temple on a hilltop (this one was covered in swastikas which is always feels a bit weird to me). We also had lunch on a beach with very fine white sand which was almost like baking soda, saw a weird park with an alligator pond, visited a little fishing village, and had some overpriced beers at a creepy karaoke bar.

Then something really cool happened.

There is a “Holy Grail” in the version of reality that exists in the minds of tourists, and I found it. It is being invited to a local home for a traditional dinner. For whatever reason it is considered to be the most “authentic” experience one can have.

There are tour companies that offer this as part of their trips, but it’s just not the same to have dinner in a house that gets paid to host a van load of tourists every other day of the week. My motorbike guy liked me enough though to invite me to join him for some dinner and meet his wife and kids.

He lived in a ramshackle little dwelling. It consisted of three rooms and a tiny outside area nestled in with a bunch of other similar buildings. It had one dinky little power cord strung in from the street that powered a fluorescent tube in the entry/living room.

We had picked up two kilos of scallops from a street vendor and grilled them on top of a coal fire in a bucket. On each one we plopped a spoonful of sauce made out of oil, green onions, garlic, salt, and then we heaped on some ground up peanuts.

Having had some time to reflect on it I think the key to good tourism, traveling, whatever, is to mix it up. Tour companies are often run by local expats with a real love of the place. They are an easy way to see the sites and make some friends. Going off on your own can be lonely and confusing, but you’re a lot more likely to have a unique experience. Plus you get to feel like a “traveler”.

If Adam Smith were alive today Vietnam would be for him what the Galapagos were for Darwin.

The ideas of specialization and exchange of labor are completely pervasive here. Tiny businesses pour out of every nook and alley. People set up 3 stool restaurants on the sidewalk. Most barber shops are just a mirror hung from a tree and a chair, and you can even pay to have your ears cleaned while you drink your beer at the park by someone carrying what looks like a lock pick set of tiny ear-goop-scoopers.

You can even buy Buddha off the back of a motorbike.

Having studied business for the last 5 years I can’t help be be incredibly curious about how much money each of these businesses make, why each person ended up selling their particular product or service, and how they compete with each other.

So I asked a local Vietnamese friend of mine to come out for the afternoon with me and help me to interview some of these street entrepreneurs. I asked them how long they have been selling their product, why they chose that product, how much money they make per day, what their prices and profit margins are, and how business has been lately.

I converted the currency at rate of 17,000 Vietnamese Dong per US Dollar. I also adjusted their daily income based on US purchasing power using Purchasing Power Parity rate of 2.6 from the IMF (PPP adjusted GDP divided by Nominal GDP). You can ignore this if your not into economics, it’s just to give you a better idea of of how much stuff you could actually buy with that amount of money in Vietnam. Although keep in mind that food can be especially cheap in Vietnam so even $2 a day is enough to feed one person if you’re buying ingredients at local markets and cooking them at home in family portions.

We first spoke with 3 bike or basket style street vendors on my street.

Tin Stuff Seller: has two shoulder baskets filled with pots and teapots made of tin

• Time selling tin stuff: 10 years
• Why tin stuff: She likes it and they make it near her town, although she buys it from a reseller not directly from the maker.
• Daily net income: $1.75 US or $4.50 in purchasing power, although she complained that some days she makes as little as $0.47/$1.22ppp.
• Cost, Price, Profit for a tin pot: $1.18, $1.29, $0.11
• Business lately: Difficult. She says it’s very easy for people to buy this stuff from many stores in town.

Sandal Seller: has a rolling cart filled with colorful pairs of plastic sandals

• Time selling sandals: 5-6 years
• Why sandals: The sandal factory is in her village so everyone from there sells sandals.
• Daily net income: $2.64 US, or  $6.88 in purchasing power.
• Cost, Price, Profit: $0.52, $0.61, $0.09
• Business lately: hasn’t been good, she had only sold 4 pairs so far that day. (at about 1pm)

Giant Rice Cracker Seller: two big plastic bags of stacks of tortilla like rice crackers

• Time selling giant rice crackers: 2 years
• Why giant rice crackers: Normally she works on a farm, but this is the off season and she has lots of free time. She also buys them from a reseller.
• Daily net income: $1.50 / $3.80ppp.
• Cost, Price, Profit: $0.18, $0.29, $0.11
• Business lately, slow because the weather has been hot, people buy more when it’s cold.

Next I went to the pho (Vietnamese rice noodle soup) place next door to me.

• Time selling pho: 15 years for the woman and her husband who currently run the place, and her parents ran it for 20 years before that. 35 total.
• Why sell pho: family tradition
• Net Income (whole business): $60 per day, $1,800 per month
• Employee pay: $76 per month / $200ppp (x 8 employees)
• Rent: $600 per month
• Owner Profit: $564 per month /$1,468ppp
• Business lately: good

Finally we headed over to the more touristy old quarter of town and interviewed a few microbusinesses there.

Alley shop: sells drinks, cigarettes, and handicrafts

• Time running the alley shop: Her mother has been running it for 10 years, she’s just watching over it for the day while her mom is out.
• Daily net income: $5 /$12ppp
• Free rent because they live in the building down the alley. She buys most of her stuff off of other vendors and her husband makes the carved stone handicrafts.
• Most of her customers are Vietnamese but she gets a lot of tourists too.
• Water Bottle Cost, Price, Profit: $0.20, $0.35, $0.15
• Business lately: fine

Tea and Beer guy: has a little stoop set up at the entrance to a small alley (declined having his photo taken)

• How Long: 20 years, since his retirement
• Daily net income: $3 /$7.65ppp
• Why: he’s retired and likes sitting out on the street and selling tea to his neighbors. He used to be a general accountant for the Hanoi Energy Ministry.
• He makes most of his money from tea, which he sells for about $0.18 and is practically free for him to make.
• He also sells packs of cigarettes; cost, price, profit: $0.55, $0.60, $0.05
• Business Lately: Good, he has a lot of regular daily customers.

Paintings Shop: a small gallery that sells reproduction and custom paintings, mostly to tourists

• How Long: Current owners have been running the shop for one year, they bought it from the previous owners along with the entire building. They live above the shop.
• Why Paintings: There are a lot of other painting shops on the street, it’s a good tourist area, and it already was a painting shop. They took a 6 month training course from an experienced ‘master’ painter before they started.
• Business Net Income: $1000 monthly
• Salary per painter: $60 monthly /$152ppp
• They sell about 6 paintings a week for $30-50 depending on size and difficulty, their costs are negligible.

Shoe Repair Guy: sits on a stool on the corner in front of his house fixing shoes

• How long: He’s been doing this for the five years since he’s retired.
• Why shoe repair: he lives on the end of a street of shoe stores and there are other shoe repair guys also set up here. He also explained that he used to work as a welder which was very hard and dangerous, he finds shoe repair very peaceful comparatively.
• Daily net income: $9 /$22.50ppp
• His costs are negligible but the initial investment for his tools and grinder was about $60.
• He gets about 10-15 customers per day that pay between $0.50 and $5.00 depending on the kind of repair.

I’ve made a few realizations about these businesses: They survive in part because an incredible capacity for idleness. A lot of these people live in their families’ home and really exist in a world without bills and other overhead expenses that need to be supported by a full time job. If it’s not their role to support a family they can really afford to just bring in a little bit of money once in a while.

They also don’t directly compete with each other on price, quality, or the variety or novelty  of their goods and services. They don’t even compete geographically. You can find long streets of nothing but stores that all sell identical brown shoes (or light bulbs, or mannequins). They rely on social networks and loyalty for their marketing. People buy from vendors that they have family or social connections to, and they stay very loyal to one vendor. Everyone has their particular guy for everything.

Originally I was disappointed that the Muhammad Yunnus model of micro-finance hadn’t caught on here in Vietnam. Now I realize that it already exists here and it always has. They just don’t need any smarty-pants outside economists to come here and set up a financial structure for making small loans to individual and family ventures. Vietnamese already do this very efficiently within their family and social networks.

Culturally and sociologically this is a fantastic part of the urban world. Everyone knows everyone else on their block. Hugely complex and intertwining social networks keep order in the city. And people who would otherwise be left out of the economy get to participate, especially the elderly.

I think the US could benefit a lot if people could run businesses out of their homes, especially in poor dense urban environments. I imagine you might not have as much violence on the streets if they were filled with grandmothers selling soup and people repairing bicycles and kids running around buying eggs from their neighbors.

On the other hand none of these businesses probably pay taxes, follow any particular health code or minimum wage, or are legally liable. This works here though because they are socially liable to their families and neighborhoods. I’m not sure if it would in the US.

I went to another conference last week. This one was my favorite so far. It was hosted by the Vietnam Green Building Council on the topic of Green Building in Vietnam. They brought in some really good speakers from Singapore and India. I learned a lot about the cost/benefit of different levels of green building and a lot about the real specifics of the planning and building process. There was also really interesting discussion about the role of green building certification and even some analysis of developer incentive. There was even a really detailed lecture on exactly how air conditioners work and how to make them more efficient.

What also made it good was the crowd. Everybody there was either a serious industry expert, an active member of a relevant NGO, or a representative of a company somehow involved in green building. Again there were awesome real time translation headphones and great free food.

There was also this wonderfully unnecessary powerpoint slide:

I met a few really interesting people, including a partner from a Venture Capital firm that was starting a clean tech fund. That was very exciting for me as it’s a perfect match for my background. I pitched to a couple of clean tech VCs when I was working for Nitride Solutions and really learned a lot about the venture capital process from my technology entrepreneurship program at UCSB. I emailed him my resume. He responded today that they’ve filled up all the positions for their clean tech fund. I emailed back making the case to make a spot for me, even if only as intern or research assistant or something else entry-level. I don’t have high hopes though.

I am starting to feel conflicted. So far I have been very picky about who I actually send my resume to. For starters I don’t want to get a reputation in the small business community here as being the guy who sends everyone his resume. More importantly though is the first job I take here is really going to set the tone for my whole career. I would much rather start out in venture capital, or micro-financing, carbon credit trading  or something else interesting like the wine importing company I applied to.  I’m afraid to do something bland might really stick with me and put me down a boring career path.

Next time I look for a job I don’t want to have on my resume that I spent the last two years exporting low grade galvanized steel because that will make to make the case for doing something cool even harder. At this point I’m still a blank canvas.

On the other hand I’ve been here over a month now and I haven’t made any real progress in finding an actual job or project. I’m starting to get tempted to just go the traditional route and spam my resume to every company I find.

Doing that would call into question my most basic assumption of what I’m doing here: the idea that if you can put yourself out there in the business world, actively network, and make an effort to impress people you meet, you can get on the inside track to a good job several rungs up the career ladder from what you would get just responding to employment ads.

Perhaps it is still a good idea, but I’m just not very good at it. Maybe I don’t make a good first impression. There is always that evil little demon that lives in our heads that causes us to talk to most about what we know the least about. At the time we think we are cleverly implying a greater underlying knowledge but in reality we probably just come off looking like idiots. Maybe mentioning that I’m looking for work so early when I meet people is a turn off.

I could blame it on the economic crisis, but I think that’s a cheap excuse. Sure companies are cutting costs, but life still goes on. Besides, I haven’t met anyone else out here trying to do what I’m doing, so there really only needs to be one opening somewhere for what I’m doing to work.

Oh well. I’ll keep at it for now. If nothing comes up by mid janurary I’ll have to change strategy.

Lately I’ve been networking full time, going out to these business conferences and other social events, meeting people that I think might help lead me to an interesting job or other promising opportunities.

It’s been a learning experience. At first I was talking to a lot of people at these business conferences who really weren’t my peers in any way.  They were all older than me, and usually worked very high up in big organizations, banks, trade groups, government ministries, embassy’s and NGOs. I had some interesting, if a bit awkward, conversations with these folks during these events. But they would never respond if I wrote them an email trying to follow up.

Recently I’ve been going to different sorts of social gatherings, and a lot more charity fundraisers and events. Charity events are a big deal here because so many people work in NGOs, and it’s very important to expats to stay involved. I’ve been recognizing and getting to better know people I’ve already met, instead of always starting fresh. Most importantly still is that I’m really starting to meet some more people closer to my age, background, and situation. This week I’ve met some other recent graduates getting into economics and finance, a few younger professionals that are also looking for projects to work on or their next job, and some guys from San Fransisco working doing environmental research.

The first lesson I’ve learned is that business conferences and lectures aren’t very hospitable to social outsiders.

Most of the time is spent listening to a presenter. Before and after the event people tend to greet and say goodbye to those they already know, although it’s not too hard to sneak in an introduction and a handshake here and there. The real trick is in which table you sit at to eat. The instinct is to try and sit with people who look important. What happens though is that they engage mostly in conversation amongst themselves about issues that really are none of your business. It’s a lot better to sit with people who look like they’re also somewhat new or out of place simply because they’re a lot easier to talk to.

The second lesson I’ve learned is that if you can find it’s be a lot better to network within your own peer group.

It’s more fun. You have a lot more in common so there’s more to talk about and more opportunity to make friends. That commonality also makes them a lot more likely to identify with your job search and not mind helping you out. Of course the down side is that unlike hanging out with executives they can’t actually give you a job.  Still, they can ask their employers if they’re hiring and recommend you or if they get an offer to do something they can pass it on to you.

The third lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t just talk to someone about business for five minutes, trade cards, email them to follow up, and expect a response.

You really have to hang around in the same circles and meet people a few times before they really can be bothered to deal with you. Worse, if you did email them and they didn’t respond it makes it awkward next time you meet.

This last one is more of an observation than a lesson: a good personality trait for networking is a genuine annoyance at having to eat by yourself. I push myself to meet a lot of people largely because I really just hate sitting alone and silently starting at my food for 20 minutes every night.

Not much direct progress yet though. I sent my resume to a really interesting wine importing company / restaurant group. If they find a place for me in their orginization I’m hoping that I can tap some of my friends back home who have wine industry connections as a resource. I’ve also met a few guys that are interesting in exporting furniture, and some other guys that also have experience in that market. It’s not really the kind of exciting cutting edge industry I would prefer. Still, a lot of people say it’s a good opportunity here and it could lead to interesting things. It’s also a good time for that sort of project, some WTO rules benifiting vietnamese exports are about to kick in and vietnam is about to finish it’s first deep water international shipping port.

I continue to meet a lot of teachers that say they could get me a great job teaching, and I’m still keeping that as my backup plan. Though I did design a few flyers for tutoring advanced business english. I have no idea what the market for that looks like.

Another piece of advice I keep getting is that I should really have my own apartment and motorbike. I don’t think I’ll take those steps until I have found some good work here though. I want to be able to easily pick up and move if I hear about something promising to do elsewhere.

I was talking to my mom the other day about what I’m doing out here, and she thought of a really clever, if not particularly flattering way of describing it. In her words I’m essentially a “Business-Groupie”. Thanks mom.

Actually this is pretty accurate. Basically what I’ve been doing so far is going to businessy events and butting in, hoping to absorb some of the success of those around me through pure osmosis.

I think a nicer analogy would be looking for love. A good strategy when you’re single (analogy: unemployed) is simply to go out to places where you think you might find single people of the gender you desire (business opportunities) and basically make a nuisance of yourself until you find someone you’re compatible with. Once that happens, all the people you didn’t really click with (companies that never emailed you back) don’t really matter any more.

Until then I’m reminded of a Smiths lyric:

“There’s a club, if you’d like to go, you could meet somebody who really loves you. So you go, and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home, and you cry, and you want to die.

You shut your mouth. How can you say, I go about things the wrong way? I am Human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does.”

Or in my case: I am human and I need a job.

Please indulge me while my analogy machine plops out another stinker: This is also a lot like the cliche of a pretty girl from the country going to Hollywood and hoping to be “discovered” and become a famous actress.

Until you get discovered, you need a day job. Something easy you can do in the off hours of being discovered so you don’t run out of money. I realize now that I too need a day job, or at least an internship.

Also, you have to think about what you’ll do here in the off chance that you don’t get discovered. In Hollywood I guess (to continue the cliche) that would be going into porn. I think the local equivalent might be teaching English. It’s easy, it pays well, and you’re basically just selling yourself. No great personal achievement. Still, always an option.

Either way, until what I’m trying to do works out, I’m essentially just on the worlds lamest vacation. While the other tourists spend their time biking through the mountains, kayaking across picturesque bays, touring ancient ruins, and getting really drunk… I go to business conferences and hand out my card to people at coffee shops. Woo!