Day D9: Hammering it Out

February 13, 2025

With only a few days remaining, it was time to take stock of the situation and see how many group classes plus events I had managed to hammer out. It was staggering. So the natural questions that emerge: why is this happening and why so gung ho about it?

The answer to that is really two-fold. First is that the belly fat accumulated over three months due to a toxic job and a leadership change to micromangement which, let's be honest, was unprecedented. Would it be unrealistic to reverse the entire thing over a week in Dubai plus all the cycling in Thailand? Surely so. But I could make a killer dent in this fat and then continue chipping it away at a slower pace when returning from the holiday.

The second part is that Dubai simply offers the opportunities in abundance to do these things. Fitness, partying, healthy living. Dubai represents what the life in Shanghai used to be like before all the restrictions kicked in and the toxic bosses came to keep people enslaved. In fact I would say, despite the negatives mentioned earlier, it's an even better situation than what Shanghai was in the past.

It was at another event last night that some new people I met offered more information and insights to update my earlier views. For one, I wasn't aware of it but the government is actively trying to move people out of cars and promote more cycling infrastructure. You couldn't see it immediately, but they mentioned that in certain parts of the city it is rapidly growing. Even the event organizer said that she cycles around everywhere.

People also said there are tons of jobs. It's just that the process of finding and filling them is horribly inefficient. This immediately reminded me of the metaphor with trying to meet people after a social event on the weekend: they were all clogged up in these coffee queues and only mingling with those limited people they knew already. The entire system of meet and greet was set up backwards. She explained that it's the exact same with jobs. It's not that things are necessarily competitive, although they are, but it's more of a structural problem. The allocation system is all backwards. When you go through those websites or whatever, even meeting people at events and passing out CVs, it doesn't really go anywhere. It's like you're wasting your time in a manufactured situation for employers to find people they can't find anywhere else. The real meet and greet is happening organically and off to the side.

There needs to be a more creative and efficient way to do all this, and she helped me gain more traction.

The third rebuttal is that the pace of life mainly depends where you are and what you're doing. Dubai is such a massive sprawling city that I've seen maybe 2% of or less. Some parts are frenetic, others less so.

So all told I probably met another half-dozen people at this event, and in total it was rapidly approaching into the 30s. At that point, I wanted to develop the approach I had for remembering names. There are tons of videos on YouTube about these so-called "gurus" who practice techniques but they mainly involve decontextualized mnemonics, i.e. they say things like 'Sarah is a star who shines' or whatever, then they visualize a star on her face. Say what you want about this method, it simply doesn't work for me. It is unnatural for one and doesn't really aid memory.

What I tried instead was to brainstorm a bunch of ideas for what I usually do to remember names, throw them into AI, and then see if a structure could be built out of this. As this went back and forth, sure enough, it did.

After a lot of back and forth, it became clear that the conversation usually progresses organically. I'm not the one to follow a script of asking the same questions. There are hundreds of ways that things can go. But over time, people share more information and, along with the context that develops, I can build a mini narrative out of it. For example, the German woman who complained that there aren't enough drink choices for non-alcoholics. This led to a conversation where she shared how she quit drinking and encouraged me to cut that also. Combine that narrative with physical features of the person, how they dress, hairstyle, how they talk, etc... then build all that together. Next step is summarize all that into one sentence. After that, cut it down to a few words and make it a title with that person's name. So to use this example it all boils down to 'Amelia: the bold reinventor' This is not some dumb mnemonic like 'Sarah: the star who shines' but rather something with context. Best of all, if you happen to meet the person again months later or somewhere else, you can still remember who they are.

This was immediately clear from the people at Barry's (one of the fitness gyms) who recognized me after months. That was the motivation for all this: if they could do it with me and this is how I felt, then imagine if I could that with meeting others and remembering them after months too. Besides the obvious part of building a personal connection and knowing that people want to be seen and valued, there are business aspects to all this. And let's face it, that's the world we live in. If you can genuinely build these connections and remember names in this way, you never know how down the road it could lead to all sorts of other invitations and business connections. But none of is is really expected or manufactured which, I think is the key to all this.

It was also fitting that I made the switch to the same Airbnb as the previous trip with a much more involved host and in a better location. This actually made a world of difference.

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