Ming’s Wisdom

I’ve been asked a lot by my friends how I feel about the recent Foxconn iPhone incident, where a Foxconn employee committed suicide after being accused of stealing an iPhone prototype. Having worked at Apple on the iPhone 3G and 3GS, spending almost half my time on Foxconn grounds and working with Foxconn employees in Southern China, I feel obligated to make a few observations.

First of all, I don’t know very much about this incident other than the details revealed by the press, so I can’t draw any conclusions about whether any stealing was going on or whether either company did anything wrong. However, both having seen the front lines of Apple and Foxconn employee relations, and being Chinese American, I can draw a few conclusions from my knowledge of the culture of both.

Apple is, in summary, American. People work hard on a product, driven by consumer demand and holiday shopping. High stress levels and long working hours are what employees have chosen through their own free will, and in return they get salaries, stocks, and the rush of developing the next big thing. People are willing to negotiate and yell at each other over what’s best for the product, and in the end the best solutions are chosen. Foxconn however, as expected, is much more engrained in a Chinese culture. There is a high regard for elders, both age-wise and in company position. Chinese people are very accommodating, to the point of sacrificing themselves. People work hard as well, not so much driven by satisfying shopping seasons, but by the need to please bosses and customers. The customers, in this case, are Apple.

The moment I landed in China I was put into a big VIP van with chauffeur carrying my luggage, given a gigantic VIP badge to hang around my neck, and guards stood up to salute when I walked by. And what did I do to deserve this? I worked for Apple. To this day I’ve felt the VIP badge to be a huge oversized eyesore that brought unnecessary hierarchy to what otherwise could have been a much healthier relationship. We solved engineering problems together, as expected. We worked hard together, as expected. We sat in boring meetings between lots of people from both companies, as expected. But what alarmed me, was where the yelling in those meetings was coming from, and to whom it was going to. Apple people yelled at each other, that was fine, whoever got yelled at, yelled back. But Foxconn never yelled back. The mega-monster VIP card breathed a massive force field to block any criticism aimed at Apple.

Well, to be clear, Foxconn was the one to require those VIP badges. Now why would a group of people choose to limit themselves as NOT EQUAL to another group? I think the Chinese culture of being accommodating and respecting status plays a role in this, and the long history of more hierarchy as well. I’ve definitely seen much less pride in Foxconn employees and more humbleness, which seems to fit my general gut feeling from meeting people in Southern China. One other factor is that Apple is in China, doing work speaking ENGLISH. Everyone at Foxconn needs to speak in their second language to communicate, and this automatically gives an impression that the Apple people are “better”. If you reverse that and Apple people had to learn Chinese, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Apple employees were more often the ones who look dazed and slightly confused, and the raising of the voices would come more from the Foxconn side.

Two experiences of mine really highlight how the two company cultures could come together to cause havoc, despite no one party intending any harm. On a Sunday afternoon, two Apple employees, Byron and I, were at the factory. As we worked, a man wearing a mask sprayed a mystery substance all around the area. We were pretty scared, and emailed some people to find out what it was, and why the guards outside were only provided small masks inadequate to protect from the spray. The two of us were some of few people from both companies who made good friends with the guards, and did not treat them as “subordinates”. To our surprise, the response we got from Foxconn was that Apple employees would be notified when the next spraying would occur. Where was the respect for your own health, for the health of our friends who have to work as guards on Sundays? Do they deserve more deadly bug spray than higher ranking managers? To be frank, they probably deserve much less. Later as I recall, was a comment from an Apple employee about how the bathrooms smelled. Foxconn then closed the bathroom to its own workers and made it “VIP Only”. Despite being a polite gesture to solve a problem of bathroom overcrowding, by coincidence it ended up being rich predominantly white Americans being able to use the bathroom, while all the Chinese kids working for low wages weren’t able to access their own bathroom. I was not willing to tolerate any of this. I emailed a huge group of people, included directors and HR, and caused a huge ruckus. And I loved it, since it sent a bunch of people scrambling, and fixed the situation immediately.

In both the experiences, no one from either Apple or Foxconn intended to do any harm, though the end result wasn’t too good. To apply to the current situation where the Foxconn employee committed suicide, I see these factors at work to cause problems out of something very small. Foxconn tends to treat anything Apple as the most important thing it’s ever touched. And Apple tends to be very anal about keeping track of iPhones so that no information leaks. So a combined culture of a one-sided subordinate relationship between Apple and Foxconn, and the worship of the iPhone’s secrecy as the most important aspect of the job, quickly spirals into what happened recently. My guess is that he didn’t steal the phone, and that it was a simple accident of the phone gone missing. After all, working in our offices in Cupertino phones would often go missing for days when coworkers take them to work on in their own offices. In this way Apple employees and Foxconn employees definitely get different treatment. My personal opinion is that no consumer product should be worth a person’s life, no matter how much money that product launch can make. The two companies will really need to figure out these cultural differences to make their relationship more level. I really don’t think Apple did anything to cause this incident, but I’m not saying that Apple has done too much to make sure they are treating their factories in the most respectful manner either.

Today I stayed at home.

My family is moving to California and living with me. I’m very happy about it, and have been cleaning recently to make room for our truck-load of stuff. Since I no longer work, I have just enough time to go through the things in the garage to “simplify” things a bit.

But today was more than just another day of cleaning. Even though I wasn’t going on an exciting date like Stephen, and wasn’t lounging around in underwear doing nothing like Joseph , and I was simply home scooting furniture around and scooping squirrel poop out of the garage, I spent my day with a feeling of fulfillment, that nothing could have made this day better.

Two people, an older lady with a young man, walked over to the dumpster a short distance from my open garage door. They pushed a cart with them, wearing plastic gloves and immediately started digging through the trash. Being a compulsive recycler, and also being educated in the art of California CRV refunds, I knew exactly what they were doing. I asked if they were looking for bottles and cans to sell for money, and offered to bring mine over. I didn’t have that many to give, but the look of those two making a living off of those cans made me feel so very sorry for them. So I did what I had to do… steal some from Joseph’s pile (no one tell Joseph ). I put it together with mine in a bin and carried it over for them. The young man said thanks in a shy and embarrassed way, then insisted on carrying the bin back for me.

Later a man in a motorcycle outfit walked towards the dumpster. He was very friendly, and started talking to me. He had a Hulk Hogan kind of look, but had trouble lifting up the trash that he was trying to throw away because he broke his wrist. While dumping the trash the weight of the trash can caught his wrist at a wrong angle, and he froze. He called out to me to quickly help him catch the can so that his wrist can stop lifting. We talked for a bit more. He can’t work anymore because of that accident, so he asked if I could let him know if I was throwing out anything useful.

Several hours passed, and to my surprise an older Asian lady walked towards the dumpster. Like the pair that came earlier, she also didn’t look homeless, pushed a cart around, and immediately started digging. Yet again I felt very compelled to give her some bottles and cans. So I took a couple more bags from Joseph’s pile… hey he hasn’t recycled them for half a year and they’ve been taking up precious space, so I consider it public domain now due to negligence . As she saw me walking towards her with two bags in hand, and realized what was in those bags, I could see a deep smile form on her face, a smile that cried relief that today will be a good day, that there will be food to eat. She was recently laid off, and has been coming three times a week. As I started walking back, a small kid ran over with some of his family’s bottles, and yelled that he had more coming as the lady thanked him. I could tell that his family has been saving those bottles regularly for this.

As I continued to clean, thinking about those bottles, my neighbor came home from work. I met him and his wife, talked, realized they’ve been living there for two years now. Apparently, one day during the winter every year, the peak of the rainy season overflows our gutters, which are poorly designed to flow through a hole in the garage, through the length of the garage, to the street, and the overflow goes into the neighbor’s garage, damaging their stuff. He looked very happy that I was cleaning my garage, because he had come over a year ago when his garage got wet because the water passage through the garage was clogged (by the squirrel poop), and no one could unclog it because so much stuff was on top of that passage. There was no more stuff on top of that passage, and boy was he excited. He immediately offered to sweep the passage for me, which was now filled with squirrel poop from the surrounding area, which I was putting off to do later since it was very stinky. He didn’t care it was squirrel poop. He swept that passage full of poop like he just won the lottery, and carrying it all with him in a broom pan, made his way towards the dumpster.

I finished up my cleaning as it got dark. The garage was finally clean, and I could walk from one end to the other. Water could flow from one end to the other. Today has been fruitful. But what will happen to everyone that I met today? They were all amazing people, and I hope that they find what they are looking for, be it bottles, health, or a dry garage. In one day of staying home I got to see the interconnected web of the neighborhood, how people who lost their jobs came over to the dumpster for their income, how one family thinks about them each time there are bottles to throw away, how neighbors ask each other for things and how neighbors can help each other out. My garage door was open today, and during that one day of open doors neighbors from every direction came and talked to me and revealed their biggest secrets that they are probably embarrassed to even tell family and friends about. It was amazing to see how these neighbors lived life, how their lives are intertwined, in this cased through that one dumpster in the middle of it all. This one dumpster showed me so much about how life can be difficult when all you have is someone else’s trash, but as long as you cherish what you have and delight in the relationships surrounding you, your life can be quite an enviable treasure. No longer having to work on a Thursday, and leaving that garage door open, has uncovered for me the neighborhood coming alive, making the scarce goods found in the dumpster their treasure and life. Finally I wrapped up and carried the last of the trash to the dumpster. That was my day.

How are you supposed to thrive without a job? That’s the question I set out to answer exactly one week ago.

I had everything, an exciting job at Apple working on iPhones and iPods that have yet to be released, business travel that took me to 5-star hotels in China having my own private bathroom made of glass, and a nice, reliable paycheck. It was the stereotype of the ideal job, but I wasn’t satisfied. Each hour that passed by trying to make sure Apple’s next product was a hit, I felt that the earth was getting a little warmer, the poor were getting a little poorer, and the injustices in this world established themselves even deeper than before. Where was I while all this happened and passed me by, and how am I contributing to resolving global issues when I was simply putting electronics (albeit very well-designed electronics) into (fairly well-to-do) people’s hands? Sure, some of you might say (and have said to me) that the iPhone revolutionizes the way we communicate with each other and use information. But will it reduce segregation of the poor and rich, or teach kids the fundamental values of the greater good? Sorry, but I think improving the world through adding one more way for the rich to chat with their friends, that’s stretching the definition of philanthropy. Okay okay, to be fully honest, I also thought a lot about the hierarchy of corporations, and how the top of the pyramid was deeply established to keep its supports exactly that: supports. After all, what are the chances of me being able to take the place of Steve Jobs, by climbing the ladder? Heck, what are the chances of ANY of the Senior VPs getting to take the place of Steve Jobs?

Exactly one week ago, was my last day at Apple. What will I do afterwards? Eric insisted that I blog about this experience, so here it is =).

Here’s my plan: I will approach this in a three-pronged attack.

1. First, I need to simplify my life. The working life is complicated; working and commuting add lot of of thoughts and tasks to your daily routine. You make more, you spend more, and have more credit cards and belongings to keep track of. I’m going to be selling or recycling things that I don’t have a use for, and organizing the rest. My end goal is to have my life almost self-sustaining in terms of upkeep (banking, papers, taxes etc). I actually plan on writing a few more articles how simplifying can improve your life.
2. Second, I want to improve my habits. Lots of exercise, eating well, improving my eyesight, spending more time with loved ones. Pollute less, recycle more. Think more and learn more. It makes you feel good and want to be more efficient.
3. Lastly, I’m doing several projects to try my hand at making money. I will definitely make use of my programming skills since not everyone can be a good coder, and that gives me a head start. I also plan on doing some computer science tutoring as a side income. In addition, this blog will definitely be written in often, since it’s my venue to write about things I’m passionate about. All in all, my income will be much less than before at least in the beginning, but this still works because I’m spending my time now to cover the fundamentals in #1 and 2. A simplified life where I always have a clear view of my current state, and good living habits, will make life much less expensive. I believe that the savings accrued from work will last for a good period of time (perhaps six months), and after that the projects should be maturing to generate some income.

There will of course be updates to my situation in the future. Currently who knows what will happen with everything, but as things change I will definitely announce the (good) news .

The number 1, divided by your contact lens (or glasses) prescription number, is your eyes’ focal length. This focal length is the distance in meters when things start becoming blurry. This simple statement blew my mind.

Just moments ago, sitting on the toilet, I realized its implications (it’s truly amazing how many of our greatest ideas come either when we’re in the shower, sleeping, or on the toilet). It all started last night, while taking a late-night jog through the streets of North San Jose. I’ve experimented with not wearing corrective lenses while jogging in hopes of making my eyes adapt to naturally focusing into the distance and improving my near-sightedness. Joanne (the optometrist in training) was running with us and revealed this fact to me.

For example, my left eye has myopia with a prescription of -4.00. My right eye is at -3.75. To make it easier to calculate, let’s take my left eye as an example. The number 1, divided by 4.00, equals 1/4th meter. That means when objects are more than 1/4th meter away from my eyes, they are not as clear as they should be.

I have a suspicion that the muscles that focus the eye are at an equilibrium state when focusing on objects at their focal length. E.g. when I relax my left eye, it is focused on 1/4th meter away. Now the only way to bring a healthy 20/20 (1 divided by 0 prescription gives a focal length of infinity) eye’s balanced state to the distance of 1/4th meter probably took a lot of exercise of the eye’s squeezing muscles (ciliary). That much exercise meant that the eye must have focused on objects averaging around 1/4th meter away (probably multiplied by some constant factor). In short, your focal length is determined by the average distance of the objects that you look at. (1)

This could have profound implications on how we treat our eyes in our daily routine. If your focal length is determined by the average distance of the object that you look at, then you would be able to change your focal length by simply looking at objects that average a different distance from you. By its definition, changing your focal length changes your prescription. That means, if your prescription is -4.00, but you would like it to change to -2.00, you would simply need to change your focal length from 1/4th meter to 1/2 meter. Instead of looking at objects averaging 1/4th meter away, look at objects averaging 1/2 meter away. Stop reading with your eyes next to your book, no matter how intense Harry Potter’s next adventure may be. Try not to slouch into the computer monitor. Get outside every so often to avoid staring at walls at a close distance. It may be hard to do, especially for students and certain professions, but could have amazing effects.

Notes:

(1). I don’t yet have concrete experimental proof of this. Right now it’s a suspicion, and was logically deduced from what I currently know about eyes. As I learn more about them I will definitely search with all my ability for experimental proof of this.

Sometimes pressing “shuffle” on my iPhone or iPod to shuffle my playlist into random order can cause a little confusion.

Are you sure this is random? Maybe the random number generator used in the shuffling software is broken? If it’s truly random, how come it keeps playing the same song from the same singer that I don’t like that much? I feel like when I press “shuffle”, it’s not guaranteed that the order of the songs is random.

Well, I think there’s a reasonable explanation for this. What the computer considers random, is truly random. I’ve thought through how the human mind thinks about this, and what we consider random, goes something like this:

1. When an artist is played, the next song (and the next next song) should not be by that artist again, no matter what.
2. Songs of different genres should be balanced, so that songs of one type shouldn’t bunch up.
3. My favorite songs should be played more often. The more I like it the more often it should play.
4. When a song has played, it shouldn’t come up again later.
5. 6 or more songs in a row sung by artists of the same skin color and/or country is a strong indicator that the playlist is not randomly ordered.

You may have noticed that this is very difficult to achieve, especially considering that #3 and #4 conflict with each other. Perhaps for someone with these criteria for “randomness”, they will never be satisfied that their playlist is indeed random (Maybe #4 should really be “When a song has played, it shouldn’t come up again later… unless I like it.”?). A human perception of a randomized playlist is almost completely a carefully hand-selected mix of their favorite songs. In any case, the shuffle feature could probably use some additions to make it more “random” =).

Last night I woke up at 3am, itchy with a few small rashes on several parts of my body. I didn’t know what caused it, but didn’t really get a chance to think about it either since I was still half conscious. But the itchiness increased, and I started to sneeze, a lot. In addition, my eyes felt bulging with pressure, almost like when I’ve had pollen allergies in the past, though pollen should have been much weaker. During the hour when the feeling was most intense, I had plenty of time to think over all the things I did to cause this, and figured it out; it was the walnuts I ate.

So I had walnut allergies, which was a new discovery, but not quite as profound as the one that came right after. At this point my eyes were bulging, feeling like a balloon filled with a little too much air. But what startled me was that I could see everything in my room with stunning clearness, and could distinguish tiny details in all the objects in my sight. I normally am near-sighted, so anything further than about a foot away should start to blur a bit without glasses or contacts, but last night I wasn’t wearing any. And this, I believe, was the last piece of the puzzle that finally came together, in my contemplations about eyesight.

If you’ve ever had near-sightedness, and most people have it to some degree, then you know the standard speech that optometrists give you. Usually near-sightedness comes when you are young, gets progressively worse during the teenage years, and as you get older it slows down and stabilizes. There is no way to reverse it. Please, try on these new glasses and contact lenses, and if putting them on everyday is too much trouble for your daily routine, you should get Lasik surgery. Near-sightedness is caused by the eye ball changing shape, so that the front of the eye is further away from the back of the eye than it should be. The front of the eye ball, acting as a lens, no longer focuses light correctly onto the back of the eye. That’s why you need to get the front of your eye cut with a laser to adjust its curvature for the new shape of your eye, says the friendly neighborhood optometrist.

Forming around the lens of the eye, there’s an elastic ring of ligaments that pushes outwards called the “zonula” (for focusing far), as well as a ring of “ciliary” muscle that contracts to squeeze the eye ball to be longer front to back (for focusing near)(1). As with any muscle, the more exercise it gets, the stronger the muscle becomes. For most people with near-sightedness, their ciliary muscle is a hunk of beefed up machine that never turns off. With ciliary muscles exerting much stronger force than the zonula that tries to balance them, what you end up with is the inability to focus on far-away objects anymore. Several burning questions follow: Why would this happen to so many people? What did people do before the invention of glasses? Are there lions in the Serengeti that can’t see too far, and aren’t they disadvantaged in terms of ability to hunt? Well, following the mechanics of the eye’s focusing described above, near-sightedness would not have been a problem until fairly recently in human history. In recent centuries, our lifestyle has increasingly resulted in our eyes looking at closer and closer objects. We started with an outdoor lifestyle, and moved to one of houses with walls enclosing us on all sides, of reading tiny words printed on paper, of writing on friend’s walls… on Facebook. These close activities have a huge effect on our ability to focus on the far away (2). Our eyes almost never get a chance to relax and focus on objects further away, when everywhere we go there’s something a foot in front of us to look at.

My understanding is that if you don’t use a muscle, it gradually weakens. Relaxing the eye for long periods of time, by looking off into the sky, or at distant trees, can stop near-sightedness. And eventually reverse it. It’s my strong suspicion that if you were to quit your job and go sightseeing in open meadows and hills for six months, when you come back your eyes will be much less near-sighted. All that time looking at far away objects relaxes the ciliary muscles and lets them slowly degenerate, weakening to a state where the zonula can resume its effect on pushing the eye back into shape for focusing on far away objects. I still have a lot to research concerning this subject, but I’m very surprised that no optometrist I’ve seen has ever been able to explain this to me, that a whole industry has sprouted to correct the symptoms of something while ignoring the guiding principles behind its workings.

For those of you who would like to do something about it, I would recommend reading these two books listed at the end of the article. Although I am proud to have made this discovery through my own random experiences (and through my sister’s science experiment, thank you Cara!), over ninety years ago Dr. William Bates first published his findings on the principles I’ve glossed over. The first book is a re-publication of the original book by William Bates, while the second book is a modern expansion of the Bates method, with steps on how to improve your eyesight through exercises. I will be getting these books and following the exercises in them, and I can update you all on the results as things progress.

The Bates Method for Better Eyesight Without Glasses
Relearning to See: Improve Your Eyesight — Naturally!

References:
(1) http://www.pc.ibm.com/ww/healthycomputing/vdt13eyeb.html
(2) http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1059711

Okay, I’ll be honest. I’m experimenting with blogging and at the same time want to make a little side income with it. I’m not sure if it’ll work, but any success would be awesome and exciting. To reassure you though, I will be writing only about things that I am absolutely passionate about. I’ve had a lot of (in my opinion) very intriguing insights on life in general, and I really want to share them. I’ve always wanted to write a book with these thoughts someday, so it’ll be both fun and meaningful. And hey, if I can make a little bit of income from it while doing something I’ll enjoy, it’ll be a nice plus.

I was pretty excited about this whole thing, and I even went ahead and wrote a whole long essay welcoming everyone to my blog. It had big adjectives and other flowery decorations in my writing. Well after a couple days I realized, that’s not me. I’m a pretty straight-forward guy, usually very optimistic and happy, and definitely not an English major. I like to speak my mind without beating around the bush, so this blog will be in my true voice. None of that stuff where you hear one thing and then you infer more stuff from it and psycho-analyze the writer to get to their true meaning. And the two of you can stop hiding now, you know who I’m referring to .

I plan to write about things like my thoughts on how to enjoy life more, being more efficient or successful, or other random experiences that I think are a slightly different way of looking at life, maybe even insightful discoveries that most may not have realized before. It’s mostly aimed at young professionals, but will probably be useful to a wide range of people. I really hope that you’ll benefit from this blog and take away something useful from it. Or at the very least be somewhat entertained by “what other wacky ideas Ming has come up with” =). Enjoy!

– Ming