Gloria's Blog

On New Year’s Eve, me and my friend Jason set out for a mini adventure. We went on the street and asked strangers one question, “If you could change one thing in 2018, what would you change?” We asked nine people, including a couple from San Francisco, a backpacker from Spain, a homeless artist in front of a Starbucks, a couple under Ferris Wheel, a daddy taking daughter in a chocolate shop, a fisherman by the lake, an Uber driver. We videotaped everything, and made it into a documentary. Here are six things I learned from this mini adventure: 1. We asked nine people. Nine people answered. People are nicer than you thought. Well, I can’t ensure everyone will get 100% success rate at any time :) Win people’s trust is one of my strengths. Later, Jason told me his observation: my gesture of approaching people, how I open a conversation, how I pause after asking questions, how I listen. But I still think my seemingly innocent chubby face might be the biggest successf...

Last week, I went to the Microsoft Redmond campus for the annual AI and Machine Learning Conference. It was a fantastic conference! But in the afternoon, I had a serious information overflow. I can't intake and process any more info. So I hopped on a Lyft. Driver's name is Jeff. When I was on the car, Jeff started talking to me. We started by chatting about random things. For example, he said, "Well, Wednesday is usually slow. But you sometimes get a lot of riders. It's either a hit or a miss." - I was passively listening and said "hum interesting.", and thinking, well, you said a lot but you said nothing. Then Jeff started to talk about the new airport pick-up service that Uber just introduced. I got a bit more interested. I asked him some more details about how the service work. He couldn't really explain. And he is aware of that. - Then I was politely passively listening again, about to plug in my earphones for some music. After Jeff fi...