Day N

Call to Adventure

On Day 1 I walk along the sidewalks and down the long staircases which thread between houses and follow Taylor Ave North, feeding towards downtown Seattle.

As I slip between the houses and the trees I catch glimpses of downtown Seattle. In the humid air the place I will be spending my days appears distant and blurry.

It is about two miles from Queen Anne to the office where I will work in Belltown. Every hundred yards I check my GPS to make sure I’m still on course. As I descend towards the city the buildings become taller and sharper.

I approach the colorful glass building where I will work and sit down outside. I watch as people walk about the area, entering and exiting. Perhaps they are engineers? Doing what I hope to do. I let this sink in as I admire the quantity of maybe engineers–I had only just met my first software engineer a few days ago. The possibility that there were enough of them in the world to fill one of these colorful glass buildings, let alone dozens, was honestly a little perplexing to me. Anyways, I’d seen it with my own eyes, it was a real place it seemed, so I walked home.

Initiation

On *Day 3 *it is Monday morning and I take this walk again, this time without GPS. I sit outside the colorful glass building at a quarter to nine in the morning.

I enter and ascend the tall entry staircase. The riser of each step is steel, and engraved with aphorisms: LEARN AND BE CURIOUS, INVENT AND SIMPLIFY, BIAS FOR ACTION…

On *Day 8 *it is Friday so I decide to go for a leisurely walk around lunch time. I walk towards what looks like the most central part of the Amazon headquarters which is anchored by the three largest buildings: *Re:Invent, Doppler, *and Day 1. Inside them, on the walls are displays including Emmy awards, every edition of Kindle, and a large map describing a global network of servers an infrastructure–an empire of breadth and depth.

Road of Trials

*Day 1 *(the phrase), I would come to find, is a core philosophy of the Amazon culture. Coined by Jeff, it emphasizes maintaining the mindset and agility of a small startup company, even as a large company. In particular, it outlines a few key points:

Customer obsession rather than competitor focus

Quick decision-making and nimble action

Fighting organizational bureaucracy and stasis

Just think of the first day of a new job, the excitement and focus you bring; or of a new love, your imagination of what may be.

The opposite would be Day 2, but it is always Day 1, as Jeff says to shareholders in 2016:

Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.

As time passes I gain more and more knowledge and skills and with them my own decision making and agility improves. I learn more about my product and I better understand the users. This all happens rather quietly and rather quickly, perhaps because of my welcoming team, or other reasons. But regardless of reason, rather suddenly, on Day 63 I realized I was wrapping up the substantial part of my work.

Refusal of the Call

On *Day 68 *it is Tuesday and I begin to wonder, now what? I’ve done what I came to do. On Day 68 I realize I should start to enjoy my free time, I can relax now. But if you’re anything like the little me in my head, you can’t do that. To be relaxed is to be stationary is to be complacent. This is followed rather suddenly by irrelevance, excruciating, painful decline, and finally death [1]. No bueno, the little me says.

But if you’re anything like me you also like to not always listen to little me. You like to be bold, take charge, and attempt to flex, bend, and shape your mind in the name of curiosity. So you would try to relax and do nothing for a little while. So I did.

And honestly what followed was a painful manifestation of boredom.

And it wasn’t that I was short of fun plans to occupy my time. In fact, I had compiled a substantial “bucket-list” of things to do in the Seattle surround. In the earlier days like Day 34 and Day 52, whenever I might have had some free time, I would often assume I was a little too deserving of rest to tick something off my list. Whether I was really tired or not, I assumed this was a reasonable approach because, of course, I would have plenty of time later to explore and dilly dally about.

But now that the time for exploration and dilly dallying is upon me, I am disappointed to find that without any “real work” to do, I don’t really magically have any more energy or drive to pursue these experiences I’d been putting off.

On the morning of *Day 72 *I visit the nearby bakery I’ve been eyeing for months and finally purchase the croissant of my dreams. It tastes like everything I could have hoped and dreamed. Why didn’t I do this sooner?

On the afternoon of Day 73 it is pouring rain and I visit Pike Place Chowder which is deserted and slurp down the sampler selection. Seafood Bisque, Smoked Salmon, Crab and Oyster, and classic New England.

I continue to live in an experiential opulence for the next few weeks.

The Road Back

I’m not the best at hellos but I’ve especially never liked goodbyes. It’s not just people, but places too; I’ve said goodbye to quite a few places in the last two years. Without fail, in every place I’ve ever left, on my last day and night I walk. I like to walk by the places I’ve gotten used to: maybe the place I go to buy groceries, sometimes the place I did my laundry, definitely the place that served the food I liked to eat on a celebratory evening, and always the place I would go to watch the sunrise if I couldn’t sleep. Every single time I feel the same thing almost exactly: catharsis. It feels good to be done with something–one last look is what I need to be ready to move on.

So I put on some Radiohead and go for my walk.

On Day 98 it is grey and rainy in Seattle. I pause my walk to take in one more look towards downtown from my secret spot.

Crossing the Threshold

At Amazon I learned a lot about Day 1, about pushing yourself and sharing your ideas, about not ‘settling in’, about an endless ‘startup’ mentality. *Day 1 *makes a lot of sense when we talk about a technology company and a culture we might desire. But for most of us, living life is not like running a technology company. We don’t need to strive to live on the bleeding edge. Still though, why should we settle to be complacent about our own daily lives?

A Day 1 mentality doesn’t sound quite right to live by, but neither does a *Last Day *mentality. I think that a Last Day mentality is not a human experience limited to my personal time in Seattle. In all our lives we may find ourselves procrastinating the experiences we look forward too with the expectation that we’ll have time to do them later. However I think if we were to study this pattern we would find that it will almost inevitably lead to missed opportunities, poorer experiences (because they are rushed), and ultimately regret over not starting sooner.

How about *Day N? *

Treat each day as equally valuable and worthy of meaningful experiences

Spread out enjoyable activities rather than backloading them

Maintain awareness of finite time without being paralyzed by it

Live more intentionally throughout an experience rather than just at the beginning or end

I’ve always felt that trying to declare some rules to live by and living by them seems like a really contrived activity. I still stay up too late and don’t always make my bed. Anyways, maybe it’s worth a try sometime.

Day N

On *Day N *I took my last photo in Seattle.

On Day N we hiked for miles on a treacherous beach wearing jeans and sneakers during a “bomb cyclone” in search of “The Hole”.

On Day N the team and I roamed in search of the coolest office space.

On Day N the leaves fell off the Japanese Maple. It was beautiful!

On Day N we went on a bicycle/scooter adventure.

On *Day N *I watch over my boss’s dog. How adorable!

On Day N I show up to my first day of work, enthusiastic, if not a little nervous, and unsure of what I will make of my time here.