In my last post, I talked about how much I loved “Delivering Happiness”, so much so that I swooped an entire rack of it at MPH last weekend.

As I was about to reach cashier, a lady cut the queue. She didn’t mean it. I stood so far from the counter that she had no idea I was in line until she turned around.

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s ok, please go ahead,” I replied with a smile.

My turn came. The lady and cashier were puzzled why a grown man wrapped both arms around a stack of books like a kid hoarding his toys.

“This is an AMAZING book. I am giving them away.”

She was puzzled. It is something I learned from my mentor. He has bought boxes of his favourite books and given them away as gifts to his friends. It has inspired me to do the same.

“Great! Do you have our membership card? You can get a 30% discount.”

Well mine expired.

“Why don’t you use mine?” Remember the lady that I let into the queue? She held out her membership card.

“Oh, thank you so much!”

As I paid for the books, it just struck me how random acts of kindness can be contagious. Touched by the generosity of my mentor, I started giving books away. From one book giver, there are at least two today. Ten other people are reading Delivering Happiness because someone touched me with generosity. Little did I knew that by being gracious to the lady that accidentally cut the line, I ended up saving myself a small fortune.

We all went home happier that day because two strangers decided to be kind to each other. Happiness can be multiplied.

Don’t laugh, but I just install iBooks app on my iPhone. Also ordered an iPad2, my first tablet and e-reader. It should arrive in May. Back to iBooks on iPhone. Back to iBooks on my iPhone…I started browsing the New York Times top 20 booklist. Downloaded a bunch of them on my phone. You get to read the first chapter for free to decide whether you wanna buy the book. Very fair, I thought.

I started with one of the top business book on NYT’s bestseller list, Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. Forked out U$10 via iTunes and the book landed in my hand seconds later. I zipped through the book in a week. The CEO of Zappos.com, the largest shoes and apparel online retailer, with a turnover of over U$1 billion just sold the company for U$1.2 billion to Amazon. You would expect him to talk about how to make your first million before you reach 24. After all he co-founded LinkExchange and then sold it to Microsoft for U$265 million, 2 years after he graduated from Harvard.

Instead it was his mantra about creating a culture that leads to profit, passion & purpose that got me hooked. Here are the major lessons I learned from the book:

1. Passion over Security


As a fresh grad working at Oracle, Tony was getting U$40,000 per year. Pretty handsome starting pay in the 1990s especially when you can finish your work in five hours. He wasn’t passionate about the job. Parents opposed the idea of quitting a stable job to start an internet company. 

A sense of security can lull us into complacency. Sometimes the lack of security net are all we need to make our dreams work. There is no plan B, exit strategy. It’s sink or swim. I bet we would swim as hard as we could. Two years after quitting Oracle, Tony and his partners sold LinkExchange to Microsoft for U$265 million. A millionaire at 24. 


2. Know your Worth


BigFoot offered to buy LinkExchange for U$2 million just five months Tony and his mate Sanjay started the project. A few months later, Yahoo came knocking with U$20 million. Ain’t a bad idea to make a few million for a few months of work. Eventually, they sold it to Microsoft for U$265 million. It is hard to quantity our worth. Sometimes it is a gut feeling. Just because we cannot justify an intuition scientifically or rationally, it doesn’t mean we should ignore it all.


3. Fail your way to Success


This is tough sell for Asians! We equate failure as embarrassment & punishment. Remember getting smacked for scoring 89 in primary school? “What happened to the other 11 points?” my inquisitor teacher interrogated. Guess why we copy others? To avoid failure!

Breakthroughs always reside outside the status quo. We cannot innovate if we insist on 100% success. Failure is part of innovation & growth. Reading Tony’s catalogue of failures freed me to embrace mistakes as part my journey to growth.


4. Create Engagement, not Buzz


Facebook & Twitter is about creating buzz for our business, according to a lot of marketers. “You’ve gotta tweet lots and post lotsa stuff on FB!” Buzz = Hype = Hot Air?

“My mother has no buzz but when she talks, I listen.” 

That’s one of my favorite quote from the book. Creating buzz is like standing in a busy market, screaming “Buy here! Buy here!” The problem is a thousand other people are doing the same thing!

Why do we tell our friends about the best laksa place in Penang, coziest bed & breakfast place in Paso Robles, the most amazing book we read recently? Perhaps all these had engaged a deeper part of our beings. We can’t help but talk & tell others about it. Engagements are created by amazing experiences, not by dominating a conversation or talk the loudest. 


5. Building Friendships not Network


I share Tony’s dislike for networking events where people swap business cards with hope the other person can help you out in business and vice versa. Instead, Tony prefers to focus on building relationships and getting to know people just as people…regardless of their position in the business world.

Stop looking at everyone as a $ sign, and start treating them with respect. “Would I be just as nice if there was no business interests in this relationship?” That’s my personal litmus test. 


6. Culture over Mission Statement


Every company, school, church, and political parties have a mission statement. I wonder how many of these bold sounding statements actually change the organization or improve lives. Don’t favor code of conduct either because they sound too much like a inhibiting list of do’s and don’ts. 

Meanwhile, Zappos build a culture based core values. For example, its number one core value, “Delivering WOW through Service”. With staff in the call center empowered to upgrade the standard shipping to overnight shipping, they wowed their clients who in turn rave about them.



To prove a point, Tony’s pals called up Zappos renown customer service line at 11pm because they were hungry and couldn’t find anyone delivering pizza at those hours. I would have hung up but the Zappos rep came back with a list of pizza deliveries in the area of the callers. In a lot of small businesses, the DNA of the organization is only evident in the key personnel. Building a service culture that permeates the entire organization is a lot harder.

7. Customer Experience over Marketing
Zappos would rather spend money to improve customer experience than on marketing. They believe that a positive customer experience is the most powerful marketing. It is not cheap to run the warehouse 24/7 or to provide a 365-day return policy but it makes people happy. It is a crazy to run a business like that…maybe that’s why their customers are crazy about them? Can Zappos radical approaches translate into healthy profits and growth? Zappos board didn’t think so and wanted to oust Tony. Food for thought…

Please don’t think Zappos is this corporate utopia where everyone walks on cloud nine. In 2008 at the peak of the financial crisis, they laid off 8% of their workforce. Tony’s commitment to building a happy culture in the company was labelled as a “social experiment” by his board. That’s what I love this book, real stories of how Tony wrestle with economic reality, a resistant board, and his ideals.

This is not a how-to book on customer service but the stories of failures and successes of Zappos narrated in first person by its CEO. With a broad stroke of honesty, candidness & audacity, it inspires me to improve my customer experience and cultivate the LPS culture. I expected Tony to be slightly abrasive and cocky since he was this internet whiz kid who made millions at 24. However he came across as foolishly passionate and rather thoughtful person.

Effective today, Delivering Happiness has become a compulsory reading at Louis Pang Studio. Get your copy!

Nine years ago today, Jasmine and I got married in St. Patrick’s Church. We hosted a small reception and went on a road trip around Sabah as our honeymoon. We were so broke that we couldn’t afford a professional photographer but we were happy.

When I woke this morning, Jasmine whispered, “Happy anniversary darling.” Nine years. That’s 3285 days with the same person. It didn’t seem that long! What makes a ninth anniversary? A culmination of many different kind of days; each leading to another.

Days in heaven. There were quite a few of them. The first day we moved into our first home, bought our first car, landed our first business deal, first time we won first place at WPPI. Lots of teary moment.

Days we hated each other. Not many, but I remember a few plates were destroyed, sleeping in different rooms, not talking for a few hours. These were days we wondered how we could carry on as a couple.

Days we cannot forget. I remember confessing to Jasmine about messing up a business deal very badly, one with a price tag of many zeros. She just held me and said, “We will get through this together.” Together. That’s the keyword. Unconditional love and acceptance. Sometimes I wonder what I had done to deserve such a wonderful woman. Also remember the first six months of starting our business. We had zero sales. We exhausted our savings. We were praying on our knees for a breakthrough. Those days taught us to be courageous and trust in God. Days we will never forget.

Days of plain vanilla. 99% of the last 3285 days fell into this category. We wake up and play our usually silly games. The loser will hit the shower first and the winner get to stay in bed for another 10 minutes. Head to work. (FYI, Jasmine and I run the business together the last seven years.) Cook dinner. Read some books, watch some movies and say our good nights.

Anyone looking into these days would probably think they are boring or insignificant. We would browse the internet on our laptops and exchange a glance or smile every now and then. Jasmine would bring over a cup of tea or coffee. I would walk over, brush her hair and tell her I love her. Just little gestures. When I was a long way from home, I thought of these moments. I missed these little gestures the most.

Well, we are 364 days to our 10th anniversary which I think deserve a year-long celebration. Shhh…don’t tell Jasmine but I am cooking up some ideas now

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’d know that the Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe softbox is my goto softbox for flashes. I’ve got the 30” and 24” version which I bring to every wedding. 

I am RELIGIOUS about my lighting approach. I ALWAYS do it step-by-step.

Just the available light
Just to see what it looks like without any flash. “Is it ok without flash? Do I need light?” I would ask. From here, I would device a lighting solution. Should it be from the left, right, bottom or top? Soft or hard? This is the baseline that allows me to compare the before-and-after of flash. I need to know how flash will change the scene. The baseline gives me that info.

Just with available light. ISO640, f/2.8, 1/80.

As a wedding photographer, my solutions depend on what my clients want. Priya & Mahendran wanted some pictures on this stage at the Hindu temple at which they just got married minutes ago. It was the end of the shoot…we had about 10 minutes. That tells me plenty about what I need to do. Retain some ambient light because I must show the environment. Make them look good. And get it done under 10 minutes.

Bring in the main light
Ezybox Hotshoe 30” on a paint pole was the main light, held at 45 degrees towards Priya & Mahendran. This usually solve a lot of lighting problems. Not for Priya & Mahendran. They have deep eye sockets. Any light coming from the top will introduce shadows around the eyes. They look heavy and tired.

A subtle improvement. The eyes still look heavy because they are under shadow.

Supplement the main light
How do we get rid the heaviness and shadows? If the light from the top created shadows, a light from opposite angle should counter and solve the problem. Another light from the lower angle point up towards the couple. A flash on 24” Ezybox. Why have a smaller softbox here? Well, I don’t have another 30”

Some people call this clamshell lighting or glamour lighting. I didn’t invent this. You can see how the additional light just lifted the picture. It feels lighter & happier. Both lights are on TTL.

The second softbox coming from a lower angle brings clear improvement to the picture.

It’s time to play
Now we’ve got the flash figured out, it’s time to have some fun with Priya and Mahendran. It’s easier to focus on interacting with the couple when I don’t have to worry about the technical stuff. Ten minutes later, it’s a wrap.

Yummy light & lots of fun = a nice photo

Guerrilla can go glamor. You just need two flashes, softboxes and two pairs of spare hands

note: entire series shot at ISO640, f/2.8, 1/80. D3S + 70-200mm

Amanda is warm & bubbly while Daniel a poised gentlemen. That was my impression after meeting them over coffee. They met during their days in Australia. Rumors had it that Daniel said something real impressive the first time they met. That was how he got Amanda’s number

I love how involved everyone was in the wedding. The friends and family created so many teary and funny moments. Amanda’s dad, Kean Ming who is an avid photographer, snapped away with his Leica in the house. Love how involved he was. I was determined to show Amanda how often his father smiled when he looked at her. He was so proud, happy and friendly. Not very typical of Asian dads.

Then there were the friends and bridal party to add to the cheers. Jia Heng, in particular, was super funny. Love the ‘musical’ he performed with his mates. Just very blessed to shoot a wedding that is so rich with love, emotion and connection…