Village Courtyard frame

Perfect life

Leisure Time frame

Leisure Tea & Coffee

8391 Alexandra Rd, 
Richmond, BC V6X 3W5

There are actually quite a long list of nice waffle places in Vancouver (see http://www.vancitybuzz.com/2014/03/best-waffles-vancouver/), but most of them are located in downtown. So in the search of a more "pang, lang, jang" and closerby waffle joint, we found Leisure serving what we want.
Overall this ice cream waffle fits our criteria of PLJ, it is close by, and you can also have a nice Taiwanese BBT and salt crispy chicken to go with your late night cravings.

Ice cream waffle ($6.95)

 

Miura Waffle Milk Bar

2521 Main St, 

Vancouver, BC V5T 3E5

http://www.miurawafflemilkbar.ca/sando-menu/

Miura Waffle + Milk Bar is a Japanese-run waffle and drink joint.  They are known for their savory waffle sandwiches "sandos", using waffle as the bread.  Their popular dishes include bulgogi sando (bulgogi beef and kimchi) and GFC sando (with garlic fried chicken).  

We visited Miura for dessert and ordered the Dreamy Berry Waffle + ice cream.  Their waffle is light and crispy served with mixed berries, fresh whipped cream, chocolate sauce.  It is the perfect amount of sweetness.  Not overly sweet.  It also looks like they make their own ice cream as it is soft-served.  Overall, delicious!  I thought it was a bit pricey though.

Very Dreamy Berry Waffle  ($6.50) + Ice cream ($1.50)

Peaceful Restaurant

532 W Broadway #110
Vancouver, BC
http://www.peacefulrestaurant.com/

Peaceful Restaurant is a Northern Chinese Restaurant.  They are best known for their homemade fresh hand-pulled noodles and knife-sliced noodles.  When you eat these type of noodles, you will notice their al dente nature and extra chewiness to it.  The cool thing is that Peaceful had been featured on Diners by hosted by Guy Fieri. 

There are three Peaceful locations in Vancouer.  This time we visited the Broadway location and tried 4 dishes.  3 types of dim sum including the beef roll, XLB steamed buns, pan-fried pork buns and a sauce noodle called Dan-Dan noodle.  I highly recommend their beef roll and noodles.  The Dan-Dan noodle is mixed with their chili oil and peanut sauce, and the noodle itself is nicely al dente.   Their XLBs and pan-fried pork buns lacks soup at Peaceful, and I prefer the more soupy versions that can be found in Crystal Mall or Ning Bo Restaurant.

I did some research online, and other people highly recommend their cumin lamb stir fry noodle.  

Peaceful Beef Roll ($7.95) - Five-spiced beef rolled in a crispy green onion flat-bread & sweet hoisin sauce

Pan-fried Pork Buns ($7.95) - filled with pork and scallions, soft bun, crispy bottom - 6pcs

Dan-Dan Noodles ($7.95) - spicy, tangy peanut sauce, minced pork & spinach

Xiao Long Bao Steamed Buns ($7.95) - filled with minced pork, ginger and a savoury a sauce - 8pcs

Decisive – how to make better choices in life and work

by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Introduction

-          We have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way

-          Quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight on the evidence in front of us and failing to consider the offstage evidence

-          Spotlight effect

-          Why do we have problems with making good decisions? The biases. The irrationality. The gut feeling. Careful analysis. 

-          The process of making good decisions matters more than analysis.  Is it fair?  Did you consider all possibilities?

-          The pitfalls of the “pros-and-cons” list

1.     The Four Villains of Decision Making

-          1) Narrow Framing.  The tendency to define our choices too narrowly, to see them in binary terms.  Ex. Should I buy a new car OR not?  Ex. Cole hired 5 agencies to do a small project to combine the best ideas forward.

This spotlight on the alternative (i.e. OR) at the expense of all the others.

-          2) Confirmation bias.  Our normal habit in life is to develop a quick belief about a situation and then seek out information that bolsters our belief.

-          3) Short-term Emotion.  Ex. Intel decision to discontinue memory products and only continue with microprocessors.  Often decision models are listing key factors and weighing the importance of each factor and then do the math.  But often our feelings churn, agonizing circumstances.  What we need most is Perspectives – to see the bigger picture.

-          4) Overconfidence. People think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold.  We focus and shine spotlight on what we know now, the information close at hand, but we don’t really know what we don’t know they exist.

-          The 4 steps when you encounter a decision process

o   You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options.

o   You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving information.

o   You make a choice. But short term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one.

o   Then you live with it. But you’ll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold.

-          The process should now be: WRAP

-          Widen your options – think of new and better options. “AND not OR”

-          Reality-test your assumptions. Instead of stewing his own data, go out and seek out new data. Ask craftier questions.

-          Attain distance before deciding. determining what were the really important factors

-          Prepare to be wrong. Asked for insurance instead of a I’ll be perfect for the job

-          Ex. Steve Cole’s horse race (5 companies working on one project). Ex. Andy Grove’s question what would our successor do?. Ex. Van Halen no brown M&Ms in contract with list of instructions (tripwires to break the auto-pilot routine)

Widen your options

2.     Avoid a Narrow Frame

-          Teenagers and organizations are prone to narrow frame. With a lack of options. A statement of resolve or a whether or not question. Blind to their choices

-          Often think “how can I make this work” “how can I get my colleagues to behind me” instead of the better, more options questions - “Is there a better way” “What else could we do”

-          Widen your options - often our options are far more plentiful than we think

-          think deeper, what do you want in life, and what school best fits me into

-          Why is it so hard for us to see the bigger picture?

-          Economics – OPPORTUNITY COST – what we give up when we make a decision. Ex. $40 Mexican + $20 movie or $60 sushi + TV.  Ex. Stereo + music or stereo.  Given a slight reminder you can buy other things without the immediate purchase – people choose not to buy things.

-          Being exposed to a slightly weak alternative is enough

-          What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money?

-          Vanishing Options Test – you CANNOT choose any of the lists of options.  What else would you do? When people imagine that they cannot have an option, they are forced to move their mental spotlight elsewhere – and really move it – to generate another option.

3.     Multi-track

-          Multi-track – considering several options simultaneously

-          Ex. Lexicon naming projects often forms three teams of twos with each group pursuing a different angle.

-          Work in parallel and endure inefficiency and wasted time for the most creative work – you learn the SHAPE of the problem

-          Sometimes reluctance is still instructive. The choice pitch may know the right option, sometimes you don’t.  but act of surfacing another option still help us make better choices

-          Exploring multiple options simultaneously may generate DECISION PARALYSIS. But we are asking to push one or two more options.

-          Cobble together the best features of our options

-          Helps us keep our egos in check – one project per person feel criticism against the person, whereas several project per person feel criticism against the projects.  Your ego is tied up to your only one option.

-          Combine the mindset of PREVENTION and PROMOTION… seek out options that minimize harm and maximize opportunity – uncover a full spectrum of choice

-          Prevention focus = avoid negative outcomes

-          Promotion focus = pursue positive outcomes

-          Ex. reducing stress and increasing happiness

-          Beware of SHAM OPTIONS – ex. three options with two bad ones surrounding one good one to narrow frame the decision

-          Push for “this AND that” rather than “this OR that”

4.     Find Someone Who’s Solved Your Problem

-          To break out of a narrow frame of mind, a basic way is to find someone else who’s solved your problem

-          Ex. Walmart owner Sam Walton – “benchmark” competitors and absorb industry “best practices”

-          Ex. Sepsis. Difficult to detect, and why intervene early when there’s no sign.  Change -> whenever order a blood culture (physician worries about a blood borne infection), a lactic acid test is also ordered (indicator of sepsis). Sepsis alert – “code blue” equivalent to cardiac arrest alert.

-          Ideas can stem from externally or internally. Search for best practices. Look for bright spots within own organization.

-          And generate a PLAYLIST – proactive search on how it was done (like a quick thorough brainstorm of list of items before action, to spark new ideas, and to remind yourself to shine your spotlight everywhere, spurs us to multitrack)

-          What if there are no best practices to consult or no bright spots to study from?

-          Ex. how scientists think by ANALOGY.  Looking at similar experimental design or organisms.  “search for other problems that have been solved”

-          Granular problems benefit from local analogy, and conceptual problems benefit from regional analogies.  Like a ladder, the lower rugs offers views very similar to yours and has a high probability of success, meanwhile higher up more and more options but requires leaps of imagination thought with a high probability of failure.

-          Ex. speedo designs after watching shark’s skin and torpedo structure

-          Evade a narrow frame,

o   by widening your options (asking different questions, changing situation)

o   Use the Vanishing Options Test – what if I can’t do either of them? What would I do? Ask different questions

o   Multitracking by “AND not OR” – how to do both?

o   Playlist – stimulate new ideas

o   Find someone that has solved our problem internally (bright spots), externally (competitors, benchmarking, best practices), and into the distance (laddering up)

-            How then do we avoid the Confirmation Bias?

Reality-Test your assumptions

5.     Consider the Opposite

-       It is unwritten law that businesses should be growing every year.  Yet there are countless CEO’s making poor acquisition decisions every year.  This seems to be correlated with the praising press of the CEO’s – increasing their over self-confidence.

-       A good CEO need the courage to seek out CONSTRUCTIVE DISAGREEMENT

-       CONFIRMATION BIAS – hunting for information that confirms our initial assumptions (self-serving).  It is a tendency to find data that confirms out bias/wish/thinking (twice more likely to favor confirming information than disconfirming information) – especially when lots of time and effort has been invested.

-       Ex. Reference check for your favourite candidate

-       What’s the best way to assess the options we generated?

-       Consider the opposite – spark constructive disagreement. Search for disconfirming information. – built into legal systems and Church’s devil’s advocate for the canonization of a saint

-       How do you plan for disagreement inside organizations? Build in prescribed both sides for constructive argument – allows you to see from both sides

-       Change your way of thinking from “Here’s why we picked the decision” to “What data convince us of that?  This will back away your beliefs and allow factual exploration by which they give themselves an opportunity to learn something new

-       Asking tough, disconfirming questions can improve the quality of information.  Ex. iPods – “What problem does it have?” vs “What can you tell me about it”

-       ASK DISCONFIRMING QUESTIONS to people who have an incentive to spin you.  Esp. salesman, recruiters etc.

-       Open ended questions  work better for doctor/patient situation

-       To distinguish which question to ask, ask yourself, “What’s the most likely way I could fail to get the right information in this situation?” 

-       For marriages, confirmation bias also affects your notion of the spouse.  If you are frustrated with your spouse about not appreciating you, you would often notice the times that he didn’t.  For therapy it is recommended to keep a “marriage diaries” that keep tracks of things that pleases them.

-       ASSUME POSITIVE INTENT principle is a version of consider the opposite

-       Test assumption by a deliberate mistake

6.     Zoom Out, Zoom In

-       Often in life, we trust our impressions over averages.

-       “Inside view” vs “outside view” of a situation.  Inside view draws information that is in our spotlight as we consider a situation – our impression and assessment of the situation we are in.  The outside view ignores the particulars and analyzes the larger part of it. 

-       The outside view is often more accurate. 

-       Yet often we trust our inside view.  Ex. Entrepreneurship of opening a Thai restaurant.

-       “base rates” – data showing record of other people in similar circumstances

-       Find an expert.  Experts are pretty bad at predictions. But they are great at assessing base rates.

-       Ex. bone marrow transplant patient.  Take the outside view and pushing for base rates from doctors and journal articles.  But also the inside view from individuals who had similar treatments and start to self-impose an exercise regime. 

-       Mixture of big picture view and close up

-       Ex. Franklin D. Roosevelt, also ask public mail and get sorted base rate information about the general public opinion, and double the research team to check information. Read statistical summaries and read a sample of real letters. 

-       Ex. Xerox touch base with their customers combining scientific data and personal experience

-       Zooming out and zooming in gives us realistic perspectives on our choices.  We downplay the overly optimistic pictures we tend to paint.

-       To gather the best information, we should zoom out and zoom in for realistic perspectives and not rely on our rosy painting.

7.     Ooch

-       Ooching – running small experiments to test our theories.  Rather than jumping in headfirst, we dip a toe in

-       Proof of concept experiments

-       Ooching is particularly useful because we are all terrible at predicting the future

-       Entrepreneurs ooch naturally. Rather than create business forecasts, they go out and try things

-       Ex. CarsDirect.com – selling cars directly on internet

-       Ex. Kids wanting to change order of breakfast and getting change

-       Caveat:  Ooching is counterproductive for situations that requires commitment Ex. mid-20s guy wanting to go back to school but dreads going back.

-       Common hiring error – we try to predict success via interviews.

-       Ex. med student’s success rate. 

-       We should ooch instead through volunteer, probation periods.  Allows for expectations of a job.  Results in greater satisfaction.

Once we have widened our options and reality-test our assumptions, often the foremost enemy of a wise decision is you.

Attain Distance before Deciding

8.     Overcome Short-Term Emotion

-       Fleeting emotions tempt us to make decisions that are bad in the long term.  Sometime too confidence and too quick to act, and sometimes too slow and timid and reluctant to take action. Feelings bias toward the familiar.

-       Ex. car salesman to prey on customer’s short term emotion to close a deal. Test drives.

-       To overcome distracting short-term emotions, we need to attain some distance.  Ex. Avoid direct contact with car lots

-       10/10/10 provides distance by forcing us to consider future emotions as much as present ones.  How will I feel about this in 10 minutes? 10 months from now? 10 years from now?

-       Our decisions are often altered by two subtle short term emotions: 1) mere exposure (we like things that are familiar to us) and 2) loss aversion (losses are more painful than gains are pleasant)

-       Ex. organizational truth as ideas that they’ve been repeated a lot

-       Ex. mugs exposed to students

-       Loss aversion + mere exposure = status quo bias

-       Ex. PayPal ditching their PalmPilot product and pursue their more basic web-based product

-       We can attain distance by looking at our situation from an observer’s perspective

-       Ex. What would our successor do?  What would my best friend do?

-       Adding distance highlights what is most important, it allows us to see the forest and not the trees

-       Perhaps the most powerful question for resolving personal decisions is “What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?”

9.     Honour Your Core Priorities

-          Quieting short-term emotion won’t always make a decision easy

-          Ex. job offer vs family values.  Even after the initial excitement faded, she still agonized over the job offer for weeks

-          Agonizing decisions are often a conflict among your core priorities

-          Core Priorities – long term emotional values, goals, aspirations.  What kind of person do you want to be? Ex. job vs family.  What kind of organization do you want to build? Ex. non-profit locally or nationally

-          The goal is not to eliminate emotion.  It’s to honor the emotions that count

-          By identifying and enshrining your core priorities, you make it easier to resolve present and future dilemmas

-          Ex.  Interplast, recurring and nagging debates settled when determined that the patients were the ultimate “customer”.  Often use vague words like integrity to describe their core principles. 

-          Ex. Use of rules and guiding principle to make decisions correctly and consistently

-          Establishing your core priorities is, unfortunately, not the same as binding your to them

-          Ex. parents wanting to spend more time with kids

-          To carve out space to pursue our core priorities, we must go on the offense against lesser priorities

-          Ex.  USS Benfold – to actively fought the List B items like repainting so that they have more time and energy to concentrate on List A items

-          “Stop Doing List”- what will you give up so that you have more time to spend on your priorities?

-          Hourly Beep – am I doing what I most need to be doing right now? (like a tripwire)

Prepare to be wrong

10.    Bookend Your Future

-            The future is not a “point” – a single scenario that we must predict.  It is a RANGE. We should bookend the future – consider a range of outcomes from very bad to very good

-            So that we are prepared for the worst, but as well as prepared when something is going well

-            Ex. investors bookend analysis of investing

-            Our predictions grow more accurate when we stretch our bookends outward

-            To prepare for the lower bookend, we need a pre-mortem. An analysis of thinking what would happen that make us fail 2 years from now? “It’s a year from now, our decision has failed utterly. Why?” What are the biggest risks?

-            Ex. 100,000 homes campaign avoided legal threat by using a pre-mortem style analysis

-            To be ready for the upper bookend, we need a pre-parade.  “It’s a year from now. We’re heroes. Will we be ready for success?”

-            Ex. Softsoap, hoping for a huge national launch, locked down the supply of plastic pumps for 2 years

-            To prepare for what can’t be foreseen, we can use a “SAFETY FACTOR”

-            Ex. engineers multiply number by a factor.  Elevators.  Buffer factor.

-            Anticipating problems can help us cope with them

-            Ex. realistic job preview

-            Ex. rehearse asking for a raise, and how the boss would react

-            By bookending – anticipating and preparing for both adversity and success – we stack the deck in favour of our decisions

What would make us reassess a choice we’ve made? What could we learn that would make us retreat from a choice we’ve made?  What would make us redouble our efforts?  What we need is something that snaps us awake at just the right moment – a tripwire.

11.    Set a Tripwire

-            In life, we naturally slip into autopilot, leaving past decisions unquestioned

-            A tripwire can snap us awake and make us realize we have a choice

-            Ex. Zappo’s $1000 offer to quit

-            Ex. Concert brown M&M’s to signal that he needed to inspect the production

-            Tripwires can be especially useful when change is gradual

-            Ex. digital image killed Kodak. Could have set tripwires to allow bolder change

-            For people stuck on autopilot, consider deadlines or partitions.

-            Ex. Set a specific date to review.  Annual review. Or Separate money into different envelopes

-            We tend to escalate our investment in poor decisions; partitions can help rein that in.

-            Ex. spends only 50k on this jump start project. And see what happens in 1 year.

-            Tripwires can actually create a safe space for risk taking

-            1) cap risks

-            2) quiet your mind until the trigger is hit

-            Many powerful tripwires are triggered by PATTERNS rather than dates/metrics/budgets

-            Ex.  children’s hospital told nurses to call rapid response team

-            Ex. drug companies to remarket Rogaine as hair growth or Viagra as male erectile dysfunction treatment

-            Tripwires can provide a precious realization: we have a choice to make

12.   Trusting the Process

-            Decisions made by groups have an additional burden: they must be seen as fair

-            Bargaining – horse trading until all sides can live with the choice – makes for good decisions that will be seen as fair

-            Bargaining will take more time upfront but it accelerates implementation

-            Procedural justice is critical in determining how people fell about a decision

-            Ex. court cases: losers who perceive procedural justice are almost as happy as winners who don’t

-            We should make sure people are able to PERCEIVE that process is just

-            Ex. the best way to defend a decision is to point out its flaws

-            A trustworthy process can help us navigate even the thorniest decisions

-            Ex. ARTS to combine need to serve local kids and his aspirations to make a national impact

-            PROCESS isn’t glamorous. But the confidence it can provide is precious. Trusting a process can permit us to take bigger risks, to make bolder choices. Studies of the elderly show that people regret not what they did but what they didn’t do.

-            Allows us to stop agonizing “What am I missing”

Summary

-            WRAP process

-            Widen your options – add one or more options to your consideration sets

-            Reality test your assumptions – call an expert to educate base rates in your situation

-            Attain distance before deciding  - resolve tough dilemmas by asking options best fit your core priorities

-            Prepared to be wrong – bookend the future for both what could go wrong and right and then do something to prepare for both contingencies

-            Discover options.  Avoid narrow framing.  Run the vanishing options tests. Call someone who has solved your problem.  What would I tell my best friend do?  Run a pre-mortem and pre-parade.  Consider bookends, what would make us fail and what would make us succeed?

-            Process gives you confidence in your choice; it doesn’t make the decision easier though.

-            Bolder is often the right direction.  Short run emotion often makes us prefer the status quo.  Process will give you comfort, a safety net to be bolder.

-            Our decisions will never be perfect, but they can be better, bolder and wiser

-            The right process can steer us toward the right choice

-            The right choice, at the right moment, can make all the difference.  

Bao Chau Vietnamese Restaurant

2717 E Hastings St, 
Vancouver, BC V5K 1Z8
http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/14/180129/restaurant/Hastings-Sunrise/Bao-Chau-Vietnamese-Vancouver

The BEST pho soup in Vancouver!  Top of my list, probably the only one that can rival this place may be Tau Bay from Edmonton.  Their soup is so clear yet full of embodied rich flavour.  The soup is flavourful that I don't need to use any hoisin sauce to dip my toppings, which I normally would need to.  The best part?  You won't be thirsty after hours, meaning they don't put any MSG in their soups.  Their pho are cheap, large, and full of toppings! Highly, highly recommend this! 

Ichiro Japanese Restaurant

http://www.ichirojapaneserestaurant.ca/

12011 2 Ave #110, 

Richmond, BC V7E 3L6

Love love love their lunch sets here! So many choices! Everything is to perfection.  The sashimi are so fresh.  And I'm also super impressed with their cooked items.  The clay pot to hold the seafood hot pot is so cute.  The broth is so light and delicious.  Awesome lunch! Make sure to make a researvation as this restaurant is super busy!  And then go to the Steveston Village for a walk around the harbour and look for fresh seafood or cute little boutique shops of stationery, kitchen, and toy stores.

Sashimi Boat Set ($19.95) - Assorted Sashimi (Tuna, Salmon, Yellowtail, Surf Clam, Octopus, Sweet Shrimp, Red Tuna, White Meat Fish), Daily Appetizer (Chicken Karrage, Spring Roll), Steamed Rice and Miso Soup

Yosenabe Set ($18.95) - Assorted Seafood & Vegetable in a Hot Pot, Tempura, 1/2 California Roll, 1.2 Dynamite Roll, and Assorted Sushi (Tuna, Salmon, Yellowtail, Prawn Tempura)

BierCraft Restaurant

BierCraft Restaurant

http://biercraft.com/wesbrook-at-ubc/

3351 Wesbrook Mall 

Vancouver, BC V6S 0E3

Visited UBC Westbrook Mall area and came to BierCraft for lunch.  Loved the Pork Schnitzel sandwich, its like a thin deep fried pork chopped sandwich.  Not greasy at all!  I also was impressed with the idea that they let me choose a half side salad and a half side of fries.  You get the best of both worlds.

• Pork Schnitzel Sandwich // Crispy Fraser Valley pork loin, harissa mayo, green leaf lettuce, tomato on Texas toast – with half side salad and half side fries - $14

Fish and Chips was also lovely here.  Two pieces of fresh catch with lots of fries.  Fried to perfection! Yummo!

• Fish n Chips // Beer battered seasonal catch, Belgian frites and remoulade sauce – $13

Boulevard Coffee Roasting Co.

http://www.theboulevard.ca/

970 University Blvd, 

Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3

I've heard that they roast their own coffee beans on site and offer lovely coffees.  Coffee and their latte is nice.  Their large is very large.  Very busy cafe with lots of students studying.  I didn't enjoy the croissant though.  It was flaky and crispy as I liked it.  

Medium (12 oz) brewed coffee, Medium (12 oz) latte, and a ham & cheese croissant ($3.81)