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  Chinese toothbrushes. Tooth-brushing habits. Soap bars. No bedcovers. Together, they pointed me toward the same conclusion, or rather the same words: Direct. Quick. Now. This was confirmed two or three nights later when one of my host families invited me to a local restaurant, in the town of Manzhhouli in the inner part of Mongolia, near the Russian border. The restaurant had a reputation for excellent food and service, though you would never have known it from its cold, naked lighting. My host family and I took our seats around a table in whose center was a revolving stand—a Lazy Susan of sorts—and when one of us ordered a dish the waiter set it down on the stand.

  It was a memorable meal. The family ordered quickly, and the food appeared nearly at once. They spun the wheel as if playing a game of roulette. Everyone ate as if competing for a prize that would be awarded to the first person who finished. There were no pauses, breaks, respites or conversations lasting longer than a minute. Less than 45 minutes passed from the time we sat down to the time we stood up to leave.

  It seemed that the Chinese had a radically different definition of the meaning of sensual. Elsewhere in the world, sensual was synonymous with softness, luxury, slowness and anticipation. Was there any time, or place, when the Chinese weren’t in a hurry? Then there was the matter of Chinese cars themselves. They were less like cars than apartment annexes. Inside most were functional elements that mirrored a household interior, from garbage bags, to mini-kettles allowing drivers to boil water for tea while in transit using a 12-volt power system, to—in one case—a mini-refrigerator. Chinese families regularly brought food along with them, too, which they ate while driving or riding in the backseat.

  I decided to carry out an informal experiment. Over the next few days, I visited three or four local museums, including one devoted to jade, one of China’s most valuable and revered stones. Visit any museum in the world, and you’ll quickly realize how slowly museumgoers walk as they meander through galleries and exhibits. (Arguably, we walk with a reverence that complements the quality, prestige and reputation of the art surrounding us.) Once, in Paris’s Monet Museum, I clocked the velocity and speed of museumgoers over a 72-hour period. Visitors moved at around three miles per hour; that is to say, at an average speed. But at Beijing’s local jade museum, the approximate speed of museumgoers was four, almost five miles an hour. Japan is a brisk, no-tarrying culture, too, but the Chinese walk even more quickly than the Japanese do.

  To the concept of speed, I now had to add another word: transition. Even when a transition was involved—eating a meal in a restaurant, going to a museum, tooth brushing or taking a shower—the Chinese never slowed down. Their cars were mini living rooms and mini kitchens. Even the experience of moviegoing seemed to be on a fast-moving timer. Some cinemas have curtains that part tantalizingly slowly as the overhead lights dim to reveal the movie screen. Not Chinese cinemas. In the nearly half-a-dozen Beijing movie theaters I visited, the curtain flew open like a flasher on a subway.

  There was only one kind of occasion where the Chinese paused, and that was during one of their most important holidays.

  I was in Beijing when a family I was interviewing invited me to attend the national ceremony known as Qingming Jie. Qingming Jie, otherwise known as the “Tomb-Sweeping Festival,” takes place every spring, two weeks after the solar equinox. On Qingming Jie, the living devote the day to the memory of their ancestors. They fix or beautify cemetery stones and stroll around graveyards and columbariums, snacking on qingtuan, or green dumplings, while savoring the warmth and colors of springtime. Some fly kites in the shapes of animals from well-known Chinese operas, and others burn incense or pop firecrackers. Most pray and offer food, tea and wine and also burn replicas of small cars, iPhones, iPads and Louis Vuitton handbags made from joss paper, bound packs of common paper that resemble legal tender. Chinese people believe that even after they have died, the deceased may still need these things in the afterlife. As kites shaped like pigs and goats and snakes fluttered overhead, papery phones, purses and cars were consigned to the flames.

  As I observed people arriving and making their way toward the graveyard, both their body language and their behavior changed. The pace of my host family slowed down. Family members spoke to one another carefully, and with greater emphasis. Was it simply the gravity and ceremony of Qingming Jie?

  With their permission, I began videotaping my host family both at Qingming Jie and afterward. Back in my hotel room, I Small Mined the footage. I tracked and measured people’s walking speeds, beginning from when they left their cars to when they passed through the graveyard entrance, at which point they slowed down even more. My host family in particular intrigued me. Even after leaving the graveyard and making their way back toward their car, they didn’t resume their usual walking speed. For the rest of the day, they walked, drove, cooked and spoke to one another more slowly.

  China has many similar festivals, including Beijing’s Five Gods of Wealth Temple Fair, where the Chinese flock to worship gods symbolizing prosperity, burn incense, pray for luck and buy sheets of intricately designed paper decorated with the Chinese characters for good fortune and happiness; and the Lantern Festival, where red lanterns, many in the shapes of animals, are raised high in the air to symbolize the shedding of past identities and the adoption of new ones. These national festivals, it seemed, were the only times the Chinese slowed down. Other than that it was all speed, all the time.

  Velocity, it turned out, was one of the keys to understanding China. Speed represented an imbalance, an exaggeration. To me this implied several things, chief among them that the opportunities for transformation in China were rare, almost nonexistent.

  By “transformation” I mean those moments that oblige us to “become” something or someone else, or that influence and affect our behavior based on what we’re touching, or holding, or seeing, in the same way that Qingming Jie obliged Chinese families to decrease their walking speed and even speech. From Qingming Jie, I took away another clue as to what lay close to the Chinese national character. The joss money they burned represented what they held most dear: material goods. Which meant, as I knew already, that Western values were slowly making their way into the country.

  The concept of transformation in the early twenty-first century intrigues me, in part because smartphones and computers are chipping away at our opportunities for escape. The fewer opportunities for transformation we have in our lives, the more we crave it. A car is a transformation zone. So is a coffee shop. So is a ferry that takes you from the mainland to an island, or going to a movie, or taking a long bike ride. Drinking, taking drugs and even meditation are all transformation zones. Yet in a digital era, the opportunities for transformation are diminishing. Thanks to our phones we are never altogether present and never completely alone. When we go by ourselves to a coffee shop, we are, in fact, accompanied by a digital device. Do we ever shut down our computers or smartphones anymore, other than to reboot them? What’s the point, we ask ourselves, since we’ll just be turning them back on in the morning? Thanks to our phones, most of us “go to work” when we open our eyes every morning, only to stop “working” when we go to sleep. The only time we power off our laptops is when we’re in transit. We are in the same season, and emotional climate, all the time, one that’s neither work nor leisure, neither at our desk nor officially off-duty.

  From experience, I knew that the Chinese shared the same dearth of transformations as the Japanese. For decades, the Japanese have struggled with issues created by density. Tokyo trains are crowded, the sidewalks are congested, and even at home, space and privacy barely exist. Where, then, do Japanese people find space, and where had I first glimpsed the Chinese predilection for speed? In two places: Disneyland in Tokyo and Paris, where I found myself consulting for France’s Disneyland Resort Paris in the early 2000s.

  Opened in 1992 in a suburb of Paris, Euro Disney was an immediate target for controversy and critic
ism. Some French critics found it a symbol of American cultural imperialism and consumerism, with one even calling it a “Cultural Chernobyl.”16 Euro Disney faced labor strikes, then a recession and, with turnout lower than expected, financial difficulties. The “magic” for which Disney was known worldwide seemed to be missing, which is when the management team contacted me to see if I could help reverse the park’s downward spiral.

  After interviewing a selection of Euro Disney park-goers, I soon discovered that the “missing magic” could in fact be distilled to an absence of transformation. I couldn’t help but notice that this apparent flatness was coincident with a decrease in churchgoing across Europe. When I visited Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany, France and Italy, I came away convinced that what religion had historically given believers—faith, transformation—was no longer enough. In Europe at least, parishioners made their way through church portals at around the same pace they strolled through a market or store. The fact of being in a sacred place no longer slowed people down, which meant that religion was no longer creating the necessary degree of embodied cognition, or space, for worship, or contemplation, or reverence.

  This insight—that a decline in churchgoing creates the need for other outlets to address the need for transformation—was what moved me to re-infuse superstition into the Euro Disney experience.

  My inspiration was, of all people, Tinker Bell, the winged fairy from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, and the superstition we brought back was Pixie Dust. We handed out small bags of colored powder to Disneyland cast members who, in turn, handed them to visitors who were then asked to close their eyes, make a wish and scatter the Pixie Dust into the pond beside Sleeping Beauty Castle. As a ritual, it required only a fast scattering of yellow and red and blue powder into a body of water. Still, the effect was powerful. Not only did thousands of Euro Disney visitors begin tossing Pixie Dust into the pond, but I soon noticed the differences in how visitors of different nationalities did so. For example, after gripping the Pixie Dust, Americans tossed it into the pond with their eyes half open and half closed. Japanese tourists took only a minimal amount, tossing it into the lake with formal elegance. Of all the nationalities I observed, Chinese adults and children grabbed the largest handfuls possible of Pixie Dust, which they then hurled into the pond as quickly as possible. It was, I remember thinking, as though they were desperate for a transformation to take place, to enter an otherworldly zone that took them well out of themselves.

  Earlier I wrote that one of the strategies I used when turning around Lowes supermarkets was to give customers permission to act like children again. We all have multiple ages inside of us. The first is our actual physical, chronological age. Then there’s our inner age, the age we feel emotionally inside. I call this “emotional age” our Twin Self. It’s a phenomenon I make it a habit to remember whenever I’m running a board meeting. The conference room may be filled with businesspeople in their 50s and 60s, and to avoid feeling like a kid who someone managed to sneak into the corporate offices, I focus on what I take to be their approximate inner age—for most people, this age is anywhere from 18 to 26—at which point whatever fear or trepidation I might have felt disappears.

  Who among us, at 50 years of age, “feels” 50? Almost no one. A good rule of thumb in brand building is to communicate, always, to a consumer’s Twin Self—and more than anything else, I realize that this was among the strategies that could help solve the Chinese car challenge.

  What determines someone’s inner age? In my experience, our inner age is directly connected to the first time we felt liberated and on our own. It could be when we left for college, or moved into our first apartment, or bought our first car. I opened up my own advertising agency when I was 12 years old, and not surprisingly, most of the time, I still see the world from the perspective of a 12-year-old. A 47-year-old man I know once told me his inner age was 40. When I asked him to explain, he told me that only when he met and married his wife, and the two of them moved into their dream house (right around his fortieth birthday), did he feel truly liberated. Have you noticed how businesspeople sometimes carry around a backpack? It’s a sign of their Twin Self rejecting the typical props of the business world, and clinging to what it felt like to be young.

  I’ve used the Twin Self concept any number of times in my work, most notably when I was consulting for iRobot, the manufacturers of the Roomba, the high-tech floor vacuum cleaner. Founded in 1990 by three roboticists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, iRobot is a New England–based robotics company that creates autonomous home robots—the Roomba, and for hard floors, the Scooba—and also manufactures police and military robotic units that have been deployed by the US military in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. By 2002, iRobot had sold 10 million Roombas, but when sales leveled off without explanation, the company brought me in to create an integrated branding strategy to reposition the Roomba—a rechargeable black disc that slides across the floor of a house, sucking up dirt—as a high-tech alternative to the vacuum cleaner.

  Once I began my Subtext Research, a few things became clear, among them the fanaticism of the Roomba’s core fans. Once Roomba users “experienced” the Roomba, they became lifelong brand ambassadors. Each had an intimate relationship to their Roomba, treating it almost like a member of their families. Many gave their Roomba names: Whitie, Big Red, Spot. The word cute kept coming up. Consumers loved how the Roomba zoomed across the floors of their house, until it crashed into a wall or a chair. One woman had recommended the Roomba to at least 20 of her friends, adding that she often steered even casual conversations toward iRobot and Roomba.

  If most psychologists agree that identity is a construct, then we’re all engaged in three processes simultaneously: Expressing who we are; expressing who we believe, or hope, we are; and finally, expressing who we want other people to think we are. No one rolls out of bed fated to dress, or act, in any one way; each of us is a deliberate self-creation. Nowhere was this more obvious than when I interviewed Roomba owners in their homes and apartments across New York and New England.

  In a suburb outside Boston, Massachusetts, I found myself talking to a 35-year-old man named Jim. A few minutes into our conversation, I noticed that Jim had his own hydroponic plant system installed on an outdoor balcony, clearly visible from the living room. Jim told me how much time he spent cultivating his balcony garden, though he admitted to me it yielded only three or four tomatoes every year. In another home, Sam, an engineer, had set out all his technological devices on a coffee table, in precise rows. He had 9 remote controls, 73 diodes and 11 tightly coiled cables. In one corner of the room he kept a portable rolling minibar with its own built-in brew station designed to make homemade beer. Sam later confessed to me that he seldom drank beer and didn’t even like the taste. Maggie, a 56-year-old woman, had a knitting pattern hanging off a sewing machine. “It’s almost done,” she told me. Eventually she admitted to me that she hadn’t gone near her sewing machine in 15 years. Why was it so prominent in her living room, then? Maggie laughed; she had no answer.

  The bigger point was how the apartments of countless male Roomba owners were laid out intentionally and strategically. One man, Richard, kept a basketful of toys in one corner of his living room. Only once or twice a year did his three-year-old nephew come to visit, which is why it made even less sense to me that he would showcase children’s toys in his permanent collection—though I later found out he had his reasons. Two days later, I visited another apartment, this one belonging to a 29-year-old Roomba fan named Stuart. In his bathroom there hung any number of notes and placards announcing, in French, the name of certain items. The sink. The toilet. The shower. Was Stuart studying French, or memorizing grammar? No he wasn’t. Then what explained the French signs all over his bathroom? “I want to learn the language,” he replied. But when I pressed him further, I found out the real reason.

  It’s as if the insid
es of our homes, and even our cars and handbags, all feature a small variation on public image—a piano, a guitar, a vintage tattered American flag—in order to provoke an emotional response in others, and signal that their owners are more than what they do for a living, more than who or what they appear. I call this phenomenon “Breaking the Frame.”

  I first noticed this in Japan, when I saw that a middle-aged woman had hung a small key ring on the handle of her elegant handbag. I later realized how common it was, in fact, for local consumers to display a small twist of individuality in a controlled, efficient, structured, homogenous country like Japan. Japan, after all, is a country where if your meeting is at 1 p.m., you show up in the waiting room at 12:45 at the latest. The bonsai trees are impeccably manicured. The sushi presentations are small, aesthetic works of art and, as I wrote earlier, getting your purchase gift-wrapped can take up to 30 minutes. Japan is also a society where natives repress their emotions, with many feeling unable to express either their creativity or their imagination.

  By “owning” a single word—time—Switzerland can be just as repressive, at least on the surface. Swiss trains enter and exit train stations at schedules down to the second. If Swiss dinner guests plan on showing up five minutes late, they will call and alert you first. In response, many outsiders would say that the Swiss are conservative, routine-oriented, unimaginative and even dull. My experience there tells me otherwise. For one thing, based on my analysis of toilet water there—yes, I even analyze toilet water—Zurich has one of the highest levels of drug consumption in the world. Zurich was also the first and only city I know of to construct street-side mobile booths where prostitutes could entertain their clients, as well as the first city to launch public vending machines that sold condoms. Today, among other things, Zurich is home to some of the planet’s wildest raves, and it is a popular destination for the world’s most popular deejays. In short, while Zurich, and Switzerland, may be known for straitlaced efficiency, they have found their balance elsewhere.