Hospitality Kit and New Features Added to the LFP Website
November 13, 2008 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
Satisfaction and complacency are not words that I know. I am grateful for the stellar reviews of this website, but I want to continue to refine and make this website more user friendly and more extensive in its scope. With that, I am rolling out the beginning of some major additions and changes to this site that will probably take 6 months to a year to complete in full. I have been working on some of these preliminary elements for over 6 months now with my webmaster with a focus specifically to help out-of-town patients get in and get out of Dallas more easily and to make their stay more seamless, enjoyable, and less difficult.
As a huge percentage of my patients come in from out of town, I am trying to help them out. In fact, I cannot remember a day in the last 3 to 4 months that a patient did not come in from somewhere out of town, state, or country. With that in mind, I have aimed to streamline this large percentage of my practice in a unique way through a custom-built “hospitality kit”. I would like to thank Jeff from Chicago who came up with and executed in great detail his idea of a “hospitality kit”, which in short is intended to help the out-of-town visitor truly be able to visit Dallas effortlessly and with less trepidation. He was the $5000 contest winner with his elaborate idea of the hospitality kit, which I am presenting today.
Some of the features of the hospitality kit include 360 virtual tours of the various hotel rooms in Plano and the immediate surrounding area that I personally shot and edited; a video tour through the hotels and attractions as well as my building to familiarize you with the Plano area; a custom-built map that permits you to view Plano and attractions that include restaurants, hotels, laundry services, tech services, atms, banks, book stores, etc.; full menus from area restaurants that feature takeout and delivery focused on the recovering patient; a peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing on travel assistance so that an experienced patient can help a prospective one; a list of DVD movies that you can rent from me including a player for no charge; a new concierge service that is both reasonably priced and offers such amenities as fully stocking your refrigerator with items you request in advance of your stay; and the whole shebang can be downloaded as a single pdf file for your convenience to help in planning your trip to DFW (the pdf feature should be live within 1 to 2 days).
Btw, even though my hospitality kit launches today, it is already in need of an update! I just learned of two new hotels opening in West Plano that I have not had time to explore but look absolutely amazing: Aloft and Nylo. For the first time, West Plano is getting extremely COOL hotels here! I am really excited. I have already made some comments in the new Patient Submitted (in this case I submitted) Travel Assistance section.
In addition, you can now see additional features (that we are still working on at this time) including web tutorials in which I personally navigate you through parts of this website that may interest you but you cannot find given that this website has now expanded beyond 3,500 total pages (I have just finished shooting all those videos last night. My webmaster just needs to upload them and put the page together). An updates section that automatically lists each day what sections have been recently updated (this should be up today or tomorrow). Besides the blogs and forum section, I update many sections almost daily so you might not know, for example, that I added a new video testimonial or photos from Emina’s trip to Tibet (which i just did) but now you will not have to scour the site for those changes. It will be listed with a direct link to the change in the updates section. Many thoughtful visitors have sent an email to me or my staff about problems they were facing with videos, text, pages, etc. not loading correctly. Now, that problem can be sent directly to the webmaster through “Report Bug” in which the problem page is already flagged when the message is sent. (Also, I will be radically overhauling your video experience in the coming months to make some of the infrequent problems much less frequent or eliminated all together.) I hope these changes will make your visit to LFP a much more enriching, educational, and enjoyable experience!
Personal Milestone: I’m 40!
November 6, 2008 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
Today I turn the tender age of 40! I celebrated with friends and family this past weekend (see photo), with my sister and my brother-in-law flying in to offer me their best wishes from New York as well as some “over the hill” balloons and a cake that read “Oh No The Big 40″ for fun.
Of course, at this juncture I pause reflectively on my life’s journey thus far. I was on a date last week and was asked, “Do you have any regrets?” I said, “No. I never have regrets.” I think the past is something we can’t change but helps guide us for a better future. I would say that I have had a lot of learning during the 40 years I have graced this planet and hope that I can become a better person every day forward.
Too often we become the sum of our accomplishments or a sum total of our past. I can look at the writings and surgeries that I have accomplished and all the patients I have been so fortunate to touch their lives and feel deep satisfaction. Yes, that is fantastic and quite an honor for me. But, more importantly, I look forward to the future and what is in store for me during life’s journey. If we look at life like a journey (as mentioned in yesterday’s blog), we can savor the ride and look forward to the next road stop coming up.
My spa director, Linda, said to me “Dr. Lam, you are 99.9% right about things.” I said, “No, perhaps in life I am only 70% right but the 30% of the time that I make a mistake, I don’t make that mistake twice or try terribly hard not to repeat that error.” I am in a constant battle to be more self aware, which I think is the most critical thing that we can do. We need to be a better person tomorrow than who we were yesterday. As I mentioned in this blog, my organization EO (Entrepreneur’s Organization), also affectionately known as “AA for Business Owners”, helps me focus on my personal and professional growth.
I am very grateful for where I am today and look forward to where I can become in coming years! I would like to thank the love of my family, the love of my staff, the love of my friends, and the love of my patients who have buoyed me all these years and will do so I hope for many years to come. I leave you with this birthday card wish I received: “My birthday wish for you is that you always have people to laugh with and be close to, things to dream about and work hard for, places you can go to rest and reflect on all that is good in the world and especially in you…and may you always know how much you are thought of and loved.”
Sol LeWitt
October 31, 2008 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
Wall Drawing #146. All two-part combinations of blue arcs from corners and sides and blue straight, not straight and broken lines. September 1972
We are going to define a different type of culture than the last 3 days of blogs: a little more refined culture so to speak (just kidding). As you would surmise, these blogs are about getting to know me, your surgeon, a little bit better and for me to reach out to you, the reader, with my aesthetic sense of what I consider beautiful. Of course, if you do not like modern art, this blog will be devastatingly boring or foolish. My buddy, Mark Wettreich, who owns an incredible European Art Gallery that focuses on “real art”, would look askance at this blog. I doubt Mark reads my blogs. However, if you are, please stop reading here.
Perhaps the best way that I conceive of my art is of its high graphic design quality. In essence, I really appreciate good design. It appeals to me fundamentally at every level. I love beautifully designed clothing, furniture, cars, anything really (and you know by now my obsession with Apple.) I would have loved to have been an industrial designer. Johny Ive move over (he is the Apple brainchild who has revolutionized the world more times than I can remember.)
Okay, now to the core of this blog. I absolutely love Sol LeWitt. He just died last year. He was an amazing American artist whose structure, clean, and graphic sense of the world I absolutely loved. I am going to insert here my paper that I wrote for the Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery in 2003, which never saw the light of day since the editorial board believed (perhaps rightly so) that my monograph on art did not highlight the beauty of the face. Well, besides the editorial board, you will be the first to read this article that never got published:
“Wall-to-Wall Beauty”
Samuel M. Lam, M.D.
Although Sol LeWitt has produced a prodigious amount of art over the past half century – from sumptuous two-dimensional geometric prints to elaborate three-dimensional cubed lattices, his most significant contribution to the art world remains the wall drawing. When asked if the sobriquet “originator of wall drawings” properly applied to him, he replied, “I think the cave men came first.” His cheeky reply aptly evokes his self-dismissive attitude that permeates his entire life and career. He has constantly upheld the primacy of ars gratia artis and subserved his ego to his artistic ambition. He often declines to attend media events in his honor, arriving late or not at all, and has refused to pose for a portrait by his celebrated artist friend, Chuck Close, because he wanted the public to pay attention only to the art rather than the artist. Even the large-scale retrospective of his work that opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000 required years of coaxing before he could be convinced that he should participate, given his concentration on the future direction of his art rather than the past.
Part of an entrenched anti-commercialism is expressed in the very idea of a wall drawing. Unlike canvassed works that can be bought and sold as a commodity, a wall drawing lacks this vital attribute of market viability. Although LeWitt never explicitly foreswore a commercial intent, he stated, “I never think about selling a work while doing it.” LeWitt had even naively proposed that any artist that desired to replicate his wall drawings could do so to widen the public consumption of his work but has since retreated from this untenable position given the inferior reproductions that were spawned without his oversight. LeWitt’s massive wall projects are often executed by hired hands under his supervision, as he subscribes to the Conceptualism school that embraces the artistic idea more than the mechanical process, so long as the construction effort remains true to the original design. In fact, the colossal wall installations that are delicately fabricated for a specific site are often completely destroyed at the conclusion of the prescribed event.
LeWitt embarked on his first wall creation in 1968 for a group show at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. He wanted a medium that could offer him the most two-dimensional representation of his two-dimensional art, in a word, flatness. He wanted his created work to convey its true two-dimensional essence, which could not be accomplished on a canvas that by its very nature was a suspended three-dimensional object. Beyond this consideration, the artist was motivated by early twentieth-century Russian art that celebrated visual art within the context of a defined setting. His architectural sensibility may have also been partly informed from LeWitt’s time spent in I.M. Pei’s studio a decade earlier. His later sculptural monuments would also resonate with architectural vibrancy. This pairing of art and architecture achieved its fullest expression in the German Bauhaus and the Dutch De Stijl movements of the early twentieth century that prefigured LeWitt’s efforts fifty years later.
LeWitt’s contemporaries of the 1960s were also explicitly and subtly exploring the immediate environment in which their art was displayed. Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light sculptures illuminated the entire room in which they were exhibited and cast a luminescent glow and shadow on neighboring walls, floors, and ceilings. In fact, Flavin is credited with introducing to LeWitt the expressive and intellectual nature of serial, permutated forms that would become an integral element in LeWitt’s idiom. Donald Judd’s wall-mounted sculptural pieces were also intimately tied to the wall from which they were suspended. Similarly, Andy Warhol canvassed the Castelli Gallery with Cow Wallpaper, a work that must have resonated with LeWitt; and Eva Hesse’s Accretion that consisted of numerous fiberglass tubes propped along the expanse of a blank wall echoed LeWitt’s aesthetic ethos. Despite all of these varied concurrent artistic endeavors, LeWitt would most fully exploit the architectural interior and transform it with his site-specific wall installations.
Over the past thirty years LeWitt has continued to evolve his style of wall drawings from the intimate to the dramatic. Initially conceived in the 1960s, his drawings represented little more than transference of his paper drawings to the wall without a premeditated link to the environment in which it would be presented. In the early 1970s, he began to develop an artistic idea more specifically for the physical space that it would occupy. In Wall Drawing #51 in Turin, he hired three draftsmen to connect every architectural point on the wall (light fixtures, door knobs, wall corners, etc.) to each other in every conceivable combination using blue chalk. In 1975, his art underwent a transformation yet again: he began to alter the background wall color to suit his artistic needs rather than be satisfied with the typical, preexisting white facade. He relinquished part of his artistic control to his draftsman, ordering only that “White lines from the center of a [black or yellow] wall [be connected] to specified random points” as would be determined by his skilled draftsmen. By the 1980s, LeWitt’s work achieved a strong visual vitality through use of bold geometric shapes and vibrant color schemes. LeWitt himself has commented that the newfound boldness of his work reflected the size and grandeur befitting the architectural space. His wall drawings continued to expand in scale to occupy neighboring walls, adjacent rooms, and even moving out to the outdoor environment. By the 1990s, LeWitt began to use acrylic as his favored medium rather than pencil, crayon, and India ink, which he had relied on in the past. Although LeWitt still refers to his collective works as “wall drawings”, use of acrylic transformed his drawings into paintings. The austerity of his early works gave way to the playful exuberance of his acrylic pieces that exuded bright, saturated, glossy colors with a simplified geometric vocabulary. Despite all of the intellectual rigor that LeWitt has applied to his art through his writings and advocacy of the Conceptual movement, his oversized wall drawings provide an immediate, seductive appeal that remains truly unique in twentieth-century art.
Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen, Part 1 of Defining Culture
October 20, 2008 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
Horst Schulze, the former president of the Ritz Carlton, penned his famous Ritz Carlton motto, “Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen” at the tender age of 15 for a term paper in hotel school. Mr. Schulze explains how he came up with these famous words, “I started in the hotel business when I was 14 years old as a busboy. When my mother took me to the hotel to work for the first time, she said, ‘We could never go to this hotel. This is only for important people. For important, fine people. So you’re lucky. Behave yourself. Wash your hands.’ She was a typical mother. I went to the hotel and the general manager talked to my mother and me for 15 minutes and told us we could never be like the guests who came to his hotel. ‘So don’t ever get jealous. This is for Ladies and Gentlemen–very important people.’
“By the time I started working in the restaurants, I knew the guests were very important. But a few months later I realized that the maitre d’ I watched every day was just as important because every guest was proud when he talked to them. Why? Because he was a first-class professional. He was somebody special–because of the excellence he created for the guests. So when I went to hotel school about a year and a half later, the teacher asked me to write a story describing what I felt about the business. And I wrote about the maitre d’ at my hotel. I titled it, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen.’ I wrote we could be excellent like he was…absolute excellence. When you walked into a room, you know he was there. In any moment all of us who serve can be Ladies and Gentlemen, just like the guests. I think it’s a powerful thing that shouldn’t be missed by the wonderful people in the industry. They should understand that.”
I truly believe that my fine staff that work with me are true representatives of the motto. They are real Ladies and Gentlemen. As much as I expect my staff to treat you as Ladies and Gentlemen. I expect you to treat them as Ladies and Gentlemen. Remember that all of us in life are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen.
9/11 (Belated) Remembrance: Emotional Memories and Harnessing Them
September 12, 2008 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
I am sorry that I did not dedicate yesterday’s blog to 9/11, which, of course, is a very special day here in the U.S. I didn’t think to do so until the morning of during my surgery since I typically write the blog the night before or a couple of days in advance. Anyway, here is my blog.
I was at a business forum meeting about 2 weeks ago, and our invited speaker showed a photo of the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center and asked, “What emotions does this event engender?” As expected, the answers were fear, sadness, not feeling safe, etc. She then asked, what were you doing on that day? Of course, every single individual recounted what they were doing that day. For a different generation, the assassination of JFK would conjure up that level of remembrance.
For me, I remember very vividly that I had finished a facelift and heard something about a plane crashing into a building and my making some stupid, flippant remark as a joke. Of course, an hour later I apologized for my stupidity as I didn’t understand the gravity of the events until a bit later. I felt tremendous sadness and also disillusion about my career choice. I felt it was trivial beyond measure. Of course, now I would not trade it for the world, as I love what I do, and reading this incredible card that I received yesterday from a patient who flew in to see me from California almost brought me to tears and reinforced why I am on this planet.
I remember waiting to be called down to the tragedy to help out since I had recently left months prior from New York City and was in upstate New York for my fellowship in facial plastic surgery. But, of course, everyone had already died and there was no need for help. That made me feel even more helpless. My girlfriend when I was in NYC actually saw the plane hit the building as she was going to work. My sister was supposed to work nearby at a restaurant since she had just gotten back from 6 months abroad travel in Asia but called in sick that day. She could smell the carnage wafting northward for quite some time. She was hosting a Japanese girl whom she had met on her travels for a short time, and the girl had no way of getting home. The letter my sister received from her was of gratitude for a kind soul to help her when no one else did.
I won’t go into all of the details of what I learned from that business session but I will do so over a few, separate blogs. However, the point of what Dr. Gardner, our invited speaker, was talking about was the power of emotions. If I asked you what you were doing on September 11, 2000, you probably would have no idea unless it was your birthday or some other special event.
We tend to only remember things that have an emotional impact on us rather than an intellectual one. However, we too often ignore the power of emotions and regard ourselves as a purely intellectual creature. We are far from that. Emotions drive our behaviors, habits, beliefs, and what I am talking about is memory. Emotions can profoundly shape us. They are not always bad. They can help shape us to do and to feel and to think good things. I hope all of you can look at emotions as a good thing. Close your eyes for a moment and think of a good time in your past. Mine was thinking of my dad and me eating sherbet in Hong Kong at the country club. More about that memory in a future blog…