Author: Herbert Lui
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To balance out overthinking, ask yourself, “How hard can it be?”
Recently, Acquired.fm asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang what company he would start today. Jensen says: “I wouldn’t do it, and the reason for that is really quite simple (ignoring the company that we would start—first of all, I’m not exactly sure). The reason why I wouldn’t do it—and it goes back to why it’s so…
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Keep faith in the end, accept inconvenient facts
I recently came across Admiral Jim Stockdale, who Jim Collins describes as, “the highest-ranking United States military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over twenty times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner’s rights, no set release…
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Create a lot of value, extract a small part of it
Ryan Holiday writes in his lessons from writing The Daily Stoic for seven years: Give a lot of value away and capture a small percentage. I mentioned that we’ve essentially published seven books for free through the Daily Stoic email. On top of that, over the years, we’ve essentially created the largest Stoic library in…
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The point of taking notes isn’t to take notes, it’s to think more effectively
When I first started digitizing my paper notes, I was on the fence choosing between Roam and Notion. It felt like a paralyzing choice; if I made the wrong move now, I experienced this sense of fear that I’d eventually be bogged down by the legacy architecture. I ended up choosing Notion, and that was…
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Whenever you’re stuck, write down 10 ideas
A few friends have recently told me that the most useful creative prompt they got from my book was, “Write down 10 ideas.” This goal energized them to dig into their files and archives, or to jog their memory for possibilities. Sometimes they stopped before 10, because they found the idea they needed. Make lists!
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2.5 hours with Rising Green
The other day, I spent almost 2.5 hours at The Met with Lee Krasner’s “Rising Green.” The experience felt much less like looking at the work, and more like reading it. I took many notes, and eventually fewer, as the chatter in my brain quieted. I slept very well that night. This experience was prompted…
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Meme as spine (continued)
The strength and weakness in audiobooks is how passive the experience is. For me, it’s easy to forget where and how I heard something; one trick seems to be in remembering the associated time and place where I listened to an interesting point, a scene that I was seeing at the time. In any case,…
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The little poster that Steve Jobs made famous
Millions of people—including me—found out about the Whole Earth Catalog when Steve Jobs closed off his Stanford commencement speech with it. A new archive of it just went online, along with this ad that Steve quotes: Making memorable things. Share it with people. It’ll all be worth it somehow.
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Contentions: Do something nobody else can
When I first entered the marketing profession, there was a popular saying, “Every company is a media company.” The saying was punchy and catchy, and fascinating because media companies themselves were in the midst of drastic change and adaptation. For example, as a business, The New York Times looks very different today than it did…
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The aspiration capability gap
When you’re one person, practicing creative work, and you’re constantly choosing between a creative factor and a commercial factor (that provides your livelihood), it can feel extremely unfair, and even downright torturous (see Costica Bradatan). One reminder: whether you are one person, or a thousand-person company, at any given point, there will always be a…