Author: Herbert Lui
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Marketplace of truths
“Language is also clearly crucial for a special kind of abstract thinking that requires what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls ‘scaffolding’—chains of reasoning so complex that we need external placeholders to keep us from forgetting where we are,” writes Edward Slingerland in Trying Not to Try (p. 60). Slingerland continues, “The sum total of these…
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Advice for high performers
If you’ve been recognized as a high performer by someone, you’ll probably need to learn different things than everyone else. For example, while other people can let go of their work very easily, you may have trouble doing that; you can’t stop thinking about it when you get home. This might be fine in your…
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Ironic effects
A few weeks ago, Jaylen Brown said this after winning three games in a row and on the verge of a historic playoffs moment. He pointed out how his team almost fumbled the game. “I guess I’m not sure why we do it. It seems like when we get in those moments, we get a…
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Free lunch
If you’re eating a lunch you didn’t pay for, you’ve exchanged something for it. Your time. Your energy. Your presence. Your compliance. Your opinions. Etc. Was it worth it?
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On first principles
In Trying Not to Try, Edward Slingerland writes: René Descartes, in his Meditations (1641), famously declared that you can’t accept as reliable knowledge what you’ve been taught in school. The only way to obtain true knowledge, he argued, is to acquire it yourself, building up logically from first principles. This is a seductive idea, and…
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Paper happy
A paper gain is an, “Unrealized capital gain (loss) on securities held in a portfolio based on a comparison of current market price to original cost.” For example, if you bought a share of stock for $20 and it rose to $25, you’ll have $5 in paper gains. If you sell your share of stock…
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Contentions: Track your rewriting
When I edited my book Creative Doing with Rachel and the Holloway team, we worked together mostly in two different documents. Cumulatively, there were 3,016 suggested changes and 240 comments across both documents. Those numbers sound reasonable to me, though I wouldn’t be shocked if that’s an underestimate; we spent a lot of time on…
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Promote your best work
Ideally, other people know you for your best work, not your worst work. The production value, the thoughtfulness, the collaboration, all makes your best work much more valuable and impressive than your worst work. Given this principle, you want to put your best work forward as much as you can. When someone asks you about…
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Stretching time back out
Whenever you experience overwhelm or feel like time is moving too fast, you always have the option of slowing it back down. You won’t be actually changing time, of course. Time passes by constantly, and there’s always only ever the present. What you’re actually doing is changing your perception of time. There are a couple…
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On shrinking, dying, industries
Sometimes, the most rewarding things to do also make little sense on paper. They would be the complete opposite of a smart decision. Two examples come to mind: 1. When graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang started writing comic books, Marvel Comics had just declared bankruptcy. “People were predicting that it was just gonna blink out…