If it’s your first time making something new, treat it like a proof of concept. Make it a recoverable risk; don’t invest any money or time you can’t afford to lose. Avoid optimizing for profit, or making it perfect yet.

Inspired by Jeremy Leslie’s interview with Danny Miller.

The post Your first try is a proof of concept appeared first on Herbert Lui.

The problem is it’s not so easy to shape this sense of satisfaction. Companies collectively spend over a trillion dollars to shape your desires and persuade you to make change. People are constantly on social media influencing each other. A saying attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer goes, “A man can do as he will, but not will as he will.”

Rene Girard’s mimetic theory suggests that you want what the people around you want.

One solution is to figure out what your core values are—your authentic desires—and to focus on taking action that aligns with them. 

Still, an awareness of your conscious values may clash with your unconscious desires. The key to alignment is in your physical and social environment. If you can shape your environment, you can also influence what you want. 

If you want to want something different, then you need to either reshape your environment or change it entirely.

The post Happiness, desires, values, and environments appeared first on Herbert Lui.

It sounds simple enough, but logistics can get tricky quickly, especially with international laws and regulations. Plus, all of this takes place over the internet and with the help of dedicated volunteers who help chaperone dogs from South Korea to destinations around the world. 

I can imagine many others involved: employees to help manage the market (including finding the dogs, managing the website and social media, telling the story for each dog, filtering through applicants, taking photos, etc.), people who are willing to foster and offer temporary homes to dogs, people who care for the dogs who are waiting for adoption, people at pet stores who donate food, and so on. It’s all people.

Today, my wife and I picked up a dog we adopted through one of these organizations. We’re really grateful for the opportunity, and we hope to get her adjusted to her new home.

In my brief participation in this market, I can feel how much passion and purpose fuels the people running it.

It means a lot. It makes a difference. It saves lives. 

If you work in marketing and experience cynicism about the industry, this is a reminder of the change that this line of work can enable.

The post A market fueled by purpose appeared first on Herbert Lui.

This isn’t a useful frame for actually making something you want to make, which is what being a creative person actually means.

Instead, shift your focus to the process. Measure your creative work by your contribution. What can you give? Who can you help? Where can you offer support?

In The Courage to Be Disliked, a fictional philosopher character explains, “It is through labor that one makes contributions to others and commits to one’s community, and that one truly feels ‘I am of use to someone’ and even comes to accept one’s existential worth.” 

Creative contribution is the guiding star. The rest of the metrics are just noise, useful for marketing, but not very useful for actually making stuff. 

The post Creative contribution appeared first on Herbert Lui.

But even Steve had limits to his abilities; he couldn’t make his original vision for NeXT’s black cubes work, and the business needed to pivot into selling enterprise software to survive. He denied that Lisa Brennan-Jobs was his daughter for many years. And, he couldn’t distort his way out of cancer.

I had once planned on writing a book about reality distortion, and how today’s business leaders seem to have continued the tradition. As the years go by, I’ve grown to see its undisciplined use as a risky, unhealthy, and unreliable practice. 

Engaging a healthy, expansive, and optimistic attitude is different from engaging an extreme delusional perspective. 

Reality catches up. There are much more constructive ways to deal with painful reality checks. As Will Smith wrote, “The bigger the fantasy you live, the more painful the inevitable collision with reality. Reality is going to pay you back in equal proportion to your delusion.”

When you want to connect with reality, loosen up your grip on what you believe and your vision for the future, and see what happens. As Philip K. Dick wrote, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Or as Oliver Burkeman paraphrases Michael Singer, “Reality doesn’t need you to help operate it.”

The post Against reality distortion appeared first on Herbert Lui.

A few moments, or perhaps days, later, I realize that I’m not going to have the time and energy to write it at this moment; maybe I never will. My hands are full, and life is too short. That fever turns into grief.

This process takes place in a similar spirit to how Visakan Veerasamy describes his unfinished drafts as having “grandiose shapes.” He explains, “They’re conceptualized from the beginning in ways that require a lot of time and energy to finish, and would also require quite a lot from my readers.”

Several years ago, I realized that focusing on agility as a writer can be useful. A couple of years after that, I started writing every day at this blog. 

This practice is training my brain to take big ideas and, instead of putting them into a grandiose shape that I don’t have bandwidth to work on, find a more modest one for them that I’m actually capable of. It’s much scruffier. It’s imperfect because it meets the real world. The game doesn’t end when an idea is in the form of a book; the whole point of the game is to keep writing.

The post Modest shapes appeared first on Herbert Lui.

You don’t need to pursue one strategy at a time. You can draft up three to five strategies, test them out, and see which ones work. In fact, it’s probably useful to think of more than one path to win. 

The most effective entrepreneurs and companies generally practice this. The art is in executing these strategies and tests, and conducting effective research.

The post Multiple strategies appeared first on Herbert Lui.

For context, no team losing by that much has ever come back to win in the finals. They were leading the series by 2-1. 

I wondered if the coach would just sit their star players and let their opponents, the San Antonio Spurs, have it. Rest and focus on the next win.

Nope. The Knicks played another two consistent quarters, and ended up winning by a point. It was the greatest comeback in NBA finals history.

Play the whole game. Give yourself a chance to snap out of the funk, and for your opponents to make mistakes. Don’t quit at the half.

The post Play the whole game appeared first on Herbert Lui.

“Instead of focusing on being sure, they try to figure out how unsure they are, making their best guess at the chances that different outcomes will occur,” she writes. “The accuracy of those guesses will depend on how much information they have and how experienced they are at making such guesses. This is part of the basis of all bets.”

From this perspective, Annie suggests taking a more considered approach to when outcomes don’t unfold as we predicted or would have preferred. You’re not 100% wrong.

One key is to learn from the experience, and to examine the outcome to see if there are any insights or factors you can learn that might improve your reasoning the next time you need to make a decision.

The other is to accept that no matter how good your decision is—or how bad—sometimes factors that are out of your control have a greater effect on the outcome. “Luck” is just a word we use to describe these factors. 

Perhaps it’s assuring to remember that life is probabilistic; if you get to make enough decisions, and you learn from each outcome and improve your decision quality, your outcomes should also improve. At the same time, any given decision could turn out in a way you don’t expect.

The post The quality of your decision making process vs. how it turns out appeared first on Herbert Lui.

In The Biggest Bluff, author Maria Konnikova writes about her journey to becoming a professional poker player. She meets champion Erik Seidel, who takes her on as his student.

After narrowly losing a tournament, Maria finds Erik to vent about a bad beat. The odds had been in her favor. Erik, who is usually a good listener, uncharacteristically interrupts her. He tells her, “Bad beats are a really bad mental habit. You don’t want to ever dwell on them. It doesn’t help you become a better player.”

Instead, Erik tells Maria, “Focus on the process, not the luck. Did I play correctly? Everything else is just BS in our heads. Thinking that way won’t get you anywhere. You know about the randomness of it but it doesn’t help to think about it.”

Focusing on luck—randomness, uncertainty, chaos—encourages you to abdicate control over the situation. You feel like a victim. Instead, as Maria reflects, if you made the best decision possible, you want to say something more like this to yourself: “I made the correct decision. Sure, the outcome didn’t go my way, but I thought correctly under pressure. And that’s the skill I can control.” Things don’t just happen to you, you can take responsibility for your actions. If you’re learning, then you focus on the process, and the lesson you learned, and make sure to apply it to the next decision.

This attitude amplifies luck, in a sense; it leads you to focus on factors that you can control, to learn from the outcomes, which in turn energizes other people and encourages them to keep you at the top of their minds. 

I’m not a poker player, and I’ve gotten complimented on my ability to take feedback, but I’ve still often fallen into the vicious habit of framing outcomes as bad beats. As I reflect, I think about the times I’ve blamed circumstances or other people when I should have been deconstructing the outcome (by myself or with a peer/teacher), learning from it, and making a better decision and effort next time. 

Moving forward, I’ll take the advice from Maria and Erik: “No bad beats. Forget they ever happened.”

The post No bad beats appeared first on Herbert Lui.