Category: Turning Stories
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Modest shapes
Whenever I come across an interesting idea, I hear my mind’s chatter, “This would be a great book.” I can envision the book cover with a big, bold, title. The feeling is captivating, almost euphoric; I call it a creative fever. A few moments, or perhaps days, later, I realize that I’m not going to…
Herbert Lui
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Choicefulness
This year marked Apple’s 50th year in business. It came awfully close to closing shop in its second decade, largely because it lost direction. The company failed to release hit products, was losing a lot of money, and scrambling to survive. In 1993, Apple released nearly 40 products, maintaining over 70 total. (For the Apple…
Herbert Lui
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Take your practice seriously
In the 1950s, decades before he became a well-renowned composer, Philip Glass was a young man who recently moved to New York City to start his education at a prestigious art school, the Juilliard School. His first home was in a room on the fourth floor of a brownstone in the Upper West Side of…
Herbert Lui
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Multiple strategies
Advice from a strategist, which resonated with me: 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…
Herbert Lui
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Play the whole game
During the first half of yesterday’s NBA finals playoff game, the New York Knicks were losing by a lot. At one point, they were trailing by 29 points. They were not playing well at all. For context, no team losing by that much has ever come back to win in the finals. They were leading the…
Herbert Lui
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Winning at the casino
A family member, who worked at the bank, saw a lot of high net worth clients lose a lot of money gambling, to the point of even re-mortaging their houses. They told me, “At a casino, the worst thing that can happen to you is winning.” Chasing the ecstasy of the first win leads you…
Herbert Lui
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The quality of your decision making process vs. how it turns out
In Thinking in Bets, author and retired poker player Annie Duke believes that good poker players and good decision-makers are comfortable with uncertainty in the world. They accept that they’ll almost never know how things will turn out. “Instead of focusing on being sure, they try to figure out how unsure they are, making their…
Herbert Lui
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No bad beats
In poker, when you have a favorable hand only to get beaten by an underdog, you’ve experienced a “bad beat.” It wasn’t supposed to work out like that; only it did. In The Biggest Bluff, author Maria Konnikova writes about her journey to becoming a professional poker player. She meets champion Erik Seidel, who takes…
Herbert Lui
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Work works itself to work
Kanjirō Kawai was a potter who lived in Kyoto. He and a collaborator, Hamada Shoji, conducted over 10,000 experiments with glazes in their first two years working together. (Talk about being prolific.) Here’s a poem he wrote, which I found in the Kyoto edition of D Design Travel magazine: Work works itself to work Work…
Herbert Lui
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Choose to trust yourself
Some businesses—not all, and not even most!—don’t trust you. They design their products and marketing to lock you in and make you feel reliant on them. The incentive for them is to have lots of steady customers; if you can come and go at any point, then that business isn’t as steady as it could…
Herbert Lui