Category: Turning Stories
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Making a product opens up new occasions
When you make your own product, you create an occasion to consider all the details. It’s an opportunity to care, and it’s not one that everyone decides to take up. For example, when I showed a friend an early version of The Consistency Journal, he noticed that the paper was rougher than he was used…
Herbert Lui
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Creative focus
This year is Apple’s 50th year in business. Decades ago, it lost creative focus, and spread itself too thin. Tim Cook describes how Apple does things, “We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.” Each of these…
Herbert Lui
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Public transit as a destination
In her memoir Airplane Mode, author Shahnaz Habib shares her travels around the world. One of my favorite passages, though, was about her taking her local Brooklyn bus as a new parent, “Where I wanted to be was on the bus… The bus itself became my destination. A place to sit, a window to look…
Herbert Lui
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Buy things you need, with money you have, to impress people you like
“We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.” I forget when I came across this quote, but I remember being young. It resonated with me deeply. Inverting this is useful: only buy things you need, with money you have, to impress people you like. Remember, anything…
Herbert Lui
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Self approval
Peer pressure takes place when the people around you are doing something that goes against something you believe in. It could be a goal, your values, or a desire. It can be brief, like being the only person not drinking at a party because you want to wake up without a hangover. When your friends all…
Herbert Lui
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Creative stupidity
My latest column for 3 Quarks Daily is live, entitled, “Five Ways Bad Ideas Lead to Good Ones.” It was a fun revisiting of Creative Doing, as well as ideas I wrote in some blog posts. In writing this one, I came up with the phrase “creative stupidity,” which was a riff on “productively stupid,”…
Herbert Lui
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Frame money with value, not morality
You can influence how you feel. As Derek Sivers writes, “You choose your reaction. Not the first one, but the next.” When you learn to pause, even just for a few seconds, you can influence how you behave after your first reaction. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Your thoughts lead to feelings, and your…
Herbert Lui
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Your first try is a proof of concept
A proof of concept is a test project. The point is to make sure an idea can actually be created in the physical world. Perhaps it’s a prototype, or simply a finalized version of a draft, demo, or sketch. If it’s your first time making something new, treat it like a proof of concept. Make…
Herbert Lui
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Making new material with the old
A piece of advice I’ve found very useful is work with what’s in front of you. I’ve found myself applying this in single, short, writing sessions as well. For example, writing a blog post or outline without opening a new tab, using only my lived experiences as research. Writing a social media or newsletter by…
Herbert Lui
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Creating the conditions for organic content growth
A month after I first started at Figma, I traveled from NYC to SF for its annual conference named Config. It was the first in-person one after the pandemic. My co-worker Jenny and I wrote a liveblog for it, and I also got to see a copy of Creative Doing on the bookshelf at Figma…
Herbert Lui