Category: Turning Stories
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The wall of cringe
Let’s say you want to be a DJ. You’ve done some DJing for friends, you’ve gotten good at the craft, and you’re ready to go pro. Your goal is to be invited to a mainstream festival stage and get offered tens of thousands of dollars. You start to put some feelers to your family and…
Herbert Lui
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Cash covers things up
Money makes it easy for people to lie to themselves, and to other people. None of the entrepreneurs who started Theranos, Nikola, Fast, Juicero, and WeWork would have gotten very far with what they were doing if they didn’t raise cash from investors. Cash can cover up all sorts of problems, or at the very…
Herbert Lui
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Talking myself away from the fear of being seen
Some people who have a lot to offer the internet feel too much doubt to write and publish it. Ashley Willis wrote a great post about this. Even though I publish here every day, I identify with this group of people. I’ve written for over 1,000 days now. Sometimes, for me, it feels like the…
Herbert Lui
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“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional”
A couple of months ago, I caught up with a good friend on the phone. An opening came up for me to recommend Derek Sivers’s book, Useful Not True, and so I did. I chatted with my friend again, a couple of days ago, and he told me the book resonated with him. Particularly, he…
Herbert Lui
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The jellyfish knows how to survive uncertain times
A lion’s mane jellyfish can release up to 45,000 eggs per day. The jellyfish’s strategy is to lay as many eggs as possible and leave them to fend for themselves. Most of these eggs don’t survive, probably fewer than 0.1%. In ecology, this approach is known as a high reproduction selection—better known as r–selection. Fish,…
Herbert Lui
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From research to imagination
You remember a fragment of a song that sounds like it’s from the eighties. You do some research, but you struggle to remember where you heard it, and when. Your guesses are more imagination than recall. No hints come to mind. When this happened to Questlove, he was stumped. He decided to transform this research…
Herbert Lui
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The privilege and point of writing
Last weekend, my good friend showed me how I could train an LLM to write blog posts just like me. The LLM generously assessed my voice and tone (which made me feel understood!), and then spat out a blog post that could’ve been a first draft for me. While I felt curious about it, I…
Herbert Lui
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Do you borrow from your future to pay for the present and past?
A ponzi scheme takes place when the schemer uses cash from later investors to pay returns to early investors. My friend Peter makes the case that when an entrepreneur borrows from their business’s future to pay off present and past obligations, they are operating it like a ponzi scheme. Peter’s framing of the situation resonated…
Herbert Lui
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Why you feel lost, what to do next
The story of The Courage to Be Disliked is told mostly in dialogue, between a student and a philosopher. Spoiler alert: While the student starts off opposing the philosopher, hellbent on proving the philosopher and their school of thinking—Adlerian psychology—wrong, he starts to come around. By the end of the book, the student’s intention has…
Herbert Lui
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Commit first, plan later
My former colleague at Figma, Claire Butler, recently wrote a really great post about what she learned working at Figma. The lesson that stood out to me most was this one, “When you’re stuck, commit to action. Strategy will follow.” In other words, if you’re making something new, planning too far ahead will likely just…
Herbert Lui