Category: Turning Stories
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Two quotes about fans and enthusiasm
“It’s not what you know. It’s who you know,” the cliché goes. (Not one of the quotes.) If you’re doing creative work—visual art, writing, music, entrepreneurship, programming, design, amongst the many other forms of expression—it’s entirely about who you know and who knows you. These people create supportive contexts for you by working as managers,…
Herbert Lui
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Making the money vs. collecting it
Chris Rock asked a young comic what he did that day. “Nothing,” the young comic said. “But I’m going to do a set tonight.” “You make money during the day. You collect it at night,” Chris responded. “During the day is where the money is made.” There’s a writing lesson here: While comics and comedians…
Herbert Lui
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The right answer vs. your answer
Cluely is a new AI app that listens to your conversations and feeds you the best answers. The team behind it created a phrase designed to be misunderstood and polarizing, but saying that it lets you cheat on any conversation. Cheating like a calculator is cheating a math test, of course. If you choose to…
Herbert Lui
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Why not both?
“Do you want this, or that?” Yes. Sometimes, the best option isn’t to choose one or the other. It’s to choose both. (The formal business school term for this is integrative thinking.) For example, if you’re an author, and you’re asking yourself, “Do you want to self-publish your next book, or work with a publisher?” …
Herbert Lui
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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