Category: Turning Stories
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Finding help is a skill worth mastering
Everybody needs help. Asking for help can feel difficult though. You might worry about coming off as needy, or as an imposition. There’s a craft to finding help, and it’s worth mastering. Any improvement at it is worth being proud of. Your style is unique; everybody has a different comfort level with how public they…
Herbert Lui
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Good project management is about getting ahead of opportunities and problems
One useful way to think about project management involves anticipation. You can consider different scenarios and make plans for how to handle them. Goals and visions can serve as anchors for these scenarios. So can unplanned opportunities that pop up, and problems that you can foresee. For example, a friend of mine leading a publicity…
Herbert Lui
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The right and wrong times to burn the boats
When you’re in a good position, there are multiple ways for you to win. When you’re in a bad position, there’s only one way for you to win, and it requires some divine intervention. This analogy is balanced out by ancient wisdom: The night before a critical battle, an army’s general ordered them to burn…
Herbert Lui
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Three particularly resonant posts
A few of the recent posts here have resonated with me, possibly because I have been travelling: You can always choose to be calm: Even if someone’s intentions are to insult you, or have fun at your expense, you can choose to respond in a different way. Impress as few people as possible: I’ve used…
Herbert Lui
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Impress as few people as possible
“What do they think about me?” is a useful question. It’s best only when you consider it for a few people in your life. For example, your spouse, your best friend, a family member. As you meet more people, you can trust yourself to be respectful, civil, and collaborative. That doesn’t mean you need to…
Herbert Lui
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You can always choose to be calm
When your mind is preoccupied, it believes that there isn’t even time to breathe. Your body breathes anyway, though, whether you’re mindful of it or not. Specific academic estimates vary, though it’s clear that the range is somewhere between 10,000 to 20,000 times per day. Breathing is the most natural thing in the world, even…
Herbert Lui
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Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice is permanent
Ty Dolla $ign released his new album a week ago, Tycoon. It was an occasion for me to reflect on my interview with him. In 2016, when we shot the interview, Ty had already gained a fair amount of momentum in his career, which he has sustained in the nine years since. Ty’s still best…
Herbert Lui
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Every day is an opportunity to improve a skill and create momentum
If you want to learn to cook, you have three meals a day to try. If you want to improve your writing, you can publish on the internet anytime. Try once a day or once a week. If you want to get better at speaking, you can practice with the people around you. You can…
Herbert Lui
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Don’t let a misunderstanding distract you from your goals
In 2018, Louis Vuitton announced that the company had appointed Virgil Abloh as its new artistic director of menswear. It was a triumphant moment for Virgil, streetwear, and a new generation of designers and customers. One day, as Virgil was going to work, he was denied entry by a security guard. When Virgil recalled this…
Herbert Lui
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When you do interesting things, you learn to make boring things interesting
One useful piece of advice I came across early on in my writing career was to do interesting things. I travelled cheaply with friends. I met artists and authors. I worked with tech companies at the forefront of software, like Shopify and Figma. I moved out of the suburbs to downtown Toronto, then to Hong…
Herbert Lui