Category: Turning Stories
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Progress ebbs and flows
This was a lesson one of my bosses shared with me: most people don’t improve consistently every quarter. Instead, progress ebbs and flows. Sometimes—maybe many times—you might feel like you’re going through a plateau. Many other people would quit. If you remain confident you’re heading in the right direction, then you need to stick with…
Herbert Lui
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Don’t fight back, fight forward with forgiveness
A restaurateur speaks up publicly for what he thinks is right. The people who think he’s wrong take action. They vandalize his restaurant. Glass is shattered. Mirrors broken. Furniture destroyed. He had invited his father to town to dine at the restaurant. That can’t happen now that the restaurant is in such bad shape. He…
Herbert Lui
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Letting go of the scene
I live in downtown NYC. I wouldn’t consider FiDi a particularly cool neighborhood. Geographically speaking, I could probably be further from the scene—I’m not in the burbs!—but socially speaking, I haven’t broken in. To be honest, I could not be less interested. Yes, there is occasional FOMO. While I moved here for work, when I…
Herbert Lui
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Kinetic and energeial living
Kinetic life is focused on reaching a destination. You harness your drive to complete a journey. In this way of life, it naturally makes sense to find the shortest possible route and take it. Imagine it like a commute. If you were to choose between an express train and a local one, and you saw…
Herbert Lui
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Putting it out there
Brett Goldstein worked as a writer for Ted Lasso. As he worked on the scripts, he realized that he really understood one of the characters. He wanted to put himself forward for the acting role. “I also knew no one was thinking of me for Roy, so right at the end of the writers’ room…
Herbert Lui
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Why Ted Lasso gets away with not knowing anything about football
Imagine that you’re an American football coach that is now only going to coach European football (better known in the U.S.A. as soccer). And you know absolutely nothing about the sport. So on the pitch of 22 players, the kitman, the assistant coach, you know the least about the sport. That’s the premise of Ted…
Herbert Lui
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A strategy needs time
A year ago, my friend Peter decided to position his agency to focus on CPG companies. While he and his team weren’t sure if the strategy would work, they stuck with it through trying times. Their effort and commitment amidst uncertainty paid off, and they’re seeing more CPG opportunities and clients, and building a reputation…
Herbert Lui
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More responsibility, more failure
In the 2010s, Amazon launched a phone. It was a spectacular failure. When a journalist asked CEO Jeff Bezos about it, Jeff replied, “If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now — and I am not kidding. Some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look…
Herbert Lui
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Causal and effectual reasoning
What makes a person entrepreneurial? Professor Saras D. Sarasvathy believes the distinguishing factor is in the reasoning process. She identifies two types of reasoning: When you think with causal reasoning, you focus on what you want to do—the desired end goal, or the destination—and then work backwards from that. Business leaders, managers, and strategists tend…
Herbert Lui
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Don’t let batch processing get in the way of building momentum
One of the earliest pieces of productivity advice I came across was the concept of grouping similar tasks together, and doing it all in one go. This is known as “batch processing.” For example, if you’re going to read and respond to your emails, don’t do them one at a time throughout the day. Make…
Herbert Lui