Category: Turning Stories
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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
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Character, habits, systems, and freedom
An author speculates that GLP-1 drugs will curb a lot of people’s impulses. This could potentially help a lot of people make better—less impulsive—decisions. In this speculation, one concern will be a division of advantage: the people who can afford the impulse control drugs would be at a greater advantage than the people who can’t…
Herbert Lui
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Three conditions to just do stuff (and minimize overthinking)
If you have fun writing something, the reader will have fun reading it. You’ve given your work the right energy. Building on this observation, Cassidy Williams notes that sometimes she wants her work to be strategic, or clear and thorough. She writes, “I think a lot of that overthinking and ‘being in my head’ about…
Herbert Lui
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Slow is smooth and smooth is fast
In the industrial era, the people that did more stuff—faster—added more value to the world. Efficiency was the buzzword. That’s no longer the case. Now, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. We are already bumping up on the limits of how fast we can do our work—and we will never execute faster than AI…
Herbert Lui
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How wanting something less freed me up to do more
While it’s good to be passionate about your work, an overwhelming ambition—bordering on a need—to achieve or have something, sometimes this drive actually gets in the way. I learned this the hard way. I spent most of my 20s wanting to be a bestselling author—recognized by traditional publications, sold lots of books, invited to speeches,…
Herbert Lui
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Some people have it, some people don’t?
A few years ago, I wrote that writing is thinking. You are better off writing to think, not trying to think before you write. “But some people are just better at it,” Ant K writes in a comment (which Karolis recently agreed with). He compared his work with another author he held in high esteem.…
Herbert Lui
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Hangry
Hangry is an emotional state of being hungry and feeling angry. If I don’t eat, I get hangry. The longer I go, the hangrier I get. When I travelled with my friends, they would crack jokes as they reminded me to pack a snack bar. I used to get really upset with myself for feeling…
Herbert Lui