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Fast & Furious
The Fast & Furious franchise was inspired by an article on street racing culture by Kenneth Li. The first three movies in this Fast & Furious franchise—Fast & Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift—maintained its signature by staying true to this throughline, rotating its cast members, and focusing…
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Confidence vs. trusting the process
“This might not work,” Seth Godin writes in his blog post, “Out on a limb.” (It’s one of my favorites, alongside “Talker’s Block.” ) It’s fascinating to see this idea make it into a key part of his book The Practice, which I recently picked up and find myself liking a lot. If you pick…
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Serious writing
In Impro, Keith Johnstone describes how his teachers taught him to write, “They wanted me to reject and discriminate, believing that the best artist was the one who made the most elegant choices. They analysed poems to show how difficult ‘real’ writing was, and they taught that I should always know where the writing was…
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Some notes on a return visit to Hong Kong
In late 2021, I moved to Hong Kong for six months. My partner and I enjoyed it so much that we ended up staying nearly a year and a half. We moved to New York City shortly after that, and I started my job at Figma. I always thought I’d document the trip some other…
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The Path
In the winter, when I commuted into downtown Toronto from my family’s hometown in the suburbs, I would often get where I needed to go through a Guinness world-record setting network of underground tunnels called the Path. I enjoyed getting lost in the Path, which usually meant discovering something—running into a new food court, finding…
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A few seconds of space
George Mumford works with professional athletes—including Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal—on their mindfulness. When a journalist from ABC News interviewed him, one of the outstanding things he said was, “…You can slow time down when you create space between stimulus and response—[then] three seconds is an eternity.” Practicing creating this space is incredibly valuable.…
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Incompletion risk
Several years ago, I heard a professor say, “We have to get this done now. Tomorrow means we’re never going to get it done.” What the professor understood was this: when you pause (or get interrupted on) on project (or task), you open it to a chance that you won’t complete it. The less specific…
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Find more ways to win
If you play a game of chess well, with the right position, there is more than one way for you to win. If you play a game poorly, your options are few—there is only one way, perhaps even a miracle, for you to win. For any goal you have, it’s worth considering how many paths…
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Everyone makes mistakes
It’s how you respond to the mistake you just made that defines you. Will you let your emotions get the best of you? Will you let yourself get paralyzed? Will you keep digging yourself into a deeper hole? Will you react with defensiveness when somebody gives you painful feedback? Or will you regulate your emotions?…