Herbert Lui

A few years ago, my wife and I owned roughly over 500 books in paperback and hardcover. Here they were, in a condo in Toronto: When my wife and I moved to Hong Kong, I figured I’d be back in six months and we packed these books up. They were, by far, the most difficult category of item to move; heavy, required lots of packing, etc. We stored them away in my parents’ basement. We stayed in Hong Kong over a year. Then I got a job in New York City, where we stayed for over two years. The books…

A few months ago, I wrote about my return to business writing as well as one way of framing the service. However, I still felt a block about promoting it to my friends and peers at LinkedIn: should I write about the Consistency Journal, or should I write about my business writing services? The immediate thought that came to me was, “I would be confusing readers if I did both.” Eventually, I chose to announce the Consistency Journal first, figuring that I’d need many more people to know about it…

Every year, all sorts of organizations publish a list of upcoming leaders, called the Top 40 Under 40. Part of what makes it special is scarcity: it excludes everyone except 40 people. In Canada, where I live, there are just over 40 million people. 10 million of them are between 20 to 40 (let’s assume 0 to 19 years of age won’t qualify for the Top 40 Under 40). 100,000 are in the top 1%. That’s enough people to fill up a stadium. A lot of exceptional people didn’t make it into the Top 40 under…

Yesterday, I posted this at LinkedIn: A few months ago, I showed a friend an early sample of The Consistency Journal. As we caught up, he mentioned he’d been having trouble with a blog post at work. The technical writer they’d been working with couldn’t take the draft where it needed to be. “I don’t even know if you have bandwidth for this,” he said. “But if you do, would you be able to have a look?” I’d edited dozens of articles as a content strategist at Figma, as well as my book Creative…

There’s a local car service that specializes at taking customers to and from the airport. They serve customers based in a couple of local suburbs that don’t speak English. As far as I know, you can only call them by phone. They charge a consistent, flat rate and only accept cash when you get to the airport. They give you a precise estimate of time, and show up 10 minutes early. (In other words, they’re reliable. No surge pricing, no cancellations, no delays.) My family found out about them…

One of the most intriguing qualities about Steve Jobs is described as his “reality distortion field.” It seemed like he was able to bend reality to his will. For example, with its influence, he occasionally made unrealistic deadlines happen like the original Apple Macintosh computer, or going public with the Pixar IPO right after Toy Story’s debut. But even Steve had limits to his abilities; he couldn’t make his original vision for NeXT’s black cubes work, and the business needed to pivot into…

Whenever I come across an interesting idea, I hear my mind’s chatter, “This would be a great book.” I can envision the book cover with a big, bold, title. The feeling is captivating, almost euphoric; I call it a creative fever. A few moments, or perhaps days, later, I realize that I’m not going to have the time and energy to write it at this moment; maybe I never will. My hands are full, and life is too short. That fever turns into grief. This process takes place in a similar spirit to how…

This year marked Apple’s 50th year in business. It came awfully close to closing shop in its second decade, largely because it lost direction. The company failed to release hit products, was losing a lot of money, and scrambling to survive. In 1993, Apple released nearly 40 products, maintaining over 70 total. (For the Apple fans, here’s a scan of a catalog.) It was too much. By 1998, Steve Jobs and the company’s other new leaders decided to try to save it. Steve identified two things that were…

In the 1950s, decades before he became a well-renowned composer, Philip Glass was a young man who recently moved to New York City to start his education at a prestigious art school, the Juilliard School. His first home was in a room on the fourth floor of a brownstone in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, just a block west of Central Park. In the evenings, he often worked at a diner nearby, sipping on coffee while completing his harmony exercises as well as composing his own music in his…

Advice from a strategist, which resonated with me: You don’t need to pursue one strategy at a time. You can draft up three to five strategies, test them out, and see which ones work. In fact, it’s probably useful to think of more than one path to win. The most effective entrepreneurs and companies generally practice this. The art is in executing these strategies and tests, and conducting effective research. The post Multiple strategies appeared first on Herbert Lui.

Olivia Levin wrote a book, The Story of Us, to cover Taylor Swift’s fan community. It’s a really interesting angle, and it made me wonder how a story covering Ye’s fan community would look. Right away, the phrase, “A fan of yourself,” immediately came to mind. In addition to the music, and the products, Ye earned his fans’ respect by making work that encouraged them to chase their dreams. Unlike Taylor Swift, Ye has let down many of his fans. He expressed racist, hateful, and incredibly hurtful…

During the first half of yesterday’s NBA finals playoff game, the New York Knicks were losing by a lot. At one point, they were trailing by 29 points. They were not playing well at all. For context, no team losing by that much has ever come back to win in the finals. They were leading the series by 2-1. I wondered if the coach would just sit their star players and let their opponents, the San Antonio Spurs, have it. Rest and focus on the next win. Nope. The Knicks played another two consistent…

In technology, a passthrough is a device that allows a signal to transfer from a source to a receiver. A VCR could act as a passthrough for S-video signals to reach the TV. This concept applies to our work. In some ways, you act as a passthrough for ideas, directives, and requests. When these ideas pass through you, you learn and gain experience in the process. When you rely on AI to come up with plans, or AI agents to execute, you are making the agent the passthrough. You will still learn,…

A family member, who worked at the bank, saw a lot of high net worth clients lose a lot of money gambling, to the point of even re-mortaging their houses. They told me, “At a casino, the worst thing that can happen to you is winning.” Chasing the ecstasy of the first win leads you to future losses. It gives you a false sense of confidence, leading you to think you’re in control, and to do something you’ll regret. Gambling isn’t just an act, it’s an attitude and mindset. Winning any type of…

For decades, Pokémon games have largely held the same premise and core mechanics. (e.g., You play as a person who chooses one of three starter Pokémon, catch more along the way, level them up by battling other people, adventure through eight cities or towns and beat each one’s respective gym leader, beat the Elite Four, catch a legendary Pokémon, and so on and so forth.) There are exceptions like Pokémon Snap, Pokémon Stadium, Pokémon Go, etc. Pokopia’s premise is completely different. For…

In Thinking in Bets, author and retired poker player Annie Duke believes that good poker players and good decision-makers are comfortable with uncertainty in the world. They accept that they’ll almost never know how things will turn out. “Instead of focusing on being sure, they try to figure out how unsure they are, making their best guess at the chances that different outcomes will occur,” she writes. “The accuracy of those guesses will depend on how much information they have and how…

In poker, when you have a favorable hand only to get beaten by an underdog, you’ve experienced a “bad beat.” It wasn’t supposed to work out like that; only it did. In The Biggest Bluff, author Maria Konnikova writes about her journey to becoming a professional poker player. She meets champion Erik Seidel, who takes her on as his student. After narrowly losing a tournament, Maria finds Erik to vent about a bad beat. The odds had been in her favor. Erik, who is usually a good listener,…

I’ve written a couple of drafts only to find out I had no idea how to land the post. That happens sometimes. I used to hope that I could figure this out before I wrote it. This happens sometimes, too. But more often than not, if I practice that way, I get stuck in a mindset where I can’t figure out how to land any idea. The solution there is to just start writing, and trust you’ll figure it out along the way. It’s easy to recover from writing a couple of hundred words that need more incubation.…

A few years ago, my wife and I visited Tokyo together for the first time in December. We’d arrived inbound from Chiang Mai, with a layover in Busan. It felt like travelling from summer to winter. By the time we had settled into the hotel, it was the early evening, so we searched for a restaurant to have dinner. We both felt weary, perhaps even on the verge of getting sick. The neighborhood felt like a mix of business and residential; it wasn’t in the middle of action like Ginza or Shibuya, so…

Kanjirō Kawai was a potter who lived in Kyoto. He and a collaborator, Hamada Shoji, conducted over 10,000 experiments with glazes in their first two years working together. (Talk about being prolific.) Here’s a poem he wrote, which I found in the Kyoto edition of D Design Travel magazine: Work works itself to work Work is happy each and every day There’s nothing work can’t do Work does anything and everything Even work work doesn’t want to do Work only knows to move forward Work surprises…

Good writing sticks around in your mind. Perhaps it may be difficult to summarize; even if it’s long, it is probably as tight as it could be already. Once you read it, even if you don’t fully consciously “get it,” you can’t go back; you start seeing what the writer is saying. I recently read a metaphor likening writing to furniture; I’ve lost the source, so I can only make a best guess (which is where creativity has an opening to come in). Perhaps it was more like a character coming in and…

Some businesses—not all, and not even most!—don’t trust you. They design their products and marketing to lock you in and make you feel reliant on them. The incentive for them is to have lots of steady customers; if you can come and go at any point, then that business isn’t as steady as it could be. (The prevalence of the subscription pricing model is an example of this. And there are many businesses who are fighting back by offering a pay once model, which used to be the convention.) These…

A friend of mine is an accomplished restaurateur. His restaurant specializes in selling smash burgers. He is also a successful chef, cutting his teeth at one of the best restaurants in the city. A couple of times, I had his pasta for dinner. I made this realization the other day, though I haven’t asked him about it: Burgers are his products, and cooking is his art. In building a burger restaurant, he still retains his craft through cooking. Another example: while I offer business services like…

What do you want to do? If your life experiences have been anything like mine (e.g., growing up in collectivist culture, a formal education in business, working in professional services), they may have conditioned you to understand what other people wanted. Your own inclinations may appear less clearly to you because you haven’t paid attention to them in a while. Maybe you compromise, twisting yourself into fitting the opportunities in front of you that you see; you want to start a new…

You’re looking outside a window, and you see a tree. Somebody else is looking outside a different window, and sees the same tree, but from a different perspective. Success happens when they decide to come over and stand at your window for a little bit. You discuss what you both see. Then, maybe you go over to their window, and talk some more. That can also be a moment of success. What’s most important is that the learning takes place. An excerpt from my new newsletter, Leading Thinker.…

This post is for those of you, who like me, have a particularly full inbox. Here’s a useful technique: search for the keywords of common newsletters, receipts, and marketing emails. Then bulk check them off, mark them as read, and archive them. You can do this with dozens (or, in my case, hundreds) of emails at a time. Gmail has a particularly useful tool, called, “Select all conversations that match this search.” You’ll see it after you select all your email through the checkbox near the top…

Or self fulfillment, or whatever the opposite of self defeat is, here’s what it sounds like: Jay-Z was the owner of an NBA team, the Brooklyn Nets. He was proud of this, and bragged about it constantly. Eventually, the news came out that he owned a fraction of 1% of the Nets (1/15th of 1%). A writer in the New York Times called it, “A tiny share of the team.” Another writer, in VICE, “He benefits from being able to pretend to own the Nets in some pretty obvious ways….” The NBA eventually…

Livestock helps a person make a living. Cows need to make milk, chicken eggs, and sheep wool. These animals were part of a business decision. While a farmer may grow fond of their livestock, there will eventually come a day when the farmer needs to send them to the butcher. It’s business. A pet is essentially part of a person’s family. Dogs and cats don’t need to help make money in order to earn their spot; they just need to be loved. When one passes away, it can feel as painful as losing a…

Should you pursue something you enjoy, or something you’re good at? Which is more worthy? In Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, a high school student asks this question to a character named Seungwoo who works as an employee at a big corporation and also writes a blog. Does this person enjoy work more, or writing and editing more? Seungwoo had worked his dream job at a corporation, but was constantly working late into the night and travelling. He decided to switch to a division with more…

If you’re a writer, maybe your dream is to write a book that hits the New York Times bestseller list. That’s a fine dream—and was mine, at one point!—though it comes with a caveat: whoever can put you on the list, or block you from it, is in control of your dream. Let’s imagine that your dream is to hit the NYT bestselling list. If you want to improve your odds, you’ll need to get familiar with their rules, including the sales venues they consider, finding a traditional publisher, and sell over…