Blog on creativity, marketing, and the human condition.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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