Every one of them went wrong somewhere. Every one is why I write the way I do.
What the brief actually was, what I did about it, and what came back. Numbers where there are numbers.
A premium tea in China’s most crowded category, with no budget. I found international-school families — buying cultural gifts for years, and nobody selling to them. Six first orders, about $10,000.
Read →Lamborghini rebuilt its presence in China in 2024. On the ground that work was site selection: five districts surveyed on foot, and a case strong enough to move a venue already chosen.
Read →Before this, every negotiation started from the same number, and partners who could not reach it walked away. Four tiers meant four different conversations — and four of them closed.
Read →An hour before doors, the main screen went dark and the venue’s own technicians were still two hours out. I did not wait for them, and I did not guess. The opening started on time.
Read →Long-form essays written in Chinese, on my own time. They are how I think when nobody is grading it.
Why we are strong in some subjects and hopeless in others, why willpower is the wrong thing to spend, and why the only goal worth setting at twenty-two is keeping your options open.
Read →Procrastination is fear wearing a schedule. What a usable goal actually looks like, what practice really is, and the formula that says success gets measured by other people, not by you.
Read →Success needs every prerequisite at once, and each one is a probability. Five conditions at two-in-five each leaves a one percent chance — which is also a ninety-nine percent chance of failing.
Read →Discrimination is choice made under the cost of information. Once you see it that way, the question stops being who is prejudiced and becomes who ends up paying for the sorting.
Read →People who handle ideas for a living rarely carry the outcome of those ideas. A reading of what happens when the argument turns to dividing the pie instead of working to make it larger.
Read →Long-termism is usually sold as patience. I argue it is a cost problem instead: the price of protecting your own face is the better move you quietly chose not to make.
Read →There is no single universal time. What there is, is relation — and it is relation that leaves a trace behind. Everything in the world is a trace, and everything will become one.
Read →Fourteen years of team sports, two broken bones and two national titles. Most of what I know about pressure came from here.
A high-school coach gave me a tryout, and a condition attached to it: fifty pounds in two months. That was not a training plan. It was a door that was only ever going to open once.
Read →The biggest game of my high-school career. At the half I had scored nothing at all and we were down seventeen. What kept me on the floor was not the coach or the score. It was the bench.
Read →Never played a game. Never missed a practice. Three nights a week on the sideline drawing plays. That year taught me something I did not expect — leadership does not require you to be on the field.
Read →I was in Washington, three months out of the country and three months away from the game, when the team made the national final. I bought a ticket and flew back mid-semester to play in it.
Read →Some of this you already know. Some of it you would probably rather not. Either way, it is all true.
I only answer from what is written on this site.
Type a few words — I will show you where it says so.