William Louey

For most of my life, advice came from people. You asked a colleague who had encountered the problem before, called a friend whose judgement you trusted, consulted an expert or simply made the best decision you could with what you knew. Artificial intelligence introduces something quite different: advice that is

We tend to imagine success as a mountain. We spend years climbing, eventually reach the highest point and assume that, from there, the only possible direction is down. It is a useful image for an athlete trying to produce a personal best, but I am not convinced it is a

I sometimes wonder what the early 1990s would feel like to someone in their twenties today. People worried about careers, relationships, money and the future just as they do now, and we were no more certain about our choices than young people are today. What was different was the environment

The word “networking” has acquired a rather transactional meaning. It can suggest exchanging business cards, making useful introductions or meeting people who might one day be able to help us. Yet the strongest networks I have encountered rarely begin with any of those objectives. They begin with relationships, and relationships

Young people in Hong Kong today have access to an extraordinary amount of information. News, markets, opinions, messages and increasingly AI-generated answers arrive continuously. I grew up in a world where information was harder to obtain. The interesting reversal is that scarcity has become abundant, and the challenge now

Ask almost anyone how they are and the answer rarely changes. "Busy." "Exhausted." "Running behind." Those responses have become so familiar that they barely register. Fatigue no longer arrives only after an unusually demanding week. A low-level sense of mental depletion has become

Many people assume success depends upon finding the perfect answer to predictable questions. They rehearse responses to "Tell me about yourself", prepare examples of leadership and memorise carefully constructed stories about overcoming challenges. Preparation often becomes an exercise in anticipating what another person wants to hear. That approach

Early this month, one of Hong Kong's best-known landmarks was reimagined. Illuminations at The Peak invited visitors to experience Victoria Peak through light, colour and perspective, reminding us that even places we've reached many times can reveal something new when we choose to look differently.

Hong Kong is home to one of the longest-lived populations in the world. Yet according to the latest government health survey, almost 97 per cent of adults consume fewer than the recommended five daily portions of fruit and vegetables. At first glance, those two facts seem impossible to reconcile.

Most forms of wealth become smaller when we give them away. If we donate money, we have less of it. If we give away land, we no longer own it. Even time, perhaps our most precious resource, can only ever be spent once. Education is different. Knowledge is one of

One of the ideas that has stayed with me over the years did not come from business, medicine or education. It came from philosophy. Occam's Razor is a principle dating back to the fourteenth century and is often summarised in a simple way: when there are several possible

For much of my life, I believed academic achievement was one of the strongest predictors of future success. High-performing students demonstrated discipline, intellectual ability, perseverance and the willingness to work hard. Those qualities seemed to provide a reliable foundation for successful careers and meaningful lives, and I have long

When people think about staying young, they often focus on appearance, fitness, or energy levels. But one of the most important markers of healthy ageing is the brain. How clearly we think, how well we remember, how resilient we are in the face of stress, and how engaged we remain

When people talk about success, they often talk about what we gain. A better education. A stronger career. A business that grows. A reputation that lasts. A life that gives us choices. But over time, I have come to believe that real success is measured less by what we collect,

I've been thinking lately about time. Not in the anxious way, which ultimately focuses on the ticking clock and the pressure to produce. That kind of thinking dominated my younger years, and I don't miss it. I mean something else. The long view. The patient work

There is a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from reaching a long-held objective. Whether in business, philanthropy, or personal life, the completion of a project or the attainment of a milestone provides a sense of arrival. We often spend years focusing on the "what": the specific

With time, however, one begins to notice that the most meaningful conversations rarely emerge from hurried circumstances. The moments that remain in memory tend to occur in quieter settings where people feel able to speak with patience and listen without interruption.

There are stages in life when your priorities quietly reorganise themselves. For much of my career the focus was external: building, scaling, deciding, executing. Performance was measured in visible outcomes. Recently, however, attention has shifted inward toward something less visible but far more consequential. A conversation about health prompted that

After many decades in business a certain pattern of life begins to take shape. Experience accumulates and one grows accustomed to being the older voice in the room, the person expected to offer perspective drawn from years of observation. Conversations often follow a familiar path. Younger people ask questions and

There are moments in life when you pause and ask yourself how you arrived here. Recently, that moment came while I was sitting in a futuristic therapy tub at LifeClinic, undergoing sonodynamic treatment as part of a preventative health assessment. Years ago, I would have associated serious medicine with hospital

When I founded the William S.D. Louey Educational Foundation in 1995, I was driven by a desire to honor the legacy of my grandfather, the founder of Kowloon Motor Bus (KMB). However, I knew from the outset that I didn’t want to create a standard scholarship program. I