Author: Herbert Lui
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Helping feels better when you want to help
Dr. Heidi Grant writes in Reinforcements: There’s an inherent paradox in asking someone for their help: while help freely and enthusiastically given makes the helper feel good, researchers have found that the emotional benefits of providing help to others disappear when people feel controlled—when they are instructed to help, when they believe that they should…
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The creativity-productivity relationship
It’s so obvious to me that creativity and productivity have an incredibly important, and delicate, relationship. Too much creative energy without demands for productivity can cause creative blocks and fixation; the idea expands too far too fast, and it doesn’t end up coming to life in the physical world. Too little creative energy with high…
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Rebuilding year
Around halfway through 2019, I was really experiencing the peak of a creative block. I was working full-time at a Fortune 500, trying to run my editorial studio, and had barely enough time to write. Something had to give. Fortunately, my contract with the Fortune 500 would end in March 2020; conventionally, the Fortune 500…
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What your work is missing
“A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said,” Amos Tversky says to Don Redelmeier (via The Undoing Project). That’s certainly true; it’s also part of good storytelling. Van Lathan writes in his latest book, Fat, Crazy, and Tired: “I grabbed the…
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Either way, it’s gonna be difficult…
So you might as well do what you want to do, and succeed at what you want to succeed at. You may think that there are two paths; an easier one (should) and a tougher one (must). In reality though, there’s no such thing as an actual easier option. Both are gonna be tough. The…
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That’s that heat
For the new version of my book, my partner Bernice Liu (i.e., the artist Spime) blessed me and Holloway with the cover: Here’s an excerpt where I explain more about the cover. (I’m so happy that I can so conveniently link to these, it’s definitely a perk of publishing a digital book with Holloway. Print…
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De-risking
There’s a narrative that artists and industries took more creative risks in the past; one possible reason for that was the businesses and industry just was able to cross-subsidize different work. If they made a commercial success, that would fund the critical one. Author and critic William Deresiewicz writes: In the past, one of the…
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Load management
In 2019, during Kawhi Leonard’s championship run with the Raptors, I learned about the term, “Load management.” The British Journal of Sports Medicine defines the objective in 2016: “The aim of load management is to optimally configure training, competition and other load to maximise adaptation and performance with a minimal risk of injury. Load management…
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Make twice, sell twice
In November 2020, I independently published my first book at Gumroad. I had spent four months or so full-time deliberately researching, writing, editing, proofreading, and designing a PDF of ~18,000 words. That doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but you could say I spent most of the 2010s researching it (starting with this piece…
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Doubt as a driving force of creativity
One of the most difficult emotions to come to terms with is doubt; it’s also one of the most realistic ones. It’s the allure of faking it till you make it: you’re making a promise against your doubt with the hammer of reality, and trying to get more people to believe in you to drown…