Author: Herbert Lui
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Write the book you want to live
On either fence of, “Write what you know,” I tend to lean towards writing about what I don’t know; “Write What Obsesses You,” as Meg Wolitzer describes it. A year after publishing Creative Doing, and a few years after the initial manuscript, I still pick it up and enjoy flipping through it. Although there are…
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Cut it in half
A constraint is the best way to start making creative decisions. One prompt I’d recently come across, from observing feedback on various drafts, is simply to cut the word count in half. How can I summarize? Would there be a good rephrasing that can keep the original intent? If not, what elements will I keep?…
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A little flame of talent
At Granta, Kent Haruf writes: When I finished that novel I wrote John Irving to ask if he would connect me with his agent, and he said he would. He said he had sent fifty writers to his agent and he hadn’t taken any of them, but maybe he’d take me. And he did: I…
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Contentions: A good brand enables profit margins and product expansion
It’s obvious that it takes money (or time) to nurture a brand. What’s much less obvious is that a brand also pays off in the long run in more money, in the form of profit margins. Jon Lax writes: The only purpose of a brand is pricing power. The stronger a brand, the more pricing…
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Results orientation
Several months ago, the Nintendo Switch became the fastest console to sell 120 million units, and the third best-selling console of all time after the PS2 (158 million) and the Nintendo DS (154 million). Nintendo has also sold over 100 million of its Wii consoles, many millions more than the competitor’s much more polished and…
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The illusion of catching up
One of the most important parts of hesitancy is that it compounds. When you notice other people making progress, and you feel caught in inertia, it’s important not to let your own expectations get away from you; you’re not going to catch up by aiming to catch up. Let’s say you and your friend had…
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Contentions: The best content marketing example is Marginal Revolution
Marginal Revolution should be how every person or company measures success with its content marketing efforts. Let’s evaluate it from a marketing perspective: It has made authors Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok undeniable leading thinkers (i.e., thought leaders) It has become an incredibly effective launchpad for their projects (like Emergent Ventures, or acquiring PhD students…
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An author, on both sides of publishing
When I first independently published Creative Doing, the initial manuscript was 10,000 words (⅓ of its current length), published under a different title, as a PDF digital download on Gumroad. A few months later, I would connect with Holloway—as a cold submission—and sign a publishing deal with them. A year after that, after much editing…
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Confidence compounds, so does hesitancy
At The Knowledge Project 169, Dr. Julie Gurner says to Shane Parrish: I think that there is a very strong link—more than we think—with hesitancy and self-esteem. For example, I think the more you hesitate, you see other people doing things. You watch, right? If you don’t take the chance, and you watch other people…
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Who benefits from low agency beliefs and behaviors?
Legacy intermediaries (e.g., middlemen such as traditional publishers, record labels, agents, etc.) are incentivized to make you think that you need them. This belief gives their businesses the best chance of continued survival and better advantages. The key is: whether you actually need them or not is entirely another matter; they only need you to…