Category: Creativity

• Creative focus

  This year is Apple’s 50th year in business. Decades ago, it lost creative focus, and spread itself too thin. Tim Cook describes how Apple does things, “We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.” Each of these…

  Herbert Lui

  July 8, 2026

  Creativity, Creator Confidential, Turning Stories

• Making in bets

  The Consistency Journal is an experiment. There are signs of early momentum, but I don’t know how it’s going to go. It started off as a pet, and now it’s more like livestock. Creative Doing was an experiment. I started interesting conversations with it. While I continue to promote it, it’s transitioned into being a…

  Herbert Lui

  July 7, 2026

  Creativity, Creator Confidential

• Public transit as a destination

  In her memoir Airplane Mode, author Shahnaz Habib shares her travels around the world. One of my favorite passages, though, was about her taking her local Brooklyn bus as a new parent, “Where I wanted to be was on the bus… The bus itself became my destination. A place to sit, a window to look…

  Herbert Lui

  July 6, 2026

  Around the World, Creativity, Turning Stories

• Creative stupidity

  My latest column for 3 Quarks Daily is live, entitled, “Five Ways Bad Ideas Lead to Good Ones.” It was a fun revisiting of Creative Doing, as well as ideas I wrote in some blog posts.  In writing this one, I came up with the phrase “creative stupidity,” which was a riff on “productively stupid,”…

  Herbert Lui

  July 3, 2026

  Creativity, Creator Confidential, Expectations, Turning Stories

• Your first try is a proof of concept

  A proof of concept is a test project. The point is to make sure an idea can actually be created in the physical world. Perhaps it’s a prototype, or simply a finalized version of a draft, demo, or sketch. If it’s your first time making something new, treat it like a proof of concept. Make…

  Herbert Lui

  June 30, 2026

  Creativity, Creator Confidential, Expectations, Turning Stories

• Making new material with the old

  A piece of advice I’ve found very useful is work with what’s in front of you. I’ve found myself applying this in single, short, writing sessions as well.  For example, writing a blog post or outline without opening a new tab, using only my lived experiences as research. Writing a social media or newsletter by…

  Herbert Lui

  June 29, 2026

  Creativity, Creator Confidential, Turning Stories

• Make your work pay off

  In the past couple of weeks, my wife and I started watching a few different movies at home. We paused them all and stepped away, because we just weren’t enjoying them. We may give a couple of them another shot. Attention is more precious than ever. Promoting your work to other people is only part…

  Herbert Lui

  June 28, 2026

  Creativity, Creator Confidential

• Creative contribution

  Awards and sales performance are the easiest ways to measure creative work. They also frame the creative process as a competition. There are winners and losers in both, and it focuses on results.  This isn’t a useful frame for actually making something you want to make, which is what being a creative person actually means.…

  Herbert Lui

  June 23, 2026

  Creativity, Creator Confidential, Expectations, Turning Stories

• Ownership requires energy and storage

  A few years ago, my wife and I owned roughly over 500 books in paperback and hardcover. Here they were, in a condo in Toronto: When my wife and I moved to Hong Kong, I figured I’d be back in six months and we packed these books up. They were, by far, the most difficult…

  Herbert Lui

  June 22, 2026

  Around the World, Creativity, Turning Stories

• Developing a clearer business strategy helped unblock my writing

  A few months ago, I wrote about my return to business writing as well as one way of framing the service. However, I still felt a block about promoting it to my friends and peers at LinkedIn: should I write about the Consistency Journal, or should I write about my business writing services?  The immediate…

  Herbert Lui

  June 21, 2026

  Creativity, Creator Confidential, Turning Stories