Herbert Lui – Page 10 – Blog on creativity, marketing, and the human condition.

Survival mode

If you’re starting a business with little (or no) money, your main priority is to survive. You will have a mission, and a position, and specific work you want to take on. Sometimes though, if your pipeline only has suboptimal clients, boring work, and projects you’re embarrassed to be associated with, you will need to…

Herbert Lui

May 21, 2025

Creator Confidential, Turning Stories

Questions on my mind

Because the first step to finding better answers is to ask better questions: How can I learn to love working on the business model, not just doing deliverables? What is a constructive way to honor the emotional experiences of disappointment, jealousy, and fear? What tradeoffs have other people who I admire made in their lives?…

Herbert Lui

May 20, 2025

Creativity

One of the most important rules to writing

Work with what you’ve got. Bringing any work to life requires that you make a bargain with your imagination. You plead with each other to make it work. Your reality—schedule, energy, budget—demands compromise. Your imagination demands more. Both are most unhappy when you don’t make a deal and give up on the work. This is…

Herbert Lui

May 19, 2025

Creativity, Creator Confidential

Deliberate boredom

It has never been easier to avoid boredom. Distraction is all around you, offering to cover up the painful things you’re avoiding that boredom can sometimes be a gateway to. Yet without boredom, there can be no inspiration. Boredom is the mud from which the flower of imagination blossoms. Your next creative idea is just…

Herbert Lui

May 18, 2025

Creativity, Creator Confidential, Turning Stories

Three things about creative success

1. Define what creative success means to you. Try to find an intrinsic source of motivation that you can work towards. 2. Extrinsic rewards matter, because you deserve to be recognized for your good work. Sometimes, these rewards need you to compromise. You will need to decide if it’s worth it. 3. Vincent van Gogh…

Herbert Lui

May 17, 2025

Creativity, Creator Confidential, Expectations

Wading through the junk

When science fiction was still emerging, one criticism of the genre was the sheer volume of bad work. After decades of defending science fiction, one writer realized that the criticism applied to everything. “Ninety percent of everything is crap,” he said. That observation became known as Sturgeon’s Law. “One of my painting teachers said 85…

Herbert Lui

May 16, 2025

Creativity, Creator Confidential, Turning Stories

What will you grow in your mud?

Sometimes, people ask me why I wrote a book about creativity. Short answer: it’s because I experienced a creative block. (Long answer here!) I spent many years looking for the answer to this creative block, and I put the most useful information I found into my book Creative Doing. I still often find myself experiencing…

Herbert Lui

May 15, 2025

Creativity, Creator Confidential, Expectations, Turning Stories

Maybe passion had nothing to do with it

Most people do not get paid to do their hobbies. (Trying to make money off your hobby could actually ruin it.) No matter your passion, it will ebb and flow. Actively cultivating passion, to love your job—whatever it happens to be, is a more resilient strategy than passively expecting passion to carry you through your…

Herbert Lui

May 14, 2025

Creator Confidential, Turning Stories

Walking your path

In my 20s, I watched a lot of interviews with artists so I could understand how they found success. I believed I could reverse engineer these paths, and I appreciated this genre of media so much I started making my own by interviewing recording artists and authors. While I learned more than my fair share,…

Herbert Lui

May 13, 2025

A Matter of Time, Creator Confidential, Turning Stories

Is time working with you, or against you?

Does your current position get stronger with time, or are you running out of time? If you did what you did today every day for a decade, will you get closer to your goal or further from it? Are you running down the clock, or do you wake up feeling energized more days than not?…

Herbert Lui

May 12, 2025

A Matter of Time