Herbert Lui

Blog on creativity, marketing, and the human condition.

  • About
  • Creative Doing
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  • You meet ten people…

    Two will like you. There is potential to become best friends. Seven will feel indifferent towards you. You will become acquaintances at best. One will dislike you. At best, you will both treat each other with civility. You can’t please everyone. Sometimes—perhaps many times—in order to meet the two people, you need to sort through…

    Herbert Lui

    May 6, 2025
    Life
  • Customer satisfaction builds momentum

    A business delivers a good product or service to a customer. A satisfied customer tells other people about the business. Those people find the business and become customers. As the years go by, the business builds enough of a reputation and customer base to sustain itself. If we agree that’s the core loop of a…

    Herbert Lui

    May 5, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential, Expectations, Figma
  • Style = best traits + taste + flair

    In her book Executive Style, Judith Price covers a lot of really cool offices from the 1970s—think Diane Von Furstenberg, Estée Lauder, Malcolm Forbes. What won me over was this paragraph in her introduction: Style isn’t something you’re born with or something you acquire when you reach a certain age. It isn’t something you earn…

    Herbert Lui

    May 4, 2025
    Creativity, Expectations, Life
  • Practicing

    Most days, I write and I don’t think about it much. Some days, I write and it doesn’t come out as nice as I’d like for it to. I publish it anyway, though I wonder if I hit a plateau. It makes me reconsider this whole practice. Maybe this isn’t helping me write better. Maybe…

    Herbert Lui

    May 3, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential
  • Getting rich

    One path to getting rich looks more like saving money. While your friends buy the fancier options, you don’t. You’re not broke, you’re living within your means and taking steps toward richness. Maybe you used to borrow from the future, and now you’ve given that inclination up. Whereas most people may feel a horrifying shame…

    Herbert Lui

    May 2, 2025
    Turning Stories
  • Your own project

    You should always have at least one project, or a performance, that you can complete with no meetings, no bosses, and no external accountability. Just you doing something for yourself, where you don’t need to explain yourself at all, or need to make money doing. If it resonates with other people, it’s even more special…

    Herbert Lui

    May 1, 2025
    Creativity
  • Two quotes about fans and enthusiasm

    “It’s not what you know. It’s who you know,” the cliché goes. (Not one of the quotes.)  If you’re doing creative work—visual art, writing, music, entrepreneurship, programming, design, amongst the many other forms of expression—it’s entirely about who you know and who knows you.  These people create supportive contexts for you by working as managers,…

    Herbert Lui

    April 30, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential, Expectations, Promotion, Turning Stories
  • Making the money vs. collecting it

    Chris Rock asked a young comic what he did that day. “Nothing,” the young comic said. “But I’m going to do a set tonight.”  “You make money during the day. You collect it at night,” Chris responded. “During the day is where the money is made.” There’s a writing lesson here: While comics and comedians…

    Herbert Lui

    April 29, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential, Turning Stories
  • The right answer vs. your answer

    Cluely is a new AI app that listens to your conversations and feeds you the best answers. The team behind it created a phrase designed to be misunderstood and polarizing, but saying that it lets you cheat on any conversation. Cheating like a calculator is cheating a math test, of course. If you choose to…

    Herbert Lui

    April 28, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential, Turning Stories
  • The trunk and the branches

    Every tree has a central trunk. This trunk eventually splits into branches.  Some trees, like the pine tree, will maintain a strong central trunk throughout and very weak side branches, with a goal of growing as tall as possible to get more sunlight. It focuses all of its nutrients towards strengthening this central trunk. This…

    Herbert Lui

    April 27, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential, Promotion
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