Herbert Lui

Blog on creativity, marketing, and the human condition.

  • About
  • Creative Doing
  • Newsletter
  • In praise of scruffy writing

    A friend of mine recently published a new book and asked for my advice for promoting it. Fortunately, I wrote a post on the topic, so I sent them the link. (It’s much easier for me to find a link to a post from my blog than a post at a social media platform.) At…

    Herbert Lui

    July 7, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential, Turning Stories
  • Creative risk and precursive faith

    A property of any project that involves imagination—including entrepreneurship, art, writing, etc.—is the risk that it might not work. It’s not feasible to gain much certainty on the project, or even to control how it turns out. One really helpful framework is precursive faith: believing in the work ahead of seeing any evidence. You need…

    Herbert Lui

    July 6, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential, Expectations, Turning Stories
  • The shortcut that isn’t

    If you are making a change in your career—carving out a new path—one sign things are going right is a feeling of constant contradiction.  One day you feel like quitting. The next you feel like doubling down. The experience of confusion is a sign of the process taking place. You don’t want to rush it.…

    Herbert Lui

    July 5, 2025
    Uncategorized
  • Creative Doing, at Creative Odyssey

    I appeared as a guest on Emil Drud’s Creative Odyssey podcast. We talked about Creative Doing, Prologue, and my career path, amidst all sorts of other stuff.  This feels like one of my better guest appearances. It was also one of the first podcasts I’ve joined since starting New Material. As I was listening to…

    Herbert Lui

    July 4, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential
  • A good example is worth the effort

    Finding good examples, references, and stories is one of the most important, and undervalued, aspects of writing. It remains a good opportunity to make your work better: Is the example too well known and common?  Can a reader relate to this?  Does this example say what I want it to say? Does the metaphor work?…

    Herbert Lui

    July 3, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential
  • World building, observations, and names

    A couple of years ago, I wrote about how one way to see branding was to build a world. I currently work as the director of marketing at FGX. One of the aspects that continues to energize me is the depth of thought the leaders put into defining the world of global IT logistics. They’ve…

    Herbert Lui

    July 2, 2025
    Contentions, Promotion, Revision
  • A lesson this blog has taught me

    I write here every day, and I don’t take it for granted. It’s not difficult for me to imagine a world where I stopped writing altogether. It almost happened a decade ago. (I mentioned it here briefly.) While I wrote very wholeheartedly at the time, I also didn’t treat my work very well. I felt…

    Herbert Lui

    July 1, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential
  • Discover what you want to say by writing every day

    I was reading a post I wrote recently, and I realized that I’d actually excerpted the same quote twice. That was inevitable—I’ve written over 1,000 posts at this point—and it created an opening for me to explore why it continues to resonate throughout the years. I started reading each of the related posts as well.…

    Herbert Lui

    June 30, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential
  • Your brain’s ecosystem

    Virgil Abloh really DJed. Music, hanging out, and DJing shaped his brain—they were key fundamentals to his ecosystem. This ecosystem would enable him to take his skills and approach into fashion and creative direction. I write every day at this blog. It’s a key part of my ecosystem. In a recent interview, I was reminded…

    Herbert Lui

    June 29, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential
  • Sleeping just enough

    A few years ago, I started experiencing fragmented sleep. One of the first things I did was buy a book entitled, Quiet Your Mind and Get to Sleep. It came with a worksheet to help keep track of how much sleep you had, what the circumstances were, etc. I tracked this for 12 weeks or…

    Herbert Lui

    June 28, 2025
    Life
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