Herbert Lui

Blog on creativity, marketing, and the human condition.

  • About
  • Creative Doing
  • Newsletter
  • Discouragement is a test

    When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a sports commentator. I enjoyed watching sports, and I liked talking, so that sounded like a sweet job. My family gave me a hard reality check:  How many people were there on TV that looked like me? How often did such job opportunities open up? What…

    Herbert Lui

    January 27, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential, Expectations, Turning Stories
  • Good Enough

    There are enough people who don’t like how software has evolved, don’t need all of the bells and whistles (and don’t want to pay for it), and remember how much simpler software used to be. It’s how I feel about the music app, Doppler. I don’t know the team at Good Enough, but it seems…

    Herbert Lui

    January 26, 2025
    Contentions, Creativity, Promotion
  • Teenage years, interfaces, and classic technology

    When I was a teenager, I spent hours trying to improve my computer’s interface. I can’t tell you how many times I changed my Windows XP interface to try to look like a Mac.  When Windows Longhorn was out in beta, I spent many afternoons trying to get it to work too—even partitioning my hard…

    Herbert Lui

    January 25, 2025
    Creativity, Figma
  • Living the contradictions

    Uncertainty is very difficult to live with—borderline painful. I used to think it was best to make a decision and move on, as soon as possible. Don’t look back, either. Flip–flopping was not acceptable. In her book Working Identity, professor Herminia Ibarra explores career transitions. She explains that rushing into a premature decision—to either stay,…

    Herbert Lui

    January 24, 2025
    A Matter of Time, Creator Confidential, Turning Stories
  • Sometimes, you just gotta wait

    In 2019, Jay-Z and his company Roc Nation partnered up with the NFL to advise on the social justice initiative Inspire Change and advise on the Super Bowl halftime show. That year, the Super Bowl drew in 98.2 million viewers. It’s a coveted event for recording artists to play. Before working with Jay-Z, the NFL…

    Herbert Lui

    January 23, 2025
    Creator Confidential
  • What do you need?

    This is worth being curious about. But for starters, you need to be mindful and not distracted—sometimes, bored—in order to remember to ask yourself this question. “Our changing moods and energy levels, and how inspired we’re feeling on any given day, are part of the hard reality we must accept in order to take effective…

    Herbert Lui

    January 22, 2025
    A Matter of Time, Creativity, Life
  • The natural game

    When Charles Duhigg attended his Harvard Business School class’s 15-year reunion, he was surprised to discover how many of his former classmates were miserable. One of them was earning over a million dollars a year, and said to him, “If you spend 12 hours a day doing work you hate, at some point it doesn’t…

    Herbert Lui

    January 21, 2025
    A Matter of Time, Creativity, Creator Confidential, Life, Turning Stories
  • You vs. the package of you

    Personas are packages for people.  But of course, they’re not actually people. When you see someone with a crafted persona, you don’t actually know who that person actually is.  Sure—you know that they’re ambitious, chasing status, wealth, and power. You could say that they are “moving up in the world.” But without living up to…

    Herbert Lui

    January 20, 2025
    Creativity, Life
  • Meeting people with cold emails

    An extraordinary professional moment happened to me in a very ordinary finance class. Instead of paying attention to what the teacher was saying, I read an article in HBR and emailed the author asking for advice about how I could find my passion.  They graciously responded with valuable advice—essentially, to try a lot of things!—and…

    Herbert Lui

    January 19, 2025
    Creator Confidential, Promotion
  • A path to consistency

    An earlier blog post I wrote has been bouncing around my mind lately: consistency starts with inconsistency. If the fear of commitment—or the avoidance of hard, consistent work—prevents you from getting started on something, the best solution is to find another way to see it. What could make the work easy? Do you need to…

    Herbert Lui

    January 18, 2025
    Creativity, Creator Confidential, Expectations
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