Herbert Lui

In order to make something—anything!—you need to be able to experiment. And most experiments probably won’t work. If you don’t want them to reflect poorly on your body of work, call them what they are: experiments. Or, practice. They’re intended so you can learn, and will lead to your best work. The post A portfolio of experiments appeared first on Herbert Lui.

Your portfolio is a collection of something. For example, if you buy stocks, you might call that your stock portfolio. If you buy real estate, you may call it your real estate portfolio. Or, you might lump them in together and call it your investment portfolio. If you make things, a portfolio is also extremely useful to demonstrate what you do. Just like a stock portfolio, you might choose to actively maintain your portfolio by adding new work and pruning out old work. You may have a couple of…

Play, as in strategies, tactics, and moves. In a sport, a playbook contains all sorts of plays and diagrams. Teams practice plays all the time. When they execute them, they’re “making a play.” 20 years ago, Ryan Leslie noticed a lot of his YouTube viewers were from different countries in Europe. That’s where he decided to tour. While most rappers or recording artists might do a half-hour set, effectively shortchanging the audience—perhaps because of longer travel, or seeing it as a secondary…

When I first started cooking, I turned the stove top on first. I figured it was an easy first step and would help me build momentum. Heating the pan would take a few minutes, so that was enough time to do everything else. I thought this deadline would make me more efficient, so I could spend less time cooking. That wasn’t a good idea. Almost every time, I got distracted with the other preparation tasks (cleaning, washing, etc.), which always took longer than I’d forecasted, because I didn’t…

It’s much easier to be creative when you’re not constantly worried about tradeoffs. In order to relax, and actually create, you need to be able to experiment. And not every experiment will turn out successfully. Many will fail. You need to be able to make mistakes. Let’s call this creative abundance: you feel light-hearted, free to create and play and take creative risks. As a result, you make interesting work. If the consequences of experimenting are too high, then the pressure might block…

The project that earned you a promotion may not make as great an impact next year. Your bestselling product may not keep selling. The position on your services may need to evolve. Exploration is now a part of everybody’s job description. A portfolio of services and products help. Experiments to strengthen your work’s foundation. What the jellyfish knows: A compilation The post What worked this year may not work next year appeared first on Herbert Lui.

That’s a solid goal whenever you’re starting out. If you’re early in your career, find three freelance clients. That helps you kickstart your portfolio, which helps you demonstrate your expertise, and strengthens your position in the marketplace. Happy clients will refer you to new clients or serve as references. In my junior year in university, I started writing for a publication called Techvibes. (I wasn’t very good yet! But it was very useful.) My friend Keane saw this and saw an opportunity…

When I was in university, my friends and I competed to get good summer jobs. One of my friends stood out though. He successfully applied for a grant from the local government, bought power washing equipment, and washed driveways around the neighborhood. There was so much business that he even got to hire a few of our other friends. This friend didn’t look for a job, he looked for a problem. The job market has generally always been competitive. AI has made things more so. Even top talent will…

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the most successful media franchises in history. President and primary producer Kevin Feige led the team to earn this position by making really good movies, starting with Ironman in 2008. Eventually their production process crescendoed to around three movies per year. Five years ago, the MCU team was also tasked with creating TV series for streaming. It was too much, and each piece of media suffered. Some good came out of it—the Loki series comes to…

In preparation for a busier season, I started listening to the audiobook of The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. The premise of the book is to focus on managing your energy, not your time. That’s a punchy way of telling a busy person, “Be less busy, and make time to restore your energy.” It shifts their focus away from time, because they’re already scarce on it and struggling to deliver results. Instead, it suggests that the reader focuses on energy, which they can renew…

You’re having lunch with your coworker, who flew in from out of town. While your coworker used to be very busy, their schedule at the moment was wide open. When you ask them about your new boss, they tell you their boss just seems to hide off in a conference room. The two have met less and less often recently. Your coworker eats lunch at a leisurely pace, while your stomach churns as you barely finish your sandwich and hurry off to the next meeting. You feel envious. A week later, you see the…

Last week, the World Cup finals were on. I did groceries and found out Spain won as I was entering a store. There were a lot of people running errands. While I walked around, I listened to an audiobook of Abundance, then a podcast interview with Young City. A mother and daughter with Blue Jays hats walked around, presumably to watch baseball instead of football. A group of seniors left the movie theater very satisfied. It was a very ordinary moment from city life that reminded me how many…

An idea is fragile. If you’re trying to turn it into a tangible project, part of your job early on is simply to strengthen it enough to survive. Overthinking is the greatest threat to its survival. When my wife and I were making The Consistency Journal, we focused on getting the writing and design ready. We ordered the first sample within a couple of months. To me, that’s the moment the idea felt strong enough to survive. We had a proof of concept. It’d need more energy from us, of course, but…

In their book Scarcity, Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan suggest that scarcity often starts with abundance. Imagine you have a deadline next week. That’s plenty of time to do the task—abundance—so you figure you’ll do it later. Eventually, you forget about it, and you only remember the day of the deadline. Now there’s scarcity: you have to do it, today, or you’ll face the consequences of missing the deadline. That’s just a simple example. That day would be stressful; you have your regular…

I was recently chatting with a friend who wanted to reach more software developers. I recalled some of the advice I gave him in my latest post at LinkedIn, which I’ve republished below: I’ve hit the front page of Hacker News 10+ times for Figma and other companies, and picked up five tactics along the way: 1. A post has a good shot if it picks up 10 to 15 upvotes in its first 30 minutes. I’ve seen advice suggesting 5 or 6 upvotes in the first five to ten minutes, but that feels risky to me. A…

When I started an independent editorial studio, most of my business came from referrals. I continued this as I rebooted my business writing practice several months ago. I also wrote thoughtful cold emails to companies I very intentionally filtered and focused on, and made time to chat with former clients and coworkers. These sales activities led to a lot of fulfilling conversations, and even potential deals that might land in coming months. Nothing worked out in the near-term though. This was…

It’s been almost a year since we started developing the original idea for what turned into The Consistency Journal. This post is intentionally brief and incomplete: Sometimes an experiment needs months or years to work out. Taking on work outside of an experiment can buy the time and relaxation you need to sustain it. It reminds me of how the Pokemon Company sustained itself by doing services work while making its first games, which delayed the process. Part of this practice involved not…

One of my friends is an incredibly talented software developer. After a long stint building their own software products, they’d started freelancing again and built a great website for their first client. My friend gave the client’s website a facelift, of course; plus, along the way, they made it more efficient so the website loaded instantly (it took half a minute before). They also set up a pick up service for the client, which was there but not working before. All this, for a simple website…

Before The Office made its debut, the landscape of TV comedies was driven by Friends and Baywatch. Studios wanted to see beautiful people cracking jokes. The British version of The Office was the antithesis of that, and the showrunner of the American version wanted to keep that spirit. When Allison Jones was casting The Office, she looked for emerging actors. The casting call used the words “non-star” and “unknown.” As they auditioned, she told them, “If you think you’re doing too little,…

It’s been three weeks since my wife and I adopted our dog. This post is intentionally brief: Our walks started off far too ambitious. Our dog needed more time to get used to our neighborhood, as well as the sounds of the city. (I had no idea how loud downtown Toronto was!) I used to go on long walks with my previous dog, with the assumption that she enjoyed it and needed to burn off energy. I needed to update the expectations and norms that came with that experience. Getting her emotionally…

There are many aspects to life. When you let one of these aspects dominate the rest—say, a job, a relationship, a professional goal, or a vocation—you also tie your happiness to it. Whenever it inevitably fluctuates, so will your sense of well-being. A reliable way to create a life is to shrink the influence of one dominating area and introduce new aspects. Signing up for a recreational team sport is a common way to do this. Or learning something completely random (e.g., New Yorker…

Yesterday, I wrote about a hobby I had as a teenager: hacking my Windows computer’s interface to look like a Mac. Eventually, I made a decision that I just wanted to buy a real Mac. That was a significant mindset shift: making due with the status quo wasn’t the only choice. I could just choose to do the real thing. In my case, get a job or do some odd jobs, save money, and eventually buy a real Mac computer. Or, look for contests that had Macs as a prize, participate in as many as possible, and…

When I was a young boy, I saw Windows XP for the first time and thought it looked really nice. My family had an old beige desktop computer with Windows 98, so I spent many months asking my parents to buy the new Windows XP OS. They acquiesced at some point, and my computer’s interface got a beautiful makeover. Unfortunately, the hardware could barely keep up, and the software upgrade slowed my computer down immensely. That didn’t stop me from trying to make my computer’s interface look better…

A friend of mine practices two hobbies: photography and tennis. He recently found a way to blend them together by volunteering to take photos of local tennis clubs and tournaments. He could probably get paid a small fee, of course, but then he would be taking on a client. He would feel obligated to take on their suggestions. Instead, he’s giving his time and energy as a gift. In exchange, he gets the freedom to practice his craft how he likes. The post The freedom of generosity appeared first…

Less than a year after introducing its agentic browser ChatGPT Atlas to the world, OpenAI recently shut it down. My guess is the team decided to make a bet on building an AI browser, but the product wasn’t really working, and Google Chrome proved to be a strong incumbent. That resulted in a decision to shut ChatGPT Atlas down as a separate product, bundle it into ChatGPT, and focus on bets with more momentum. For different reasons, OpenAI also shut down its video model Sora, even after its…

When you make your own product, you create an occasion to consider all the details. It’s an opportunity to care, and it’s not one that everyone decides to take up. For example, when I showed a friend an early version of The Consistency Journal, he noticed that the paper was rougher than he was used to. His favorite notebooks, from Kokuyo, had smooth paper. Even though I’d published Creative Doing already, I’d never really paid much attention to the paper. Now that my customers would be the ones…

The team at Dinamo Typefaces write a fun newsletter. In the latest issue, their team introduced an updated version of their font, Gravity. In the release notes, you’ll find a 10-page original manga, hand drawn by graphic designer Melanie Schmidt. She writes, “Every line was refined digitally before I switched to analogue for the shading, because apparently I enjoy making my life unnecessarily difficult.” Going beyond requirements is a gamble. While it can feel tough in the moment, you’ll at…

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 projects are special to someone; and each of those people need to accept the rejection of that project, in order to harness their energy and focus it on a few key projects. That’s creative focus:…

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 part of my foundation. I’m making more experiments with the raw materials from it, including my speech at CreativeMornings and using it to connect with readers and discover new…

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 through as the world streamed by, offering itself without demanding anything.” This passage came to mind to me today as I went to renew my Canadian passport just outside of downtown Toronto. I usually…