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You only know how to do something after you've done it.
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0:00
And so if you keep waiting around for like figuring out how you're gonna do it, you're just gonna be waiting forever.
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If you don't have a little madness, you never dare cut the rope and be free In a way, everyone's just winging it. Right?
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Look, we're all just kind of rolling with it.
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Things are changing increasingly fast.
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The cat sat on the mat is not a story.
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A cat sat on another cat's mat is a story.
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What's missing right now is like more, more chaotic energy from the mad men side of people. All models are wrong. Some are useful.
0:37
Motivation rises and falls.
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It's almost like a temporary ability to go do something really easily.
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You gotta fit in before you can stand out. You are creative.
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Like if you're listening to this recording and thinking, No, this doesn't apply to me.
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I'm not creative, like you are and you've been led to believe that you're not, but you are!
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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
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Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
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Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
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The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
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We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
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And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
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All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
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This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
2:38
It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another Infinite Loops.
2:38
And I got to tell you, gang, I probably had a podcast length conversation with my guest, Herbert Lui, author of Creative Doings before you guys even are being brought in.
2:51
I think I almost feel bad about it because he said the most incredible things.
2:57
And I'm like, "Aw, we haven't started the podcast."
3:02
Herbert, I love your work.
3:02
As I said to you in our conversation before we started recording, I worry that we're going to agree too much here, if that's possible. You basically...
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I'm just going to start out with one of your lines that just, boom, hit me right on and I agree with, "Think less, do more." Welcome.
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Herbert Lui: Thanks so much, Jim.
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It's a pleasure to be here and really excited for this conversation.
3:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, think less, do more.
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When I was a younger person, I was not that person.
3:35
I was a keep thinking about it, keep thinking about it, keep thinking.
3:43
And I just got all caught up in my head.
3:43
I've always been a writer, so luckily.
3:50
And I've kept journals since I was 18, but as I was getting ready and going through your stuff, which I think is great and I think everybody will get more creative just by reading it, but this line just brought me back.
4:02
That's quality of, right, the idea that until we can understand what that tastes or that smell brings back.
4:09
And it just evoked a period in my life where I changed.
4:15
And it was when I started my first company and I was procrastinating and procrastinating on what I called the case statement.
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I was very academic wannabe, and it was horribly written.
4:27
Anyway, I finally just was like, "You know what, fuck it.
4:32
I'm just going to launch this company and let's see what happens." Lot of life is that way. Isn't it?
4:37
Herbert Lui: Definitely, yeah.
4:40
I think that one of the paradoxes or the most strange things to experience is you only know how to do something after you've done it.
4:47
And so, if you keep waiting around for figuring out how you're going to do it, you're just going to be waiting forever.
4:59
And actually, to your point about “think less, do more”, I don't know if I said it first or my fiancée said it first.
5:05
But I remember hearing my fiancée say it to me once and I was like, "Whoa, that was really powerful." And so, I definitely...
5:13
It resonated and it's one of those truths that you just can't hear often enough, because a lot of times, we get stuck in our own heads, especially as the years go on and we start doing more important things.
5:25
And each thing feels like there's higher stakes involved.
5:33
We're like, "Oh, I can't afford to just wing it anymore."
5:33
In reality, just winging it probably doesn't characterize doing in the most optimistic light.
5:44
But also, in a way, everyone's just winging it, right?
5:44
We're all just rolling with it.
5:49
Things are changing increasingly fast.
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New constraints come up all the time, and we need to learn how to tap into our spontaneity and our creativity in order to be able to adapt to these changes.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally agree.
6:04
And it's been one of my little soap boxes that I've been on forever and ever and ever.
6:10
I do a lot of coaching with young people, not necessarily just in my industry, but if I see somebody who I think has a lot of potential, I'll work with them to see if I can help at all. Usually, I fail.
6:20
But one of the things that I do see with younger people especially, is this...
6:27
I'm so glad I grew up without social media.
6:32
I mean, I understand the power of social media now.
6:32
I think if there's going to be a human colossus, Twitter or its successor will somehow be involved because we're going to link all of our human minds together and throw in some AI, and then we're going to get a human colossus, which I think is great.
6:51
But my God, to be under this constant pressure, to be Instagram filters, all of these things.
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We have a great friend, Joel Meyerowitz, who is considered probably the best living street photographer, and we're going to talk more about that in a minute because my wife is gaining on him.
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Anyway, he's a good friend and he called me once and he's like, "Jim, yeah, I just wanted to tell you that I love your Instagram account."
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And I'm like, "Really, Joel?
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I mean, it's just like there's absolutely no orderliness to it.
7:26
I'm very sloppy, as you know."
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And he goes, "No, no, no."
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He goes, "The reason I love it, Jim, you break every single rule of all the books on how to gain your Instagram followers."
7:40
And that spirit is one that I think, especially reading your stuff that I know you understand, this idea of you've got to be willing, as Zorba said to his boss, "The one thing you lack is madness.
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If you don't have a little madness, you never dare cut the rope and be free."
7:58
And so, I see these kids who are constrained by always being on.
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And I just want to say, "Just forget you're always on. Don't play to the crowd. Play to you."
8:12
How do you deal with that? Herbert Lui: For sure.
8:17
I mean, I grew up in a strange time.
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First, well, maybe half my life, there was social media and the other half, there wasn't.
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And so, I remember the time without it, and I remembered a time with it.
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So first of all, social media is an on or off thing for everyone.
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It's like a bit of a decision and we forget that because it comes on our phones now, it comes on our computers and we get the notifications and tens of thousands of the world's smartest people are working at these companies to figure out how to get more people on social.
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So it's a tricky thing to tackle as an individual, but there's definitely movements like the digital minimalism movement and things like that where these manifestos or these guidelines of how to manage social so that it doesn't seep into your life in a way that you don't want it to.
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And so in a way, you're taking back control.
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For me, even from maybe age 20 onwards or 19, I had tried these social media rules for myself.
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So I won't check Facebook until after 6:00 PM because I was procrastinating like crazy on it.
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Nowadays, I use a plugin called LeechBlock on Firefox to keep that from happening.
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I don't use Snapchat anymore even though some of my really, really good friends are on it because I found that I was...
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It was very distracting and I would constantly be checking it even if there weren't any new updates.
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So I turn off all notifications as well.
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And so there's these kinds of grooves that I've gradually gotten myself into.
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And I pay the cost for it as well.
10:10
My friends and I probably...
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I lose touch with quite a few of them because they upload their milestones on Instagram or on Snapchat or whatever, and it's very inconvenient for them to send it up to everyone rather than just one button, and so I also won't know about certain things.
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And that's part of the price to pay.
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I think A, we catch up often enough outside of social that I can keep up.
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And also, I think the updates come in a more organic way, like in an old-fashioned way like, "Oh, I didn't know that happens."
10:48
We're talking on the phone or writing emails or letters from before social media and really keeping up like that.
10:53
So it's a little slower and I really enjoy it. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
11:04
Like you, I don't have any notifications turned on ever. Herbert Lui: Right.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I found just that alone solved, at least for me...
11:12
But I'm an old, so most of my life was the habitual grooves in my neural network were pretty much there.
11:19
And so even though I have adapted to social media, because I do think I love the networking effect that it can do, I'm fully cognizant of all of the harm it can do as well.
11:32
But that doesn't make me not want to root for the good parts of it that can happen.
11:36
But I've found even within my own family...
11:42
So all my children are millennials born between 1985 and 1995.
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But we have a family text.
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And virtually, every day, it is filled with pictures, "I'm doing this. Here's Pierce."
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That's my grandson or my youngest granddaughter, Langdon, who was just here.
11:57
And so that effect just keeps us always up to speed more than we were before the family text.
12:04
And my youngest is a standup comedian and she's very, very funny.
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And so I have been habituated by my children to always text them before I'm going to call.
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My youngest always comes back.
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I'll text her, " Can I call you?"
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and then the phone will ring and she'd go, "Dad, I really do appreciate you trying to adopt the millennial habits, but you can just call me. I'm your daughter." But I wonder about that.
12:30
As we're talking about it, also that performance anxiety that people go through.
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When I saw the “think less; do more”, if it's your fiancée, say congratulations from Jim O'Shaughnessy.
12:48
It's like my wife and I were talking the other night about drama does not exist if there's no conflict.
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And I gave her a John le Carré quote, which is, "The cat sat on the mat is not a story.
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A cat sat on another cat's mat is a story."
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And she came back with a much sadder one, but pretty profound from Hemingway, at least we think it's Hemingway. We didn't look it up.
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But it was just these words, "For sale, baby shoes, never used." Whoa.
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And so there are so many ways to be creative.
13:21
And I want to go now down back to the “think less; do more”.
13:38
Because another thing that you advocate, which I agree with and I wouldn't have as a younger man, so I find this very interesting, I have learned that you are right over my own life experience of, as Beckett would say, try, try, fail. Try again, fail better.
13:48
And I'm really good at failing, Herbert, really good at it.
13:57
But it's like how you get better at everything. Right? Talk a bit about that. Herbert Lui: For sure.
14:07
So I'm writing every day on my blog.
14:07
I've been writing for 200 days in a row now, and one of the posts that come to mind is this one entitled, "Don't Make Bad the Enemy of Good."
14:21
And I think you see what I'm getting at here, so I'll just skip to it.
14:27
I think that a lot of people...
14:27
Or there's a tendency in all of us to want to just start off really good at stuff.
14:33
I don't know where it comes from.
14:33
Maybe for me, I'm like, "Oh," if it's a Neo from The Matrix kind of complex where it's like, "Oh, this is my thing.
14:40
I'm going to be the best at this."
14:45
And it turns out no, most of us are pretty average at most things, even below average.
14:49
And so we're going to start off bad.
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And eventually with enough practice and repetition and enough doing and thinking, then we get good at stuff.
15:05
And so really bad is just...
15:05
It's the starting point of good and good is the starting point of perfect.
15:12
And so I think that to your point with social as well as what's interesting and what's really difficult about it, is it's really difficult to be bad at stuff on social, especially if your personality might be a little more sensitive or a little more empathetic, and you...
15:28
There's the looking glass self.
15:33
You know how other people are perceiving you and you're like, "Well, I don't want them to think of me as this amateur artist or this hack writer.
15:37
So I'm not going to show my work.
15:44
I'm just going to do it by myself in Google Docs."
15:44
And unfortunately, that often...
15:44
It gets in the way of improvement and of basically the momentum and excitement of people supporting you on social and a lot of the perks that come with social.
16:03
And so you and I met on Twitter, and so that's, I think, getting used to...
16:03
Everyone has the right balance for these things.
16:11
I like writing in my blog because I've been writing...
16:11
I started writing a blog when I was 15.
16:17
I'm so familiar with the interface, I love the long form.
16:21
Some of those, I'll turn into threads on Twitter if I feel good about it or whatever.
16:26
But really, I like writing in my blog and I know not many people are going to read it, and that's where the perfect balance is for me.
16:30
And so one of the prompts in Creative Doing is set up surfaces and it's like a different surface for releasing your work.
16:34
You don't have to do it on social media.
16:41
That's not the only place you can release it.
16:44
You can put it on the fridge, you can show your neighbor, you can show your friend.
16:44
And really, that's if you're more private and would like to put only your best work out.
16:53
Then you can still practice every day, but just show fewer people and show them analog so that it's not so permanent on the internet.
16:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's a really great idea. And I love your...
17:02
You're absolutely right about...
17:02
I do believe that certain personalities, for example, mine, people will say to...
17:10
I say, "You want to be good at Twitter, just realize it's performance art." It's not real. Herbert Lui: Right.
17:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But I put a lot of real stuff up on Twitter as well.
17:26
But for me, and we're going to get into this and I hope much more deeply, but my life transformed itself when I realized, "You know what? Let's just play.
17:35
Let's just play, and let's play, as you point out, infinite games." What are infinite games?
17:40
They're games you play just to keep playing.
17:46
And then I added to it...
17:46
I have this series called The Great Reshuffle about all the changes that are happening.
17:51
I think a lot of them are going to be profoundly good for human creativity, human evolution, etc.
17:55
, but there're going to be some scary stuff too.
18:02
I like this idea of the smaller steps for people who just need to be able to say, "Hey, check this out. What do you think?"
18:13
I remember, going back to telling you when I had my...
18:13
I was paralysis analysis or analysis paralysis.
18:21
And so I got an opportunity to write an article for Barron's, which is a financial publication in the US, and this was back in the '90s when their imperator was like, "If Barron's blessed you, go forth, my son. You will do very well."
18:39
And so I wrote this article and my wife, who has a summa cum laude degree in journalism, and I were on a train in New York City from Greenwich, Connecticut, and I asked her to read it and give me comments. And I was 33? Yeah.
18:50
And so I thought that I'd made this big breakthrough like, "Oh fuck it.
18:57
I'm just going to start the company."
19:00
Anyway, so I give it to her and she reads it and she just looks at me and she goes, "I honestly don't even know where to start."
19:05
I went, "What do you mean?"
19:05
She goes, "This is horrible. This is horrible."
19:09
She goes, "Why are you...
19:09
I've read your normal stuff.
19:18
You're a really good writer. What is this? This is awful.
19:18
You're using words that you don't use and you have a good vocabulary, man, but you seem to be really striving here, and that's not you.
19:29
That's not a good look for you."
19:32
Of course, I got incredibly mad like, "What do you mean?"
19:32
We got into a huge- Herbert Lui: I would too.
19:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: We got into a huge fight.
19:36
We were going for this nice dinner with friends and we had to do detente when we got to the dinner.
19:40
But when we were on the train back, I was still furious.
19:45
Then she did a partial rewrite of it and sent it back to me and I read it and I'm like, "God dammit, she's so right."
19:58
And so that's how I learned it was...
19:58
As I was listening to you, I'm just like, "Well, gosh. That's how I learned."
20:03
I've written four books and I learned by only showing it to one person, my wife.
20:08
And thank God she saved me because I would've sent the horrible version in. So I love that idea.
20:16
And it's also really consistent with the idea of...
20:24
I don't know whether you follow Kenneth Stanley's work, Greatness Without Goals.
20:24
I'm weird because you talk about Janus, the Roman god, the two-faced god quite a bit, and how there were these competing sides of our nature.
20:35
But he has this small steps idea where let's just keep going and see where that leads us.
20:45
We were talking before we started the podcast about tangents and rabbit holes.
20:49
Well, I am like a certified rabbit hole diver.
20:49
And one of my guys at Infinite Loops, we talk every Friday and he's like...
20:56
He said, "I was just telling my fiancée that you are the ultimate tangential reference guy, but you always managed to bring it back into the conversation."
21:09
And I think that a lot of that is just as you advocate, it's just practice. Right?
21:14
It's like when I was first on TV, I pretty much sucked, if I recall.
21:21
Thank God it's not in the way back machine and people can't find it and make fun of me.
21:27
But you start, and I was thinking as I was getting ready for this, yeah, I pretty much sucked at everything I tried, that I'm now thought to be good at.
21:38
And so I just think that that is such a really great thing to urge people who are listening to us who maybe just are just lurking, I guess.
21:44
The tools for being creative, I think they're only exponentially growing.
21:52
But you don't have to make an announcement on social or do a video on YouTube.
21:59
You can get there in a much smaller way.
22:05
One of the things that you also say, which I really believe, is “doing is thinking”.
22:11
I think that specifically about writing.
22:11
So let's talk a little bit about that and what made you come up with that aha moment. Herbert Lui: For sure.
22:21
So to your point about being specific with writing, I think that that's really true.
22:27
One of the posts I recently wrote was entitled, "Don't Think to Write, Write to Think."
22:27
And I took a second there because I keep flipping it accidentally when I say it out loud.
22:38
But basically, I think that a lot of times when we work on stuff, we approach it almost like product development or like design where it's like, "Oh, we can't really...
22:47
We need to do the blueprint and all of this preparation before we actually can start the work."
22:56
And I think sometimes that's true.
23:06
I mean, the analogy still rings true in a sense.
23:11
But in the case of writing in particular, it's like the preparation work is actually also writing.
23:17
So there's no different surface in this case for it.
23:17
You're not drafting it up on an AutoCAD or on Sketch.
23:24
You're just putting words on the page just you would be on a final draft, except in this time, it's like your initial draft or an outline or even just some notes.
23:36
So writing, the challenge with that is it all looks the same.
23:39
Whereas I think with software, you'll have meetings, you'll have wire frames, you'll have different kinds of modalities and tools to express your early preliminary work.
23:53
In any case though, I still think that most people believe, "Oh, we need another meeting basically to make a decision on this," or whatever.
24:05
In reality, they probably would've been better off scoping down the project or the goal or the experiment, and really trying to move as fast and get it to put something out there just to see what happens.
24:19
So I think that in the act of doing, new insights approach you and new insights come to you, whether it's what works or what doesn't work, how you feel about what you're doing and new opportunity you wouldn't even have thought about.
24:32
An unknown unknown will present itself.
24:36
So there's all of these things that you just can't get by sitting there in your own chair and researching or exchanging conversations with people.
24:47
You do need to actually execute in order to think better and to get new feedback, and to get feedback from the real world basically. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
24:58
I thought of a line as you were speaking.
24:58
I can't remember whose quote it is, but it's along the lines of, "No matter how brilliant a person is, no matter how creative a person is, you could never ask them to come up with a list of things that would never occur to them." Herbert Lui: Right. Exactly.
25:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right? Herbert Lui: Yeah.
25:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And in a way, that sounds a bit like that's what we're trying to do when we try to divorce the note-taking and the original getting it out of your head onto paper.
25:27
So I always maintain that if you don't know how you think...
25:34
you don't know what you think about something, write about it. Because guess what?
25:37
You're going to know very quickly if you know anything about it at all, number one.
25:40
And number two, you're going to see something like, "Oh. Hey, I didn't...
25:47
Yeah, maybe I don't agree with this idea."
25:55
Because I think in the Jungian sense that ideas have people, people don't have ideas.
26:01
I think that a lot of that gets transferred through what they used to call the ether, the cloud, we'd call it today.
26:07
And so people carry these ideas around.
26:07
I always call it letting other people live rent-free in your head or ideas live rent-free in your head.
26:21
And some of those ideas are great, some are horrible.
26:24
And what you need to do, and it takes time, is you got to sit down and you got to write them all out.
26:29
It's something I advocate and do and have done all of my life.
26:29
And it really, really helps.
26:35
And the other quote I thought about that I actually wrote down because it was on your happy coincidences, and I thought of David Bohm, the physicist who says, "There are no coincidences."
26:45
But it led me, again, here we go, it led me to a quote of his that I'd used and I'd forgotten about, and the quote was, "The best thing to do if you don't understand something is write a book about it." Herbert Lui: Right. Exactly. Exactly.
27:05
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And that's like your...
27:05
What I love about you is you...
27:10
I also believe that we are much more creatures of our habits than we even realize.
27:17
And the minute I hear, "Been writing a blog since I was 15," boom, there you go.
27:24
You have it so habituated in yourself that it's like people don't...
27:24
People often come and ask right before they want to do something, "How can I do this? How can I do this?"
27:38
And my advice is often just do it.
27:38
Do it and see what you think.
27:38
And the idea though that writing is thinking is just something that I so thoroughly believe in that I often test my belief on it.
27:55
But then of course, I do that by writing.
27:55
So I feel Escheresque as the hand continues to go around. What if I asked you...
28:05
I'm like, "Herbert what I want from you, give me the strongest case you can make for thinking overdoing. What you got?"
28:19
Herbert Lui: So first of all, on the note about Escher, I wanted the book cover to be inspired by...
28:24
to have art inspired by that.
28:24
But we can talk about the cover after. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
28:30
Herbert Lui: I love the reference.
28:31
So we're talking about thinking overdoing as the opposite case, right?
28:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep, yep.
28:36
Another thing I always try to do is I always try to steelman, ideas I don't agree with.
28:39
In other words, I try to find the absolute best case for them- Herbert Lui: Okay, I got you. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ...
28:48
so that I know that best case.
28:48
So I know you don't agree with this, but I bet, because you're smart and creative, you can come up with a pretty good case for thinking overdoing.
28:57
And I realize, gang, we talked about this too.
28:57
He didn't know I was going to ask him this question.
29:02
Everything is spontaneous here and- Herbert Lui: I love it. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ... it takes brave people.
29:06
So anyway, what you got for me?
29:09
Herbert Lui: So I'll start first with an impasse that I reached with someone on Twitter, which was basically me taking a line from my book, tweeting it.
29:15
And then I think it was related to doing and thinking.
29:22
And the response that I got was, "Well, you can't do anything without a thought.
29:27
You can't do anything without thinking."
29:27
So it's a little pedantic, but I also understand.
29:33
I'm like, "Okay, you're right. You do need to..." Oh, it was a quote.
29:33
It was, "If you want to think differently, first, learn to act differently."
29:36
And so there's a chicken and egg situation there. It's like, "Okay.
29:44
Well, what's actually changing first?"
29:44
As you and I are discussing, if we're actually doing differently, doesn't that mean we thought differently first?
29:53
Didn't we change our way of thinking before we changed our way of doing?
30:00
And so I definitely think there was an agree to disagree situation there.
30:05
What I ended up coming up with was this conceptual model.
30:05
It's called the doing thinking flywheel and posted on my blog obviously.
30:11
And basically, I think it's more like a loop.
30:11
So you can't just keep doing mindlessly either.
30:19
The whole point of doing is to improve your thinking.
30:26
But then the thinking also improves doing the next time around.
30:26
Or rather than improve, I'll say inform. Right?
30:29
I don't want to see this as a linear progression sort of thing.
30:33
It just informs it and then you can express yourself again and then it feeds it.
30:37
So basically, I think that if I were to make a case, that would be thinking being more important than doing. It's like, "Yeah.
30:44
You can't do if you don't think."
30:44
And also, that's where some of the starting points come from and the actual, literal brain as cognitive center for everything kind of, you...
30:56
That's you can't do anything without the brain in the middle.
31:04
And so that's where the case for, "Oh, thinking is more important than doing would come in for me," I think, is if you're saying, "Hey, your limbic system and your nervous system and all this goes through your brain and that's all thinking now."
31:18
But okay, I'm not disagreeing.
31:18
I just think that we also think with our hands and we also think from the neck down.
31:23
And so then we can get into this whole really in-depth examination of what this means and what that means to whomever and so on and so forth.
31:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Agree.
31:37
And it also brings up the idea of people will always...
31:37
Was it George Box, "All models are wrong, some are useful."
31:47
And I agree with that, the bicameral brain, the McGilchrist having his moment in the sun with the right brain versus the left brain.
31:56
I'm a huge fan of Lao-Tzu and Taoism and it's- Herbert Lui: Me too.
32:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I know.
32:06
And it's like, "You got to have both, guys."
32:06
So I'm a huge fan of poetry, and T. S.
32:12
Eliot is one of my favorite of the modern poets.
32:12
And he's got this line in ‘The Love Song of J.
32:17
Alfred Prufrock‘ where he says something along the lines where, "It is impossible to say just what I mean, but as if a a magic lantern threw my nerves in patterns on a screen”. And that's your idea.
32:31
That brings in, we don't think just with our minds.
32:31
And the other thing that freaks people out but is very true is our brains are encased in a black box.
32:39
So everything that we think in quotes is coming to us through perception and through filters and through all of these things.
32:55
And when the filters are working properly, we miss 99% of the data that hits our perception filters or we'd go crazy.
33:00
In fact, there is a speculative theory in psychiatry, rather, that things like schizophrenia are filter failure.
33:08
In other words, wow, they're simply getting way too many of the data that hit their screens, thus the voices, thus all of that there, but for the grace of God go we , because our brains don't have that filter failure.
33:29
But the other thing that I wanted you to talk about, because I believe in it very much as well, is you made the comment, “well wait a minute, if you did it, you kind of had to think about it before you did it.
33:40
” And I love that because it brings the unconscious or the subconscious into the conversation.
33:55
I am a huge believer in the power of the subconscious mind. I think the old...
33:55
If I was going to make a meme about it, not a Dawkins meme, but a picturesque meme, I would do the iceberg.
34:09
And so this up here would be the conscious mind, and then below the water would be the unconscious mind, which runs thousands of apps and keeps us alive.
34:14
Can you imagine having to think, breathe in, breathe out, right?
34:22
So talk a bit about the unconscious, because that really appealed to me in your work as well. Herbert Lui: For sure.
34:33
So I definitely think that there's...
34:40
We touched on a lot of really interesting points in this conversation.
34:40
I want to try to tie back together. So we talked about...
34:44
you mentioned left brain, right brain, and we've talked about creative tensions almost, I think Austin Kleon, we called them that, I call them more oscillations, moving back and forth between things and the conscious and unconscious mind is very much one of those extremes here.
35:01
I think when we talk about thinking, we're only talking about thinking consciously, because naturally you can't, unconscious thinking is also a black box.
35:12
You can't really force yourself, you can't make yourself go to sleep, first, that's the best example.
35:17
The fastest way to not do that is to try to make yourself go to sleep.
35:22
And the fastest way to fall asleep is to try to stay awake, actually, funny enough.
35:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
35:27
Herbert Lui: So there are so many things that you can only allow yourself to do.
35:28
And usually those are very unconscious.
35:36
I had no idea how I did that.
35:36
Or even subconscious maybe.
35:36
So to your point about ideas, having people, I have a quote from Pharrell in the book, which was just basically kind of saying the same thing.
35:48
Humans are just radios and transistors and we're just receiving signals and we're the ones that speak it out.
35:53
And that's also really unconscious too.
35:59
I think that the doing part of creative doing is very much trying to tap into these unconscious feelings or inclinations or intuitions we have, and to express them just to get them out there because we're sitting all day and we're stuck in our own head.
36:13
So in the book I used an illustration, I actually based it on Professor Betty Flowers’ illustration of what a writer should be, a writer's action for people.
36:29
And I got this from my editor, Rachel Jefferson's, really great writer and editor.
36:29
And two of these four people are the Madman and the Judge.
36:34
These are the personas she uses.
36:34
And the Madman is basically this creative force.
36:42
They can scribble out 10 pages in an hour, they can do anything and everything.
36:51
And they love to play super energetic. So that's the Madman.
36:59
And we don't have to look too far to see can see them in a child, right?
36:59
They're just do anything that comes to mind.
37:06
They're super impulsive, super spontaneous.
37:06
Now as we grow up, we have to learn to develop how to get along with people and how to develop skills and discipline and things like that in order to get by and to thrive in the actual business of being an adult, being grown up.
37:26
And so that's when this other personality starts developing the Judge.
37:31
And the Judge is very controlled, very calculative, very protective, and helps keep you safe basically.
37:36
So we learn, "Oh, don't say that."
37:36
That's the Judge learning, "Hey, I'm not going to say that anymore."
37:43
Or think before you speak, the Judge is saying, "Oh, I'm going to think before I speak."
37:48
And so throughout the years, our Judge actually gets stronger and stronger and stronger and more practiced at the cost of the Madman usually, which is basically getting weaker and weaker to the point where one day we feel like we're not creative anymore because we haven't experienced one of those impulses or acted on them in a long time.
38:09
So, "Oh, it would be really cool to make this, to print out a T-shirt."
38:13
The Madman would say that, the Judge will be like, in a much louder voice, "No, that's a stupid idea.
38:18
What are we trying to accomplish here?
38:18
Anyway, that's kind of dumb.
38:22
I can't believe you would say that."
38:25
And so part of the key to uniting the conscious and unconscious mind, the unconscious represented by the Madman, the conscious Judge, is to get them to be friends again, but also to practice to feed the Madman a little more and to be like, "Hey, I'm going to practice being spontaneous every day in this part of my life or in that part of my life."
38:40
Whether that's a daily creative challenge and getting the words out and releasing them or doodling and just keeping in your notebook or even cracking a joke to someone who just met or you're not sure if, maybe not at work, but maybe who knows?
38:58
And so that's really where I think what's missing right now in a lot of spaces are a little hungrier for creativity, is more chaotic energy from the Madman side of people and also more understanding, more forgiveness from each other and creating this environment so that our inner child or our inner children can all come together and play and get together and not just try to accomplish a goal or even play politics and things like that.
39:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, there's a great stanza from Robert Frost that I actually put up right before I joined you.
39:38
And it basically goes along the lines of, "My aim in life is to unite my vocation and avocation as my two eyes make one insight, only where love and need are one is a deed ever really done." Herbert Lui: Wow.
39:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's such a great snippet because I really passionately believe that, and I tend more towards Madman as anyone who knows me well would say.
40:04
But I also, I have an extremely disciplined Judge, if you will, using your terminology.
40:12
I don't refer to them because label thinking, I see myself do it all the time.
40:18
Labels are so powerful because they're short hand heuristics that humans chunk data together and they create a label, 80% of the time that label or that heuristic is correct, 20%. It's really not correct.
40:31
And so I think about my own thinking a lot.
40:37
So I don't like the word Judge, I just hate that word.
40:37
And maybe it's because I have all these negative connotations, like, "You're not the boss of me." I've always been very...
40:51
like tell me not to do something as the way to get me to do that very thing. And so I obtained that.
40:57
I think we'll see, I probably have not as I will spectacularly flare out at something, but I guess the idea where I achieved some lift off in my own life was just this idea that we're here for such a short period of time and ashes and dust, we go back to the source.
41:26
You can use whatever more metaphor you want, they all go back to Plato in the cave.
41:31
And then if you read Jed McKenna and gang, it's just like, whoa, this is... and so what's his name?
41:38
Alan Watts had a great quote that was something along the lines that was talking about worry.
41:43
And he basically says that worry is an infinitely skinned onion.
41:48
And that really appeals to me because I'm not cavalier, I'm not reckless.
41:54
But by the same token, you just got to try.
41:54
I love your, and it sounds like an oxymoron, planned spontaneity.
42:04
"Oh, let's be spontaneous now, okay? Let's do that." And.
42:13
[inaudible] Herbert Lui: It sounds like the worst summer camp ever.
42:15
It's like, "Hey, let's have fun guys." Oh God.
42:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Let's have fun. Oh my god.
42:20
You know you're not going to have fun at that camp.
42:20
"Come on, let's get into the spirit."
42:28
If you want a way not to get kids or adults into a spirit is tell them to get into the spirit.
42:37
Herbert Lui: Oh my gosh, yes.
42:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The idea that I really like of yours is just make it a habit to do.
42:42
So we talking before, I have some weird habits.
42:50
Every morning I hit the, show me a random article on Wikipedia and every morning I'll open the I Ching to an odd page, not because I'm looking to it for any divination, I'm just looking to it to say, is there something like I'm going to read a passage.
43:07
If you're familiar with the I Ching it's a book of divination and Asian, and some people tie it with the Taoism.
43:12
I don't think it actually ties very well in the Taoism, anyway, just randomly pick it up.
43:17
And I'll also randomly do it with the, I don't know, 35 translations I have of the Tao Te Ching.
43:22
And one time I did it and I was this revelation because the translator chose it to not call it the way or the path.
43:39
This translator called it the process.
43:39
And I was like, “Holy shit”. Of course.
43:47
And I've been reading it since I was 18 years old.
43:47
And so sometimes you just find these spectacular, just the one word changed and you're like, "Okay." But the process.
43:56
So what other things would you urge people who Jed McKenna calls it “the little bastard that's in”, you call it the Madman, the little bastard is that little pivot piece of you that keeps knocking and saying, “Jim, you idiot.
44:16
You're going to be dead soon. Go have some fun”. Right?
44:23
What other things would you recommend for somebody who's listening and they just started to feel that way a little bit, what would you say, “Okay, so maybe try this and this”.
44:34
What would you give them? Herbert Lui: Right.
44:35
So if you're feeling it a little bit and you don't have an immediate way of expressing it in front of you, the first prompt in my book is “Choose a creative operation”.
44:45
And the whole point of that is basically to find a way to express it, a medium, whether that's writing, design our programming, curating, editing, whatever that medium is, choose one and choose one- Jim O'Shaughnessy: [Inaudible] Herbert Lui: So choose one now basically, and try it out for 10 days.
45:10
So “Set a 10 day quota” is one of the other prompts as well.
45:10
And basically the whole reason for that is that feeling comes and goes, You and I know very well motivation rises and falls and inspiration and it's almost like a temporary ability to go do something really easily.
45:30
And so that's where actually impatience and spontaneity kind of flip sides of the same thing.
45:37
Maybe that's why it's so important because we're feeling it.
45:39
It's like, oh, if you store it for too long like, "Oh I'm going to capture this feeling in a bottle."
45:44
It doesn't work, It disappears.
45:44
And so go pick a creative operation.
45:50
It could be one you're doing now or it could be a different one and practice it for 10 days.
45:55
And so that might mean just taking a few seconds to do it.
45:55
One of the prompts is trying to find a version of the operation you can do in 20 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds.
46:05
So in writing, it's like writing a one five word sentence or 10 word sentence or whatever.
46:14
You can do that right before bed and there'll be no problem.
46:14
So time can't be an excuse basically for you not to do it.
46:19
And so one example would basically be a constrained cartoon.
46:25
Same panels every time, just change the text before panels, boom, there's a new one.
46:25
So I think those three prompts are pretty good places to start.
46:31
I would add one to that, which is basically say yes and say yes is just, it's all about surrendering.
46:37
It's like letting go of the no and letting go even of what your own preferences are.
46:43
Instead just going with it, right?
46:50
There's the, there's that Jim Carey movie I think is Yes Man.
46:50
And yeah, I really liked it.
46:55
I was like, wow, there's something really philosophically interesting about this movie, even though yes and no, right?
47:00
It was a comedy and they didn't really dive in, but I thought the theme was really interesting.
47:06
You say yes and interesting things start to happen.
47:11
Things that you will never have planned and couldn't have planned.
47:11
And that's the whole point.
47:15
That's what people call getting lucky.
47:15
You're exploring things, you're coming across things you never would've thought of.
47:18
New opportunities, new challenges too.
47:23
And you're expanding your attitude to be more open and more positive and you're really starting to take in new things that you never would've thought of.
47:38
So I think those would probably be the three or four places I would start where I would recommend someone was starting.
47:43
If they're just starting to feel, "Oh, I'm ready to make a change in my life and I don't want to quit my job yet, or I don't want to do anything drastic."
47:52
It doesn't have to be extreme.
47:52
Start small and the motivation and the muscle for it will grow as well.
47:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I think that's good advice.
47:58
My grandkids, there's a movie, I can't remember the title of it, it's a newer movie, it's not the Carrey movie, but it's the same theme.
48:02
The parents agree with the children that they will say yes to everything one day.
48:07
They put the limits in place ahead of time.
48:14
And so I often will watch the movies with my grandkids just to be part of their...
48:20
I love watching their faces when they watch movies and which tangentially, when one of my oldest grandson, Pierce was quite a bit younger, he liked the Marvel Universe movies.
48:32
And so he asked me whether I would watch, I can't even remember Black Widow Scarlett Johansson. Herbert Lui: Okay. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay. Yeah.
48:42
So she's a Russian agent or something.
48:42
So I was watching it with him and the scene was a Russian general interrogating her in Russian.
48:49
And of course at the bottom are the subtitles in English.
48:57
And Pierce goes to me, "Papa." And I went, "Yeah."
48:57
And he goes, "What are they saying?"
49:04
And I said, "Oh, he's interrogating her."
49:04
"But papa, what language are they speaking?"
49:10
And I say, "Well, they're speaking Russian."
49:10
"Oh, well, but what is he saying to her?"
49:15
And I'm reading the subtitle to it and the look on his face, he looks at me with his eyes get wide.
49:22
And he goes, "Papa, you speak Russian?"
49:34
But it's a wonderful tangential bridge to being around young children and watching the way they process the world.
49:44
I mean, if you get the opportunity, to your idea, say yes, because I think that we are born as natural.
49:55
We learn by play, we don't learn...
49:55
I think a lot of it is our evolutionary history.
50:05
So we come out with the software for language fully installed.
50:11
If I took someone and I put them in Hong Kong with you, they would become fluent in Chinese, Mandarin or other dialects.
50:18
Meanwhile, if you took someone born in anywhere in Asia and put them here, they would be accent less English. The brain is born.
50:25
And I had to check this with a neuroscientist I had on because I didn't believe it.
50:32
Babies have something like 5 billion extra neurons when they're born. And it's essentially... I didn't believe it.
50:42
I read it in a book and he even footnoted it.
50:44
And then I had Erik Hoel who was a neuroscientist on for a novel he wrote and I asked him and he was like, "Yeah dude."
50:51
And I'm like, "So explain this to me."
50:51
And he goes, "It's evolution.
50:58
Evolution wants you to be redundant.
50:58
Evolution wants you to be able to drop a human baby anywhere and let that baby as best that baby can.
51:03
Hopefully with the caring parents figure out that environment."
51:10
And he goes, "They all die off after."
51:10
I think, I can't remember what he said, two or three years once the environment is set and understandable. But guess what?
51:19
It takes us years and years and years and years to learn how to read.
51:19
And that's because in our evolutionary history, the story was always, everything was verbal once we learned how to talk.
51:33
And then I read behavior or a evolutionary psychologist who essentially said that speech was basically invented so people could gossip.
51:44
When I first read it, I'm like, "This is bullshit man."
51:44
I mean these people and she's got a PhD, but then when you read her thesis, it makes a ton of sense.
51:50
Like if the 24 clock that we homo sapiens have been here on this rock.
51:56
So everything but the last five minutes maybe we were in hunter gatherer tribes.
52:02
And so when you think about it that way, well of course if you notice that Grog isn't carrying his weight and maybe taking extra rations, you don't want to be alone and say, calling Grog out, you want to talk your friend, "Hey, have you noticed that Grog is kind of a slacker?" And so yeah, I get it.
52:22
So the saying yes is something that...
52:32
what I call, and I didn't obviously come up with the term, but I loved it, so I use it a lot. Think boy.
52:37
So the think boys, all they do is think. And they don't act.
52:44
You just see, I wrote one time, "Action without forethought is foolish, but thinking without action is futile."
52:55
So, let's say I was just reading your work and looking at all your prompts and I just thought about it and I'm like, Oh, these are good. I guess I'll do this. I maybe changed myself.
53:08
Maybe I'm probably way too lazy to actually do it.
53:14
But now we're going to have a conversation, we're going to release it. People can listen to it. They can...
53:19
And that's what makes the world go around.
53:19
And so don't be afraid, as you can hear, just from listening to me talk, certainly you're more eloquent than I, but I fuck up a lot. And so what? Just keep going.
53:35
And I love that as part of your message.
53:35
I have another question though, because it just kind of naturally occurred to me.
53:42
Do you think that there is such a thing in creativity specifically?
53:47
So not sports, but in creativity.
53:47
Is there such a thing as just a natural talent?
53:54
Herbert Lui: I definitely think that talent, creativity is trickier to pinpoint.
53:58
Sports, you have really clear goals, you have really clear technical skills.
54:09
I think that for what it's worth, there's definitely natural...
54:15
Creativity has the same natural restrictions of sports.
54:24
So let's say for example, my hands are not a pianist hands, they're very stubby, I'm not very well coordinated, practiced for several years and was mediocre at best.
54:29
So you could say I'm not very good at piano, the skill of piano.
54:39
But the way that I was approaching piano, which could have been a very creative way, it was actually not creative at all.
54:49
I was just playing practicing other people's songs. And I was getting...
54:49
It was a technical proficiency I was building up.
54:55
There was not much original thought.
54:55
I did not take lessons in composition.
54:59
I had no interest in actually composing music or doing whatever.
55:04
And so that to me, that's one train of thought or one way to explore it is like, yes, there's definitely technical skills and natural physical talent or psychological ones as well.
55:12
I think that one of the best unlocks or the best foundations for creativity is a capacity for both confidence and doubt.
55:31
If you naturally have both of these things and know how to apply it, you're a couple steps ahead of everyone.
55:40
And so I, that's kind of weird because most people have one or the other.
55:44
They don't usually have both.
55:44
Because how can you have both?
55:44
And that's like when your brain has to be really okay with attention and with the extremes, with the paradox dualities.
55:56
And that's why I loved dualism.
55:56
And you have to know, without doubt your work is going to be stuck here.
56:01
Because you're never going to think it sucks. So, "Oh, it's awesome."
56:07
And you'll never strive to do something more.
56:07
But without confidence, you'll also never release it.
56:12
You won't think anything of it.
56:12
And creative work has this really strange, almost like a self-fulfilling dynamic in a way.
56:24
Once a few people start believing, everyone starts believing, and then your creative work becomes more elevated and people actually start caring and paying attention to you.
56:35
And without that degree of confidence that shows in your promotional work or even just in the work itself, you're going to hold yourself back.
56:40
You're not going to put yourself into it.
56:45
And I think that's probably another aspect of creative talent.
56:50
I also think that the third thing is probably just how disciplined you naturally are, structure wise or how disciplined you grew up.
56:56
Because one theme of the book is consistency and quantity and practice and making a lot of really acceptable things.
57:08
The premise of creative doing was actually the starting point for this whole book.
57:14
I wish I have, Beside me, I keep looking at it in case you're wondering why I'm looking down.
57:19
But the whole starting point was an article I'd written back in 2013 called ‘Why Quantity Should Be Your Priority’.
57:24
And I wrote that on Medium, really early days of Medium.
57:29
And right now it's gone maybe around over 200,000 people have read it.
57:35
And that's one of the keys to a creative talent as well, is basically like, "What's your capacity for making a lot of things?"
57:43
And not just the productive side of actually making it but also showing it to people.
57:49
So your capacity for rejection, your capacity for fear, your capacity for creating new versions of things and remixing your own work and new combinations of things.
58:00
Finding new places and applications for it so it can be useful, more surprising, more useful, or more original. Right?
58:05
So I think those are some of the key aspects where different people might have different starting points for it but you can definitely develop it and practice it as well. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I think that's right.
58:22
I like the multi part answer because I don't think it's any one thing.
58:29
I do think that we are born with certain dispositions, either genetic or environmental.
58:36
You mentioned, did you grow up in an environment that was supportive or disciplined or etc.
58:43
I think that, that all play into what we become.
58:53
I like the idea of the creative tension. What was it?
58:53
Fitzgerald, “A mark of a truly great mind is they can hold two diametrically opposed ideas in their mind without losing their mind”.
59:07
Something along those lines.
59:07
Herbert Lui: I get quote anxiety, I can't attribute it very well.
59:09
But that's exactly the one I was thinking of.
59:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, yeah. I always butcher them.
59:14
But you kind of get the idea across.
59:14
You had another thing that I loved when I read it, it's like...
59:20
Because it reminded me of me, that me that I was talking to you about that was trying to think of the case statement, this heavy duty nonsense.
59:31
And you say, "Quality is a word smart people use to procrastinate". Herbert Lui: Yes. 1000%.
59:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You got me back then.
59:41
Herbert Lui: Me too though.
59:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Everybody. Herbert Lui: Everybody.
59:44
Did we just call ourselves smart?
59:48
I don't know if we just called ourselves smart.
59:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, no.
59:50
Herbert Lui: We'll call each other smart. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. You're smart.
59:52
Herbert Lui: And you're smart, Jim.
59:54
Jim O'Shaughnessy: There's a great Jed McKenna quote that I quote all the time and that is, "The smartest thing I ever did in my life was stop being smart". Herbert Lui: Yeah. Seriously.
1:00:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Because Pirsig who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
1:00:08
He had a great quote in there which is, "Ego isolates you from quality."
1:00:13
Because I was thinking about the idea of quality as I was getting ready for this and I love Pirsig and I've read that book many times.
1:00:24
I remember thinking, yeah.
1:00:24
He had a really good one liner about that.
1:00:30
I mean, really what is ego?
1:00:30
But your Judge that we were talking about earlier. Herbert Lui: Right.
1:00:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right?
1:00:37
Freud, ego and super ego.
1:00:37
This has been around for a long time, right?
1:00:41
But we're back to George Box, "All models are wrong, but some are useful".
1:00:47
I think this idea that Pirsig is using the term ego about this sort of the idea we have of ourself.
1:00:54
I think it's a mistake to create the idea that we have of ourself through the eyes of others.
1:01:03
I think for the most part, honestly I don't really care what other people think about me and maybe it's just I've aged out maybe.
1:01:08
But I think that, that allows for quite a bit more playful exchanges and everything else.
1:01:17
But this ego isolates you from what he calls the “quality reality”.
1:01:23
So the question that I have for you, what do you think about that?
1:01:27
Do you think that there's a way...
1:01:27
You do a lot of prompts around this but what has worked for you to say “ego shut up” or “Judge shut up”?
1:01:38
What has been the most helpful for you in your own creativity? Herbert Lui: Right.
1:01:42
So sometimes I do have inner dialogue like that, right?
1:01:46
Where it's almost very adversarial. It's like, "Oh, my God.
1:01:46
I'm so upset with myself."
1:01:51
I think one of the most important things though is to...
1:01:51
I think I said this before, kind of mend the relationship between the two sides, right?
1:02:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You did.
1:02:02
Herbert Lui: I mean, we can call it the Madman Judge.
1:02:02
We can also just call it chaos and structure or the Apollonian Dionysian.
1:02:04
You're trying to unify everything together and everyone's trying to accomplish the same goal when you think about it.
1:02:15
And so that's one of the keys I think is to not be so hard on myself and also to be less precious about things.
1:02:24
To not take it so seriously.
1:02:24
I remembered for so many years I wanted to write a book and was going to...
1:02:29
The expectations were just getting so high.
1:02:34
And that's why one of the prompts and is, “Relax your expectations and let go of results”.
1:02:39
Let go of whatever you think is going to happen and focus on what's in front of you, which is the work.
1:02:44
So by focusing on the process, I have certain things that I do.
1:02:51
For example, I mentioned I write every day at my blog.
1:02:53
I've wanted to do this for years.
1:02:53
I couldn't figure out how to do it.
1:02:53
And then I realized, "Oh, a post can literally be five sentences.
1:02:58
Why is that not acceptable? I don't understand”.
1:03:04
And so I changed my own definition of what was acceptable and then I started doing it.
1:03:07
And it works really well for me.
1:03:07
That's one thing specifically that works really well for me.
1:03:12
I don't have enough time.
1:03:12
We're talking about doing and thinking.
1:03:12
I don't have enough time for my thoughts of what people might think to get in the way of me actually writing and putting the words down on the page.
1:03:25
In other words, I can't omit too much. I can't...
1:03:30
If I have to take a snapshot every day of what's going on in here, there's only so much omitting I can do until something comes out.
1:03:39
So naturally I'm kind of forced to be honest.
1:03:39
We were talking earlier about the...
1:03:39
I think messing up the handwriting in the letter.
1:03:45
It's like, "Oh, the handwriting's messed up."
1:03:51
This was the pure, real, authentic snapshot of what happened in that moment.
1:03:51
And so that really works for me as well.
1:03:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And we were talking about that in our relation to the letters that I started writing to my kids.
1:04:06
And I realized I still have the book. I hand wrote them all.
1:04:06
And I started when my son was four days old and I read the first one and I thought, "Oh, this is pretty good." And then I started...
1:04:17
Then I was kind of like, "Ah, but I probably should take that out."
1:04:22
And that just spurred another...
1:04:22
The second entry, which is I wrote original on the cover of this book because I didn't like one of the things that I'd said in the original letter.
1:04:33
But then the thought struck me.
1:04:33
I mean maybe that's where all the good stuff is.
1:04:33
Maybe it's in all of the, "Oh, I meant to say." Or you actually see...
1:04:39
You said snapshot, right?
1:04:49
You see a movie of the person who's communicating with you. And this idea of...
1:04:55
The thing that helped me a lot was this idea you mentioned earlier, the idea of ideas getting us.
1:05:02
And Tesla, the man was very famous for saying that. That's it.
1:05:11
He basically said, "Understand the math, understand that you're a receiver and just tune in."
1:05:19
And so I very much like...
1:05:19
And calling him a spiritual writer is to do an injustice to people who are spiritual reader.
1:05:26
I mean, he's almost like a terrorist of the spiritual camp Jed McKenna because he's really, really clever.
1:05:32
But one of the things that I learned from him that helped me a lot was to start thinking of myself at best as the co-creator.
1:05:48
Like there's a lot of stuff going on and I'm going to get ideas from you and our conversation that before our conversation I wouldn't have had on my own.
1:05:53
And the idea that it's okay for me to be a co-creator and with the universe, with you, with anyone I talk to, opens up so much more room, right?
1:06:11
Because, A, you don't get all. "That's my work. How dare you?" I mean, come on.
1:06:17
What was one of the earliest forms of writing was cuneiform.
1:06:27
And it was a poet lamenting that all the good poems had been written 15,000 BC.
1:06:35
And so the second thing that I wanted, as I think about that though, the serendipity that involves and almost giving yourself permission to just of be out there on record of saying, "Listen, I'm a co-creator at best here.
1:06:53
I take in God knows how many different thoughts I read all the time.
1:06:59
I listen, I do all these things.
1:06:59
So I don't know, was that a mash up of your ideas and the guests that I had on how to paint better?"
1:07:07
And it probably is, right?
1:07:14
So that helps, at least in my case a lot.
1:07:14
But the thing that bothers me is why...
1:07:26
And we were talking about this earlier, and I can't even call it a thesis because it doesn't rise to that level.
1:07:30
But I call it spontaneous adaptive cooperation in culture.
1:07:36
And by that I mean it's not like there's some conspiracy where a bunch of people sit around the big table and the lizard overlord say, "Now we're going to do this to the humans."
1:07:50
We're going to crush all of the creativity out of them."
1:07:50
But when one looks at, say, our antiquated educational system.
1:07:57
When one looks at, you make a great case for work and play, meaning very different things in people's minds and that work, you have to be serious and all of these...
1:08:12
Again, we're back to labels.
1:08:12
And yet, so why is culture do you think?
1:08:12
And this doesn't seem to be just western culture, this seems to be kind of universally human.
1:08:27
It seems like many cultures want to beat the creativity out of us.
1:08:27
And that is, you can see it in our educational systems, you can see it in...
1:08:37
That's not the way it's done.
1:08:43
You can see it in trying to program the correct answer into people's minds.
1:08:43
I'm a huge believer in teaching children how to think not what to think.
1:08:51
I'm a huge believer in trying to keep their creativity.
1:08:58
And I think that's one of the reasons I'm so excited about all these new tools that are coming online.
1:09:03
The Synthesis School and other things like that. But why...
1:09:10
And this is a philosophical question, you can just say, "I haven't had time to think about it."
1:09:15
But why do you think that if we look back...
1:09:15
And it's not just us now, why do we...
1:09:22
Is that we strive for uniformity, we strive for the survival instinct, what do you think it is that makes societies in general try to crush creativity out of people?
1:09:36
Herbert Lui: This is a really fascinating question.
1:09:36
And so similar to how you mentioned, I have a starting point for this. I don't have a thesis.
1:09:45
So one idea that has been on my mind lately, and one possible explanation is basically we are all in some way instruments a human as an instrument.
1:09:59
Meaning, for example, in today's world where capitalism is the prevalent business model, we actually need to pick up skills and or build assets.
1:10:14
And that itself is also a skill in a way that's going to produce financial return to some degree, to varying degrees.
1:10:21
But at least a kind of a middle class income sub, we can all at least survive.
1:10:29
We can have some shelter, have some food, et cetera.
1:10:36
The force that everyone's afraid of is risk.
1:10:36
And you're risking something.
1:10:36
Every time you're practicing creativity, you're like practice...
1:10:46
You're saying what's on your mind.
1:10:50
You're not really saying what you think your boss wants to hear.
1:10:52
You're not saying what you perceive the truth to be.
1:10:52
You're actually, "Oh, I'm an instrument right now.
1:10:57
I'm here to support my company, to support my boss, to support whatever."
1:11:02
And that's what really gets in the way.
1:11:02
And that's why we also try to filter ourselves and edit ourselves so much is because we're incentivized to try to become this instrument.
1:11:11
And so I think that it can feel like creativity is being beaten or sucked out of all of us.
1:11:20
But I really think it's a matter of risk.
1:11:20
And I think it's a matter of what will everybody think about this?
1:11:25
One of the reasons I think...
1:11:25
So I write some threads on Twitter about Yeezy.
1:11:28
The company, Yeezy and naturally its CEO, Ye.
1:11:28
Formerly known as Kanye West.
1:11:34
And one of the most interesting things to watch...
1:11:34
So as we're talking right now, latest news is they're severing the working relationship.
1:11:43
But it was really interesting watching the big corporation, Adidas, try to work with this maverick quintessential artist, which is Ye.
1:11:50
And to see them clashing...
1:11:50
I mean, imagine all the emails we didn't see, but even to see them publicly come at odds with each other, I think that's kind of a very microcosmic example of what happens to all of us is we have these sides of us that are very spontaneous, that are creative geniuses.
1:12:21
And the other side, or our partners we work with just can't take the risk on. They can't manage it.
1:12:27
And they think they have to manage it.
1:12:27
Public perception, there's too much at stake. Why should we trust you? We don't believe in you.
1:12:34
And so can you prove that you can make us a ton of money, even if you can, we still won't give you a [inaudible] because it's not predictable.
1:12:42
All of these things are...
1:12:42
I think they're all themed towards risk and themed towards, "Is this going to help us survive or not?"
1:12:52
As a company and as an organization and as a country and as a person.
1:12:52
And so it happens at all scales.
1:12:58
And that's why we also kind of beat ourselves a little bit.
1:12:58
We cage up the chaotic energy inside ourselves.
1:13:03
And so I think that's what tends to happen.
1:13:03
And there's a lot to actually learn in order to survive.
1:13:12
And so that comes at the cost of what we think is, we've unfortunately deemed creativity and expressiveness in art in any essential skill in our schools.
1:13:23
We might teach our classes, but we don't really teach creative thinking.
1:13:29
We don't teach how to express and we grade them.
1:13:29
That in itself is also a strange thing.
1:13:36
I mean, we do that at the grandest scale too.
1:13:36
We have awards shows, which is also streams to great creativity.
1:13:39
So I think all of that...
1:13:39
We treat creativity as this fungible thing that each person is or each...
1:13:46
Let's treat it exactly like everything else.
1:13:46
Let's treat this topic everything else.
1:13:54
When in reality it's kind of different and it's almost like a complete, a layer that you can put on top of every single class and really enhance each experience.
1:14:08
So that's kind of my long winded stream of consciousness.
1:14:08
That's my starting point for why I think creativity fights the battle and is often on the losing side sometimes.
1:14:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Actually, I think that was brilliant.
1:14:21
And what's so funny about it is most of my life was assessing things through risk, right?
1:14:33
That's what I do for a living.
1:14:33
I'm an asset manager and I always understood that one of the, I guess, blessings that I had was that I had a...
1:14:42
There was an asymmetry in me that was far more comfortable with risk than most people.
1:14:49
And it's one of the things...
1:14:49
I have a good friend who's a genius here in Manhattan, and he's always telling me, "Jim, stop telling people to be probabilistic thinkers.
1:15:03
You want deterministic thinkers working for you.
1:15:03
Do you want them to think about the probabilities that, Jim, you're a madman. You're crazy.
1:15:14
I'm not going to do anything for you."
1:15:14
But it's all this asymmetry and why Steve Jobs existed and why Elon Musk existed, right?
1:15:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that answer and I need some time to think about it, because I think it's a perfect answer, actually.
1:15:27
Seeing it all through a risk function makes so much sense, right?
1:15:32
Evolutionarily as well, you got to fit in before you can stand out.
1:15:32
And that's one of the things.
1:15:41
It's like the thing I said earlier, where it's hard to ask a guy to think of things that wouldn't occur to him, and I viewed that more specifically through the risk angles of investment only.
1:15:58
But for now, I always ask all of my guests the following impossible question, which is we're going to wave a magic wand and we're going to give you the ability to, you've seen the movie Inception, where you can make somebody think they came up with the idea of themselves?
1:16:16
We're going to wave a wand and give you two ideas.
1:16:21
You can speak into the magic microphone, testing, testing, and you're going to speak two things, and everyone in the world, every single sentient being in the world, that might include some non-humans, we don't know yet, but every single sentient being in our world on this lovely third rock from the sun is going to wake up the next day and think, honey, I just had this great thought. I'm going to...
1:16:48
What two things are you going to accept in the world's population?
1:16:54
Herbert Lui: Well, the first thing is actually a truth that we've been led not to believe, which is that you are creative.
1:17:02
If you're listening to this recording and thinking, no, this doesn't apply to me, I'm not creative, you are.
1:17:07
And you've been led to believe that you're not, but you are.
1:17:12
And I mean, just think back to when you were a kid. You're bored.
1:17:12
You're sitting at a desk. The teacher is talking.
1:17:18
You have a pen and paper in front of you, you doodle.
1:17:23
There's no question about it.
1:17:23
And we all know how to do this.
1:17:23
So you think back to that, that's enough proof. You are creative.
1:17:28
It might be sleeping inside you or you haven't practiced in a while, so there's that component.
1:17:34
So A, I would love for you to believe that you are creative.
1:17:38
The second thing is to believe that whatever you want to do, you can do it to some degree.
1:17:47
Now, to some degree being a key aspect of that.
1:17:54
I think that what's really fascinating to me, and one of the things I want to explore in the future in my writing is the self-fulfilling dynamic.
1:17:58
And a lot of times, it's really applicable to creativity.
1:18:06
It's like creative self-efficacy, I think, is the psychological term for it, where if you believe you can do it, then you can do it.
1:18:11
And if you can't, then you can't.
1:18:16
That's not to say that you don't need a supportive environment or resources and things like that.
1:18:21
All of those are really important too.
1:18:21
However, a lot of us, we have a lot of those things already and we still don't think we can do it.
1:18:26
We still keep coming up with these reasons we can't do something.
1:18:30
So the solution there is actually to think big, but also to start really small.
1:18:35
So if you're like, hey, I want to spend $700 to 3D print this sculpture that I think is really beautiful, then maybe start with a smaller.
1:18:49
What would the $30 version of that look like?
1:18:49
What would it look like if you printed it on a t-shirt instead, or just made it a poster instead, right?
1:18:54
And you could use capitalism to its advantage, which is to gain the resources you need to actually try that idea, rather than to go all in.
1:19:04
We were talking about risk.
1:19:04
It's finding these less risky ways to express yourself into be creative.
1:19:11
And I think that applies to a lot of other parts of life as well.
1:19:15
Granted, sometimes you do need to, caveat, again, is the anti-pattern.
1:19:15
Sometimes the minimum amount of risk is still very high.
1:19:21
So sometimes you just got to shoot your shot and take your bet anyway.
1:19:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love the first one, because that's something I repeat to a lot of people I work with.
1:19:27
It's like, yeah, actually you can come up with great ideas, you just have to let yourself do it.
1:19:36
And your last point there, I think that might occupy the first 45 minutes of our next chat, because I am a huge believer in whether you believe you can or not, you're right.
1:19:51
And that's kind of the power of belief.
1:19:51
And Eleanor Roosevelt, that's her quote, I think.
1:19:58
I'm botching it, I'm sure.
1:19:58
But Shakespeare, “There's nothing either good nor bad, but thinking makes it so”.
1:20:04
And that also reaches down to, I'm kind of a blend of Daoism and Stoicism.
1:20:16
And if you read the stoics, basically that's what they say, too.
1:20:16
They're like, listen, if you are in pain or you are suffering or all of those things, realize that it is because of the way you are reacting to some external thing.
1:20:36
Ask yourself instead, can I take an action?
1:20:36
And it fits really well with what we've been talking about.
1:20:40
Can I take an action or have a thought that will change that thing?
1:20:40
And if the answer is yes, then take that action or have that thought.
1:20:46
If the answer is much more likely no, then don't let it disturb you at all.
1:20:53
And it's like we were talking about social media, we've had such a great wide-ranging conversation here, but they're poking you.
1:21:08
They're poking you, because they want your outrage, right?
1:21:08
And he who outrages you or he or she who angers you, controls you.
1:21:16
And if you want to get controlled by something you can't change, even if you did everything in your power to do it, well, I mean, then you're going to be very unfulfilled. So I love both of them.
1:21:30
I think you're absolutely right.
1:21:37
I am kind of a all-in, spur in the ships kind of guy, so it's knock on wood.
1:21:47
There's a lot of charities who are like, oh Jim, don't blow it.
1:21:52
Herbert Lui: But it works. I think it works. That's the thing, right?
1:21:57
I think every person has, you mentioned a capacity for risk, we all have kind of have that built into us.
1:22:04
And the original title, the first version of this book, the original title was also something my fiancée had said.
1:22:10
There's something to be said about should she have been the author of this book?
1:22:15
But really, it was entitled “There's No Right Way To Do This”.
1:22:20
And if I could have a third thing, that would be it.
1:22:20
There's no right way to do what you want to do, and there's no right way to approach things.
1:22:25
So what works for you, Jim, might not work for me, and vice versa.
1:22:33
And you really need to do with what works for you and is maybe slightly outside of your comfort zone, but not in this, I mean, that's me talking, right?
1:22:46
That's what I'm comfortable with.
1:22:46
But some other people are more comfortable with let's go all in.
1:22:50
And it works really well for them.
1:22:54
And every one of us needs to do what works well for us and fits in with our own personalities and inclinations.
1:23:00
And yeah, all of that resonates.
1:23:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And it does.
1:23:04
And we can weave it together with the idea that you said your fiancée came up with that too.
1:23:10
Well, she was your co-creator, like my idea, right? Herbert Lui: Exactly.
1:23:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So immediately, it's just like, oh no, she's just my co-creator here, and you just feel good about that.
1:23:19
And you don't feel like you're taking anything, even though you're giving her credit, which is great.
1:23:23
If you think co-creatives, that just opens you to allow to weave all this stuff in. And you're right.
1:23:29
Back to me finding that one translation that called it the process as opposed to the path of the way, everybody's process is different.
1:23:40
And when people will ask me for investment advice, I say, okay, so first thing I would tell you is index your money.
1:23:47
Because unless you're a lunatic like me, and you want to figure the market out, okay, that's great, then that's going to be part of your process.
1:24:01
Then you got to read a lot of stuff.
1:24:01
But then you've got to create your process, and your process is going to be different than mine.
1:24:11
And don't try to copy me or copy Warren Buffett or I hate these, the 10 things great investors always do. No, no, no.
1:24:19
And it's like, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, come up with your own kind of outline and process that's right for you, and guess what?
1:24:33
That one is going to work great for you. So, same.
1:24:33
It sounds like it's good investment advice and it's good creativity advice as well. Well, listen.
1:24:43
This has been so much fun.
1:24:43
I love conversations like this.
1:24:43
I am a sucker for anything that we can just talk about a bunch of stuff in my [inaudible].
1:24:49
It's like, oh yeah, no, this is the way you do that, and you have fulfilled that. Herbert Lui: Awesome. This was my pleasure.
1:24:58
I'm looking forward to the next one and thanks so much, Jim.