Creative slack – Herbert Lui

Creative slack

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 you. You may worry about what happens if nobody buys this work, or if you don’t have enough time for another draft, and so on. You won’t be able to relax.

If you rely on your creative work for income, you’ll experience a sense of scarcity. A day job helps alleviate that pressure, which helps unblock your creative flow. (So does unearned income.)

Creating room for these mistakes to take place is the first step to creative abundance. And the word for that is slack. Some potential adjustments to consider, in service of slack:

Choose materials that are in abundance. Here’s a good example, from Scarcity by Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan: Bees take a long time to build honeycombs because they need to produce wax. Wasps build their nests with mud and sticks and carcasses of other insects, which they can find very quickly. For example, if you’re a writer, try to write articles or stories with your own life experiences instead of topics that require new time-consuming research.

Scope a project down so you have twice—or even three times—as much time as you need to do it. If you’re ever in doubt, make it smaller. Shape it to require very little maintenance.

Only work on projects that you can afford to fail, both from a financial and emotional perspective.

Work at a pace where you can try over and over again. You’ve found the right cadence when you feel that you’re gaining creative momentum with each attempt. (Writing a blog post every day, here at this blog, is how I adjusted.)

There will always be moments where you experience creative scarcity and need to rise to the occasion. But those should be the exceptions, not the norm.

Herbert Lui

August 1, 2026

Creativity, Creator Confidential, Expectations

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