From Finance to Storytelling: How to Craft Meaningful Narratives by Lawrence Yeo by Kazuki Nakayashiki

From Finance to Storytelling: How to Craft Meaningful Narratives by Lawrence Yeo

Kazuki Nakayashiki

Nov 14, 2024 9:29 PM

Summary

Introduction to Lawrence Yeo (00:08): Lawrence Yeo, founder of More To That, is introduced as a storyteller with over 38,000 newsletter subscribers, known for exploring the human condition through narrative.
Transition from Finance to Creative Pursuits (01:30): Lawrence shares his journey from an economics major and finance professional to a music producer before ultimately discovering his passion for writing and illustration.
Influence of Illustrations in Storytelling (05:14): He cites Tim Urban and Allie Brosh as inspirations for his unique illustration style, which complements his serious writing topics by adding levity.
Writing Process and Inspiration (11:49): Lawrence discusses how he typically starts his creative process with writing, using illustrations to either amplify his points or explain concepts visually.
Daily Routine and Balancing Craft with Business (49:04): Lawrence describes his daily routine which includes morning exercise for mental clarity, dedicated writing time, and handling business tasks in the afternoons.
Advice for Aspiring Writers (52:10): He emphasizes understanding one's motivations for writing and suggests starting without the pressure of monetization to explore if it's something they truly enjoy.
Thoughts on Legacy (58:25): Lawrence reflects on his legacy, stating that he prioritizes the present moment and meaningful creation over concerns about how he will be remembered in the future.

Transcript

Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of Glasp Talk. Today we are very excited to have Lawrence Yeo. Lawrence is the founder of More To That, where he crafts stories that explore the nuances of the human condition, and his insightful work has garnered a loyal following with over 38,000 subscribers to his newsletter. In addition to his storytelling work, Lawrence is the creator of Thinking in Stories, a transformative four-week course designed to help curious

minds turn their ideas into compelling narratives through storytelling frameworks, live workshops, and creative exercises. So with a background in finance and a degree in economics from UCLA, Lawrence has seamlessly transitioned from spreadsheets to storytelling, connecting with millions of readers globally. And today, we will dive into his unique journey and his storytelling philosophy and how he inspires others to embrace the power of stories.

Thank you for joining us today, Lawrence. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Kazuki and Kei. I'm excited to be here. Thank you. Yeah, we are huge fans of your newsletters and content. But first of all, we are really curious about how and why did you start More To That? And because your background was like finance and econ, economics. And yeah, we were really curious about that part. Yeah. So, I mean, as you say, I started off as an econ major.

And a lot of that is because I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do. And it was like, the fewest amount of classes I had to take to graduate. So I chose that. And then after that went into, yeah, I went into finance. But I always knew that finance was like my way of being able to do something else. Right. So it would kind of give me the resources for me to free up my attention to eventually do something that I would deem more creative.

And what I first considered to be that avenue was music. So I started off as a music producer. I made a lot of beats and so forth. And so the first leap I took was I left finance to do that full time. And I did that for about four years professionally and then decided, damn, this is not the career to go into. So then I went back to finance. So kind of. But with the intention of, all right, I'm going to go back here because this is what I know how to do and I could get paid

to do this. And at the same time, try and figure out what other form of creative expression there was that I wanted to venture more into. And it was during that time where I started writing and I started drawing. And it was a nice, refreshing thing, because with music, especially the way I was making it, you know, I'm not singing or I'm not rapping or anything. I'm just kind of putting together instrumentals. It's hard to get a sense of my ideas. Right.

If you're listening to it, all you could really think of is, ah, Lawrence, that guy sounded kind of sad when he made this or maybe he was a little happy or something to happen. But I can't share what I know to others. And what I found with writing was that it's a very direct way of sharing ideas in that manner. And I really loved it. And a big thing was, can I do this for long periods of time without feeling like I have to be read or I have to

reach the widest audience possible? Like my whole thing was, can I do this because I intrinsically enjoy it? And that was a lesson from music I had to learn because of music. I was so focused on how am I going to get heard, how I'm going to make this my career and all that stuff that I gradually started to lose my love for making music. And so when I ventured into writing, I wanted to make sure I really enjoyed doing that for its own sake.

So more of that started with this piece called Travel is No Cure for the Mind. And that piece took me like 100 hours to do, maybe a little bit more. But what that experience taught me was that, hey, I can sit here and draw my way and think my way through this topic and enjoy doing it. Right. Because I had no audience, you know, and I still did it. And I had many posts like that even before I launched it. But, you know, it turns out that people did enjoy my work and I continued at it.

And here I am, a couple of years later, still doing it and no longer in finance. So this is my thing. Oh, yeah. Thank you. And I was always curious, you know, you started with that illustration. Your illustration is really unique. But I see the similar pattern with like a Tim Urban has, you know, Wait But Why, you know, that has a similar taste. And did you get inspired by him or did you have your own like a unique way of, you know, showing illustration? I was always curious

about the illustration part. Yeah, I was heavily inspired by Tim Urban of Wait But Why. And there's also another blogger or writer that people don't know that much about now, but she was pretty big back then. Her name is Allie Brosh. And she had this site called Hyperbole and a Half. And she made use of many illustrations throughout her pieces. And they were also long form. So I've always loved drawing as a kid.

And one thing I tell people when they're trying to figure out how exactly they might want to express themselves is what did you enjoy doing when you were a kid, always go back to that because you're kind of unencumbered by pressures of the world. This is just what you want to do. And I kind of thought to like, Oh, yeah, I love drawing, I love doodling. So and I think Tim Urban and Allie Brosh showed me what was possible, right, that that there is a landscape of readers that enjoy telling stories in that way.

So actually, with the travel piece, I think I started with the illustrations first, if I'm trying to remember correctly, like just trying to plot out the narrative that way. And then kind of, I think I or a matter of written it on notebook first, and then kind of carried through from there. It's a little fuzzy now. But illustrations were definitely like, crucial to my ability to tell these stories.

And I think what's important, though, is that if you're going to use illustrations, you want to have some differentiating factor. So you know, like Tim Urban did the stick figure thing. So I didn't really want to do stick figures. Also, because I didn't really draw stick figures when I was young, I actually drew characters. So the characters that you see on the blog, like, I drew those same characters back when I was 12 years old, or something. So my one one joke I like to say is that my if my 12 year old version of myself saw, you know, my 30 something year old

version of myself, and I'm still drawing the same stuff. He'd be like, dang, your your drawing curve, it kind of stayed the same, huh? Like, it didn't get any more like realistic or anything. And I think, you know, funnily enough, that kind of contributed to the character of, of the blog. And I didn't know this at the time. But I think what happened was that those illustration helped to be like a good juxtaposition with my writing, because I tend to write about like pretty serious

stuff, right? Death, the meaning of life, money, and really adult things. But what the illustrations helped to do is to bring some levity into it. And I think that the combination of those two things that seem a little paradoxical, is what allows it to resonate. So yeah, it's been a big part of what I do. So sorry, I, yeah, I just wondering, you know, did Yeah, it's a dumb question.

But you know, you know, over the six years, seven years, and I was always, you know, when I did, you know, Tim Urban's article in your course, and I was always wondering, like, yeah, I'll say, drawings get better over time, or are they intentionally keeping the same quality? And yeah, that's a good question. Um, yeah, you know, I didn't, I've never really made an effort to improve, as in, like, make it more realistic, or anything like that, or to, or to switch up my style with it.

But one, one thing I do try to improve at, or like, try to better think is how do I present an idea visually better, right? And that has little to do with the accuracy of a drawing, or if my vector is like a little bit better lined up than than before. It has nothing to do with that. And that's the thing too, I say is that your drawings could suck from a technical standpoint, but really resonate from an emotional standpoint. So I think the latter is way more important.

And if in order to really create something resonant, like you have to really think about the framing of it, you have to think about Alright, let's say I'm, for example, we could go back to the travel piece, because I've already talked about it. But I was trying to think of, for example, how am I going to convey the feeling that you wake up, go to work, come back, eat dinner, sleep, watch TV, whatever, wake up again, like, how, how do I convey that monotony of life, and our desire to break away from it by traveling,

or by getting these novel experiences only to revert back to that again, right? So I think about that. And I'm like, I don't want to Use the word hedonic treadmill okay like it's played out people know about it i don't i don't want to use another person's concept in this case i you know it's it's cool to borrow concepts of course but in this case i felt like there was an opportunity for me to make it my own thing

so in that case i kind of thought about all right what is that feeling of doing everything over and over again what does that feeling exude oh it feels like you're trapped okay what makes you feel like you're trapped in something what's an object oh a box and and then i thought okay what if i call this the box of daily experience and being in that box is where we're trapped and we try to break out of that box by chasing novel experiences but it kind of doesn't work so i didn't think

about how am i going to make this the most realistic box so people see it and they're like oh next time i see an amazon box i'm gonna think about this no it was more so about how do i think of a concept that ultimately i could just draw a rectangle call the box the experience and draw some funny things and that's it but it's not the it's not the level of technical ability in the drawing that people resonate with it's the fact that i thought through all that and put it into

that framework that makes it resonate um so it's more about thinking it's more about how you think as opposed to what you're actually drawing on your tablet um that makes the difference but when you want to write a newsletter or a story so do you start with drawing the idea at first then so you know framing the you know letters our sentence what do you start with you know writing a sentence at first then you know pick drawing picture so how does it work

yeah i start with writing i mean i fundamentally view myself if i were to choose between writer illustrator i'm a writer so i i start with writing and um but because i know that illustrations are part of what i do it has an interesting way of kind of driving my writing in a sense where if i feel like i'm writing and i'm like okay when i wrote the sentence i feel like if i put a visual right here it will help to like amplify what i just wrote right so there's usually

there's two ways you could think about illustrations is one they act as an amplification for what you just wrote so the reality is you might not even need the illustration there and your piece will still flow but if you put it in there it makes the sentences you wrote before hit more that's one way and the second illustration is you put it in there because it's needed to explain the concept right so so if i'm drawing a spectrum for example and i have

different things in there that needs to be in there in order for people to see what i'm talking about right but a lot of the time it's just drawings that help to amplify what i wrote so that means the writing comes first so i'm i'm writing and i know that okay i'm just going to write my way through if it's a good time to add an illustration great sometimes though there are some pieces where i'll start with a drawing and because like i feel like oh that drawing is so good i want to anchor

my piece around that so i have a story called the nothingness of money and it's all about wealth and finitude and how to deal with the fact that we think about money all the time knowing that in the end we're all going to die and like we know that it's not the answer and for that i actually took out my notebook and i drew a graph a two-axis graph and if you check out the piece you'll see it almost immediately if you scroll down like you could think of the y-axis as thoughts about money

and the x-axis as just time so birth and death and basically it's like i thought okay the moment we're when we're born we don't know anything about money right we don't know anything about it and then at some point we fit we find out about it we find out about it and the moment we find out about it and what it can do then so it's like you just imagine it catapulting up and it just stays like that you just think about money think about money all the time and then when you are

aware of your mortality not just not just theoretically but viscerally then you're like what am i doing i i no one expects me to squeeze out an extra dollar with the time i have left if i know i'm gonna die then then all of a sudden you're not thinking about money anymore it plummets and then you start focusing on what's purposeful where can i direct my love to all these things but the urgency of death is what causes that so i thought about this really simple graph just dude

and then plateau and then dude and then when i drew that i was like there is a story here there's some story here that i can i can write about so that's an example of where it started with the illustration um and the illustration is just some either a graphical representation of my idea or some framework that i want to anchor people into um yeah and i've done that with actually a good amount of my money posts where i i think of the visual first but when i start writing it's

just like okay everything helps to explain what that visual is all about interesting yeah thanks and so do you think you can realize so your images by drawing so every time uh like if you are struggling with like generate uh i don't know lighting and drawing that picture so where do you see or how do you get the inspiration um yeah so i think when i when you think about inspiration so even this right now like i imagine inspiration as like two characters right so i envision

inspiration one is like a fairy that goes around and then sprinkles dust on you whimsically right just you're just doing your thing and then all of a sudden some idea hits you that's the fairy working and then the other kind of inspiration is a laborer i refer to him as a laborer and he has like a hard hat on and that's the kind of inspiration where you have to show up be disciplined every you know at a certain time and i think one of the things that people get wrong about

inspiration is that they think it's either or right it's either the fairy or it's either the laborer right it's like creativity can be scheduled it definitely can't be scheduled there's there's a lot of these two camps talk out amongst one another but like many things i think the middle is where the answer is where you kind of make usage of both right and um i think you want to put yourselves in positions where you can generate inspiration from both so in my case

i have the laborer at work in the mornings for about two hours where i just write right right and we can go into what i choose to write about another later if you'd like but basically i show up there it's i'm either continuing something that i was already working on or i'm just like i want to write about some problem i'm thinking about and just start there and then in the afternoons i'll leave more time for the fairy to come so it's like whether i will go for a walk

or i'll just pick up a book or i'll have a chat with a friend you know we're doing this in the afternoon right this is another it's my secret way of maybe the fairies and i come to play here you know with all of us and um you know these are the things that help me with inspiration on that side so i think you kind of have to have a blend of both it's like having a sense of stability and anchoring of discipline and then serendipity where it's much more whimsical and if you could combine

those two things together then i think you'll have you'll have so much to write about and you'll have so many ideas to create on i see and do you keep the ideas you know when you come up with any interesting ideas or you know like you imagine something you know like something new and do you keep the ideas and if so where usually you know put these ideas is that apple notes google docs yeah it's apple notes it's pretty simple i used to do it in rome research but i don't really use

that anymore i don't know do people use don't use rome i i dabble in it every now and then but not really yeah you know i've never been a huge note-taking guy i just um i feel like if there's an idea that really resonates me with me like it kind of just makes its way to the brim of my mind and what the laborer helps me do is to be like all right here's all these things you got let's just pluck one out and let's just start and see where that goes so um i yeah i have been

playing with some other note-taking systems tools i've been playing with this tool called cortex which recently came out um and that's been interesting for the most part i i use apple notes like it's very simple i just pull it up if i have an idea i write it down um i also use voice notes sometimes just to uh dictate what i might be thinking i have like an apple watch which like the only purpose of that is to do that or i don't know i could just check the time i don't

even really use it for anything else um but yeah it's a very i have a very minimalist Notetaking Approach typewriter. So, you say, either I'm going to aim for this word count or I'm going to write this many minutes and then basically it just blocks off everything, all you see is a blank page and all you can do is write. I think that works well with my style of thinking about ideas, because I don't need Notetaking software to write or anything like that.

It's very simple, obviously very simple and you can't get out of it. I mean, you can like hard reset your computer if you really want to do that, but yeah, it's been amazing. Ever since I learned about it in 2017 or 2018, I've written almost everything in Cold Turkey Writer and it just eliminates all distractions. It's easy and it's simple and it's awesome, frankly. Wow, interesting. And it's free. Oh yeah, that's important.

But I'm curious, you know, why did you choose WordPress and have you ever switched into, let's say nowadays people use Substack and some people use Medium and have you thought about using those like a distributing or blogging system? Yeah, so I started off on Medium and I initially had my first readers there, but simultaneously I had the WordPress blog because I always wanted to have kind of like my owned property and it's independent of any platform.

And it's also a lot easier to just convert people into the newsletter through the site on WordPress. But you're right, there are so many different platforms that people could write on, whether it's Substack, whether it's Ghost, whether it's Medium. I mean, there's many different options. And I think if you're starting out, it's wise to choose one of those discovery platforms. But in the end, the question is more about do you want to have your own site that you have, you know, pretty much complete control over,

right? And if you can control the aesthetics of it, that was important to me because my work is so visual, right? So when I was thinking about a theme, I just wanted something really minimal because it's not the theme that's going to be the visual component, right? It's going to be my drawings. So what allows me to accentuate my drawings and plot them out in a way that looks great? And once again, that's also a testament to the fact that you don't need to have the most

beautifully designed site. All you really need to have is something that conveys your style. And like that theme I've been using ever since I started, I haven't changed it. And frankly, I don't really have any plans to change it. But there is a lot of temptation to jump on one platform, jump on the other, right? If Beehive gets hot, you jump on that. If Substack gets hot, you jump on that. And there's a lot of temptation to do that.

And I did feel like there was some wisdom, I guess. Maybe that's too strong of a word, but just what happens if I just stay consistent in what I do? And if things change dramatically, then yeah, I could always jump to another platform. But WordPress offers a lot of different functionality. And I also have ConvertKit integrated or I guess now Kit, but that's where I use to send my newsletters. It's pretty well integrated with WordPress, so it works well.

I see. Thank you. And by the way, I'm curious about your favorite writing so far. You mentioned that nothingness of money is your one, what your favorite is, but do you have any other like a favorite post in your past? Favorite post. Yeah. Yeah. I think when I talk about favorite posts, it's the one that I actually go back to myself because I need a reminder of it. And I think, I feel like the best writing really, it's, you write it for, like I write for myself

in the sense that it's like, I write for myself, but I try to do it well because people, I think the way I say it is write for yourself, but do it so well that people pay attention. And when it comes to this piece, I only, I wrote this piece in just two hours. So the piece is called The Antidote to Envy, and there's just one illustration at the top. And I think this is a good moment to kind of introduce how I think about publishing and writing.

It's like, I think of it as two buckets. There's one where you're writing to figure out what you think. And the second is you're writing to present. And those are two different things, right? It's like, when you're writing to figure out what you think, it's because you really aren't sure what you think about something. And writing has this interesting thing to it, where as you type out your thoughts, like threads start to unravel and things start to make more sense, where you're just sitting

there pondering, looking at the wall, couldn't really do, right? So that's the first part. The second is writing to present. And this is more of like, you have your idea fleshed out, you've talked about it, you may have written about this idea before, but now you're like, okay, I think I have a pretty solid framework here. And now what I'm doing is I'm going to present this idea to people, right? And these are the pieces that have the capacity to be read a lot, because I've

put so much thought into it. And it's almost like I'm giving a talk about it, right? I've prepared it in a way where I'm going to present it. So the antidote to envy piece, which is interesting, because it's not a writing to present one, which you may think is the one that in whatever time I put into, that's the one that will be my favorite. But it's actually the antidote to envy, because it was this problem I was struggling with.

Yeah, why do I feel my envy kind of increasing lately? And, and, you know, like, it was oscillating. But at this particular moment, I was like, yeah, it feels like it's high. And I want to know what's going on. So with these writing to think, most of these pieces on my site are under what's called reflections. So if you look at the menu, you'll see this thing called reflections. Most of those pieces there is like, I set up cold turkey writer, say I'm going to write for 120

minutes. I don't know what I'm going to write about yet. But let's just go. And the first sentence I would write is usually today I want to talk about and then the problem. And then I just go from there. So the antidote to envy, I think, yeah, I just like today, I'm going to talk about I'm talking about the antidote to envy and why knowing yourself is the way forward or something like that. Right.

And then that first sentence is not going to be in the piece I published, but it's just my way of starting. And then I'll just boom, I'll just go. So that one, when I finished it, I was like, damn, this really helped me to think through this issue. And my envy that I was feeling, it was just gone. It just dissipated. And, you know, when I feel that again or when I start feeling it rise up again, I just read that piece again. And it just like, boom, it instantly levels it out again. So.

The antidote to envy was one of those pieces that fall under the reflections, I actually have another piece on envy, which is much more presentation style. It's called Envy is the Cancer of the Soul. But once again, I don't know. I think there was just the fact that I did that that reflection piece in one go. It was really like at this moment of time, this is how I was feeling. And I just revisit that one a lot. So I think that's my favorite one. I see.

But your thoughts evolve over time, right? When you did, you know, you did your past content. And sometimes you want to, I think you, I don't know if this happens to you, but, you know, this part changed in my life. So I want to update this part and this part. Has that happened? And also in that sense, I think we can continuously editing the content, right? For the whole time. So, but you got to publish at some point. So how do you manage this part? And how do you update, you know, over time? Yeah, well, I don't when I publish something,

I don't edit it, right? Like if it's up there, it's up there. I mean, unless it's like a typo, or unless there's some note in there where it's like, I have to update the date or something like that. I don't, I don't change it if my views changed on something. What I'll do is I'll just write another piece. And, and that will be my, my kind of updated version of how I think about this. And I think the great thing about blogging or writing online too is,

especially on your own site is that you could link to your other pieces, right? So if people Wants to Take a Look at. So if I want to tell people, hey, this is what I once thought, I could link back to it and people could check that out. But really, I view the pieces I put up there, it's just a snapshot of my thinking at a given time, right? It's like a balance sheet of my thoughts. It's just a snapshot.

And funnily enough, these pieces all kind of act as bricks to something else sometimes, right? So maybe I'll write a reflection on a topic, and I'll write two or three of them. And the next thing you know, I'm like, oh, those things could be gathered for a bigger piece. Like that happened for, I have another piece called The Arc of the Practical Creator, which was quite popular. And that one. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, cool. So yeah, that one was a combination of a lot of like reflections I had on the topic, right? So I was writing,

I had this piece where I was just kind of writing about what money means, but in a very, you know, boom format, I was writing about creativity. And then I was like, Hmm, what if I kind of like, bring all these things together. But in order to bring them together, I want to think of a framework. So this, you know, you can kind of see how the gears are spinning here. And I was like, oh, two axis graph, that might do it again.

And that's another thing, if I were to give any pointers to the audience here, is that two axis graphs are incredible. They they're, they're so simple, but people love them. And I think it because it helps to simplify a lot of complex phenomenons. And you could just do a lot of interesting things with it. And your writing will help to kind of walk through readers through it, right. And of course, Tim Urban does this all the time.

And like, you'll with the beauty of, I think, that piece was that it was really just my way of distilling all the writing to figure out what I think pieces into something presentable, or like, I want to present this because I've thought about this so much. And, you know, like, that's kind of what writing a book is like, too, right? If people ever end up writing a book, a great way to write a book is to start writing shorter pieces before then, because your shorter pieces are going to help to inform you of what you may want to take and and put into there.

So like, you're gonna, these are all kind of building blocks to other things that you can do. And they're all kind of connected. But yeah, to your original question, if I do edit that my the way I view it is, it's to just to do a new piece. And that's to share my updated thinking. I see. Just curious, like, what is a source of information? So because you're probably reading a lot of books, subscribing to newsletter, or like, when you come up with

ideas, you search something on Google or YouTube. So how do you get ideas? And what is a source of information or knowledge? So I think the biggest well I draw upon is personal experience. And but I look at my personal experiences through the lens of just the general human condition. Like I have this belief where if I understand myself better than I could understand anyone. Because we all share very similar characteristics. We all share very similar emotions.

And if I could think of, all right, if this experience made me feel a certain way, and what were the lessons I drew upon that, then I could translate that in the form of a story that other people could relate to. So I think about yeah, personal experience is my first well I draw upon when it comes to when it comes to secondary sources or external sources. Probably the most the thing I draw upon most are just our books.

But I don't know, it's interesting. I don't really draw upon them that much, either. I read a lot of fiction, actually, as opposed to nonfiction. And I wish there was some like clear cut lesson here, but I'm not sure if there is. I, other than I think that when you're too embedded in your own silo, so let's say I'm a nonfiction writer, right? If I just read nonfiction, I don't think that will allow me to kind of expand beyond what I currently know.

And it doesn't really stretch my imagination. But if I read fiction, it's what it does, it's not really what the author is saying in the form of an idea that I could use. But just the fact that I'm in a whole nother world, and I'm in that world, and I'm like, seeing how these ideas are unfolding. I'm like, damn, that's cool. That's cool how they could, he or she could take this idea and put it into a world and communicate it that way.

Like, I feel very inspired by that. And I think that also, I could embed some of that into my work too about when I when I come across an idea or a quote, even in a nonfiction book, it's like, how do I build a world around that? As opposed to how do I just drop this quote in here to support some point that I'm making? Of course, you could do that. But I think going beyond the domain of where you operate in really helps you connect dots that you don't know were there.

And I think that's what all the all the great thinkers have been able to do. I think it was Schopenhauer who said that talent, talent hits a target that everyone sees, but genius is a target that hits a target that no one can see, right? So it's, it's basically like, you're just trying to extend beyond whatever you can see. And I try to do that with reading fiction. And it just, and honestly, it's just a lot more fun to read fiction than to read nonfiction book after

nonfiction book. So I think in a way, it gives me ideas, but not in the sense of quote this, quote that, but just different ways of thinking about something. So one thing I would recommend is like, what's your domain of interest if you if you're in nonfiction, and then what's the fictionalized version of that, that's, that's, that's available. So I'm really interested in philosophy.

And the fictional version of that that I could delve into is like Dostoevsky, the Brothers Karamazov, or one person I've just been heavily, heavily reading is Ted Chiang, who's an incredible sci fi short story writer. And his stories are very philosophical in nature. And there's also Jorge Luis Borges, who writes philosophical short stories. So I read a lot of those folks. Ursula K. Le Guin, she's amazing, too. So there's all these different people that have nothing to do with nonfiction.

But my interest in philosophy is found in their works a lot of the time. And that that really helps to broaden my mind. I see. And yeah, I love the course. And I love how you get ideas, inspiration. And, you know, recently, I've read the whole series of the three body problem. And that's the sci fi, fiction. And that's really interesting. That, you know, like reading fiction, that as you mentioned, reading fictions, sci fi, gives us like a really long term

perspective. And it was like, it's a fiction, but you know, it's a potential future. And as you mentioned, like a philosophical perspective of the universe. And that's, yeah, that sometimes give us gives us a new idea. And yeah, I love it, too. Yeah. Yeah, because there's no inherent utility in that, right? Like you read it, and you're like, okay, I don't know how I'm going to apply this to managing the team at Glasp or, you know, or anything like that.

But I think what it does for you is that it just it shifts what you may think is possible and what the future can look like. And I think like also with the with like Shishi and Lou and the three body problem, it's, it's, it's not a story just about what the world is like, and this high level view it, it goes down into certain characters, right? And how they feel about that world. And that's what fiction does is it's not the entire world, it's always done through the perspective of a few

people in that world, right? So they're trying to humanize that world, no matter how science fiction he gets, no matter how crazy it may seem, what is unchanging are the ways in which we process those that stimuli, right? And the way we think about it, and our emotions about it, like that's what these fiction authors tap into. And, and you internalize that, I think, when you, when you work in whether you're building a company, or you're writing online, or writing

nonfiction books, like there is something about you putting yourself in this fictional character shoes for a moment that helps to kind of broaden the way you view this. And I think it does wonders, but there's no immediate utility, I think you have to just go into it with a sense of this seems really enjoyable. And then when you How did your newsletter grow over time? It's generally incremental, but there have been some posts that just were very popular.

So I mentioned the travel post that was very popular, I think. And that was the first thing that I wrote. I want to caveat this, though, by saying that I was writing on Medium well before more to that. So I think I was actually writing in 2015, but I started more to that in 2018. And during that time, I was just experimenting with what the hell I want to write about. And even before more to that launched, I had three posts that were just as long

as the travel one already done that I didn't publish. Because once again, like I was saying, I was just trying to figure out, do I like doing this thing? And also, I had my corporate gig that there was no pressure whatsoever for me to try to make money from this. So it gave me the freedom to do work on that on the nights and weekends. So I had these three things done. So when people, because I think some people may think, oh, you published that first piece,

and then it popped off. So that might be an outlier thing. And sure, but I wrote a lot before then. It was me finding my voice, finding what I want to do. I didn't incorporate illustrations right away when I started writing on Medium. This was all a very gradual process. And then that piece popped off. And then after that, there were just a couple. The nothingness of money was very popular. A lot of my pieces on money actually have been quite popular.

And Arc of the Practical Creator was popular. But it's for the most part, it's not like a boom kind of thing. It's kind of like these, it's going up and then it goes down. Because another thing people don't consider is you send newsletters and the people unsubscribe. So it goes down. And then you're kind of going up. So in the end, it kind of comes down to this element of consistency in terms of just doing it often.

But having a blend of pieces that I want to publish quicker and other things that I'm kind of marinating on more, maybe this will turn into a bigger idea or something else. And you just never know what could be an inflection point for growth and so forth. You kind of just have to put things out and then see what works. And in my case, too, I had this interesting dynamic where the newsletter is much bigger than my social media following.

Usually, it's the inverse. If you're going to have 40,000 newsletter subscribers, you got to have 200,000 Twitter followers or something like that. But that's not the case for me. And I think a big part of that is because from the beginning, I focused on storytelling. And you could do Twitter threads and stuff like that or do long form on there. But for me, the more conducive medium was on WordPress or even using Medium, the platform.

And that's the other thing to consider, too, is there's some platforms that are more conducive to your style of writing. And you want to lean into that more. So if I knew that long form is where I think my work excels, then I don't need to rely too much on Twitter to get people to my newsletter and so forth. If there's this thing that if I create a good piece and people share it, then it has the capacity to spread.

So, I mean, there's a little more strategy behind it than that. But it is possible to not be under the reign of social media in order to grow a newsletter. I see. Thank you. So I think I was thinking which one I should ask. But nowadays, Chachibiri came out, Anthropic Cloud came out, and people use AI for writing and getting ideas and brainstorming. Do you use AI tools for your writing or brainstorming? Or has that, like in 2022, I think Chachibiri came out, right?

So does that impact on your newsletter or your workflow? No, no. I've used AI for like copy editing. So, you know, I'll like put something in there. I'm like, hey, is there grammatical mistakes in here or stuff like that? And or I think Claude is a little better for that. But when it comes to generating ideas and or like, I definitely don't write with it. I write with my own voice. And I think that's what makes it enjoyable.

And, you know, I think that's the thing, too, is that with AI and so forth, well, what's ultimately going to matter is if you know how to tell good stories. Like that's going to be the differentiating factor for writers. And with writing, too, it's like it's much harder than speaking. You could tell stories. But as you're telling stories, you can kind of revise what you said and be like, whatever you could get away with more.

But with writing, it's kind of like the words are staring at you on the blank page. And you're like, damn, that doesn't sound that good. I got to go change that up. You can kind of see it there. So I think like storytelling with writing is a little bit different. And I think what AI, the limitations of AI still is like telling a good story. Like it could tell you all the information that you want. I mean, better than LLMs could do that way better than any human being can.

Any information that you need, you could get it right away, structured in a way where it's easy to read and so forth. But to make it to make someone feel something when they read it, like something deep, maybe you'll get there. It's just not quite there yet. And I think that's another thing, too. Illustrations, I'll put that. One of the paradoxes of drawings and illustrations is that, I don't know, maybe it's just me,

but I feel like everyone could tell if something is AI generated. There's just this feel. You could just feel it and you could see it right away. And it's kind of like with me and my simple ass drawings, you see that. And in a way, it's like, oh, that's not AI generated. That's just some guy drew that. And it's kind of like with AI, too. They say the hardest things are the most rudimentary for an AI to do.

All right. And I think the same thing with drawing or with storytelling. It's like to tell simple stories well, AI still has a hard time doing that. So I think now more than ever, it's important to lean into that skill, especially in an era where information is not only cheap, it's just, yeah, completely low effort. Yeah. Yeah, thanks. I'm just curious like your daily life. So like how much you're spending your time on like writing, editing, reading, or like drawing.

Also, how much time you spend, for example, exercise. So what's your daily life look like? Yeah, so I exercise every morning. I either swim or run. And it's not for my physical health, per se. I mean, of course, that contributes to it, but it's more for my mental health. There's something about exercising. It just dispels the fog. All right. So I do that in the morning. And then I have a four-year-old daughter.

So I take her to school. If I don't take her to school, I pick her up later. Or like I'm playing with her in the morning. So yeah, that's usually the mornings. And then when she's at school, then I'll spend about two hours, two to three hours writing. And based upon what project I'm doing, I'll be writing. And after that, then I'll have lunch. I don't know if this is interesting, but I'll have lunch. It's interesting.

Okay. I won't tell you, I put the stove on this degrees. I just eat. And then I, what is that? Yeah, then the rest of the day is more for my kind of free-flowing stuff. I'll either read or I'll do more admin stuff. If I have my course coming out, then I'll do things to help with the course. You know, one way you could think about it even is kind of like you have art and business, right? And there's like this kind of timeless tension between the two.

And I don't think there needs to be a tension. I think you could bake both of those things into your day. So if I were to like really simplify it, you could think of it as my mornings are spent with my art, my craft, just getting better at that. And then my afternoons is like, I'm just taking care of the business side of things. It requires a different hat a lot of the time, but that could even just come down to replying to emails, you know, like connecting with my clients or

doing stuff like that. So it's a nice little division knowing that the most important thing, which is to focus on my art, I was able to do in the morning. Thank you. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like how you spend time. And so, you know, since time is running out, so I want to ask you, because our audience are like aspiring founders, writers and newsletter writers.

And so do you have any, you already shared many advice and life lessons, but you know, do you have any other advice to those people? Yeah. Well, I guess I could only give some sort of advice to what I know, which is if you want to start a newsletter or if you want to, yeah, if you just want to, if you want to write, I think, I think first, just have the intention of what you're doing this for. All right. It's like, what is, what are you, why are you writing? And I think like,

of course the immediate thing is, okay, well, let's say I'm writing because I want to share my ideas and that's wonderful. If that's the case, the thing to consider is, okay, do you want your idea sharing thing to just be a personal form of expression or do you want to build a business doing this? Because those are two different things and there's different approaches. So if you want to build a business doing it, then, you know, you have to, you have to explore what it

means to do this for yourself, but to also provide value to others and like to kind of marry those two things, which is very difficult. So here's my advice in the beginning. If you want to write So here's my advice in the beginning. If you want to write, if you want to start, start some media entity or whatever, is to try to eliminate the money question in the beginning. So you can figure out whether this is something you really want to do.

There's a difference between thinking you want to do something and hitting the reality of doing it every single day. There's a huge difference between the two. And I think we get enamored by the thought of doing something. So when you're in that stage, you have to do it to figure out if this is something you intrinsically enjoy. And like I said, you have to take the external piece out of it. So the best way to do that is like have a job that has little to nothing to do with this.

In my case, I was in finance and building spreadsheets had nothing to do with drawing funny characters and writing philosophical reflections on the meaning of life, you know. But it worked out that way because it funded what I was doing. I referred to it as my patron and I was able to understand whether I wanted to do this or not. And the answer was yes. So if that condition is met, you know this is what you want to do,

then the next step is to continue doing it. Continue doing it and still try not to focus too much on the money part. But you can start to incorporate that into your workflow bit by bit. It's like, okay, what kind of product can I create that will help me make money that may be loosely tied to my writing? Do I want to do sponsorships? Do I want to do this, that? Start thinking about that a little bit.

But in a way where when you make a dollar, you're like, hell yeah! You know, instead of like, only a dollar, how am I going to pay for next month's rent? That's not what you want to think. You want that dollar to feel so damn good because you're like, wow, okay, this is possible to do this. But you can only think that way when you have something else that's giving you enough money for you to think that way. So have that in place so you can feel grateful for that.

And inevitably though, that dollar is not going to feel like that much. And then you're going to want to kind of continue building that up. So all this to say that I think, you know, the advice of taking a leap before you have all this stuff figured out, I think that's kind of dangerous advice, really. I think the smart thing to do is to figure it out. If you enjoy doing this, kind of slowly start embedding more of the business side into things to give you some confidence that this is something that you can make money from.

And then if it hits a certain point where the time that you're spending at your day job or whatever is starting to intrude upon the potential of this becoming a very viable business that could replace that or at least feel on par with what you were making, then the question is, all right, is it time to make that leap? And then if you make that leap, remember that this is not the kind of end-all be-all. It's not like, all right, this is it.

Everything's just going to go in perpetuity. You have to work hard at it, of course. But if you have to go back to what you were doing before, going back to finance or going back to engineering, whatever you were doing, that's awesome. I think sometimes people feel shame that they're like, oh, it didn't work out and I have to go back to this, whatever. There is absolutely no shame in that. I think the fact that you did it, the fact that you try to do it and you gave it what you can, you go back,

that's beautiful. I think the question then is, okay, do I want to still try building that up? That's an important thing to ask yourself too. I think there's a journey here where you want to balance those two realms so that this could be a source of meaning, but it could also be very practical for how you want to live your life. I think you need to have both. You can't just have one or the other, really.

That's my long-winded advice of being a practical writer or creator. Great advice. Thank you for that. This is the last question. Since Glasp is a platform where people live what they are learning, leading for other people, we see it as their digital legacy. We want to ask you this question, big question, but what legacy or impact do you want to leave behind for future generations? This is probably going to be an unsatisfying answer, but I think it's an allusion to think

about my legacy. I really do. I don't have any delusions that within, I don't know, generation, or hopefully the next generation remembers me because my daughter does, but a couple of generations after that, I don't have any hopes for that. I think what really matters to me is what I can do with this life that I've been gifted, that we've all been gifted. I think that's what propels me to create. We're really here for a blink of an eye.

I look at my daughter and she's just evidence of just how fast time moves. When that hits me, I'm just like, there's so much that I've lived, so much that I've read, so much that I've discussed that I want to get out. I want to get out into the world. How do I do that sustainably? How do I do that for as long as possible? That's all I really care about in the context of creating and my work. What happens after that, I really don't care.

I don't care, nor do I think it really matters. I think all this to say that The I don't think the the promise of a legacy should influence what you do in the present moment. I think this is really all you ever have and that becomes much more salient when you have loved ones that you got to care for and all that stuff too. So you really want to take that into consideration. Yeah, yeah, beautiful. Yeah, save the day, save the moment and be in person.

And yeah, very great. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. So yeah, thank you for taking time today. Yeah, yeah, we really learned a lot of things. And I was always curious what the illustration part and your writing process and so on. And yeah, thank you for sharing everything today. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's like, it's nice talking to you guys. You guys, that's really thoughtful questions.

And yeah, hopefully one day I could make it out to Japan and hang out. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Thank you.

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From Finance to Storytelling: How to Craft Meaningful Narratives by Lawrence Yeo

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