This issue features writer Chris Jones. He is not based in Asia but when a book publicist reaches out to your fledgling newsletter offering an interview with a writer you’ve been reading for years, you say yes. Chris talks about getting lucky early in his career, earning it retroactively, and the transition to screenwriting.

We also talk about his new book The Eye Test, about valuing creative expertise — that combination of raw talent honed through years of study and effort — alongside the data and analytics so dominant in today’s decision-making.

The book features artists, craftsmen, scientists, athletes, and other pros at the top of their game, and is inspired by his son Charley, who has autism and has worked out how to read by memorizing the shape of words.

Highlights from our conversation are below, and you can listen to the full podcast episode here👇🏼

I am rejigging Foolish Careers while I balance it with a full-time job. You’ll hear more about that later this year. Meanwhile, tell me what you think or just say hi. My email is timi@foolishcareers.asia or just hit reply.

Much as journalist Chris Jones would have preferred to play out his entire career as an award-winning magazine writer, the world he knew at Esquire no longer existed. 

He had talked his way into the magazine as a young reporter. The story involves a saintly janitor, donuts, and the naïveté of youth:

Fourteen years of world-class storytelling, two National Magazine Awards, and a stream of how-did-I-get-into-this situations ensue.

Walking around Comic-Con with Justin Timberlake, disguised as Ernie (Justin) and Bert (Chris):

Interviewing George Clooney the morning after emergency gall bladder surgery:

Inviting strangers to join him on assignment for three days of drinking at the best bar in America:

Amid a regime change at the publication, the entire writing staff was fired. The same year, Chris also got divorced. So at 43, he had to figure out how to parlay his writer skills into viable work. 

Luckily, the last feature story he filed for Esquire, Home, about astronauts who spent a year in space, was optioned by Hollywood for $30,000 a year. Chris got paid another $750,000 when the show got the green light, another stroke of luck in an industry known for scripts languishing, unmade. (The show is now the drama series Away, starring Hilary Swank, on Netflix.) And luckiest of all, Chris got a job in the writers’ room, which kicked off his screenwriting career.

So it isn’t an exaggeration to say that during that annus horribilis, Chris’ body of work saved him financially and emotionally. He says:

“There were delicious snacks. I liked everyone who worked in the room. I enjoyed how not lonely it was. I'd just been divorced and it was like medicine going to this hopeful place to work.” 

Here are highlights from our conversation:

There must’ve been something in you that made you walk into the Esquire building. 

Idiocy. I would never do that now.

Do you think people can replicate that now? 

Hearst, the parent company, built this massive skyscraper in New York. Esquire's on the 21st floor. You would never get in. It was only because Esquire was in this little building that you could walk right in. 

I still think you get jobs in creative fields by meeting the right people. And I think if you ask most successful creative people if there was a point in their life when someone just took a weird chance on you, they would almost all have a story about someone who just said, “I don't know why, but I'm going to give you a shot.”

Writers will talk about someone's luck and it would bother me because it diminishes the work you did. Now that I'm older, I recognize how lucky I got. I feel like I earned it retroactively. 

Were you aware that you had to earn it retroactively? 

Yeah. The thing about working at a place like Esquire, you're surrounded by really talented people. I was probably 28 [when I started], and Esquire had this very established core of great writers: Tom Juneau and Charlie Pierce and Tom Chiarella. Mike Sager. Scott Rabb. I loved reading them, but there's a weird intimidation that happens when your stories show up next to their stories. You realize you have to really pick up your game because you can be embarrassed by the comparison. 

Do you remember the first story where you felt, ‘I'm earning this’? 

Yes. and I felt that way because my editor told me that. I wrote the sports column for a while, and then I got to write my first not-sports feature. It was a story about three astronauts who were on the international space station when Columbia, the space shuttle, exploded. 

It's also the same one that won you a National Magazine Award. 

Yes. So that's how I knew I got there. In the magazine business that's like the equivalent of a Pulitzer. The next day I went into the office and [editor in chief] David Granger made me a writer-at-large. That meant you were a staff writer who could write about anything. It was like being knighted. 

What do you like, and not like, about screenwriting? 

Well, the money is great. It's a lot less lonely than magazine writing because you write as a group of people. You literally sit in a room together with bulletin boards and index cards. It looks like a serial killer lives in that room.  

And it's just scene, scene, scene, scene, and you're moving them around. And eventually what you end up with is a season of television mapped out with index cards, and then you go and write an episode that's “yours.” And then other people will work on those shows, you'll work on other people's shows. 

What I don't like about it is that a lot of writing happens that never becomes anything. And for someone who grew up in magazines, if we got assigned a story, we wrote the story and it showed up in a magazine, there was never work that happened for no reason.

Whereas, I've worked steadily as a screenwriter now for five years. I've had that one show come out. Nothing else I've written has come out. I'm getting paid, but it doesn't show. I have friends who are screenwriters, who've worked their whole careers and made good livings and never had a single thing come out. That, as a business model, seems very wasteful.

The book cover is a tribute to your son Charley. 

It is. 

Can you share a bit about Charley and how he reads?

Oh, It's my favorite part of the book. Charley is my oldest son. He's about to turn 16, which is crazy to me. Charley has autism. He can talk, he's very loving, he hugs, but he has some profound disabilities. He doesn't understand numbers. Charley will never understand that 1985 happened before 1994. And he has this amazing memory, but he doesn't have the motor skills to write. 

One of the things that always confused me about Charley was he always read. He could read when he was two and everywhere he goes, he carries a giant bag of books. The idea of Charley not having something to read is his nightmare. So this bag of books goes everywhere he goes, and I couldn't understand how he read when he couldn't spell or write. 

I learned to read with phonics, you sound out the syllables. Charley never did that, but he would ask what words were. And so we were constantly saying: That is car. That is dolphin.

And what we realized through his therapy is that he just memorized words. He memorized the shapes of words the way you remember faces. The shape of the word is somehow stamped in his mind because he has this incredible memory. 

If I asked you to picture a friend of yours, you could. But you probably couldn't draw a perfect portrait. Charley recognizes that word as a friend, but can't replicate that outside of the reading experience. Charley is just as good at reading as someone who learned through phonics, it's just different. 

I spent a lot of my life being a very black-and-white thinker about the right way to do things. Being Charley's dad has taught me that's not true, that the world is much more complicated than that. And those different perspectives and different techniques are really useful. They open doors that would otherwise be closed. 

In the book, you talked about Penn & Teller and their magic trick Shadows as an example of what you call embodied analysis. Teller the magician told you: 

Sometimes magic is somebody just spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect. 

Best quote I've ever gotten. We were sitting in his kitchen. I remember it was like I had found the fountain of youth or something.

What Teller was trying to say is: what we perceive to be raw talent — where we use the expression “overnight success” like someone got struck by lightning — actually someone has worked really hard at something for a really long time, more than you would ever imagine. And then you go, oh, that's magic. Meanwhile, the person who's doing it is: No, I spent six years perfecting this thing. 

As a professional writer, what's your own embodied analysis? 

You're asking me to be egotistical? 

Uh-huh.

I can pretty quickly figure out where someone's coming from. Can I trust them or their motivations? One of the great gifts of being a journalist is you get to ask the questions and then you sit back and listen. And if you're a good listener, you learn a lot about people and how the world works. I think I'm a good listener. And now it's pretty quick. I can meet a stranger in a bar and I can pretty quickly figure out what's going on about them. 

Are you still in touch with Joe from Missouri?

Yes, we emailed just yesterday.

Chris Jones is @enswelljones on Twitter. Get his new book The Eye Test wherever good books are sold.

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INTERVIEW: How losing at Webbys launched storytelling careers

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Temujin is a limited-series audio drama about the life of Genghis Khan. It has a fan base in the audio drama world and was a finalist at this year's Webby Awards in the Podcasts - Scripted Fiction category, where it competed against The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and entries from HBO, the BBC, and Wondery.

Spoiler alert: Temujin lost to Trevor Noah. But it was comfortably in second place with 34% of the 2 million votes cast. (The Daily Show with Trevor Noah got 40% of the votes. Third place got 10%.)

It has opened doors for the show’s producers. Writer and director Roshan Singh was brought on as a writer on the animated adaptation of the beloved graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan. He and fellow Temujin producer Isabel Perucho have set up Andas Productions to create narrative stories for audio and video games. 

But back in university (they graduated from Yale-NUS three years ago, although it feels like a lifetime in the past), Temujin was a capstone project Roshan worked on with his classmates.

Most thesis projects simply get printed and sent to the archives. He wanted to put it out into the world, despite little encouragement from mentors. 

“One thing a mentor of mine said was that Temujin was just a silly little side project I was doing with my friends and that I would have to grow up soon and figure out what my actual career is going to look like.”

He first pursued it as a play, but there was no interest. So Roshan considered audio. “The beauty of audio is if you have the resources, nobody can tell you not to do it.” With Isabel running marketing, they raised $10,000 on Kickstarter to fund the production. “We decided to push ahead because we had this faith that if it meant something to us, then it'll mean something to someone else.”

In this interview, Roshan and Isabel reflect on the experience of finding a listener base for Temujin and how they're navigating the industry as young producers. 

Listen to Roshan and Isabel tell their story on the podcast.

Here are excerpts from our conversation.

Finding Temujin’s first listeners:

It’s been months and they’re still talking about us?

Isabel: One of the most important things we did was post on Reddit. r/audiodrama. Passionate community. That's where most of the following really started. 

We had always had Twitter. Didn't know what to do with it. Revisited it after a few months and realized people were tagging us and we didn't even know it. And we were like, “It's been months and they're still talking about us?” The community is here. Let's engage. 

Roshan: When we talk about marketing and target audience, we've given up on the idea of targeting our shows by geography -- we want to reach the Americans, or we want this one to hit with the locals -- because it's so much, pardon my language, a crapshoot.

And there's that well-known miserable truth that to make it big here, you have to make it big there. And it is true, right? It took Webby recognition to get Singapore recognition. Southeast Asian recognition is almost the last thing, you have to come home with an Oscar. 

Isabel: The real lesson we learned is that we had conventional ways of thinking about how this was going to grow — you start at home and then you go outside. When we can so easily connect with people who are so far away, why start close when you can start as far as the ocean will take you? We don’t even need the ocean, we just need wifi. It really changed for us what the idea of success could be. 

Creating original work in Southeast Asia for a global audience:

It’s nice to know there isn’t one correct answer. Everyone’s just in this giant mosh pit trying to figure out what works.

Roshan: Temujin is a show that we mixed and edited in a college dormitory. We rehearsed it in classrooms. Why shouldn't it have the kind of reach and success that anything made in America can? There is no good reason why it can't.

And I think... I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this. I'm a TV screenwriter as well. With TV, I've noticed there's a sense of defeatism in the other local screenwriters that I've talked to. Not an unwarranted defeatism, mind you. But there's a kind of wariness. 

I was at a talk surrounded by other screenwriters. One person started yelling at the guest speaker, "What's the point when everything's so neo-colonial?" 

Then someone else in the front row turned around to that guy and went, “You just have a bad attitude, man.” And it was just chaos. 

It was nice knowing there wasn't really a correct answer. Everyone's just in this giant mosh pit trying to figure out what works. The best thing we could do is have a positive attitude.

On promoting your own work:

You must make senpai notice you. 

Isabel: What's valuable about the peaks and valleys [of our listener growth]? We were always putting ourselves out there. We were always continuously engaging with the community. 

And we had faith that we had crafted something good. Part of the success was having that confidence. So when you shuffle it around to different awards or tell different people to listen, it's because you've done something that you can put your stamp on.

As creators growing up, we were told that if you put good work out there, the audience will come. But there is also twiddling your thumbs and being, “When will senpai* notice me?” And you must make senpai notice you because there are so many things to look at. 

*senpai: A Japanese honorific used when someone is older than you in age or they have more experience in a field. The opposite being kouhai. It is usually a trope in anime or manga for a kouhai to desperately seek their senpai's attention but fail. (source: Urban Dictionary)

Submitting to the Webbys:

We applied for Diversity and Inclusion because we thought that we wouldn't stand a chance in Scripted Podcast Fiction.

Roshan: For the Webbys you have to submit your show. We didn't apply for Scripted Fiction originally. We applied for Diversity and Inclusion because we thought we wouldn't stand a chance in Best Scripted Fiction. 

Isabel: It was 10 PM. Roshan checks his phone and says, “Hey, we got the Webbys!” And we looked at it and noticed Trevor Noah's face next to our cover art.

And it's just the mother of all screenshots. The moment of realization that we were being seen by people that we had admired growing up. I can't begin to describe the short-circuiting in my brain. Wow, we have to make this moment count. We have an opportunity for all eyes to be on us and get this story to an even bigger audience. We couldn't pass on the chance.

The Webbys campaign:

We wrote to everyone [in the Singapore press]. Most of the time they didn't write back. There were some who specifically told us nobody cares.

Isabel: The voting period was two weeks, so it was very compressed. One of the first things that we wanted to do was reach out to the press because this indie Asian story from this corner of the world was being recognized among studio giants, like HBO, Comedy Central, BBC, and Broadway.

Roshan: More than just supporting us, we wanted to make the statement that if we made this in our university dorm in Singapore and it's being recognized on the American stage, then imagine what else?

Unfortunately, this is another semi-negative bent to the story. We got told flat out by a lot of Singaporean news sources that they're just not interested in covering it.

We wrote to everyone. Most of the time they didn't write back. There were some who specifically told us nobody cares. That was a bit disappointing. Only Mothership featured us. 

There was still an outpouring of support in Singapore. It just wasn't coming from the press. It was coming from TikTok influencers, it was coming from the podcast folks. It came from Reddit.

Isabel:  The sheer thought of tens and thousands of people voting for us is wild. We got in touch with the community that we had built, and the support was so forthcoming.

Roshan: Oh, I'm really proud of one thing. Dirk Maggs, my personal idol, I grew up listening to his audio shows. He did Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the BBC, American Gods, Neverwhere, Good Omens… Dirk tweeted about us and made a Facebook post. 

We started talking on Facebook and he was so supportive. He made a whole push for us and introduced so many people to our show.

To have him listen to our show and enjoy it and then make two different posts while working on Sandman season two. What an honor, right? Who needs a Webby? 

How to behave in meetings:

The vice president of Marvel content creation told me to chill out.

Roshan: The vice president of Marvel content creation told me to chill out. [laughter] He told me that I can't afford to be so visibly nervous the next time I talk to someone like him.

It was really kind. Because I came up with this huge list, I wrote down what I wanted to say. This is amazing! I’m so glad to meet you! And he said, “Okay, first: chill out, calm down.” And that note helped a lot. 

How else do you learn this stuff other than by being in a position Isabel and I are fortunate to be in? Meeting people we never thought we would meet and doing things that we never thought we would do.

Starting up a production company:

It’s 10 different things where it could pay the bills, or it could not materialize.

Roshan: Once we've gotten over the fact that we're speaking to [industry executives] at this level, what we have to do next is: What do we offer? What can we do? What do we in high-pressure business meetings present ourselves as? Let's consolidate all this ethereal positivity and good vibes and positive work environment into something which is sustainable so that we're not just, “Hi, we're Isabel and Roshan.” It's “Hi, we're Andas.”

Isabel: Our strategy is producing good stories that people enjoy experiencing. We're trying to make sure our next thing isn't a sophomore slump. The second thing is the moment that people either say, “they just got lucky” or “they know what they're doing.” 

Roshan: Capital's hard. We're in this tricky stage where Isabel and I are trying to translate that goodwill and the critical recognition into finances. We'll get a lead one day, someone who's interested in seed funding, for instance. And then for four months, we don't hear anything. And we're like, ah, did we lose that? 

And it’s 10 different things where it could pay the bills, or it could not materialize. If even a single one did that would change the game for us. 

Every day we have exciting news, but that exciting news always stops just shy of, here's 50K seed. 

Post-Webbys reflection:

Your career lives and dies in these moments of learning how to politely start difficult conversations.

Isabel: I sometimes forget that I'm 25, Roshan's 26. I always go to this interview that Taika Waititi did. He started directing at age 33 and he said that people always told him to take a break. And he said ‘I'd been taking a break for 33 years.’ I feel like I'd been taking a break for 25 and I'm not gonna wait. But even though we have that mentality, there's room to refine and polish so that what comes next is something we're proud of.

Roshan: For the first day [after the Webbys loss], I felt this migraine headache thinking of all that support. We're going to have to log on to Twitter and Facebook and tell everyone it didn't work out. 

I always knew that this was the likely outcome, but I just felt so guilty because we were pushing this narrative. We wanted to make this thing about hope. If we can do this, then maybe any of us can do this. Does [losing] mean that hope doesn't exist? 

And I snapped out of it by reminding myself, I'm 26. I idolize people much older than ourselves who have never won a Webby or been recognized at award shows. I don't care if they won these things. 

In the past two weeks, I've been negotiating for a bunch of shows. I've been learning how to send chaser emails for writing payment or contractual negotiation. This is the thing, right? Your career lives and dies in these tiny little moments of learning how to politely start difficult conversations. It's not about whether you can write a pretty piece of dialogue because so many people can. And that helped me take it way less seriously.

Isabel: What I tell people all the time is that, no matter what, our name is on the website forever, because you can't take back anything on the internet.

Yes, of course, we would have loved to win. But when we submitted, we just wanted to be nominated.

We got here through being told no. And then saying no back. We're going to do it anyway.

Andas Productions is @andasmedia on Twitter. Roshan is on LinkedIn here and Isabel is on LinkedIn here. Listen to Temujin: An Audio Drama wherever you listen to podcasts.

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INTERVIEW: The patient ways of chocolate

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Paniti and Nuttaya Junhasavasdikul had stars in their eyes. They had just spent two weeks in Hawaii with Nat Bletter, a pioneer in the bean-to-bar chocolate movement, and at the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute in San Francisco with chocolate scholar Carla Martin. From Dr Bletter they learned how to produce and package bean-to-bar chocolate, and from Dr Martin how to grade cacao, the better to evaluate the beans they were buying directly from farmers. 

Their idea of having one’s own brand of chocolate…seemed…possible. 

They had already planted 400 cacao seedlings on a plot of land in Mae Tang, in Chiang Mai province. Which they found while on a motorbike trip around Thailand. Which they had done to slow their lives down after two decades working as lawyers clocking billable hours. 

“Those hours, we only spend them and we don't get anything back,” Paniti says. “Lawyers have a good life. We get paid well, we reward ourselves with cars and watches. But finally, we felt that this wasn’t for us. So we tried to enrich ourselves with more experiences than objects.” 

The plan was to build a retirement farmhouse, eventually. But in Thailand, unused land is taxed heavily, so a farmer suggested they plant cacao. “We can grow cacao in Thailand!” Nuttaya thought. “This is interesting.”

Following their curiosity, they crisscrossed the country on their own cacao learning tour, then Nuttaya taught herself how to make chocolate. The texture of these early batches wasn’t great, but they discovered that cacao from different provinces presented unique flavor profiles. 

Cacao from Chumphon, on the Gulf of Thailand’s western coast, has “notes of ripe grapes and red berries.” Just 200 kilometers north, Prachuap Khiri Khan, which grows pineapples and coconuts, is “bright and citrusy, with a smooth floral aftertaste.” Beans from Chantaburi, in the east, hint of “passion fruit, mango, and a honey-lemon creamy body.” 

“And that was it, the idea ran wild,” Paniti laughs. 

Kad Kokoa, their brand, celebrates Thai culture through chocolate. Now three years old, Nuttaya and Paniti have self-funded it to where it is today: a retail space, a cafe, a lab, a talented team, relationships with farmers, awards, the support of top chefs, an outpost in Tokyo, and a growing base of regular customers. 

Paniti used to think this was the time to scale. They met with many investors and almost closed some deals. The typical response was: “We like your brand very much, but you need to move a needle. If one day you make half a billion [baht], talk to us then.” On reflection, this type of investment was not for them. “We cannot take money then suddenly we are running like a rat trying to deliver investor returns from chocolate.” 

So until they find their “investor soulmate,” as Nuttaya describes it, someone who has patient capital and is investing for impact, they’ll continue to bootstrap. 

In this interview, Nuttaya and Paniti share what they’ve learned about patiently building a product, a brand, and a creative life from scratch.

Find a teacher who can impart super-specific know-how.

“Our knowledge about the chocolate business was zero,” explains Nuttaya, “so I decided to write to Nat Bletter of Madre Cacao in Hawaii. There were months and months of silence, but finally, he said we could come.” 

There’s a proliferation of online learning platforms today where one can go from “noob” to “informed” through self-paced online video -- or at least share a certificate that claims it. 

But to go from hobbyist to craftsman, from amateur to pro, requires customized learning. It requires one-on-one instruction. It requires context. It requires walking around a cacao plantation on Oahu with a pioneer of bean-to-bar chocolate.

“Nat taught us how to prune, how to pick the cacao pods, how to ferment. Even how to wrap the chocolate bars. He showed us where to place a sleeve or a sticker, what information you need on your packaging. We can say that we learned from a guru.”

Bake your mission into the brand.

“Kad” is the word for “market” in the Northern Thai dialect. It’s a nod to the place where their idea took seed and reflects their mission: to become the gathering point for lovers of Thai cacao and the ecosystem it supports. 

“That's a key part of our brand-building. We don't want to compete with anyone in terms of who makes the best chocolate? Are we more expensive? Why we are not as sweet? Let's look at the impact we make, how we help the community as a whole.”

At the core is the commitment they’ve kept with farmer collectives from whom they’ve consistently bought cacao for three years non-stop. 

kadkokoa_chocolate

A post shared by Kad Kokoa Official (@kadkokoa_chocolate)

“Right now, the hardest part is managing cash flow. Business has been slower because of COVID, but the beans are not affected by COVID. They’re even thriving more. So our job is to make sure we make good quality chocolate that customers like, and sell it as soon as we can because the next batch of cacao will come again very soon from the farm. We cannot stop buying from them. Otherwise, we will break the chain.”

Ask yourself if your product can attract top talent and advocates.

“We don't believe in the concept that the founder does everything,” says Paniti. “I think you should try to work with someone who's better than you. We know our weak point: we are not pastry chefs. So we need to make up for the lack of domain experience.”

To do this, Kad Kokoa had to be good enough to attract top F&B talent. So Nuttaya left her legal work and, with a small team, focused on developing the product and the brand. 

To highlight the flavors, they make their chocolate with only two ingredients: cacao and organic cane sugar. “Chefs know we are using the best cacao we can source and we don't add anything else. We let the chocolate speak for itself.”

Soon after their launch in 2018, they won awards and had the support of one of Bangkok’s top pastry chefs, Laurent Ganguillet, who added Kad Kokoa to his long-running, show-stopping chocolate buffet at the Sukhothai Hotel. 

Chocolate became their tool to build a brand imbued with Thai-ness. Their packaging reflects Thai craft, with the new season inspired by textile weaving patterns from each region. The café itself is a rice barn from their farm in Chiang Mai. “We needed to save costs when building the cafe, and since we weren’t spending time in Chiang Mai, we disassembled the barn, moved the wood to Bangkok, and rebuilt it. It looks like a friend’s house. It's not uptight, it's relaxed and casual.”

Kad Kokoa’s pastry chefs and chocolatiers gravitated to them from the city’s top hotels. Thailand’s Bocuse d’Or team is using their chocolate for the cooking competition in Lyon, France. They are partnered with the Tourism Authority of Thailand to promote community tourism. Their Japan partnership started in the same way: Yumi Sawahira, an industry veteran, visited the cafe every day for a week, then proposed the idea of setting up shop in Tokyo. 

“While we make chocolate, we sell more than chocolate,” Paniti explains. “We look at how the brand can represent Thailand, from any angle.” 

Recognize and nurture your real customers

While industry pros were quickly won over by the high-quality product, educating consumers has been a different matter altogether.

Kad Kokoa, from the product to the packaging to the space, is Instagram-ready. This ensured opening-day crowds. But four months in, the scene had changed. Those early visitors were cafe-hoppers who needed social media fuel, showing up once then moving on. It was an eye-opener.

“Don't get complacent when you open something and the first three months you are so busy,” says Paniti. “You think that's going to be your forever model. No. Month four, month six, you will feel ... hey, where are they? The posts about you are down in Instagram...deep down.”

This launch phase was a test of patience for Nuttaya. “The cafe-hoppers didn't understand bean-to-bar chocolate that well, so they just complained, in good ways and bad. And we were disappointed because we thought we could please them. But we decided not to change the taste of our chocolate. We stuck with our philosophy and chose to educate our customers more.” 

“We are 50,” Paniti adds, “and a lot of the time we had to please young customers at a cafe. That was hard for us!” 

So they sifted through their customers and found their real fans. For Kad Kokoa these are people who like craft food and health-conscious consumers. “They will come every week to fill up their stock of chocolate. Then this is the key: let them speak for themselves. If they like our chocolate, they will refer their friends. This way takes time, but it lasts longer.” 

Even with a growing fan base, customer education is a never-ending job. Kad Kokoa’s fruity flavor is unique, so every Saturday, Nuttaya and her team host chocolate tasting workshops. “Instead of one-on-one, we can do eight to ten guests, but that's it. So it will take time for the scale to tip.” 

Entrepreneurship is a lifestyle. Design your life accordingly.

In this partnership, Nuttaya takes the lead on the brand and the product. With characteristic humility, Paniti says, “My job is not much. It’s designing our lifestyle, making sure we can still cover the downside, and most of all, managing our time.” 

His job is not “not much.” It’s the key to their ability to build patiently. His experience as a lawyer working in private equity and venture capital is a unique advantage for Kad Kokoa because he has knowledge of all the ways startups can fail. This informs how they design their business.

“We don't want to put all our eggs in one basket. When we decided to do this, we had to separate our roles. Nuttaya was focused on her chocolate-making skills and thinking about the brand concept, and I support her. So I still work on some legal advisory cases to pay the bills.”

It’s also why they decided early on to build a team, and why stock options are part of employee compensation. “When we started, our brand was nothing. Chefs came to try the gig for a while, and if it didn’t match their passion, they moved on. But the current team has been with us for two years. They prove themselves, and we put the money where our mouth is. This way, instead of going out and opening another brand, they feel that Kad Kokoa is theirs.”

And the search for their investor soulmate? “Financial investors want a return. They will look at discounted cash flow. A business like ours is more about brand equity than cash flow. So you will keep arguing with investors about the valuation forever. We meet a lot of investors all the time. They like to own this beautiful brand, but we haven't struck good chemistry with anyone just yet.”

Because Kad Kokoa is generating revenue, they can focus on building brand value for the next few years. “Right now it's the happiest time. We keep our face down and keep grinding. I think building brand value is still important for us. And we still believe that one day we are going to meet our soulmate.”

Kad Kokoa has an online store at kadkokoa.co and @kadkokoa_chocolate on Instagram. Their cafe is located at Naratiwas 17, Sathorn, Bangkok 10120 Thailand.

For people who want to apply a startup mindset to their small business, Paniti recommends the book The Fail-Safe Startup by Tom Eisenmann.

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More interviews:

• Anonymous founder Felix Ng on when to scale, and when to stay small

• NFT artist Amrit Pal Singh has a non-fungible community

• Creating a Netflix-worthy comic book on top of a demanding day job

• Giving up rock-and-roll journalism to recalibrate a writing career

Up next:

• The producers of audio drama Temujin, a retelling of the life of Genghis Khan, on becoming a finalist at the Webby Awards and what comes next

Foolish Careers grows through word-of-mouth. Please tell a friend or collaborator who might find this useful. Or share it on the social media channel that least annoys you these days.

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Some of you have commented on the newsletter’s thumbnails and colors. Credit goes to Marla Darwin and Kitty Jardenil. Marla is a Foolish reader who runs NS Design, a branding studio in Manila. Kitty is a designer specializing in illustration and letterforms — she interned at NS Design and just graduated from university. Check out her portfolio here.

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INTERVIEW: Amrit Pal Singh has a non-fungible community

There are several embedded videos in this story so you may want to read this in your browser.

While leading product design at a fintech company, Amrit started a side hustle selling 3D design assets on Envato, a site where designers can download millions of creative assets. He charged $5-$30 for phone icons. 

Design assets are ready-to-use visual elements like icons and templates, similar to stock photos. Designers buy them to speed up the mockup process. 

In an interview for the Envato community, Amrit says:

“Initially, I uploaded 2 or 3 products just to see if it was something for me. I noticed a certain amount of money consistently coming in every month and that really got my attention. I started making products weekly and researched the categories I could contribute to. I had a full-time job, but I still made time because the idea of getting paid passively for my creations was fascinating. I eventually found my niche of making device mockups using my 3D skills, and that enabled me to upload 4 to 5 items monthly.” 

In 2019, as Amrit tired of the startup ecosystem, having this separate income from mockup sales gave him the confidence to leave his job and pursue making assets full-time. 

He founded his studio Mr Bumbles to offer his unique mix of 3D illustration and a design approach infused with wonder, playfulness and diversity. They launched books and card games, and worked with brands like Pinterest, Netflix and Adobe. Snapchat commissioned Amrit to create filters for its users in India. He designed a vibrant filter inspired by Rajasthani turbans that was used by over a million users.

To fulfill his own desire for diverse user interface assets, Amrit created the Toy Faces Library in June 2020. The idea was to have more choices when creating mockups that needed profile photos.

“Representation was the number one factor behind Toy Faces. Over the years, illustrations and character design have established wrong standards of beauty and importance. Most people have been left underrepresented in this medium. The majority of avatar projects treat diversity as an afterthought and they have a standard template to seem inclusive. With Toy Faces, I made sure I represent as much as possible. I hope anyone looking at the library can find themselves in it.”

Amrit thought the Toy Faces Avatar Library might attract 100 buyers. He offered 60 faces for $10. If a designer wanted to embed it in an app, they could pay an extended license fee of $50.

Since going independent, Amrit had been steadily connecting with like-minded people on social media. He started an Instagram account in 2018 (late by design world standards) and became active on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

So by the time Toy Faces launched, Amrit was embedded in a supportive community. He launched on Product Hunt, where Hunters started voting the product up. And to encourage more word of mouth, Amrit offered to make custom Toy Faces, charging $50 a pop. He received 200 orders in 24 hours. It was official: Toy Faces had a fan base. 

“Cultivating a professional community around my work has been the major reason for Toy Faces’ success,” Amrit says. “Having a community that cheers for you and invests in your work is a blessing. Platforms like Product Hunt, Twitter, and LinkedIn have helped me quite a bit. Focusing on building a community vs followers has made me fond of marketing and promoting my work. To anyone struggling with that aspect, I would suggest focusing on building one-on-one relationships and a genuine interest in one another.”

Amrit spent the pandemic in a highly productive state. He grew Toy Faces to a 120-avatar library with 7,000 customers and completed the 2000th custom Toy Face at the end of March 2021. “It's a lot of work but I kept going because it was a great way to market the product.” 

Through Twitter, he started getting suggestions that Toy Faces would make a good NFT — there was a collectible vibe to it.

Wait, what’s an NFT?

NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. An NFT is a unique digital asset that uses blockchain technology to establish a verified and public proof of ownership. 

NFTs can be used to represent easily-reproducible items such as photos, videos, audio, and digital illustrations  — like a Toy Face — as unique items.

NFTs make it possible to trade digital art because now the art is unique and traceable. There are several platforms that let an artist generate (or “mint”) NFTs, tie them to a digital file, and put them up for auction.

The artist can also enable a feature that will pay them a percentage each time the NFT changes hands.

Collectors who participate in auctions pay with the cryptocurrency Ether (currency symbol: ETH). 

At the time of this writing, 1 ETH converts to US$4,227.

Amrit started with a Frida Kahlo Toy Face on the NFT platform Zora. Frida was minted and put up for auction on February 17 for 0.2ETH. The auction closed on 22 February at 3.9ETH.

amritpaldesign

A post shared by Amrit Pal Singh (@amritpaldesign)

He followed this with a Van Gogh Toy Face on the platform Foundation three days later. It was minted on February 21 and listed for 0.80ETH. The auction closed 24 hours later at 3.70ETH.

Then three days after that, Daft Punk announced their split, and Amrit hopped on the bandwagon with a pair of Daft Punk Toy Faces. "Cheers to the duo that defined electronic music,” he tweeted. “Maybe you can reunite them as NFTs." A fan bought the pair for 15ETH.

In two weeks, he had earned 22.6ETH.

Amrit launched multiple auctions every month on Foundation and OpenSea. He created tributes to characters like Sherlock and Tin Man, ran a fundraiser for oxygen in India, celebrated Malala and a quartet of female astronauts, and my personal favorite, Hayao Miyazaki animated with No Face from Spirited Away. 

Since that first drop 9 months ago, Amrit has earned 210ETH from 42 artworks. (Convert ETH to USD here.)

For now, Amrit has paused all other work to focus his efforts on creating “non-fungible toys.” He’s expanded his portfolio of toy-themed art with Toy Rooms, another pandemic project, this one inspired by rooms in art, literature and cinema, and is working on commissions and collaborations.

He says there are many good reasons artists can consider going into NFTs:

“Money, community, recognition for your work, and witnessing the future of art in the making. But making a quick buck is a wrong strategy. It most probably won't work. Get in the game for the long run, there is a lot happening. Once you are here with that mindset you are more patient and you can see there is meaning to the chaos. Be genuine and be excited about the space.”

A creator getting into NFTs will need digital art, some ETH for network transaction fees (called “gas”), and an account on an NFT auction platform. But before all that, they need a community that believes in their work. 

“Don’t rush into making an NFT,” Amrit writes on his blog. “Take some time to understand the market. Engage with people on Twitter. If you have no community or followers it is extremely hard to sell. Think of ways you can be an active member of the community and then when you feel ready, mint your artwork. NFT has been here for years and it’s not going anywhere. Don’t rush just because you feel it’s a bubble and you want to cash out before it bursts. A lot of my first bidders were my clients or people I knew.”

In this same spirit of community, he is working on an NFT guide for new artists, which will live on his website for free. 

Amrit on social media, productivity and growth: 

On social media: It's all about the community. Support like you want to be supported. Be genuinely interested in people and what they are building. In return, someone will do the same with you. Be consistent and true to yourself. Pick things you are comfortable with. I feel going out of your comfort zone for everything is overrated. I use mediums that I am comfortable with, that keeps me consistent. For example, I am not into making videos and I don't bother with it. I post the type of content I like and content that I can be consistent with because I enjoy it. I feel you need to find community-building habits that you like.

On productivity: It's as important to say NO as to say yes. I don't do it all. I just focus on things that I want to do and the rest of the things I don't even attempt. I try to keep my to-do’s to a minimum. I think about all opportunities in detail before committing to them no matter how big they are. Mental well-being is very important to me so that is always my focus. That said, I do take out a lot of time for experimentation and play before committing to something.

On growth: When I first started as a designer I thought there were two ways to grow. One way was to grow at a company starting as a junior designer to Head of Design. The second was to start a design firm, expand my team and clients, and grow in that way. In 2019 I read a book called Company of One by Paul Jarvis. The book changed my idea of growth. I could see how I can take a different route that is not measured by the team size. In fact, it's measured by the type of projects and the freedom I gain from being a solo business owner. There is no one right way to grow. Growth is subjective and everyone needs to find their own measurement unit.

Amrit’s work is on his website. He can be reached on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. His NFTs are on Foundation and Opensea.

NFT Explainers: If you want to dive into NFT technology or learn why ether is its cryptocurrency of choice, the explainers I’ve found most useful are NFTs, Explained by The Verge, Kara Swisher’s interview with the artist Beeple, Patrick Rivera’s Crypto fundamentals and NFTs slide presentation, and this interview with Opensea founder David Finzer at the a16z NFT Virtual Summit.

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More interviews:

• Anonymous founder Felix Ng on when to scale, and when to stay small

• Creating a Netflix-worthy comic book on top of a demanding day job

• Giving up rock-and-roll journalism to recalibrate a writing career

Up next:

• The founders of Kad Kokoa, a food startup in Thailand building a brand around single-origin chocolate 

• The producers of audio drama Temujin on becoming a Webby Awards finalist and what comes next

Foolish Careers grows through word-of-mouth. Please share this with a friend or collaborator who might find this useful.

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I am so glad to share our next Foolish interview with you today. It’s with Felix Ng, cofounder of the creative lab Anonymous, who generously gave two hours of his time and openly shared the challenges — and opportunities — of a small studio.

As always, just hit reply if you want to reach me. Please share Foolish Careers with a friend or collaborator who might find this useful, or on the social network that least annoys you right now.

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INTERVIEW: How Anonymous decided when to scale, and when to stay small

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As fledgling graphic designers, Felix and his co-founder Germaine were held at arm's length by clients. While developing a brand identity for a restaurant, they never had a chance to taste the food. Another client claimed to do guerilla marketing but actually did above-the-line advertising, and when Felix pointed this out, he was told to stick to designing the logo.

“I felt like we were just designing the candy wrapper for this thing. I didn't really know what we were selling, whether it was good, whether it lived up to its promise.”

The situation amplified the value (or lack thereof) businesses saw in design. Design Film Festival — the studio’s first, most visible, and longest-running venture — was their response to the need to educate non-designers about the value of design. 

“The design conversation had to move beyond its professional ghetto,” Felix says. A conference or book wasn’t the solution. “It's difficult to convince a banker or a housewife to go out and buy a huge design book, but if you ask them to spend 70 minutes watching a film on Dior, that’s quite simple.”

They convinced movie distributors in the US and Europe they were legit film festival producers and assembled a lineup of 8 films screened over 10 days in a 100-seat theatre.

On the first day, only 30 people showed up. 

But those 30 people spread the word, the press came, and by the end of the run, 1,800 people had come to the screenings. 

One would think the local design industry would get behind the festival. Instead, Felix was told he just got lucky. “A group of industry veterans said it was a stupid idea. But detractors like that, I realized, are fuel for me. Every time I have to prove someone wrong, I'm energized. I'm going to try to see if we can do it again.”

They did have the support of Mabel Tay, co-founder of Old School. She had transformed the abandoned buildings of a girls’ school into a space for the local creative community. Mabel offered the theatre to Felix rent-free, with instructions to “just make the space interesting.”

Old School was the Design Film Festival’s home for two years. But the city’s master plan had Old School earmarked for residential development, and in 2011 the lease was discontinued. It is now the site of Sophia Hills, a 495-unit condominium complex, and while some heritage structures were retained — and used to market the property —the creative space was gone for good. 

They didn’t know it then, but losing the rent-free venue was the turning point that pushed Design Film Festival to grow. 

While they had lost their Singapore venue, the festival was invited to stage screenings in Portland and Taipei, and demand back home remained. So in 2013, Felix decided to try staging the festival in Singapore again.

Expensive rent continued to be the barrier. “We went to every single museum in Singapore. We went to all the galleries. The minute we went in for the meeting, bam! This is business for them. They all wanted to charge us corporate rates because we were not a nonprofit. It was SG$30,000 for two days.” 

They also tried government grants. “We went to the Singapore National Agency for Design and said we want to help non-designers understand the process through film. They said, ah okay, but this is a film event. This is not a design event. You should talk to the Media Development Authority. So we went to MDA, and they said, oh, this is an art event, this is not a film event. So we went to the National Arts Council and they said, this is a design event. This is not an arts event. To them design is business. Art is about painting, about folk music. It's not about this intersection of different things.” 

They were out of options. But because there was demand, Felix decided to gamble (his word). “We put in all the money we had, $30,000 for two days’ rental. We did it at the School of the Arts.”

That year, the festival sold between 3,500 to 4,000 tickets, with every screening nearly full house. They almost broke even. The experience made them realize they needed to grow.

“The only way we could survive and not let this film festival become a project that was constantly bleeding money is to scale. There is a certain fixed cost to running a film festival: licensing the films, printing, promotion. If we can only sell 4,000 tickets, we can't make it sustainable. The only way we could sustain this is if we had more screenings.” 

So in 2014, they moved the film festival to Shaw Lido, one of Singapore’s oldest theatres and a nostalgic place for three generations of Singaporeans. From 8 screenings the previous year, they hosted 30 and sold out every single one.

“That was the year Design Film Festival exploded. I think it was 6,500 or 7,500 people. It was not just a one-day, two-day event, it ran over two, three weeks. And we got more and more press coverage.” 

It had taken five years, but Design Film Festival was finally on the path to sustainability. 2014 was also the year when the majority of festival-goers (60%) didn’t work in design. People had flown in from Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Portland.

“If you are small, you die. If you don't scale and take that risk, it's hard to grow.” 

Ten years in, the festival has screened 97 films to over 100,000 viewers in 8 Singapore editions, 11 international editions, and private screenings for design-led organizations like Christian Dior, Steelcase, and Zoukout.

Here’s how Felix thinks about scaling: “How do you build things for people who don't care, but who could benefit from it? Scaling is not just about growing an audience, making more money. It's also about helping to change more people's lives and help more people discover things. The number of people you serve directly impacts the value of the work.”

Felix generously gave two hours of his time for this interview. There’s a lot more detail here that didn’t make it into the article, so have a listen.

3 ways Anonymous leverages its network:

1. Getting big names to participate in their studio project Books Read By

Felix is a designer who really wanted to be a writer. Books Read By, launched as a pandemic project, is a growing resource of book recommendations from creatives around the world. 

booksread.by

A post shared by booksread.by (@booksread.by)

It features the region’s creative sparks like Eugene Kan, Chef Pam, and Paco Guerrero. They’ve also convinced hard-to-get people like WIRED founding editor Kevin Kelly, journalist and podcaster Ann Friedman, and The Gentlewoman editor-in-chief Penny Martin to participate in their project. How? 

“The last question: Whose reading lists are you most curious about? We deliberately built that in as a network effect. That's the next person we're going to feature. The power moves away from us to this person, who selects another person, then another person selects another person.” 

2. Winning a big account without pitching for it

In 2010, Felix launched a magazine called Bracket to help creatives navigate the world. He interviewed John C Jay, a seasoned creative at creative agency Weiden+Kennedy.  

Years later, Felix reconnected with John, now global creative head at Uniqlo, who wanted to understand shopping and street culture in Singapore and Southeast Asia. 

“He asked a bunch of questions: How is shopping in Singapore? Where's cool? What's interesting? What do people wear? I thought maybe he was just curious. A couple of days later, his assistant emailed again, asking me who I think are the really good creators in Asia.” 

Felix didn't think about it too much until a few months later when he was told that Uniqlo was going to open their first Southeast Asian flagship store, in Singapore, and was asked if he wanted to work on the project. 

“All of us have this imposter syndrome. When someone asks us to do something that we've never done before, you feel that you want to do it because you're going to be able to stretch and do something more difficult. But you always have this doubt in yourself, whether or not you're the right person. So I asked, isn't Dentsu, the agency of record, going to be working on this?”

Uniqlo wanted to work on the project in a different way. Felix would be the creative director and producer for the project. He’d go on two months of field research (read: travel to Southeast Asian cities and spend time with young people doing interesting things), develop the brief, and bring on creatives as the strategy dictated. He’s written extensive field notes about that research here.

This approach reflected a broader trend of brands setting up in-house creative teams. It makes sense: Why outsource the strategy to an agency that specializes in TV ads before you know you need TV ads?

“It’s not the agency who solves the brief. Defining what we are going to do is actually the solution. When I hand off the brief to a motion graphics designer, to an artist, to a design studio, what is happening is they are giving me an interpretation of the solution.” 

3. Collaborating, not hiring

“I used to identify myself as a designer who makes things. It's very much about me, my world, the legacy I want to build, my portfolio. The life of a designer can sometimes feel very egoistic.”

But spending time with talented creators in Manila, Ho Chi Minh, Bangkok, experiencing the culture and community spirit in these cities, changed the way Felix thinks about his life’s work as a designer.

“My role now is about helping other people do their best work. It's not about my name. It's not about my vision. It's about: how do we find incredible talent and then put them in the spotlight, guide them to do their best work.”

The same people that Felix wanted to work with were also changing the way they wanted to work. The independent creative entrepreneur was on the rise -- talented individuals who no longer wanted to work for a company and were choosing to work for themselves instead. They were doing it from anywhere and getting back their time to make and build their own brand, their own small business, their own platform.

Anonymous had 6 people on payroll at one point. Instead of hiring more people, which was getting harder to do anyway, Felix decided to go back to a two-person studio and redesigned his organization. 

“The model we are using now is like Lego. Depending on the project, we can use different Lego pieces to form a different shape. Instead of saying we are a design company with web developers, copywriters, designers, art directors, we can morph. We look at the brief, we realize that it requires an advertising approach, then we build ourselves to be like an advertising agency. If we need to do an event like Design Film Festival, then we will form a team based on that.” 

This has opened up partnerships that would otherwise not be possible. “In Manila, there’s no way I can hire Dan [Matutina, founder of branding studio Plus63 and an in-demand illustrator]. It's impossible for me to hire Dan. But it's easy when we are collaborating on projects. So if we have a project and I think Dan will be interested, then everyone gets featured. It's not just Anonymous. It's different people in the Philippines or Thailand or Vietnam.” 

Felix could not have known how this arrangement would serve them well during the pandemic. “If we had a five, ten, twenty-man team, there's no way in hell we can survive. When the pandemic hit, if you had a payroll of 10, 20 people, you probably went through a lot of pain, but we were okay because it's just two people.” 

Felix is co-founder and Creative Director at Anonymous, a creative lab in Singapore, and co-producer of Design Film Festival. The next edition is in the works. Felix is also on Instagram and Twitter.

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Upcoming interviews:

• The founders of Kad Kokoa, a food startup in Thailand building a brand around single-origin chocolate 

• Designer and NFT early adopter Amrit Pal Singh

• The producers of audio drama Temujin, a retelling of the life of Genghis Khan, on becoming a finalist at the Webby Awards and what comes next

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Have you ever been told: “You should get a more sensible career"? I’m Timi, and each week we interview a storyteller, artist or creative entrepreneur in Asia who ignored this advice to pursue a creative career. They show us how they paved their own path and dealt with unmitigated failures on their way to building a unique and singular foolish career.

The goal with each story: zero generic fluff. 

If you’re not yet a subscriber, you have great timing! This is only Issue #10 and I’d love for you to be an early reader. Sign up, it’s free.👇

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Catch up on past interviews

This is Issue #10! To those of you just joining us, welcome.

I’ve been getting feedback like: “Haven’t read all the stories yet, they’re in my queue / bookmarks / open browser tabs.” So catch up today. 

You can jump straight to a story, scroll through the archives, or listen to the podcast episodes.

Issue #1: Creating a Netflix-worthy comic book on top of a demanding day job

Issue #2: Giving up rock-and-roll journalism to recalibrate a writing career

Issue #3: How (and why) a chef built the first buffalo dairy farm in Laos

Issue #4: An indie filmmaker explains why every creator needs a scene

Issue #5: Passion or Talent? Here’s what you said

Issue #6: The sommelier who used Wine For Dummies to kick off his career

Issue #7: Launching your debut novel amidst a mass protest

Issue #8: How to LinkedIn like a human

Issue #9: A technologist develops soft skills

Consistency vs Quality, and an update on what’s next 

When I started this project, my biggest goal, and the one I was most worried about, was writing and publishing every week, to a quality I imagined in my head but wasn’t sure I could pull off.

It turns out when you rearrange your life to prioritize writing, you can write.

So 10 issues in, here’s what I’m trying to figure out: 

Do I publish consistently throughout the year, every Saturday morning, no matter what? 

Or do I prioritize quality, producing stories worth reading even if it means I miss some weeks?

Consistency is the #1 way to build momentum. It helps every creator find their voice.

Quality is the reason you bother to even open the email and don’t bounce after two seconds.

At this point, both aren’t possible. Interviews need a lead time, and it takes 25-ish hours to produce each story, from research and interviewing through to writing, editing, graphics, publishing and promo. So for now I have to pick one or the other.

Tim Urban is the author of the epic Wait But Why essays. When he started, he published twice a week and found that the articles that worked best were those that took a whole week to research and write. So he adjusted his schedule to once a week, producing deeply-researched 5,000-word articles. That adjustment allowed him to deliver more consistently. Later on, as he wrote even longer articles, some running to 70,000 words, he updated the tagline on the site to “new post every sometimes.” 

On the consistency vs quality trade-off, Tim says:

Doing a pretty good article every week, is far less likely to build a big career than writing a great article sporadically, because the great article will stand out and people will forget [the rest].

Foolish Careers is nowhere near Wait But Why’s size and success. (Although, wait, but why not one day?) The point is, for the current state of things, I’ve decided to go with Quality. 

I already know many of you aren’t able to read every story, so piling more on isn’t the solution. By taking this time to regroup, I can also figure out a scope and schedule that works…thus getting back to delivering consistently.

Choosing Quality does mean breaking the commitment of a weekly issue to you, my earliest readers. This is what I was trying to avoid, and it sucks. I’m sorry! 

This break is probably going to run for a month, maybe six weeks. Two months feels like too long away. I’ll keep you posted. 

Meanwhile, if you’d like to support this stage of the venture, here’s the best way to do it: 

Rate Foolish Careers on a score of 1 to 10, and tell me how I can close the gap.

Thank you so much for being a reader. 

As always, you can reach me by hitting reply or at timi@foolishcareers.asia.

What did you think of this newsletter?

🔥  It's great! ~ 👍🏼 It's good. ~ 😐  Meh. ~ 🤷🏻‍♀️  I've heard this all before.

Have you ever been told: “You should get a more sensible career"? I’m Timi and in each issue, I interview a storyteller, artist or creative entrepreneur in Asia who ignored this advice to pursue a creative career instead. The goal: zero generic fluff. 

If you’re not yet a subscriber, you have great timing! This is only Issue #9 and I’d love for you to be an early reader. Sign up, it’s free.👇

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INTERVIEW: A technologist develops soft skills

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When I asked Keith Timimi for an interview, it was going to be about his experience as a pioneer and respected leader in Asia’s digital industry. 

We’d have the drama of joining one of Asia’s first digital consultancies, raising then losing many millions of dollars in the dot-com bust of 2000 (easy to do when you spend $1 million on a golf tournament), followed by a humbler second attempt in starting an agency in 2004 and redemption through an acquisition in 2011.

Keith would also tell us about his work as Chief Innovation Officer at VMLY&R Asia and his own incubator, Stanley Street Labs, set up to invest in online media and marketplaces and now focused on sustainability.

The model of a modern digital executive and entrepreneur.

Then Keith said, “I should put my real life story on LinkedIn. Because everyone’s LinkedIn is a lie.” 

So our conversation took a different direction. Keith spoke about leaving Iraq to escape Saddam Hussein’s regime (and the ensuing survivor’s guilt), a year as student council president that ended in chaos and required him to resign, drifting into the grey economy and getting arrested for drugs.

“Behind it all, I was lost. People have realities they don't talk about. The more I've gone on, the more I feel it's important to be able to express that. My darkness wouldn't have been quite as dark if there were ways and means to talk about it.” 

Through self-inquiry, Keith has embraced vulnerability and emotional honesty for a more meaningful career and life. “I'm 50 years old, I should know better, but I don't think the learning journey ever ends.” 

And he incorporates these ideas into the robust innovation workshops he designs for clients seeking to imagine meaningful customer experiences. While the work requires academic rigor and practical experience working with organizations and ecosystems, Keith says “quite often, the soft skills are actually the difference between success and failure.”

There’s a lot more substance than can fit in an email so if you want to go deeper, listen to the full conversation on Spotify (just click play) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

6 emotional tools to encourage openness and creativity:

1. Remember we are all impostors.

In Keith’s world, there are two types of people: 

Those who know they don't know what they're doing— they’re aware of it, and it gives them anxiety. And those who don't know what they're doing and don't realize it — they think they're brilliant. 

“Truth be told, how many bonafide experts are there who've researched a topic deeply? And everything that they've ever pitched to anyone, they know a hundred percent it's right, bang on, it's going to work? That's going to be less and less what life is about because change is happening faster and faster. So we're all just making it up as we go along. It's better to have a little bit of honesty about that.” 

2. Recognize and support vulnerability in everyone...

In his school days, Keith was found with weed and arrested. As a minor, he was given a caution and released. After university, Keith drifted into the grey economy and experience dark days. Telling his parents about what had happend was the first time he truly had to face his shame.

“Telling them it wasn't just weed. It was acid and crack cocaine and I'd been a dealer. A very bad dealer, I have to say. That was a really hard thing to do. But it's also liberating once you're able to deal with your hurt and the hurt that it causes other people.” 

Shame breeds fear. Fear prevents vulnerability, which stifles creativity.

So before we can be vulnerable, we need to address shame. “Shame is a deeply powerful thing. The people who feel disconnected, it's because they have a fear, they have a shame. There's this excruciating feeling around vulnerability. You feel so vulnerable that you're trying to hide.” 

For anyone who struggles with this, Keith recommends Brene Brown’s The Power of Vulnerability: 

Keith applies vulnerability research in the workshops he runs, creating processes that call for radical openness. 

“If I'm sharing with you now some of the skeletons in my closet, we're also asking our clients to share some of their skeletons. If I'm going to ask them to really listen to each other, I need to really listen to them. If I'm going to ask them that maybe their insight will come when they dream about it, then I also need to be ready to go that deep and kind of dream about things, because I don't know what the hell I'm doing.” 

3. …and instill a childlike desire to play.

“Now, all of that can be crushing. So we also need some positivity, some optimism in order to have some fun going through this process, to take us to the point of prototyping and coming up with our best guess of what we can do.” 

This mindset is crucial when clients test their ideas with human beings that will ultimately use whatever they’re developing. It gives them the courage to admit when an idea is wrong. Giving people the freedom to fail ultimately leads to those elusive aha moments.

“My favorite projects are the ones where we just don't know what the end result is. We work together and there'll be aha moments: That's what our customers are looking for. This is what the employees care about. This is the opportunity. The new technology enables this. This is what our brand really stands for. We could do this. I love that journey.” 

4. Use vulnerability to improve planning.

The pandemic has wiped out the illusion of linear growth projections, those charts that go up and to the right year after year. 

“Now we can finally admit to ourselves, all our projections were just made up stories. Something like this allows an opportunity for people to say, there are certain elements where we just don't know what's going to happen.

It doesn't mean we won't put in our projections. We have to, we're an organization. But we should also be honest with ourselves, our communities, our stakeholders, that there are unknowns and we're trying to put the best plan in place to mitigate those things.”

5. Instead of a post-mortem, run a pre-mortem.

Many of us are familiar with post-mortems, those reviews at the end of a project. Sometimes they become blame games. The good ones identify the things that can be done differently.

“Maybe you institute some of those, maybe you don't. If you do institute, it often just becomes bureaucracy. Which is like a sledgehammer for a job of a scalpel.” 

A pre-mortem helps the team identify possible failure areas while a project is still in the planning stage. Here are Keith’s pointers for how it’s done:

Imagine we're a year's time in the future and we've launched the program, and it failed. Why did it fail? Try to think about all the things that could have gone wrong.

• What should we have done more of?

• Are there areas we should have spent more time amplifying? 

• What should we not have done? 

• What could have caused each failure? Cultural reasons, marketplace reasons, our customers didn't even want it, things we just didn't think about.

You work through that and then update the plan. What else can we do to make our plan more robust?

6. Get to shared clarity through active listening. 

In Keith’s work, he needs to ensure teams have shared clarity: Everyone must know exactly what success should look like and how it should be achieved. 

The challenge: few of us truly listen. “When we're listening to people in a work setting, we feel like there's a problem we need to fix. And so we're going straight to the solution. And quite often, people aren’t looking for a solution. In fact, we don't understand what someone’s really saying, because our heads are full of our own narratives.” 

Active listening addresses this. Here are some tactics Keith uses: 

• Say to yourself: “Right now, in this conversation with important people in my life, I'm not trying to fix a problem. I'm just going to listen, really seek to understand.” 

• Extract specifics. You can use a phrase like: “Just help me to understand, what do you mean when you say something.” 

• Repeat the thought or story back, by starting with: “Okay, so you're saying this.” Then pause and let people talk more.

When done on a consistent basis, listening (to each other and to ourselves) builds self-worth, which in turn strengthens emotional resilience. 

“We all have shit to deal with and we've all got this highly critical voice in our head. When you get that everyone has that, you can relax a little bit, and be a little bit open, and we can share with each other. That helps relieve some of the pressure. The difference is being able to talk about things. It's such a simple thing, but it's amazingly transformative.” 

Keith is on LinkedIn. He is Chief Innovation Officer, Asia at VMLY&R and incubates ideas at Stanley Street Labs.

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Where we highlight the things our readers say and do. Do you want to tell us about your work? Introduce yourself in this thread.

Meet Olivia. She’s a filmmaker - writer, director, and producer - based in Singapore and originally from Jakarta. She’s directed a few short films, including a romantic comedy short film and an experimental dance short film. She’s currently writing an animation series project and also co-directing an animated comedy short film. Besides these projects, she’s aiming to finish a TV pilot script.

That’s all on top of her day job! Olivia works in a publisher's branded content team, specializing in social media and digital analytics.

Olivia’s always open for collaborations, so check out her works here and connect on LinkedIn. 

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INTERVIEW: How to LinkedIn like a human

At the end of 2020, LinkedIn’s editors (they have a team of 60+ around the world) published their first Top Voices List, a collection of industry professionals who have an engaged following on the platform. 

Before you roll your eyes, this is not a ranking of people who gamed LinkedIn using annoying clickbait and hollow copy. The editors used these criteria:

Are the contributions insightful, conversational and timely? Do they seek to give and get help vs. being self-promotional? Finally, does this list reflect the world we work and live in today?

Most of the profiles are who you’d expect from a professional social network: senior executives, entrepreneurs, consultants, the occasional young up-and-comer. 

On the Singapore list, Xiao’an Li, a musician and composer, sticks out as someone who works in the creative arts (not the most active industry on LinkedIn) and for his casual, irreverent tone. 

He is co-founder and partner at Li & Ortega, a music and audio production firm for games and advertising. Or as Xiao’an describes it in his LinkedIn profile, “music for whatever the hell you want.”

Xiao’an credits his visibility on LinkedIn for all sorts of work opportunities — new clients, speaking engagements, and meeting interesting people outside his immediate professional circle. LinkedIn has become Xiao’an’s flywheel.

If your creative work can benefit from interaction with the professional working world, this interview provides practical advice — even if you don’t post twice a day. 

In this interview, Xiao’an also shares what he’s learned from his time running a career community for 7,000 musicians, a job that is thankless and meaningful in equal measure. What he learned from that experience informs the way he engages online today.

1. The real benefits of organizing a community

As a composer fresh out of music school, Xiao’an had difficulty finding work, and he learned he had to network constantly to drum up business, showing up at conferences and industry events all year round. 

“I have a great deal of social anxiety going up to people I didn't know and striking up conversations that way. That remains to this day my least favorite method of networking. I hate it. I decided to find a way around it, which was that if people knew me online and I was visible online, when they saw me at a conference, they were more likely to come over and say hi, thus sparing me the trouble of going up to them.”

He decided to run a Facebook community to help composers get consistent information about the industry. 

Xiao’an asked four experienced composers for support to bring the group together. They brought credibility and he did the groundwork, canvassing other groups, asking people to share it, and ensuring a steady stream of useful content in very moderated discussions. 

From a few hundred members at launch, it grew to 7,000 members over three years.   

The work didn’t drive business, but he stuck with it, “because I felt it was meaningful to share the things that I knew no matter how early my career was with people who were having similar trouble in their early careers: finding work, understanding how the industry works, what to charge, what kind of rights to negotiate for their contracts.” 

As the group grew, people started to know Xiao’an less as a person and more as a faceless admin, and the amount of unpaid work, like signing off on activities or approving advertising, became too much. So he stepped away.

“Imagine being in Congress or the Senate without a salary. This is also my fault for not coaching my fellow moderators and delegating properly to them. The level of delegation is also very limited, in retrospect, because it was a Facebook Group and not a proper organization or a company. I should've just run it myself, at least I’d be able to make unilateral decisions.”

What do people get wrong about communities? 

“It's not a device by which you gain personal advantage. You should only do it because you want to, and by helping people, you inevitably build a grateful network.”

2. Learning how LinkedIn can be useful, and how to be useful on LinkedIn

For several years, Xiao’an used LinkedIn as a way to educate himself about business, following people and reading articles. 

“A lot of articles would quote other articles and it just brings you down this rabbit hole of bullshit. I would find articles that corroborated each other and then found their primary sources and read those. My wife is a scientist. If I do less, I'll hear from her.” 

Xiao’an started posting actively in 2019, with not much success. Here are the things that didn’t work:

1. Shared links to industry articles and news

2. Wrote articles (sometimes)

3. Shared my work via outbound links

4. Posted 100 times between Jan 1 - Aug 13

5. Little to no community/comment engagement 

Compared to the 2019 list, here’s what he did differently in 2020:

1. Created text, image, and video content focused on providing value/entertainment to others

2. Wrote short and long form posts instead of articles (people don't have to navigate away from their newsfeeds.

3. Presented my work in an insane but unique manner

4. Posted 300 times between Jan 1 - Aug 13 (consistency)

5. Engaged with nearly every comment

3. Landing on his signature post — his music videos

“On LinkedIn, I realized that people like a personal element to any story you write, which also has to have a lesson. So it has to be entertaining, it has to be insightful, or it has to be educational. And in its entertaining value, it has to reflect some manner of truth.”

His posts offer distinct advice on music composition, making decisions on music production, and building a career in music today.  

What makes Xiao’an’s feed stand out, though, are his music videos. In these posts, he shows project snippets by distilling a client brief into a quirky humorous one-liner and producing a homemade video.

The comments light up with technical questions and conversations between composers.

“I feel like it's my ‘fuck you’ to people who make highly produced videos of their music, because it's just my iPhone. And then I sync it up with the music afterwards in Logic. And also you’re not taking yourself too seriously. Because we've got people on LinkedIn who take themselves sooo seriously.” 

4. Mining life experiences  

Much of Xiao’an’s insights come from his own experiences and mistakes. “It's very difficult to have stuff to write if you don't have life experiences. So if you're willing to put yourself through a few years of suffering, you'll get a lot of lessons and you can put stuff on LinkedIn.” 

These moments of introspection are encapsulated into LinkedIn posts as broad lessons that can apply to different situations. “Sometimes you can have a hundred different LinkedIn posts, all about the same concept, but applied in a different situation and a different angle geared towards a different audience.”

Each post uses hashtags like #creativity #personaldevelopment #music and #gameaudio to get onto the feed of people interested in these topics. 

And occasionally, a personal post might pop up.

“I think people like the occasional swearing, they like the occasional nonsense, because it breaks up the feed.”

5. A simple workflow

Xiao’an posts once or twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. 

“If I post at 8:30 in the morning, I miss everyone in Europe, but I get people in Singapore before they go to work and I get people in the US on each coast after they're done with work, after dinner, or right as they're getting home. Sometimes I post 8:30 at night. I'll get some early risers in New York. I will miss LA, but I'll get Europe while they're at lunch.”

The only automation he uses is the free plan from HootSuite, which lets him write a post at anytime and schedule it for publishing.

Unable to attend conferences due to the pandemic, Xiao’an used LinkedIn to network. His presence grew in 2020 through consistent posting, one to two times a day. By the end of the year, he had posted 484 times and gained over 1 million views.

If there is one thing that 2020 has taught me, it’s that you don’t need to fly to expensive conferences or attend time consuming networking events to meet new people and make friends around the world.

6. A no-mercy approach to trolls

“I've dealt with racist people. I've dealt with people who think that maybe I'm being unprofessional on LinkedIn. To be perfectly honest, I love those people. They should come around more often because every single time I share something about those people it’s at least 10,000 views.”

Compared to other social networks, LinkedIn has been much better at managing post quality. “I feel it actively deprioritizes useless content or anger or hate speech. And I think that with the amount of moderation and machine learning they're using the background, it's been very effective.”

Xiao’an is on LinkedIn and has a personal website. He is a partner at audio production firm Li & Ortega and blogs at music tech startup Musiio.com where he is a music strategist. 

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Where we highlight the things our readers say and do. We want to feature as many of you as possible, so introduce yourself in this thread and pepper it with links to your work so we can check it out.

When you’re ready to LinkedIn, check out 18 Steps To An All-Star LinkedIn Profile by Foolish reader Andrea Edwards. She wrote this guide for LinkedIn beginners and spells out the actions you can take, from scratch, to get your profile working for you. 

Andrea left an award-winning career in strategic B2B communications to help senior executives become positive change agents at a time when we need good people to step up and lead. It’s a mission-driven consultancy she runs from Phuket. She’s always been on the Foolish path, starting her career as a musician in the Australian Army.

Upcoming interviews:

• A two-person creative studio on the virtues of staying small

• A serial creative entrepreneur shares 21st-century leadership values

More stories:

• Creating a Netflix-worthy comic book despite a demanding day job

• Giving up rock-and-roll journalism to recalibrate a writing career

• A filmmaker’s career arc shows why every creator needs a scene

• Learning to become a sommelier using Wine For Dummies

• How (and why) a self-taught cheesemaker built a dairy farm from scratch

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Have you ever been told: “You should get a more sensible career"? I’m Timi, and each week we interview a storyteller, artist or creative entrepreneur in Asia who ignored this advice to pursue a creative career instead. They unpack how they paved their own path and dealt with unmitigated failures on their way to building a unique and singular foolish career.

The goal with each story: zero generic fluff. 

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INTERVIEW: Launching your debut novel about protest amidst a mass protest

Sunisa Manning was born and raised in Bangkok to a Thai mom and American dad. She studied journalism at Brown University then came back home to work in the non-profit sector, which led to spending time in rural Thailand with farmers, school teachers, and descendants of royalty alike. 

The experience opened her eyes to the wealth disparity in the kingdom and was part of Sunisa’s political awakening. (“I was one of those people who couldn't have told you it was rice growing in the field for a long time.”) 

It planted the earliest seeds for her debut novel, A Good True Thai, a coming-of-age story about three college students from different classes and ethnic backgrounds who join Thailand’s 1970’s violent democracy movement. 

The characters are compelling. It is deeply researched, taking six years to write. At least one Bangkokian described it as having an incredible sense of place. 

Between the writing and the topic, there was potential for getting published in the US, and they tried for three years.

“We first tried to sell it in March 2017. Donald Trump took office in January 2017. I talked to my agent about it: ‘You think Americans are going to want to buy anything to do with the rest of the world?’ She was like, ‘I think it's so topical.’ And that's really not what anyone else thought.”

Looking for other options, Sunisa submitted her manuscript to the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, a Singapore competition that opened up to Southeast Asian writers in 2020. A Good True Thai was a finalist, got published, and sold out in four months, which hasn’t happened since the Prize’s first year.

In this interview, Sunisa tells us how she advocated for her own work and promoted the book in Thailand while she was stuck in California during the pandemic. Read on for the highlights.

If you have a novel in your drawer or in your head, this is the podcast episode to listen to. We’re joined by Epigram's Fiction Editor, Jason Erik Lundberg. He edited Sunisa’s book and provides insight into the writer-editor relationship.

Here are some highlights:

1. Find a work arrangement that doesn’t deplete your “writing resource”

Because it takes place in an actual era of Thai history, the book required in-depth archival research and dedicated writing time. Sunisa says, “I learned very quickly that if I didn't make writing the first thing in my life, it just wouldn't happen. I used to work in nonprofit communication, which was a great day job, but there's a lot of writing in it. That actually depletes my writing resource.”

So she switched to teaching, a conscious choice that gave her the brainspace to write.

“I go a little nuts when I'm just writing, particularly with novels because they're so big and, to hold that in my head, it's very cerebral. I can float away. Teaching puts me in the world. It puts me in service of other people, which I think is healthy for the ego.”  

2. Clarity of purpose: Why are you writing this book?

A Good True Thai is told from the point of view of three young Thais who meet as freshmen at Chulalongkorn University: Det, a great-grandson of King Chulalongkorn; his best friend Chang, a smart kid from the slums; and Lek, the eldest daughter of Chinese immigrants who has radical ideas.

Sunisa was always clear that she wanted her novel to be a story about Thailand written by a Thai person, featuring Thai people. As she says in this interview: 

“The way I wrote about Thailand was not to show it to foreigners. If the outside of the circle is what foreigners see, I really wanted to write for the inside of the circle – I wanted to write a book that took place entirely within a Thai consciousness that isn’t mediated by this white, usually foreign gaze.”

It guided her choice of agent and helped her say no to suggestions of dropping a character. 

“Editors mostly just wanted Lek. They said, if this was all her book, we might take it. A lot of Americans didn't like Det, and I get it. He's highborn and sensitive. But of course, within the context of Thailand, if you don't have what the nobility is up to, you don't capture the whole story.”

While she stood her ground on those decisions, it was a difficult time for Sunisa as an artist. Through artist residencies, she was in touch with other serious young female writers like her and could see their progress. 

“They had their books sell in the States. They had these big publicity teams. It felt like I was just watching all the rocket ships around me take off. So that was really hard, not because I was competitive with them, but because I stopped believing in the book's integrity.”

3. Make it a family affair 

While writing itself will always be a lone act, Sunisa was surrounded by a supportive family who fought for the book as much as she did and helped her at various stages of the project.

“Right after I gave birth, I was going through major edits on the book with my agent. In retrospect, I would wait. But such is the force of my ambition that I really wanted to sell the book. My husband took the baby a lot. I would nurse him at my desk and then pass him over my head like a football and keep working. I had always hoped that my book baby would come out before my baby baby, but it didn't work out that way.”

It was Sunisa’s brother who told her about the Epigram Books Fiction Prize. And her in-laws co-produced her launch at the Foreign Correspondents Club Thailand. Her father-in-law, who works in video, lit her professionally, while her mother-in-law, a gallery owner, chose the painting for her backdrop.

“It was very cool because, for Thai people, red symbolizes one side of the political spectrum and yellow traditionally has been associated with Rama the Ninth, the current king's father. And so I loved the fact that I got to launch in Asia in front of a backdrop that was all of that gradient. They assume that I feel one way about the King, but actually, I wanted to sketch out all the points.” 

4. Build a press list of your dream reviewers

“My experience in American publishing taught me that no one is going to advocate for your book the way you are. I tried not to be too neurotic, but when I saw most of the press list was in Singapore, a little bit in Malaysia, nothing was Thai… This is my home country, so I got to work and reached out to everyone. No shame.”

Sunisa made a list of her dream reviewers, people she didn't know whose work she admired, and prepared a basic pitch: “Heeey. I have a novel coming out. You want to read it? And write something about it?”

Almost anyone who is Thai or whose field is Thailand said yes, which she says demonstrates the dearth of Thai stories. 

One example: Jasmine Chia, a London-based Thai journalist. “I just reached out to her on Twitter and was like, love your work genuinely. I feel like you would really dig my novel. Would you read it?” It was an interview that met Sunisa’s desire for intelligent engagement, touching on subjects that are still considered taboo, and Jasmine joined her launch as a guest speaker.

Sunisa also built a spreadsheet to track pitches, and synched up with Epigram’s marketing department. “We were a really good team and they let me be extremely Type A. They worked in the spreadsheet and we would just hand things off.”

Here’s Sunisa’s color-coded spreadsheet:

• Green: Active for Sunisa

• Yellow: Active for Epigram

• Pink: Piece is published

5. By doing the work, you can place yourself in the path of luck

On October 14, 2020, the day A Good True Thai launched at the Foreign Correspondents Club Thailand, the pro-democracy protests ramped up again and swelled to a fever pitch throughout the week. It helped book sales.

“The day of the FCCT launch, Jonathan Head [the BBC correspondent hosting the launch], arrived late and out of breath because he was running in from the protests. And we had a lot more journalists who were meant to come to the event but had to report on the protest. It’s kind of crazy timing. I’m telling you, do not mess with fate.” 

This was obviously not something that could be planned, but the relevance of the story, combined with the groundwork Sunisa and the team had laid down for months, allowed the book to ride this wave.

A Good True Thai sold out its first print run in four months. This hasn’t happened since the first year of the Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2015. 

6. Think about self-promotion in a bigger context

Like most creators, self-promotion is not Sunisa’s favorite thing to do. To get over this, she thinks of her book in the larger context of getting more books out about Thailand, written by Thai people.

“I don't think of it as my book on a pedestal. I think of it as just kicking that door open. It's really embarrassing that these farangs come and marry their young Thai wives, have barely lived in the country, and write these atrocious orientalist tomes. It drives me absolutely crazy. Now my book is next to those books in bookstores.” 

Sunisa wanted to dedicate the book to her Thai grandparents, but “my most sincere wish is that Thailand sees a bit more change in terms of who is allowed to have opportunity in the kingdom. So I put that dedication on it and I feel like it has been very auspicious for the novel.”

Sunisa is at sunisamanning.com, Twitter and Instagram. A Good True Thai is available on the Epigram Books website and as an e-book everywhere.  

The Epigram Books Fiction Prize is now accepting submissions for 2022. The Prize is open to all citizens and permanent residents of Southeast Asia. More info here.

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• A serial creative entrepreneur shares 21st-century leadership values

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• Creating a Netflix-worthy comic book despite a demanding day job

• Giving up rock-and-roll journalism to recalibrate a writing career

• A filmmaker’s career arc shows why every creator needs a scene

• Learning to become a sommelier using Wine For Dummies

• How (and why) a self-taught cheesemaker built a dairy farm from scratch

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Where we highlight the things our subscribers say and do. We want to feature as many of you as possible, so introduce yourself in this thread, pepper it with links to your work, or just tell us what’s on your mind.

Meet Elle Griffin. She’s a business editor and freelance writer who is embarking on an experiment to publish her first novel as a serial. She explains why she chose this path and what the subscriber math could look like in our conversation.

Here’s the plan in a nutshell:

In the fall of 2021, I'm going to publish my novel as a serial for my newsletter subscribers, releasing one chapter per week until it's done (42 weeks). My newsletter is free, but I will charge $5/month to subscribe to weekly chapters of my novel. Once the book is complete, I will offer a hardcover collector's edition of the book for superfans, and then I will publish it to KDP and Wattpad to expand its reach.

If you want to follow Elle’s progress or support her experiment, join her newsletter The Novelleist at ellegriffin.substack.com.

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Have you ever been told: “You should get a more sensible career"? I’m Timi, and each week we interview a storyteller, artist or creative entrepreneur in Asia who ignored this advice to pursue a creative career. They show us how they paved their own path and dealt with unmitigated failures on their way to building a unique and singular foolish career.

The goal with each story: zero generic fluff. 

If you’re not yet a subscriber, you have great timing! This is only Issue #6 and I’d love for you to be an early reader. Sign up, it’s free.👇

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Thank you for spreading the word.

We continue to see new Fools sign up for the newsletter, despite me missing every single marketing milestone I set for this project. So it’s all you. Thank you. I appreciate every bit of sharing you do.

Welcome to our new subscribers! If you’re new here:

• Meet your fellow Fools in this Introductions thread and take a minute to introduce yourself.

• Check out everyone’s views on Passion vs Talent and add yours to the discussion.

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INTERVIEW: This top sommelier used Wine For Dummies as his first textbook

How does a kid just out of National Service learn about wine when there are no teachers in Singapore? Wine for Dummies, of course. 

Gerald Lu, one of Singapore’s leading sommeliers, partner at Praelum Wine Bistro, and current chair of the Sommelier Association of Singapore, had no choice. “The industry wasn't very helpful then. There wasn't a sommelier association. All the best wine guys are at The Raffles Hotel or Les Amis, and these guys are very busy so you email them and nobody replies.”

Choosing to become a sommelier is unconventional in Asia, and hard graft in a place like Singapore where alcohol is expensive and wine isn’t baked into the culture. The Ministry of Manpower created a category for the job only in 2015.

Gerald is an example of how you can pursue the work you love despite being misunderstood or dismissed. In this interview, we talk about how he found a path through an underdeveloped industry and a sommelier’s role as storyteller. 

Listen to Gerald tell his story 🎧

Here are some highlights:

1. No curriculum? Create your own.

Gerald knew he wanted to work in F&B because he could meet people and learn new skills. But he didn’t do well in hospitality school because he sucked at cooking, so he decided to get hands-on experience working the floor and bar at a restaurant. This is where Gerald fell in love with beverages, because of the amount of knowledge required to be good at the job. 

To focus his learning, he reached out to sommeliers in Singapore, without success. “Either you sit down and do nothing or you make something happen for yourself, so I went to Kinokuniya and bought Wine For Dummies and French Wine For Dummies.”

Gerald got a job in the wine cellar of Waterfront Restaurant by Indochine, a pioneer in Singapore’s modern Asian dining experience, and created a simple learning system for himself.

“My job was to open stuff. I just did stuff near the cellar. So I put the two precious books I had in the cellar, and every time somebody ordered something, I’d look it up. ‘Oh, Sancerre from the Loire Valley.’ I go into the cellar, pick up the Sancerre, put it on the trolley and prepare the glassware. And while waiting for the sommelier to come, I just read the book quickly. At least I know something.” 

This six-month stint was enough to get Gerald a job as a wine captain after National Service. (Male Singaporeans do mandatory military service for two years.)

The day before he started, Gerald got a call from the restaurant manager. "None of us here have any wine knowledge. You probably have the most, so tomorrow when you come to work, instead of being a captain on the floor, we'll elevate you to wine captain. We’ll pay you 50 bucks more, and you take care of the wines as well."

2. Saying “I don’t know” increases learning speed

So Gerald started his first full-time job, making SG$1,250 (before CPF deductions) and working six days a week. To compare, this was less than half what his peers were earning working in banks and large corporations. But he was truly part of the industry now. 

As the wine guy, Gerald was invited to trade tastings. It was at one of these tastings, hosted by Louis Jadot, a producer from Burgundy, that he realized he was truly at the bottom of the hill.

“I was staring at the 18 wines trying to remember information from my poor little Wine For Dummies book. They're all pinot noir, so how the hell do I know the difference? Do you arrange it left to right, right to left? Oh shit. So I just stood there and stared.” 

While Gerald was trying to figure out what was what, a gentleman came up to him and gently said: “Hey, you look lost. Do you know what you're doing?” 

Relieved, Gerald admitted he had no idea, and asked where he should start. This was Tommy Lam, the man who would become Gerald’s mentor. Tommy owned a wine bar and was trying to start up the fledgling industry. He eventually founded the Sommelier Association of Singapore. 

At that time, Tommy had just started conducting WSET classes. The Wine and Spirit Education Trust provides education and qualifications for drinks professionals and enthusiasts. He invited Gerald to sit in on a class for free. “Wow, it’s very good and structured knowledge. Great for an Asian boy like me. I guess at some point he was marketing his business, sure. But the approach was very kind.”

Gerald borrowed money from his mom (“at that time I was spending all my money on tasting wines”) and completed the first level.

He is also quick to emphasize that certification is secondary. “I strongly encourage you to take accreditation, but I think most important is the passion and natural drive and instinct to be good. It doesn't make a sommelier less than the other if he doesn't have a certain accreditation.” 

3. Do things before you’re ready

Gerald bought a third book, Italian Wine for Dummies by Mary Ewing Mulligan, then was encouraged by Tommy to take the Master Sommelier exam that had just been introduced to Singapore.

“Obviously I did badly because I have no clue what to expect. I remember opening the paper, and out of a hundred questions, I know ten. And out of the ten, I think I know five. Oh my god, I'm going to fail. This is the first time I opened a paper in my life that I don't know so many things.”

What followed was a year of nothing but study. Gerald prioritized this over everything else, then joined the competition again.

He stuck out for his youth (he was 25) and his outfit. “Everybody was wearing the sommelier outfit of black, white, tie, apron inside of a jacket overcoat. One of them even had a tail jacket. Then I rock in, light gray suit, pink shirt, grey tie. And the tie is a cotton woven tie, baby blue pocket square. No socks, brown loafers.” 

He would’ve been happy just reaching the semifinals, but found himself in the finals with two much more experienced sommeliers. 

“During the finals, we probably all screwed up, but they screwed up more than me. It took everybody by surprise because this guy has only been in the industry for two and a half years and then suddenly he won. Who the hell is this guy?” 

The perception of what a sommelier should look like was changing. “But it was a slow transition. And along the way, there's so much criticism and so much flak, just by not conforming to the norms.”

4. Growth over comfort

Following his win, Gerald was promoted to Head Sommelier, a fun job that paid well and carried reputation and authority. He was active in the small but growing professional community. One day he was helping a friend launch a wine bar when she suggested a career change. 

“I said it was a stupid idea to open a wine bar, but she's a smart lady and was determined to do that. So she went ahead anyway. During the opening, there were a lot of hiccups. I was trying to help her out as a friend and she said, why don't you just join me?”

Why did Gerald decide to give up a comfortable job and a great salary in a stable company for something small-scale and new? “It was a leap of faith because I was young. I might lose some time, but at least I gain some experience. So I said, okay, let's go from ordering 30 cases of one wine, to three bottles.”

Praelum Wine Bar wanted to offer a great selection of wines, including 50 by the glass. This was a new idea in Singapore when most drinkers kept to brand-name wines and “wine by the glass” meant a cheap house pour. Praelum’s cellar has 1,000 bottles, where Burgundys and Brunellos rest next to bottles from small winemakers, New World producers, and uncommon locations like Hungary and Lebanon. 

But with no marketing budget, and without the online platforms and advice available today, the business started slow. “People walking up and down Duxton Hill are like, ‘What’s this new place? A wine bar. No, I don't feel like drinking wine, bye-bye.’” 

To get the business going, they couldn’t always stick to just wine. “Some people will come in for a beer because it’s a quiet place and they wanted to chat. So I served beer, I served cocktails. I served wine. I served whiskey. I was serving everything. This became a drinking hole. What I’m really good for is wine. But I wasn't moving enough wine.”

Gerald describes that trial-and-error period like this: “You know how you play video games, right? When you want to level up the character, you just go whack the tree 1000 times.” 

It was word of mouth, patiently over time, that worked. “It was really table by table. One friend introduced the next friend and the next friend and it just grew like that. And it was a very slow process. It's nine years old and is still growing. In a way it was good, we had time to figure it out. But it’s not great for the investors, they have to wait.”

Over the years, Praelum has become a home to local sommeliers in Singapore. Gerald supports young people who have decided to pursue wine as a career. He recommends getting hands-on experience and sets realistic goals for mentees. With hard work, one can become a decent sommelier in two years.

“I spent a significant amount of time just figuring it out and banging walls. When I was banging all these walls, nobody gave me a hammer. How I wished someone helped me, and I was lucky I met somebody.”

5. A sommelier’s job is to tell a story

Gerald tells a great story about each bottle and feels a responsibility to represent the winemakers who make the product. 

“If you don't help by explaining what's so special about the wine, then you're just a vending machine. Just put a coin in, and dispense. You are a sommelier because you bring to life this inanimate object.

“And if you truly like your industry and you fall in love with these things, you realize you fall in love with the people who made this product. Your job as a sommelier is to bridge this story across to someone. I think sometimes, sommeliers lose the plot on that. They are so concerned with just serving the best wine.”

This responsibility carries through when judging wines, and the difference between silver and bronze can be material to a winemaker’s livelihood.

“If you are 89 points, you win a bronze medal. If you are 90 points, you win a silver medal. Because you are a silver medal, you can charge $1 more per bottle. If you make 300,000 bottles, that can send one of your kids through school for a lifetime.”

Gerald is also on a mission to make wine accessible to new curious Singaporean drinkers. He’s presented a wine education series with local supermarket chain Fairprice, where one learns that the reason wine is decanted is the same reason kopi uncles pull teh tarik -- to aerate the drink.

At recent competitions run by the Singapore Sommelier Association, which Gerald currently chairs, competitors are now expected to recommend a wine to pair with Asian dishes. For slow-braised wagyu beef, one somm proposed a cabernet from Napa Valley’s Chateau Montelena, and for chilled mango sago cream with pomelo, the 1996 Vin de Constance, a sweet wine from South Africa. For xiao long bao: ginger ale. (I get that. Let XLB be XLB.) 

“I think it's very sad when you tell people you're a professional in food and beverage, and you actually have to teach people about somebody else's culture, then as a Southeast Asian, you don't know anything about your own. Quite embarrassing, right? I think you are not getting your priorities right.” 

Gerald himself, in an interview with Vice Munchies on how to pair wine with Singapore’s iconic foods, is happy to drink a vinho verde with char kway teow and chenin blanc with fried bee hoon. For most dishes, though, from chili crab to assam laksa and chicken rice, he suggests a simple rule. “When in doubt, turn to the saving grace of Southeast Asian dishes: riesling.”

Gerald is on Instagram and can be found most evenings at Praelum Wine Bar on Duxton Hill in Singapore.

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Where we highlight the things creatives say and do. We want to feature as many of you as possible, so introduce yourself in this thread, pepper it with links to your work, or just tell us what’s on your mind.

Meet Tanmoy Goswami, “a therapy-going, pill-popping mental-health writer based in New Delhi, India.” He left behind a two-decade career in business journalism to work full-time in mental health, driven by his own experience of living with depression, anxiety, and self-harm, and a close view of mental illness and suicide in his personal circle.

His last salaried job was Sanity correspondent at independent news title The Correspondent. That publication has unfortunately folded, so Tanmoy has launched his own publication, Sanity By Tanmoy, a platform dedicated to the politics, economics and culture of mental health. Check it out and consider supporting him with a paid subscription. This type of support truly alleviates entrepreneur anxiety.

Tanmoy has a post in our Introductions thread, so you can also say hello here!

QUICK POLL: What do you think of the newsletter? 

🔥 It's great! ~ 👍🏼It's good. ~ 😐 Meh. ~ 🤷🏻‍♀️ I've heard this all before.

The goal with each story: zero generic fluff! 

If you’re not yet a subscriber, you have great timing! This is only Issue #5 and I’d love for you to be an early reader. Sign up, it’s free and takes a minute.👇

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Passion or talent?

At the end of every interview, we ask this question: In a creative career like yours, what matters more, talent or passion? 

We received specific, thoughtful comments from many of you: writers, artists, commercial creatives. Zero generic fluff!

My favorite response is from Gerald Lu. He chose a career as a sommelier in Singapore before the industry was developed, and had to teach himself using Wine For Dummies. Read on!

Do you choose talent or passion in your own career? Share your view in this thread.

ⓕⓞⓞⓛ

Hui-E Seeto is a senior marketer at Adobe. She has a long-running photography practice focused on adventure travel and nature. 

When I hire, the baseline 'talent' is more or less there — if your recruiter has screened candidates properly! What tips the balance when I have to decide between candidates is always about passion. Or, in my parlance, fire in the belly. It's that hunger that will help them overcome obstacles, and it can't be taught.

hueytheseeto

A post shared by Hui-E Seeto (@hueytheseeto)

ⓕⓞⓞⓛ

Lyra Garcellano is a visual artist doing installation work, paintings and comic strips.

I learned to view the idea of passion as a form of internal fuel — the gasoline to keep our engine moving. Without it, we stop way before we even reach longevity in whatever field we find ourselves in. Talent is a tricky word. Its definition is always in relation to someone else declaring it. Who is to say one has talent? There are special skills involved in the mention of talent but the exceptionality of the so-called skills are subject to certain constructs.

So yeah...the question is complex.

Both matter — the fuel to be able to keep on chugging, even if the tools required in the field are constantly being redefined. 

projectspacepilipinas

A post shared by Project Space Pilipinas (@projectspacepilipinas)

ⓕⓞⓞⓛ

Xiao’an Li is a composer and partner at Li & Ortega, an audio production studio for the gaming industry. His tagline on LinkedIn is “music for whatever the hell you want.”

I don't feel like I'm the most passionate person, but I do feel that I'm able to create better work than people who consider themselves passionate about the job. That’s an obvious disconnect: that the level of passion is not necessarily related to the quality of the work. 

And being able to do the work without assigning too much of their personal value to it. Because if I'm working on something and someone says, “I don't like that, I want this instead of that,” just put it in. Who cares? It's not mine. So just do it.

Can you imagine the carpenter that made chairs... If you said, "I want a three-legged stool," and he says "Gasp, that's not even a chair.” Who wants to work with that guy?

ⓕⓞⓞⓛ

Budjette Tan is co-creator of the Trese comic books and creative director at LEGO. 

He says collaboration beats talent any day. Listen to the audiogram on our Insta (and give us a ❤️)

foolishcareers

A post shared by Foolish Careers (@foolishcareers)

Go to Budjette’s interview: Writing a Netflix-worthy comic book on your coffee break

ⓕⓞⓞⓛ

Tony Samson is Chairman and CEO of Touch XDA, an experience design agency. Many more people know him as a writer. He’s been writing for 50+ years and has published four books based on his long-running newspaper columns. 

Talent drives passion. As then passion expands and deepens talent. The two sink and swim together.

As someone who has achieved longevity, what can you tell those of us who are midway in our careers?

Don’t recycle your past successes. Work should always be a new challenge. Try new clients who haven’t heard of your awards. 

ⓕⓞⓞⓛ

Lisa Wallin is senior editor at the Tokyo Weekender and a travel consultant for local government and businesses in Japan. 

I think talent is important but without the drive (or passion) to continuously improve, then a person will seldom excel. I strongly believe that it's the passion that will get you where you need to be — talent may help you get your foot in the door, but it's not enough on its own.

And thank you, Lisa, for looping Foolish Careers into this conversation about expanding a career beyond your current specialty, initiated by another Japan-based travel writer Rob Goss. (Welcome, Rob!)

Several experienced writers shared how they did it. It’s a useful thread to understand the importance of having a niche and the investment in time and resources needed for such a pivot. 

robgosswriter

A post shared by Rob Goss | Travel Writer (@robgosswriter)

ⓕⓞⓞⓛ

Dan Matutina is an award-winning designer and editorial illustrator whose work has appeared in Wired, Fast Company and The Wall Street Journal. He is the founder of Plus63 and partner at Hydra Design Group.

When he was starting out, Dan says “I didn’t have the skill to match my passion.”

At that time, I was very passionate about design and illustration, but even if I was very passionate about it I didn't have the necessary skills to produce and execute things that I wanted to do or imagined. Passion is a good fuel. But fuel just makes a machine move, you still need to be able to control it. Even at this stage of my career, I don't think we always overcome that. There are always new skills and new knowledge to learn.

Enjoy this mini virtual studio tour on Dan’s Instagram, entitled Objects I Miss.

ⓕⓞⓞⓛ

Wayne Ree is the author of the short story collection Tales From A Tiny Room and co-creator of the narrative podcast Ghost Maps. As an advertising copywriter, he went freelance a year ago because “I wanted to work on projects I believed in, or at least collaborators whose work I admire.” He explains why he’s able to be picky in this thread. 

Not only do I think passion is more important, but I personally don't even like the amount of value placed on talent! Talent, even baseline talent, implies that a natural aptitude towards something is important, when what's really important is how you nurture that talent.

Nurturing works for someone without an innate ability too. Sure, maybe it'll take longer and more practice, but that lack of talent doesn't disqualify someone from being good at something. Placing an importance on talent tends to overshadow that hard work that someone has to put in to get good—and, in creative endeavours, hard work is almost always fuelled by passion.

Wayne has a new project, the comic book Work-Life Balance in collaboration with Benjamin Chee, where they ask the question: “How do the supernatural cope with the super mundane daily grind?” It will be published by Difference Engine in 2022. Congrats, Wayne! 

ⓕⓞⓞⓛ

Shaz Hassan is an independent filmmaker and co-author of the Stickerbomb series.

Shaz weighs in at 60-40. Listen to his response on our Instagram👇🏽

foolishcareers

A post shared by Foolish Careers (@foolishcareers)

Go to Shaz’s interview: Every creator needs a scene

ⓕⓞⓞⓛ

Kristine Fonacier is a writer, editor and entrepreneur.

“A lot of people mistake proficiency in English as the end all and be all of writing talent. It is not.” She explains here:

foolishcareers

A post shared by Foolish Careers (@foolishcareers)

Go to Kristine’s interview: Giving up rock-and-roll journalism to recalibrate a writing career

ⓕⓞⓞⓛ

Gerald Lu is a sommelier and current chair of the Sommelier Association of Singapore.

In a Singaporean context: The talent pool got no pool, bro. There's very little people to benchmark yourself to. And you don't even know how to benchmark. So I always say at the start, talent is not important.

I started off at $1,250 and my friends were starting out at $2,800 in a junior level position at a bank. And here you are grinding like crazy. I'm not saying my friends don't grind like crazy, they also grind like crazy, but at least they got money to spend on the weekends.

So definitely, definitely, without a shadow of a doubt for me, passion. Not just because you like the product, but because you have so many bad days, and so many moments that you will feel, why the hell do I put myself through this?

That's where the passion part kicks in. Because I love this thing. I wake up because I want to, not because I have to. And then as you go on, you realize, maybe you have some talent, maybe, maybe. Yeah, actually I'm able to pick out flavors quite quickly. Not bad, I can memorize things quite well. I think customers seem to enjoy what I pick. 

We’re featuring Gerald in an upcoming issue of Foolish Careers. If you haven’t yet, subscribe here to get every issue, free.

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Talent or passion: which matters more to you? Add your view to this thread.

Further reading for fellow nerds: The Practice by Seth Godin

Seth Godin has been my Yoda since he wrote Permission Marketing in 1999. Last year he wrote The Practice to help artists, writers and entrepreneurs commit to putting their best work out into the world. “Creative work doesn’t come with a guarantee, but there is a pattern to who succeeds and who doesn’t. And engaging in the constant practice of its pursuit is the best way forward.” 

Seth says this about passion:

Once you decide to trust your self, you will have found your passion. You’re not born with it, and you don’t have just one passion. It’s not domain-specific: it’s a choice.

Our passion is simply the work we’ve trusted ourselves to do.

This is worth deconstructing, because the strategy of “seeking your calling” gives you a marvelous place to hide.

After all, who wants to do difficult work that doesn’t fulfill us? Who wants to commit to a journey before we know it’s what we were meant to do?

The trap is this: only after we do the difficult work does it become our calling. Only after we trust the process does it become our passion.

“Do what you love” is for amateurs.

“Love what you do” is the mantra for professionals.

What did you think of this issue?

👍 Do this again

👎 Stick to the interviews

Have you ever been told: “You should get a more sensible career"? I’m Timi, and each week we interview a storyteller, artist or creative entrepreneur in Asia who ignored this advice to pursue a creative career. They show us how they paved their own path and dealt with unmitigated failures on their way to building a unique and singular foolish career.

The goal with each story: zero generic fluff. 

If you’re not yet a subscriber, you have great timing! This is only Issue #4 and I’d love for you to be an early reader. Sign up, it’s free.👇

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INTERVIEW: Why every creator needs their scene

By age 30, Shaz Hassan had several significant projects under his belt. His London-based production firm Studio Rarekind, cofounded with Ryo Sanada, had produced and sold three independent films, “Scratching The Surface” about Japanese hip hop culture, “Rackgaki” on Japanese graffiti art, and “Soka Afrika” documenting human trafficking in football.

They also authored two books on graffiti art in Asia which led to a new project, Stickerbomb, a series of sticker books curating street art from around the world.

These projects established Studio Rarekind’s reputation as a creative studio plugged into contemporary culture and attracted projects in sports, music and art. 

Not bad for someone who started out as video paparazzi doorstepping Justin Timberlake as he came out of a club.

The day after he submitted the hard drive containing Soka Africa, Shaz got on a plane to Southeast Asia “and basically never left.” He lived and worked in Siem Reap, Jakarta, Bangkok and Singapore for the next decade. 

Shaz had come up as part of the street art and DJ scenes in Brighton and then London’s East End, which nourished Studio Rarekind creatively. Coming to Southeast Asia, he sought new creative scenes and found pockets of it in Jakarta, Bangkok and around the region. 

Moving to Singapore to “get serious,” Shaz struggled to find a scene that synced with Studio Rarekind’s edgy vibe. While they won great projects with advertising clients like Nike and Netflix, it pulled them away from making the films they loved. (It maps to the 5-year gap in Shaz’s IMDB page.)

“I was out drinking one evening with another agency and I realized that what we were creating was essentially what they have. It set off a trigger in my head: Wow, I don't want what they have. I never wanted that in my life. What am I doing?” 

In this interview, Shaz talks about how Studio Rarekind built a culturally-relevant body of work, the decision to close down the studio in Singapore, and why every creator has a “therapy piece.” 

🎧 Shaz is an opinionated, entertaining guy — listen to our conversation.

Here are the things that stood out for me:

1. Be your own first commission

It’s hard to get seen when you’re new on the scene. Making work and showing it is the best way in. Shaz and Ryo did this by making their first film, “Scratching The Surface,” a self-funded documentary about hip hop in Japan.

The original plan was to do a film on hip hop in London, but Ryo (who is half Japanese), ran the numbers and worked out it was cheaper to fly to Japan and make a film there than it was to hire the equipment and do it in London.

They went a step further by selling it to a respectable French TV program. That’s how they learned there was money in this kind of work. Then people started contacting them about projects, so setting up a studio was a natural step: “Hold on. We just do what we want to do, and people ask us to do jobs. Why stay in a job?”

Creative production is a crowded marketplace, and this project gave Studio Rarekind their differentiation early on, for format (documentary style) and topic (contemporary culture). 

2. The value of being part of a scene

There’s a long-accepted stereotype of the creator or artist as a lone genius. In reality, creativity needs to feed off people and environments. 

Music producer and artist Brian Eno created a word for this: scenius. “It's not individuals who create things, it's scenes – a community of like-minded peers. Genius is individual, scenius is communal."

If you want to geek out on this, watch this lecture by Brian Eno where he illustrates the difference. Forward to the 23-minute mark.

When a creator finds their scene, whatever its size, they can be inspired to produce their best work. Think about craft communities, Silicon Valley, writing workshops.

Immersed in the world of graffiti art, Shaz and Ryo wanted to get their next project funded. “We spoke to a lot of production companies, broadcasters. We're in our mid-twenties, so they're like, whatever, whatever.” 

Meanwhile, they were inspired by a book + film product released by an art book publisher, and decided to change tack. “We could do the film and just do a book with it. Really easy. So we reeled off 10 emails to every single publisher in London. Three, four of them got back to me.” 

They signed with Laurence King, then a fledgling book publisher focused on the creative arts, and produced two books and films on graffiti art: Rackgaki about street art in Japan, followed by Grafitti Asia.

This led to a new idea, Stickerbomb, a book series featuring street art as peel-off stickers, which is now on its 12th title. This ability to curate is only possible because they stay engaged in that community. 

3. Sometimes, the audience just ain’t buying what you’re selling

Once Stickerbomb worked, they tried to expand it in various ways: fashion, stock imagery, art, events. 

“It's quite a weird one, Stickerbomb, because every time we tried to monetize it in other ways, it didn’t work. It works well as a collection of images presented in a book format for people to buy in a shop. That's it. The audience likes this. This is what they've always bought. And you can try X, Y, and Z, but this is what they want.” 

Regardless, it's a creative asset that pays its way. 

“Every now and then, when we've had a shit few months, it's okay because we might get a royalty check through, that's pretty cool. That just keeps us going.”

4. Relevant work opens all sorts of doors

Their film Soka Afrika told the story of human trafficking in professional football. They immersed in the world of sport and kicked off work with brands like Adidas and Nike who liked their knowledge of football culture. “I realized, wow, we can make a good living doing what we love, hanging around with football players.”

It also led to a second film, Foul Play, about match-fixing in professional football, which follows the story of an English football coach parachuted in to save an Indonesian football team and discovers that the best team doesn’t necessarily win.

“Foul Play did a lot better than I thought it would. It got bought by Amazon in the US, iFlix in Asia and a few local broadcasters across Europe. The sheer fact that I managed to prove I can come up with an idea, make it and get it sold and distributed the whole way through pretty much by myself was great.” 

5. Make sure you can articulate why you’re doing what you’re doing 

While they shot projects all over the region — Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok, Seoul — the work was frequently commissioned out of Singapore. Shaz visited the city frequently to meet with clients.

After three years in Jakarta and Bangkok, Shaz “felt the need to go serious,” so he set up shop in Singapore. SRK was unique in town for its vibe and links to various creative scenes. They won projects based on this and they were growing. 

There was only one problem: Working in the advertising world — making things for other people rather than for themselves — was never what Shaz wanted.

“Even if I push and play it out, even with the most massive success, I was just not going to be happy at all with where I was going. At all.”

Shaz found that the daily stress of jobs, payroll, taxes (which was fine when it was for his films) just wasn’t worth it. Plus he didn’t like some of the people he had hired. “We had a new generation of staff coming to the office. They're not bad at their jobs. Just didn't like them as humans and didn't like them as workers. When you start hiring people you don't like, something's up. I might have fucked up here. And that is when you realize, sometimes a business is faster than you.” 

So he made the decision to close down a creative business that had a promising commercial future. To do this, Shaz revisited his mission and vision. 

“When you were younger, putting together your mission documents and your vision documents and what the business should be like, you never really realized why it's important — until shit hits the fan and it's too late and you realize, Oh, that's why I have a mission. And that's why I have a vision.” 

Your mission and vision don’t have to be complicated. “Right now, our mission is just to make relevant pieces of work again. The work we were making previously, whether it be politicized work about human rights, like Soka Africa, or about music scenes, like bassweight or street art and graffiti, it was very relevant. And I think that's why they did well and sold well.”

6. Scenes can’t be manufactured

During this time, Shaz was also working on a passion project, Soi Music TV, a platform documenting urban music scenes emerging throughout Southeast Asia. They released two music videos every week for two years and brought a community together, but bumped up against the hyperlocal nature of music scenes in the region.

“I love that project. I look back on my time in Singapore, that's what I should have pushed for additional funding to explode. We needed help. If I was in the UK or the US, or maybe other parts of Asia, I would have got the help. Whereas in Singapore, there just isn't a scene to tap into, to take energy from.”

Some of the artists featured in Soi Music are now signed to labels.

7. Every creator has a therapy piece

It was an unplanned move to Seattle — a literal change of scene — that rekindled Shaz’s love for film and art and creativity.

Walking through the city, Shaz easily worked out who the graffiti artists were, and came up with a concept for another film, Sodo Express. And he was able to meet people who were up for collaboration.

“I’d just fresh come into Seattle. I'm just this one dude. And I just start meeting people and then bang, on Instagram, someone contacts me. ‘You did this, you live in Seattle. What are you doing here? Do you want to have a coffee?’ And he became the lead actor on my film. And then suddenly I'm making a film in some crazy parts of Seattle.”

sodoexpress

A post shared by Sodo Expreess (@sodoexpress)

He calls Sodo Express his “therapy piece.”

“I think a lot of creatives, artists, writers have therapy pieces, because they'll finish one phase of their life and then they'll get out a lot of emotion, a lot of energy, in one piece.”

Sodo Express is now in post-production and the plan is to distribute to film festivals and online. Shaz’s ambitions for it are very focused: “My only desire for it is for the right so-called people to see it. The commissioners, other production houses. So I don't care if a thousand people see it but those thousand people are good people who give a damn.”

Shaz is on LinkedIn and Instagram. Studio Rarekind is at thesrk.com. Stickerbomb is at stickerbombworld.com and Instagram.

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Upcoming interviews:

• How to promote your first novel during a pandemic

• Learning to be a sommelier using Wine For Dummies

• Using LinkedIn like a human: tips from a music composer

Previous stories:

• How (and why) a self-taught cheesemaker built a dairy farm from scratch

• Creating a Netflix-worthy comic book despite a demanding day job

• Giving up rock-and-roll journalism to recalibrate a writing career

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I’m glad you enjoyed last week’s story about chef Rachel Elman O’Shea and the Laos Buffalo Dairy. It turns out we may have a Venn diagram overlap of Like-Minded Creatives X Cheese Obsessives.

Like Ben, who has a background in Ancient Greek and Mechanical Engineering, and (more relevant to this post) makes his own ricotta and was worried about cheese when he moved from Italy to Asia:

I discovered Laos Buffalo Dairy about 3 years ago when moving to Macau. I was terrified that I was going from Italy to the middle of nowhere (cheese-wise). I already made my own pasta, bread, ravioli, pizza... but the foreboding of not having access to cheese made me terrified. I was trying to find ways to make it at home effectively in this climate; they were the only ones close. One of these days I look forward to visiting these awesome ladies and tasting their products!

That’s it for this week. Don’t forget to respond to the question: Passion or Talent? Post your thoughts here.

QUICK POLL: What do you think of the newsletter? 

🔥 It's great! ~ 👍🏼It's good. ~ 😐 Meh. ~ 🤷🏻‍♀️ I've heard this all before.

In your own career, which one matters more?

Personally, I hate the overuse of the word passion (with a passion). But the more interviews we do the more I realize everyone has a different perspective, and it’s pretty much a tie.

So I’m asking you, Foolish readers: Passion over talent, or vice versa? Post your thoughts below.

Here’s a post summarizing what creators have said so far.

Photo by Bambi Corro on Unsplash

Have you ever been told: “You should get a more sensible career"? I’m Timi, and each week we interview a storyteller, artist or creative entrepreneur in Asia who ignored this advice to pursue a creative career. They show us how they paved their own path and dealt with unmitigated failures on their way to building a unique and singular foolish career.

The goal with each story: zero generic fluff. 

If you’re not yet a subscriber, you have great timing! This is only Issue #3 and I’d love for you to be an early reader. Sign up, it’s free.👇

Subscribe now

Greetings for the Year of the Metal Ox, and/or Valentine’s Day.

My email software is warning me that this email is near the length where Gmail cuts it off. I do worry they’re long, but having the full story in the email seems convenient for most people. What do you think?

👍 I'm fine with it. ~ 👎 Too long.

~Timi

INTERVIEW: How (and why) a self-taught cheesemaker built the first buffalo dairy farm in Laos

What if you had to explain the concept of a gallery, then build one, before you could present your art? What if a creator had to build YouTube or TikTok before they could produce their first video? 99.999999% of us would never get started. 

And what if you craved cheese while living in the poorest country in Southeast Asia, where milk isn’t part of the diet and farmers didn’t know they could milk their buffalo? 

If you’re the founders of Laos Buffalo Dairy, you do it all from scratch: build the dairy, convince farmers to rent you their buffalo, grow the grass the buffalo was going to eat, set up the breeding program to improve genetics, import the equipment. And of course, make the cheese -- and yogurt and ice cream and cheesecake.

“We wanted a midlife crisis with a purpose, not a Porsche,” says cofounder Rachel Elman O’Shea. “The Porsche would’ve been cheaper.”  

Rachel is a trained chef. With her co-founder Susie Martin, a seasoned corporate executive, they decided to deal with their midlife crises by moving from Singapore to Luang Prabang, the Lao city known for its monks and languid life along the Mekong. The plan was to build a hotel, sell it, then figure out “the cheese thing” afterward. 

But a farmer was willing to lend them his buffalo for the cheese experiment. Before they knew it, they were learning to milk buffalo and trying (and failing) to make buffalo mozzarella.  

Listen to Rachel tell her story 🎧 

Lessons for building a creative venture from scratch

1. Identify your riskiest assumptions, and validate those first.

Will the Lao swamp buffalo give milk? And can the milk be made into mozzarella? It’s easy to assume the answer to both questions is yes, but the local breed had subpar genetics so nobody knew what to expect. Also, Rachel had never made cheese before. And the founders were going to sell their homes to fund this new business, so it had to be de-risked.

By sheer coincidence, a tourist staying at their guesthouse had 25 years of dairy experience. She wrote down directions for how to milk a buffalo, and armed with a Lao translation, the founders walked up to their first herd, not knowing how the animals would respond. 

As it turned out, buffalo are like big puppy dogs. The humans were quickly surrounded by buffalo calmly looking them up and down. With the help of YouTube videos, they worked with the farmer, Mr. Eh, and his wife, on milking them. They got very little milk, but it was a start, and a six-week trial was underway.

“Every three to four days, I would have enough milk to make cheese, and cry,” Rachel says. “There was a lot of crying going on during this time because you cannot find buffalo milk cheese recipes online. Very few people make it, and no one shares the recipes. I had to use cow milk recipes and the compositions of the milk were not the same. Not being a chemist, I was just guessing.”

With the six-week deadline looming, Rachel emailed 15 dairies worldwide. “I said, ‘We're this tiny little place in the middle of nowhere. We're trying to help the local community by giving farmers an extra income stream. And in the process, I want cheese. Please help me with the recipe. It's not working.’”

She received just one response, from a cheesemaker at Shaw River Dairy in Australia, who shared her recipe with a warning that the different fat levels would change how the ingredients react. This information was enough for Rachel. “I started with her recipe and it got me much closer and I adjusted again. And finally, we had a perfect little ball of mozzarella.” 

2. Identify and work with your high-expectation customers first. 

What is a high-expectation customer? This term was coined by Julie Supan, a branding expert who crafted the customer positioning for YouTube and Airbnb in their earliest days. 

“The high-expectation customer (HXC) is the most discerning person within your target demographic. It’s someone who will acknowledge—and enjoy—your product or service for its greatest benefit. The HXC needs to be a person who others aspire to emulate because they see them as clever, judicious and insightful. If your product exceeds their expectations, it can meet everyone else’s.” 

Rachel’s HXC for mozzarella was, without a doubt, Somsack Sengta, the Lao-born, Swiss-trained chef and owner of Blue Lagoon Restaurant, a Luang Prabang institution. 

For the Italian mozzarella he used in his restaurant, Somsack was already resorting to hand-carrying the product from Thailand or Singapore, an expensive and time-consuming arrangement, just to avoid sub-optimal shipping conditions. To go from that to a supplier up the road? He gave Rachel feedback for a year, then finally placed his first order.

On the supply side, they needed to convince farmers that their proposition wasn’t too good to be true. In Laos, a farmer’s buffalo is their bank account. Each is worth 12 million kip (US$1,200), roughly the average annual salary. 

During their information sessions with farmers, Rachel described the pushback: “You mean you want me to give you my buffalo? You're going to take my buffalo to your farm. You're going to feed her. You're going to vaccinate her. You're going to take care of her. You're going to help when she has a baby, you're going to take care of the baby. You're going to vaccinate the baby. Then when you start to milk her, you're going to pay me for the milk. And then you're going to give me back my buffalo and the baby and money. What's wrong with you people?” 

Enter Somlit, the chief of Thinkeo Village. He understood how this venture could become a new income stream for his community and was willing to rent them his buffalo for the six-month milking season. Farmers who came to the new dairy could see how well his buffalo was doing. “Look at how fat they are compared to your buffalo,” Rachel would say on these tours, “because these buffalo are getting fed a proper diet and your buffalo are scratching for food because it's the dry season.”

3. Work with the community, not just for them.

The original plan did not include housing the buffalo during milking season or becoming part of a national breeding initiative. They were just supposed to pay the farmers for the milk. But these programs were necessary to gain the community’s trust. It wasn’t uncommon for NGOs and charities to show up for a few years then move on to the next thing. 

The farm’s investment in a breeding program tipped farmers over. “Outside of our farm, 50% of the calves die before six months. Inside our farm it's less than 5%. That's a big difference when this is your bank account we're talking about. It took about 18 months for the babies to turn around, moms to get pregnant again with better genetics, go off, have another baby. And farmers finally started saying, you know what? This is a really good deal. I'm getting in on it.”

They’ve also started training Village Champions to teach farther-flung villages how to use and care for their buffalo. They can then sell their milk to the dairy, plus it helps with another challenge: child malnutrition. In Laos, 44% of children are chronically malnourished before the age of two. By age five, it's almost 50%.

Rachel explains: “All they need to do is milk their buffalo, take 500ml of milk and put it in the rice cook pot in the morning. They will effectively pasteurize it by boiling it. And they will impart the nutrition from the milk to the rice to their entire families. So they can work on the malnourishment problem within their villages before anybody ever gets truly very sick.” 

Working with the Department of Health, children are weighed and measured on a regular basis. As the kids grow, they’ll be able to track how this milk is contributing to better nutrition.

4. Nurture multiple opportunities 

Alongside supplying dairy products to the luxury hotels and restaurants in Luang Prabang and Vientiane, the farm welcomes tourists for a day out petting buffalo and eating lemongrass-flavored ice cream. Until the pandemic hit, Rachel says, “We were looking at becoming sustainable all-in and possibly making a little bit of a profit.”

Laos closed its borders early to fight COVID-19, and the country has done well, with only 45 cases and no deaths. Tourism revenue, however, has evaporated. They’ve been able to keep the farm open and retain staff on slightly lower salaries, and are focused on growing non-tourism revenue.

One of these opportunities is supplying cheese to Japan. It’s a relationship that started three years ago when a buyer visited the farm looking for new products to bring to Japanese consumers. The dairy has shipped 300 kilograms of cheese to Tokyo over the last two years, and their cheese will be presented at the massive FOODEX trade show in Chiba, Japan in March 2021. 

With the help of volunteer organization Crossfields, their website has been translated into Japanese and their product will be promoted on Japanese social media. 

“We're in the process of trying to raise funds to expand equipment. If we can get that up and running where we're delivering two tons of cheese to Japan every month, that's 163 buffalo that need milking every month.”

5. Have somebody in your corner 

Rachel describes her co-founder Susie Martin as “a superhero in business terms.” A seasoned executive, Susie lived in Burma and Jakarta then moved to Singapore to run the Asia-Pacific business for Servcorp. And she shared Rachel’s cheese obsession -- she even named her daughter Brie. 

While Rachel is in charge of production and marketing, Susie leads business development and fundraising, and is adept at navigating bureaucracy. Ask her for tips on getting a governor’s signature on a permit. She had to get nine.

Rachel had Susie to lean on in the dark days of failed mozzarella. “I would try and make cheese, and it would fail, and I would cry, and Susie would say, ‘Well, we can sell it as mozzarella crumble. It still tastes good. It'll be great in a salad,’ which of course would make me laugh. And then I'd try again.” 

This all started with a personal need for cheese. With creativity, grit and resilience, it has scaled as a purpose-driven enterprise. Rachel’s view: “You have to have somebody in your corner, like Susie, who can see outside the box and see how you can make something work when it seems like everybody's trying to tear it down, and find another way to keep going.” 

Get updates on Laos Buffalo Dairy through their website, newsletter, Facebook and Instagram.  

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Upcoming interviews:

• An indie filmmaker’s diverse revenue streams 

• Using LinkedIn like a human: tips from a music composer

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• Creating a Netflix-worthy comic book despite a demanding day job

• Giving up rock-and-roll journalism to recalibrate a writing career

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Where we highlight the things creators say and do. I want to feature as many of you as possible, so introduce yourself and any projects in this thread.

Thank you to reader Alexandra Seno for this Chinese New Year greeting, a special downloadable and printable amabie (pronounced ah-mah-bee-ey). Alex is an arts administrator with Asia Art Archive and an art critic. The amabie was reimagined by Charlotte Mui, a member of the AAA library team who has an art practice outside of the office.

Why the amabie, Alex?

This Japanese supernatural being emerged from the sea near Kumamoto [in the 19th century] and predicted a pandemic, instructing people to draw and pass around its likeness to defend against disease, and promising good harvests to come.

To us in Hong Kong at AAA, it also resembles Lo Ting, the mythical part-human, part-fish ancestor to the first settlers of our hometown. Long-lost magical maritime cousins, perhaps?

Please accept this heartfelt wish for positive energy for the year ahead, and as a timeless celebration of the healing power of art.

The amabie has gone viral in Japan. The Health Ministry uses it in COVID-19 communications, and people are sharing images online, on fabric, and in food.

Quick Poll: What do you think of the newsletter? 

🔥 It's great! ~ 👍🏼 It's good. ~ 😐 Meh. ~ 🤷🏻‍♀️ I've heard this all before.

Have you ever been told: “You should get a more sensible career"? I’m Timi, and each week we interview a storyteller, artist or creative entrepreneur in Asia who ignored this advice to pursue a creative career. They show us how they paved their own path and dealt with unmitigated failures on their way to building a unique and singular foolish career.

The goal with each story: zero generic fluff. 

If you’re not yet a subscriber, you have great timing! This is only Issue #2 and I’d love for you to be an early reader. Sign up, it’s free.👇

Subscribe now

How did Week 1 go?

The best thing, hands down, has been discovering interesting people. Like this one: Marla Darwin is a design studio owner, craft beer brewer and millennial parenting columnist. It’s typical of the multi-hyphenate nature of this group. Pooja Pande said it best in the comments: “So many coolios here.” Her company’s news network, Khabar Lahariya, is a newsroom in northern India run by Dalit women.

Check out your fellow readers the Introductions Thread — and take a minute to introduce yourself.

A lot of you tell stories, or aspire to, so I thought this week was an excellent time to feature a storyteller who’s made some unconventional choices to keep growing in her career. Kristine Fonacier is a seasoned editor who has helped countless writers get their stories into shape, including mine.

I wasn’t planning to have two Filipino creators in a row but don’t worry, we’re making our way through the region. The editorial calendar is a fun game of Diversity Jenga that reflects us and where we are in the world.

Timi

INTERVIEW: Swapping rock-and-roll journalism for volunteer work to recalibrate a writing career

Journalist and editor Kristine Fonacier launched her writing career in the golden age of magazines, and freelancing as a music journalist quickly took off. Ten years in, she found herself questioning her work’s relevance.

“I was doing rock-and-roll journalism. After your hundredth party, you begin to wonder if you’re really contributing anything to society.”

This triggered a career recalibration that included 18 months of volunteer work in Guyana, an experience that informed her decisions when she came back to the publishing world and went on to build a body of work covering business, politics, culture, and travel. 

As editor-in-chief of Esquire Philippines (the first female editor in the title’s 80-year history), Kristine led an editorial shift that placed fully-clothed middle-aged women on the cover and called out misogyny in its pages. She helped the country’s youngest billionaire write his first book. Then out of a desire to tell travel stories about the Philippines that were not listicles about white-sand beaches, she co-founded Grid Magazine, an independent title still running today. She is currently editor-in-chief of travel title Smile Magazine.

In this interview, Kristine spells out the traits that helped her build a versatile writing career, how to turn a passion project into a sustainable business, and why she looks for attitude over talent when hiring writers.  

Listen to Kristine tell her story in her own words 🎧 

Here are some highlights:

1. Show up like a professional from day one 

When she started out, Kristine set a personal rule: she said yes to every assignment. “I said to myself, just keep doing the work. Turn things in on time, turn in a lot of things on time, and be unassailable, go the extra mile, do the extra research.”

This part of the job was not about being a talented wordsmith (although she is). It was about developing curiosity. “You have to be interested in everybody's story. This speaks to the kind of person you are, not just to the kind of writer you are.”

It meant doing things as simple as showing up without knowing if there was a guaranteed story. “Sometimes it's going to be interviews with people you don't want to do right now. But you really never know where that's going to lead. Some of the best stories I’ve ever had come from connections made years before.”

Showing up also helps cultivate access, an edge that has allowed Kristine to find original stories, whether it’s an inside look at the over-the-top lifestyle of a provincial governor or clocking new freediving records with the Sama fisherfolk, an indigenous community in the southern Philippines wary of outsiders. 

The freediver story, Water Breathers, was three to four years in the making. “I first went to an island to write about a specific resort, made friends with some resort owners, the resort owners invited me to take freediving lessons with this guy, this guy called me up two years later to say, ‘Hey, I'm doing this cool thing, do you want to come?’ And I did. I showed up, there was no story there yet. I showed up and that story got written maybe one, two years later.” 

2. Proactively confront your career crossroads

After a ten-year run covering music and lifestyle for every title imaginable, Kristine took a step back to ask herself if she was doing what she set out to do. She describes this period as a crisis of faith. “I think all professionals, at one point, if their work matters, they step back and think, am I doing what I set out to do? I wanted to know if communications work was contributing to the betterment of society.”

So she exchanged lifestyle journalism for volunteer work. Kristine spent 18 months working as a disability communications advisor in Guyana, a job she found through Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). The experience gave her a different perspective on the role of communications in society.

“It taught me the importance of access, why we must keep telling stories outside of the mainstream, why we must keep servicing the people on the sidelines. I heartily recommend a mid-career volunteering stint to everyone. It changes you in ways that you can't foresee.” 

3. Hold the line on quality storytelling

Kristine and her team at Esquire used lifestyle features to show readers how politicians and public figures lived. This wasn't always well-received, especially with subjects intent on controlling their image. In the Philippines, this can place a writer in real danger and have ramifications for the publication. 

“We covered all kinds of people, including unsavory characters. We covered gangsters. We covered people with questionable wealth, and it was always done with a nod and a wink. But we tell the story as it is because it's important to cast a light on what their lives are like and let people base their judgments on that. Because if we don't keep putting those people in the limelight, we will forget, then they can get away with their evil in the darkness.”

4. To make a creative project sustainable, build a runway

Grid Magazine is “a love letter to the Philippines.” Co-founded by Kristine with photographers Francisco Guerrero and Sonny Thakur, and creative director Nachi Ugarte, it came out of their desire to tell culture, travel and adventure stories that never found space in mainstream media. 

Their ambition included creating a fair and equitable marketplace for creative work and paying creators what they’re worth. Kristine says, “Having been freelancers ourselves, we knew the struggle. And we knew that we weren't going to screw other people the way we were screwed.”

To achieve all this, they had to approach Grid not as a hobby, or even a project for nights and weekends, but as a business. The founders wrote a business plan and raised investment. 

Meanwhile, Kristine knew that developing the new magazine’s voice was going to take time — years, really — so in the two years between the idea and the funding, she built her own personal finances up so she could live off it until Grid got to a stage where the startup could pay her. 

Having this runway meant Grid had time to develop its editorial voice, set up its systems, train writers and photographers on the atypical stories they were looking for, and test sponsorship. Once they got the hang of this in print, Grid started producing short documentary videos and relaunched their website. Stuck at home during the pandemic, they launched a podcast. 

“It was a gamble. We weren't sure we were going to make a lot of money. It is definitely an achievement that it's been able to survive so many years. And it's still telling the stories that we want to tell.”

One point of pride: As Grid Magazine was figuring out how to deliver a relevant issue during COVID, the current team led by General Manager Kimi Villa-Real tested a new revenue model, the single-issue sponsorship. One Day In The Philippines was released while the country was in lockdown, sponsored by a telecom company. For Kristine, who has worked with large publishers in the midst of digital transformation, seeing this agility was a refreshing change.

5. For career longevity, it’s attitude over talent 

Above a certain talent baseline, the traits that make a writer stand out are things everyone can hone in themselves:

Going above and beyond to produce a story

“As an editor, I can always help you shape a story, but I need somebody who knows how to find what makes a place or a person or a thing unique, and is able to tell that entire narrative very well.”

Continuous learning 

“A good story looks like it sprung fully formed from the forehead of the writer, but the truth is there's a lot of work that goes into that. There's a lot of education, even a lot of training. And then there's the research that goes into the piece and a lot of that doesn't even show on the page. And it's a lot of physical work too.”

Reading the publication you want to write for (really) 

“What drives me up the wall are writers who don't think that they need any more training. And writers who don't read. Those exist. I still get a lot of queries from people who say I've never read your magazine, but I think I can write for it. It just drives me crazy.” 

6. Should you have a fallback?

It doesn’t hurt. “You look around, you see how much anyone in a corporate job makes. And you really have to wonder, why am I in this? If I had a child who asked me if they should, I would say, perhaps you can also develop a career in law as a fallback.”

On the other hand, it never feels like a job. “Writing is the way we process things, and this is the way we think about life. So there's no off switch for that. I can't imagine how I would cope with reality, without reading or writing.”

Kristine is on LinkedIn and Instagram. Grid Magazine is at gridmagazine.ph, Spotify and Instagram where they invite photographers to do account takeovers. 

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Upcoming Interviews

— An indie filmmaker’s diverse revenue streams 

— Using LinkedIn like a human: tips from a music composer

— How a chef pivoted their business during COVID to support farmers

— If you missed the first story: Creating a Netflix-worthy comic book despite a demanding day job

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Where we highlight the things creators say and do. I want to feature as many of you as possible, so introduce yourself in this thread, include links to your work so we can check it out, or just tell us what’s on your mind.

To write about travel is to write about place and to do that today means stories about sustainability, disappearing cultures, and climate change. It reminds me of the work of Jittrapon Kaicome, a photojournalist from Chiang Mai whose projects focus on under-reported stories in the Mekong region.

Bose, as we call him, decided to document the air pollution crisis in Northern Thailand in 2014. National Geographic Thailand published his photographs, and he has since been building a body of work that has been featured in Le Monde, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Channel News Asia and many more.

This is why Bose does his work:

Zooming in on trans-boundary matters in the Mekong region will show how people's lives and activities are connected to the rest of the world. These truly are the stories of my time.

Visit Bose’ website and Instagram for photography and tearsheets. He is looking for someone who can professionally comment on his work or be a guide through the industry, so if you think you can do that, let me know and I’ll make intros.

Thank you for reading. If you know of a colleague or collaborator who will find this useful, please forward this along.

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Quick Poll: What do you think of the newsletter? 

🔥 It's great!
👍🏼 It's good.
😐 Meh.
🤷🏻‍♀️ I've heard this all before.

This is for you, the people who were told, “You should get a more sensible career,” then ignored that advice to pursue a creative career instead. 

What you won’t get: Generic advice to “follow your bliss.” I like bliss as much as the next person. I just don’t think it’s useful career or business advice. More about why here.

Thank you for the messages of support, they mean a lot. My inbox and social feeds have gone nuts in the last 48 hours. With each ping delivering a new subscriber, it’s clear that you are a diverse set.

If you’re not a subscriber, you have great timing! I’d love for you to be an early reader. Consider subscribing, it’s free.👇

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And if you’re up for it, introduce yourself on this thread. Many creators have already introduced themselves! You are writers, filmmakers, journalists, photographers, fictionists, musicians, designers, artists, copywriters, marketers, advertising people. Folks in the culinary arts. Owners of creative businesses. Educators. Coaches and mentors. A bunch of you have podcasts (of course). We have a researcher of Chinese science fiction and two creators who also work with bikes. Who knew these ven diagrams overlapped? The common denominator: nobody does just one thing. Your turn!

Have a read, then hit reply and tell me what you think. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Timi

INTERVIEW: How an ad executive wrote a comic book on his coffee break, then sold it to Netflix

While working long hours at an ad agency in Manila, Budjette Tan and his co-creator, artist Kajo Baldisimo, started writing the graphic novel Trese, featuring detective Alexandra Trese who solves crimes with the help of Filipino mythical creatures.

From its first print run of 30 copies, Trese found a fan base. Budjette and Kajo became fixtures at Komikon Philippines and Trese broke convention as the first graphic novel to win the country’s prestigious National Book Award.

Netflix acquired Trese in 2018, which led to the real dream fulfilled: the comic book now has an American publisher and is available to a US audience.

All this took “only” 15 years.  

In this interview, we learn about the attitudes and systems Budjette and Kajo devised so they could make time for creative work. Budjette also shares tactics for balancing creative work with a thriving advertising career as Executive Creative Director at MRM/McCann and now as Senior Brand Creative at LEGO. 

During our interview, Budjette’s generous nature and sense of humour came through. Listen to Budjette tell his story here 🎧  or search for Foolish Careers on your favorite podcast app.

9 tactics to keep a creative project alive despite a demanding day job

1. One creative project, one hour a day, for one month.

If it’s unrealistic to block out big chunks of time, find shorter, more manageable blocks. Budjette’s collaborator, Kajo Baldisimo, figured he could draw one page in one hour, so he blocked out his lunch breaks for a month. That’s 20 days to draw the story plus 10 days to add the word bubbles. The first Alexandra Trese detective case was completed a month later. 

At Komikon Philippines 2020, Kajo cheekily admitted, “I just promised I’d finish the pages, I didn’t promise the quality.” This willingness to avoid perfection also helped them get their first issue out. 

2. Budjette’s back-to-back notebook.

This sounds basic, but pen and paper remain a great tool for capturing ideas before they flit away. Budjette has a “back-to-back” notebook: he uses the front for campaign ideas and the back for Trese plots. He brought this notebook on coffee breaks. “If I’m writing an idea for an ad and I get stuck, sometimes my mind wanders and figures out the solution to the comic book.  So I go and fix that. And by the time I fixed the plot problem, I would have figured out how to fix the [ad].” 

3. Find your early distribution channels, no matter how small, and test interest.

Trese’s first publishing run was 30 copies, priced at thirty pesos (less than US$1) and displayed at a cash register of a single comic book store in Manila. “I was just thinking, maybe no one's going to buy this so let's make it really cheap, and people will feel okay if they didn't like it. But the amazing thing was, a week later I get a call from their store clerk who said, ‘We've run out of copies. Can you deliver more?’ And that started to happen week after week.”

At Komikon Philippines 2010, Budjette grabbed the opportunity to show the comic book to Neil Gaiman. Getting on Mr. Gaiman’s radar as a creator would unexpectedly prove helpful down the road.

In 2018, Budjette and Kajo ran an Indiegogo campaign, raising US$12,900 from 200 readers around the world. The readership was small, but it proved there was an international audience willing to pay for Trese. 

Seth Godin calls this your minimum viable audience. 

Stake out the smallest market you can imagine. The smallest market that can sustain you, the smallest market you can adequately serve. This goes against everything you learned in capitalism school, but in fact, it’s the simplest way to matter.

When you have your eyes firmly focused on the minimum viable audience, you will double down on all the changes you seek to make. Your quality, your story and your impact will all get better.

And then, ironically enough, the word will spread.

4. Give your work away.

As an experiment, Budjette uploaded the entire first issue of Trese to his blog and promoted it on the message boards of PinoyExchange. Friends said he would get pirated or lose sales. “But the complete opposite happened. I started to get emails from people saying, ‘I read your comic book, where can I buy it?’ There is a benefit to sharing your story and not be afraid of somebody stealing your idea. What makes you think your idea's worth stealing anyway? If you're really creative, you will come up with a better one.”

5. Use social media to engage with the community you choose to serve.

Budjette is on Twitter (@budjette), where he has 6,000 followers. It’s not a massive group, but it’s the right group of comic book lovers. Budjette is constantly spreading the word about new writers and responding to fans. So when someone tweeted author Neil Gaiman about writing a story featuring Filipino myths, everyone tagged Budjette and the Indiegogo campaign, which in turn got a boost from Neil himself.

6. Think with intention about what skills you can hone in your day job.

Aside from the practical need to earn a living, Budjette credits several aspects of his work ethic to his experience in advertising. 

Respect for the deadline: “The wonderful thing advertising taught me was to respect the deadline. There’s the typical mistaken notion of a newbie who says, ‘I am going to write the best comic book story ever, and I'm going to take my time perfecting it. And of course, that got me nowhere. When Kajo said, ‘Give me the script at the beginning of every month so that by the end of the month we'd have a comic book, that became a deadline to follow.” 

Compressing storylines: ”Writing a TV commercial is 30 seconds long. Break it down in terms of frames, that's actually like a 12-page comic book. Thinking in 30 seconds helped me to start editing storylines so by the time Kajo said, ‘Give me a 20-page comic book,’ it was already built-in.”

Telling a story that resonates universally: “Since LEGO is a global brand, there is now a big need to tell your story with fewer words. Of course, you can translate all of the dialogue and all your taglines, but to translate your campaign into 80 languages is an expense. So the challenge is: How can I come up with a story that addresses different needs without having to come up with 20 different variations of the storyline?”

7. Choose a partner who shares your vision.

As they pitched studios, many suggested giving Alexandra Trese a romantic leading man 🙄  Production partners Tanya Yuson and Shanty Harmayn of BASE Entertainment helped Budjette and Kajo say no to offers that weren’t right. “BASE would say, ‘If they will only invest so much, it's not going to be the best way to bring your vision to life. We have to wait for the right blend.’ And when the right door opened we were ready for it.”

8. Get into a collaborative mindset...

“There are many talented people out there who are not persistent enough and do not collaborate enough and are not problem solvers. You might be the most talented person in the room. But if you don't follow up, if you don't submit on time, if you don't know how to collaborate with your artist, writer, editor, publisher, then eventually people would rather not work with you.”

9. ...then simplify collaboration itself.

Text messaging is the main way Budjette and Kajo communicate. “I know some people who love sitting in front of each other. They're going to have beer or coffee and talk about things together. But for me and Kajo, it's always been mostly through email or messages. When I was in Manila the times we’d be in front of each other was at Komikon. While we're there signing or waiting for people to come by our desk, he just throws something up and says, ‘What do you think if we do this?’ And I'd say, ‘Okay, okay, I'll take note of it, I'll write that down.’ And eventually, those ideas would filter into the story.”

Budjette is on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Kajo is on Instagram where he posts redrawn panels of early Trese stories. The new redrawn edition of Trese Volume 1 is available where all good comic books are sold. 

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Context: Why did Netflix acquire a graphic novel from Southeast Asia? 

In short, the streaming wars. Netflix and Disney are competing for your household’s subscription dollars. From this CNBC report: “One of Netflix’s best bets in animation is not going straight at a competitor like Disney, but hitting Disney where the House of Mouse is weaker, and where there is high global demand. That leads to Japanese anime.” Netflix has 16 anime projects in the pipeline. Most of them, including Trese, come out in 2021.

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Budjette Tan, co-creator of the graphic novel Trese and advertising executive: Collaboration, selling to Netflix, and tactics for finding creative pockets of time

Kristine Fonacier, Esquire’s first female editor-in-chief: How swapping rock-and-roll journalism for volunteer work led to a more substantive writing career

Rachel Elman O’Shea, chef and co-founder of Laos Buffalo Dairy: What building from scratch really looks like, and what it will take to keep going post-COVID

Shaz Hassan, independent filmmaker and book author: The importance of being part of a scene

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