Herbert Lui’s Best of Books June newsletter
I found some great books this month, and I’m excited to share them with you!
Fat, Crazy, and Tired by Van Lathan Jr.
I first came across author Van Lathan’s work at a show he co-hosts, The Midnight Boys. (A parasocial relationship emerging from fandom!) I really enjoyed this book. I’m sure I bring a bias to the table from already being acquainted with his voice at the podcast; I found Lathan to be a great storyteller in this memoir format—insightful, witty, and personable.
Quotes:
On imperfection: Sometimes people don’t want to know the parts of them that aren’t perfect. It’s a vulnerable thing, and you’re afraid you’ll be disgusted.… The one day I think I have it all figured out, that same day I can think, Oh my God, I suck. That’s the thing that you start to appreciate when you really start to know yourself, when you really start to get into who you are.
On fault: Do you know what it means if you do something without knowing you’re doing it, every day, without fail? It means the outcome from what you’re doing isn’t your fault, even though you’re responsible.
IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT.
For a lot of people, this conclusion is hard to believe.
On shame: Shame is the number one driving force behind a seemingly never-ending cycle of bad decisions. For me, food is the way that I cope. The worse I feel about myself, the more coping I need. More coping, more weight, and more weight, more coping.
On friends: But as much as I felt acceptance from them, I couldn’t hide from the truth. Every single day, I was measuring my self-worth against my friends and their priorities. In a group of alpha males, there is definitely a pecking order.… If you listen to other people long enough, when you internalize all of this noise, they will have you thinking you are emotionally and physically weak. It’s hard to live in a world where you are constantly dehumanized. People who aren’t overweight don’t understand the pain of wanting to crawl inside of your own skin…. You might be thinking, like I was when I was younger, that just because my boys were getting all the girls they were happy. I found out years later that some of them were miserable as fuck.
On metrics: Looking back on it, my problem was the metric. All the mess was in the metric. I was judging myself and my worth solely on my physical appearance.
On comfort: While most people envy the celebrities and athletes who seem to be cranked out from the perfect-body factory, I am superjealous of another group of people. I envy the ones who are comfortable in their own skin.
On people: This brotha was so committed to me transforming my body that he faked my phone number so I could get a discount. One of the reasons I’ve stuck with this same chain of gyms is because of this guy. We’ve all had that experience of walking into a gym and being with people who just want to make the quick sale. This guy was really showing me love, and he made it so easy for me to get in there.
Reinforcements by Heidi Grant Ph.D
This book is particularly important for anyone working as an entrepreneur, leader of a small team, freelancer, or independent; you may not have the resources you need to achieve your goals yet, which means you’ll have to ask other people for help. I came across this book when I started launching Creative Doing. I realized I experienced an immense discomfort—a block!—with asking people for help. Heidi Grant provides a bunch of great insights, and tactics, which I found to be great structure for my efforts.
Quotes:
On help: There’s an inherent paradox in asking someone for their help: while help freely and enthusiastically given makes the helper feel good, researchers have found that the emotional benefits of providing help to others disappear when people feel controlled—when they are instructed to help, when they believe that they should help, or when they feel they simply have no choice but to help.
On asking: The hard truth is that, if you aren’t getting the support you need from the people in your life, it’s usually more your own fault than you realize. That may sound harsh, but we all assume our needs and motivations are more obvious than they really are, and that what we intended to say overlaps perfectly with what we actually said. Psychologists call this “the transparency illusion,” and it’s just that: a mirage. Chances are, you’re not surrounded by unhelpful loafers—just people who have no idea that you need help or what kind of help you need. The good news? We can easily solve this problem. Armed with a little knowledge, there is hope for each of us to get the support we so critically need.
Steve Jobs, on asking: Now, I’ve actually always found something to be very true, which is most people don’t get those experiences because they never ask. I’ve never found anybody who didn’t want to help me when I’ve asked them for help … I’ve never found anyone who’s said no or hung up the phone when I called—I just asked. And when people ask me, I try to be as responsive, to pay that debt of gratitude back. Most people never pick up the phone and call, most people never ask. And that’s what separates, sometimes, the people that do things from the people that just dream about them.
On rejection: There’s one category of person we tend to underestimate even more than the normal run-of-the-mill person: anyone who has turned down our request in the past…. And looking back, I can think of many times when I’ve done something similar, when I’ve gone out of my way the second time around to make up for having been too selfish, lazy, or preoccupied to give someone the help they needed the first time.
On intrinsic motivation: When we engage in a behavior because we choose to, not because we have to, we are what psychologists call intrinsically motivated. And without exaggeration, research has clearly shown over the last thirty or forty years that this type of motivation is just the best. When you are intrinsically motivated, you find greater interest and enjoyment in what you do, even when it’s challenging. You are more creative in your thinking, and you absorb more new knowledge. You are better at hanging in there even when the going gets tough. Across the board, intrinsic motivation leads to greater improvement, superior performance, and a deeper sense of satisfaction.
On compensation: I still remember when someone I thought of as a friend asked me if I would watch her cat when she went on vacation, which I was happy to do, until she offered me $100 to do it. I felt both extremely uncomfortable and just slightly insulted that she felt I would want compensation for doing her a favor. I thought we were past that, so to speak. I still watched the cat, of course, but I didn’t really take any joy in it. And that’s the downside of inadvertently making people feel obligated to help you: while enthusiastically and freely given help confers a host of benefits on the helper, the people who give a grudging yes experience none of them. They may even start avoiding you, to avoid the pain of declining (or ignoring) your requests.
On specificity: Assuming you are not lying groaning in a doorway and simply need common everyday help, it’s essential to remember when you ask for it that people are very often quite busy; they have their own goals to juggle and fires to put out. You can make receiving help from a busy person more likely by doing three things.
First, be explicit and detailed about what you are asking for and how much effort from the helper it will entail. Vague requests to “connect with you about your work” or “get a hand from you with something” are likely to leave people worrying that the ask is going to be significant, and that they just won’t have the time and energy for it. Second, be mindful to keep requests for help to a reasonable size—something the other person can do, given other commitments. And third, be open to receiving help that is different from what you asked for. Don’t get hung up on not getting what you wanted. Focus instead on how you are strengthening your relationship by taking the help that is offered, and bear in mind that it might be far more useful to you than you realize.
On receiving vs. asking: One of the most common misconceptions about giving is that, if you are doing it right, it’s entirely about the other person. That giving is not supposed to be about you. But this is nonsense. The choice to help another person is often, if not always, at least in part about how you see yourself and how helping will make you feel. And this is a good thing, because the benefits of helping to the helper provide a powerful source of motivation, one so powerful that it can make a perfectly reasonable and intelligent man giddy about spending twelve hours in coach.
On apologies: When giving advice to other artists, she said that she frequently admonished them to stop apologizing for their need, because (as she correctly noted) apologies are distancing.
It’s understood, implicitly, that people who are on the same team—people who share a sense of relational or collective reciprocity—will lean on one another from time to time for support. And that, naturally, this support will be reciprocated. Apologies that accompany a request for help subtly imply that we must not be on the same team; otherwise, why would you be apologizing? In this sense, apologizing actually undermines our shared in-group identity, increasing the gap between us and severing our feelings of connectedness.
Springfield Confidential by Mike Reiss and Mathew Klickstein
I’ve literally never laughed out loud reading a book as I have with this one. I was a fan of The Simpsons since I was maybe 8 years old, so I was pretty much hardwired to enjoy this book as Mike Reiss has been contributing to the show since. If you like The Simpsons, you’re gonna love this book. If you don’t like The Simpsons, you’re going to really hate it, so I wouldn’t recommend it.
Quotes:
On pace: I hope this book feels like a Simpsons episode: fast-paced, full of quick scenes, and stuffed with hundreds of jokes, some of them funny. I’ve even structured it like a Simpsons script, which has four acts: setup, complication, resolution, and coda. Now, Aristotle said all drama has three acts, and classic films usually employ a three-act structure. We have four, which means we’re one act better than Aristotle. Also, with four acts, you can sell more commercials.
On despair: Nobody wanted to work on The Simpsons.… I took the job…but didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. After eight years writing for films, sitcoms, and even Johnny Carson, I was now working on a cartoon. I was twenty-eight years old and I thought I’d hit rock bottom. Still, I’d been a fan of Matt Groening and executive producer Sam Simon for years. They were having fun creating the show, and it was infectious. It was a summer job and it felt like the summer jobs I’d had in the past (selling housewares, filing death certificates): we knew we wouldn’t be doing this forever, so no one took it too seriously.
On excitement: Maybe that’s the secret of the show’s success: since we thought no one would be watching, we didn’t make the kind of show we saw on TV; we made the kind of show we wanted to see on TV. It was unpredictable; one week we wrote a whodunit, and in another we parodied the French film Manon of the Spring. The only rule was one we made for ourselves—don’t be boring.
On media: 90 percent of what I read about The Simpsons was wrong, which made me realize 90 percent of everything I read in the paper was probably wrong.
On spontaneity: But shortly before the meeting, someone said to him, “We’re very excited to hear about your new project!” Matt didn’t have one. And so, five minutes before the meeting, he sketched out the Simpson family.
It took him five minutes to create one of the most-honored shows in TV history. Just imagine if he’d spent half an hour.
How did he come up with it so fast? For starters, he named the characters after his family: his parents, Homer and Marge; his sisters Lisa and Maggie.
On jokes: I have only one supernatural belief: No matter what the setup, there’s always a perfect joke for it. It may not be a great joke, but it’s always the right joke for the moment: it’s there in the universe, waiting to be discovered.
Dan Castanella, on pitching: “Something I’ve learned from Mike: Keep pitching, no matter what! Don’t worry if they don’t use your best stuff; there’s more to come. It’s nothing to Mike not to have something he pitched put in; he just comes up with another thing right after. Don’t be so precious about coming up with something funny if someone turns it down, because there’s always more.”
On spontaneity 2: Like almost everything we do, there wasn’t much thought put into it.
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My new book Creative Doing launched in May! The book has now been featured at Fast Company, Every, and Dense Discovery. I’ve also recorded a couple of podcasts, which I’m really excited to see go live.
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I’m still writing every day at my blog.
—I hope that some of these passages unlock the hidden doors of your mind. Maybe some will serve as catalysts for change. And remember, they’re signposts. It’s up to you whether you want to apply them or not.
Herbert Lui
