Bite-Sized Creativity

Live your creative life on top of your 9-to-5

I first wrote Bite-Sized Creativity in the crevices of my corporate schedule, wanting to feel like myself amid a deluge of emails and spreadsheets. A lot of this book was encouraged by an urge to live a life that feels mine and a healthy amount of delusion from friends I met here on Substack.

Below is the introduction of the book. It’s ~10,000 words, bite-sized by design ;) Buy the book here.

My days were a revolving door of routines that never spun to a stop.

I looked up from my MacBook Air to find my editor thumping the squeaky marker against the whiteboard plastered on a wobbly panel. He was doing his morning roll-call, asking each reporter what story we were filing that day.

I looked back down at my laptop, trying to see if there was a story from the interviews I had. The words “discretionary portfolio management,” and “core banking platform” were swirling together unintelligibly when my alarm rang. I opened my eyes and felt relief, only to realize that I did have to file something in two hours. I washed my face, then put on a T-shirt dress–an elongated t-shirt of mid-knee length, stylized to be a cocktail dress. It promised comfort without the most practical element: pockets.

The commute to my office in Wan Chai was only 30 minutes from my Sai Ying Pun apartment, split up into three equally boring ten-minute chunks: walking underground amidst a drab crowd dreading work, standing in the train while a fellow commuter put on mascara skillfully against a tiny palm mirror; whilst in the distance another walking portion of office workers strut trying to outpace the escalators.

In the office—a small room in a commercial building—I filled up my Piglet cup with water and sat down to mentally brace myself for the day.

My editor started the roll-call across my team of five reporters. Collectively, we wrote all there is to know about the private banking industry in Asia working for a publication aptly named Asian Private Banker. One reporter was highlighting the views from the Bank of Singapore about emerging market bonds. Another colleague, a regulatory reporter, was writing about the implications of MiFID II, a regulatory framework from the European Union, in the Asian banking landscape. My editor wrote the keywords next to the reporters’ initials.

He hovered over “RI,” the initials for Rebecca Isjwara.

“Becks, what’s your story for today?”

“Cathay United Bank is switching over to Avaloq,” I said, referring to a Taiwanese private bank that was switching its core banking platform to a Swiss infrastructure. “It’s a scoop,” I added. He wrote it down and began to arrange the stories for the day’s newsletter that would go out at 6PM.

The industry was so small. I was flying to Singapore every two months, seeing the same faces that grace Hong Kong’s 5-star hotels and skyscrapers. I met nearly every CEO of the top 20 private banks in the region and interviewed many in their executive teams.

But there was only so much news that happened in this tiny industry. Definitely not enough to warrant five new articles around it every work day. We squeezed as much juice as we could from the people we talked to. In the end, it was just not that interesting. But the newsletters still had to be filled out, and the magazines still had to be printed.

I had to keep going out there to somehow turn turnips into fresh lemonade.

I was only 23, yet I felt beaten down by the monotony of work that barely paid enough to cover Hong Kong rent and basic expenses. Every Friday, my colleagues and I would drink our stress away at the bar downstairs of our office, then shuffle to another bar that had darts and a stack-up table. Saturdays were for nursing my hangover. Sundays were for doing the laundry, and I got to relive the work week when Monday rolled around.

“If we’re lucky, we get to do this for another 40 years,” my colleague said stoically, taking a sip of the Taiwanese beer that the bar had on tap.

The “lucky” life I was living felt like the opposite of a childhood spent building forts from boxes and blankets, reading A Series of Unfortunate Events under the covers, and decking out my music stand with rubber bands and colorful papers like a battleship cockpit. Fifteen years on, novels have given way to news articles, forts have been replaced by tax forms, and my main pastime is replying to emails and messages.

I would look at people who chose different paths with envy: Min Jin Lee and R.F. Kuang wrote masterpieces like Pachinko and Babel. Lin Manuel Miranda wrote mixtape songs and eventually made Hamilton. Jennifer Lawrence never stopped playing make-believe and became Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.

That was 2018.

By 2022, my life turned into technicolor. I was finally in touch with the same senses that built forts and fairy worlds. A life that bursts with creativity.

I was cooking mapo tofu from scratch, a recipe I learned by watching YouTube tutorials. I was out in the park painting trees at golden hour. I was making videos and publishing them on the internet.

Surprisingly, I found so much joy in these activities that the day job—banking reporter—felt a lot more bearable. The job wasn’t my whole world anymore. It became just a part of my life.

TL;DR: The world felt fun again.

Even though I didn’t call myself an artist, I was fully engaged in creative activities. I was making things, playing with childlike wonder, going down rabbit holes. And I was doing so regardless of whether or not that activity had any utilitarian value.

Creativity became a way of living, of existing in the world authentically. I built this creativity-filled life by embracing what I call bite-sized creativity. I took something that felt like it could be fun, broke it down into an activity I could complete in the spare 30 minutes, for instance, between dinner and bedtime, and engaged with it fully.

In the early days when I started leaning into fun activities, I had a skeptical voice in my head: Why engage with creativity at all? I can simply buy a showpiece, watch a movie, dine in a restaurant.

Those statements are true. I didn’t start painting with the goal of being able to sell them. It would take decades and decades of practice before I would even dare to compare myself to the greats like John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt.

I took up painting because I wanted to have fun again. I wanted to engage in something that was just for me, had a childlike spark to it, and had no consequences.

When I buy a showpiece, watch a movie, and dine in a restaurant, my choices are limited to the options presented to me. I have preferences, but they’re not 100% what my heart truly desired.

When I create something myself, I am my only limit.

Creativity is an act of self-expression. It is a way to engage with what brings me joy or perhaps even sadness. It is a way to live out my life even when it was sequestered to my free time outside my day job.

The feelings after doing these acts of creativity are reminiscent of the late afternoon in my pink childhood bedroom, creating narratives beneath my bedsheet fort in Tangerang, Indonesia. Beneath these covers, I immersed myself in a world where my focus was centered on the vibrant colors splashing onto a blank page. That same feeling appeared as I improvised with peppercorn oil in my tiny Hong Kong flat. It’s a world free of deadlines, taxes, and societal expectations, even if only temporary.

Through bite-sized creativity, I found myself again.

I’ve been documenting my bite-sized creativity adventures, first through weekly YouTube videos in 2022, then through weekly Substack essays since 2023. I showcased my wonky paintings, attempts at cooking different Indonesian meals, and photos I took on film after a hurricane passed by Hong Kong.

As I worked towards a more well-rounded life, I started also picking up habits that would give me more energy: Pilates, weight lifting, and journaling.

Whenever I catch up with friends over brunch or dinner, I rarely talk about work updates. Instead, I share the activities that excite me. They always ask: “How do you have the time?”

We all have the same amount of time. 168 hours a week. The same as Beyoncé.

The real question isn’t about the time. The underlying question is, “How can I do everything I want in life?”

What I do is take these acts of creativity that seem daunting — writing a book, creating a masterpiece, cooking a 10-course dinner — and break them down into bite-sized chunks that are not only less intimidating to do, but more approachable because of the limited time I have outside of my day job.

I don’t believe that my life transformation was in any way radical. I didn’t rage-quit my job, build a cabin in the woods, and disappear for two years to write a magnum opus. I didn’t wake up at 5AM every day to dunk my face in a bowl of ice water, “embrace the suck,” and Bullet Bill through my workday.

I just sprinkled 30-minute slots of creative activities throughout the week. I looked at my schedule for what it was, became intentional with how I spent my time, and shifted some priorities around. All without overhauling my entire life.

Spending time with my own creativity connected me to activities I could derive joy from, like cooking and painting and writing. For the first time in my adulthood, I felt like myself again. And after that, the effects rippled to other parts of my life: physical health, mental health, and my social life.

This book is meant to help you integrate bite-sized creativity into your life. I share tools and ideas to make bite-sized creativity sustainable, so that anyone can stick with it. It also shows you how I slowly and steadily built a bite-sized creative life, drawbacks and all.

If you are seeking to imbue your life with some form of creativity, you can find the first steps in this book.

I wish you a life full of bite-sized creativity.