Lawrence Yeo’s first serious bet on illustrated writing was gloriously inefficient. He spent roughly 100 hours making an essay called “Travel Is No Cure for the Mind,” then announced it to an audience of 21 friends. The arithmetic would have alarmed any sensible growth consultant: nearly five hours of labor per potential reader, before accounting for the possibility that some friends were merely being polite.
Yeo was not careless about numbers. He had studied economics at UCLA and worked in corporate finance. He understood models, trade-offs and the mortal danger of a badly behaved spreadsheet. Yet this project required a different calculation. He wanted to know whether the work itself could hold his attention when attention from others was effectively zero.
The answer arrived before the audience did. He cared about the writing, the drawings and the peculiar business of arranging both into a story. More To That launched in March 2018. Over the years, those 21 recipients became a newsletter readership of more than 38,000, while his work accumulated more than 4 million pageviews. The first wager now looks rather shrewd. It was also a wager that could only be understood from the inside.
First, choose the wrong instrument
The clean version of a creative career usually begins with a calling. Yeo’s began with uncertainty. He remained undeclared until late in college and eventually chose economics, a practical route assembled partly from classes he had already taken. The surrounding culture supplied familiar signals about prestige and earnings. Finance followed.
He never expected the office to provide the final answer. Its more useful function was patronage: a salary could become savings, and savings could become freedom of attention. He made beats outside work, then left finance to pursue music professionally. For about four years, he produced instrumentals, sold beats online and worked near the Los Angeles music industry.
Music could carry feeling beautifully. It was less suited to the kind of explicit ideas gathering in his head. The industry also demanded energy for networking, access and getting heard. Yeo began to dislike the person those incentives were encouraging him to become. He still loved the craft; he no longer wanted its surrounding contest to define his career.
“Whatever your mode of expression is now, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be that in perpetuity.”Lawrence Yeo
So he returned to corporate work. From a distance, this could resemble retreat. In practice, it gave him another protected interval in which to ask a better question. Creativity is not one country with a single border crossing. It has textures. Beatmaking had been immersive and emotional; writing offered argument, sequence and the pleasure of turning a hazy thought until its edges appeared.
The doodle lowers the drawbridge
Yeo had written fiction as a child and doodled recurring characters on whatever paper happened to be nearby, including a figure with an upside-down triangle for a face. As an adult, he began publishing philosophical pieces on Medium. One essay about creating while feeling lost reached tens of thousands of readers. The response revealed what music had obscured: his private reflections could make direct contact with another person.
He added drawings and built a home for the combination. More To That took on questions usually introduced in solemn clothes: what money is for, why status distorts judgment, how a person knows when enough is enough, and what it means to live well. His small figures and clean diagrams make abstraction less forbidding. Philosophy comes through the side door wearing sneakers.
The method is deliberately sequential. Yeo writes first, leaving bracketed notes where an illustration might eventually belong. Drawing comes later. Prose needs his full concentration; illustration can share the room with a podcast. Separating the modes prevents context switching and respects the fact that a sentence and a sketch ask different things of the mind.
He keeps a daily one-page journal, but he is skeptical of turning every insight into a filing system. Ideas that matter tend to return. His editorial formula is similarly compact: curiosity plus timelessness. Technology and culture keep changing; human nature has the inconvenient habit of bringing its old luggage along. Yeo prefers the durable question to the fashionable answer.
A career recognized from across the garage
A year after the site began, Yeo and his wife quit jobs that could not travel and spent six months in Korea with his parents. The decision compressed his philosophy of money into an ordinary family choice: savings could buy time with people who would not always be available. With fewer office hours, he worked more deeply on More To That. Patreon income and traffic offered early evidence that the project might support itself.
His wife, an arts educator and ceramicist, had long understood creativity as a daily practice rather than a decorative luxury. They share a garage studio in Los Angeles, her wheel near his teaching setup. She twice supplied the sentence he could not yet supply himself. When she visited his office, she urged him to leave the cage. Later, when he said he hoped More To That might become his career, she replied, “What do you mean? It already is your career.”
The recognition mattered because creative work often begins without the ceremony that accompanies employment. No offer letter arrives from the imagination. The hobby becomes a vocation through repeated attention, then becomes a business by solving enough problems for enough people. Yeo turned his process into Thinking In Stories, a four-week course that has reached hundreds of students across 22 countries. He also created courses on philosophical essays and visual communication.
The audience grew in an unusual direction. His email list became three to four times larger than his social following. Most creator funnels widen on a platform and narrow toward the inbox. More To That circulated through the essays themselves, helped by Medium and word of mouth. The work did the prospecting. One suspects the doodles never once asked anyone to smash a subscribe button.
“The question is far more important than the answer.”Lawrence Yeo
The compass leaves home
In July 2025, Yeo self-published his first book, The Inner Compass: Cultivating the Courage to Trust Yourself. He had spent much of the previous year on it. The book is concise and illustrated, roughly the length of a generous afternoon, because he did not want to inflate an idea that could be delivered clearly. Its subject is the tension between external approval and an internal sense of direction.
There is a pleasant comic problem in writing a successful book about loosening one’s dependence on success. The Inner Compass became an Amazon category bestseller, sold thousands of copies and secured eight foreign licenses. Spanish rights went to Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial. Korean rights went to Wilma Publishing, which pleased Yeo for a homely reason: his parents in Korea would finally be able to read it. Whether they actually do, he joked, can no longer be blamed on the language barrier.
The next shelf
Money gets a book of its own
Yeo has signed a deal with Penguin Random House’s Portfolio imprint for a forthcoming book about the purpose of money. A rights catalog lists The True Purpose of Money for May 2027.
The subject closes an elegant loop. Finance first appeared in his life as prestige, employment and a way to fund creative freedom. More To That later gave him a place to examine money as a relationship rather than a score. His forthcoming book asks how people can assign money a purpose before it assigns them an identity.
Timeless questions, timely tools
Yeo’s newest work has another texture. Alongside writing and teaching, he is building small tools with artificial intelligence. His public workshop includes a course-sales dashboard, a system that turns manuscript excerpts into social images, a YouTube transcript-and-summary workflow and FocusWriter, a calm web app for distraction-free prose. Other experiments aim to find book-marketing opportunities or convert an idea into one of his familiar graphs.
The pairing makes sense on his terms. He advises understanding the timeless through philosophy, psychology and history, while studying the timely through technology, distribution and AI. One protects sanity; the other helps pay the bills. His tools are not presented as synthetic wisdom. They handle the surrounding chores so that human attention can return to the stubborn old questions.
That distinction is the quiet constant across Yeo’s zigzagging career. Finance became useful when it served attention. Music became untenable when reception crowded out craft. Writing endured because he could still enjoy it without an audience. Teaching worked because it gave other people agency instead of installing him as a guru. The book traveled because its private question was widely recognizable.
A conventional résumé would make this path look erratic: economist, finance professional, beatmaker, finance professional again, blogger, teacher, author, software builder. Seen from closer range, the line is steady. Yeo keeps asking which form allows curiosity, usefulness and a worthwhile struggle to occupy the same room.
The first essay’s 100 hours were never justified by 21 emails. They were justified by the person those hours allowed him to become. Everything that followed - millions of reads, classrooms of writers, translations on distant shelves - is the public afterlife of that private decision. A spreadsheet can count the reach. The compass explains the direction.