Daily Inspiration: Meet Heather Li

Today we’d like to introduce you to Heather Li.

Heather, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
A life philosophy I have is to be adaptable and open to new experiences. This mentality is largely shaped by my experience of immigrating to the U.S. as a child and straddling a cross-cultural identity ever since. I was born in Beijing, moved to Hawaii during elementary school, and then moved to the east coast for high school. After college, I embraced new opportunities, living in Hong Kong, the Midwest, and back to the east coast. When quarantine started, I had been living in NYC close to five years and in Oct. 2020, I spontaneously decided to move to LA. Initially, I intended to live in LA just temporarily to escape quarantining through the cold winter months, but I’ve come to really love the city! The weather, the creative culture, and laidback lifestyle. On top of all of this, I started dating someone in LA, so I decided to relocate permanently! It is a big transition, but this move coincides with my new chapter as an entrepreneur focused on creating intentional content around human connection.

After college, I started my career in investment banking in Hong Kong. After a year or so, I desired more work life balance, so I moved back to the U.S. and continued working in finance. In 2014, I watched a TED talk by a woman named Rachel Schechtman, who presented a new future for retail that combined the retail business model with media and started what is now known as experiential retail. I was blown away after realizing the shopping experience can be framed as an experience instead of a transaction – focusing on narrative, curation, and context instead of productivity per square feet and turnover. With this new perspective, I decided to pivot my career from finance to retail, and went to Columbia Business School and spent two years interning at startups and large conglomerates across the entire retail ecosystem. In my last semester at Columbia, I had the opportunity to meet Rachel, the woman from the TED talk who inspired my passion for the industry and in a surprising twist of fate, she offered me a job. She had sold her experiential retail startup STORY to Macy’s, and I joined her to build the brand experience team at Macy’s. As Senior Director of Strategy and Operations, I helped launch new in-store shopping experiences in dozens of Macy’s stores, and also helped to incubate a new experiential retail brand, Market by Macy’s, that included the best of national brands, featured local makers, and was a space to shop but also eat, participate in events, and socialize. I was helping to pave a new approach to retail at one of the most historic, legacy retailers.

Soon after quarantine started, stores close and there was significant pressure across the retail industry. Consequently, my team was laid off. Instead of finding a new job, I decided to embark on a creative endeavor and I created a voice only matchmaking experiment! I had been single and was drained by dating apps, so I wanted to learn about the social science behind interpersonal connection and I wondered if the power of voice could lead to a deeper connection. I designed a 30 days matchmaking experiment where participants can only get to know their matches through voice memos. I solicited dozens of strangers to participate and after collecting 100 hours of voice memo messages, I knew I had to share these stories of human connection. So, I created a podcast about the connections made and the lessons I learned from the experiment. Making and writing this podcast was one year in the making and at the end of May 2020, I completed my 6 episode podcast, It’s Nice to Hear You, available to listen on all podcasts platforms.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Having moved around so much has been a challenge, but it has also been the largest blessing to be presented with new opportunities amidst these big transitions in my life. Being laid off is certainly a difficult reality to accept, but reframing the less than ideal reality as an opportunity is always an option.

After being laid off, deciding to give myself a year to work on my own creative endeavor and launching It’s Nice to Hear You was a huge risk at the time, but looking back, I’m so grateful to have taken this leap. In the making of the podcast, the largest challenge was determining the narrative structure. I collected 100 hours of audio from my experiment, and condensing all of this content into a cohesive story was extremely daunting. Also, not having any professional writing or storytelling experience, I experience many periods of feeling stuck and unqualified. However, I started to reach out to podcast producers, editors, and writers to seek advice and intentionally built a team of collaborators to refine my ideas. Keeping a discipline of continuously writing, iterating on ideas, and engaging with the content was also critical in evolving towards the final product. This process of creating the podcast was the best education in storytelling, audio production, and entrepreneurship. Most humbling of all is knowing that I was able to significantly impact the lives of strangers who participated in my experiment. Some pairs of people actually started dating as a result of my experiment! This has taught me the power of action and the power of human connection. Life will always be messy and unpredictable, but keeping an open mind and framing struggles as new opportunities will always result in valuable life experiences, and the rest – wealth, relationships, career, etc. – will all fall into place!

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I am most proud of the process I engaged in while creating my dating experiment and podcast It’s Nice to Hear You. It’s intentional and thoughtful, and I am proud to have given it the time it deserved to make content that gives justice to the idea. It took me 15 months to make it, but in some ways, it also took three decades since this work is informed by my life experiences and represents the culmination of my creative approach. I’ve always considered myself a human Venn diagram with lots of disparate interests ranging from architecture, art history, commerce, and design.

Ultimately, my wide scope of interests informs my unique point of view, allowing me to create It’s Nice to Hear You, a genre bending podcast that is narrative driven, rooted in intentionality, with a splash of social science. It has the intrigue from a reality dating show, intimacy from a personal memoir, and insights from a psychology study. I’ve always believed that the intersection of different disciplines is where the magic happens – it not only results in a more integrated experience but more thoughtful content. One example of one of my interdisciplinary collaborations is partnering with an AI-powered emotion recognition technology company who analyzed all the voice memo recordings of my participants. Just assessing how someone speaks can surface significant insights about how one feels, and these insights are shared in the podcast.

Making the podcast has been a life-changing experience and taught me a lot about entrepreneurship, storytelling, but also relationships. Below are the key lessons in dating I learned as a result of listening to my participants.

1. Compatibility is not something one can filter for. It is something that is earned and happens over time.

2. Openness is not the same as vulnerability. Disclosing something truly vulnerable feels scary and is threatening.

3. It is a privilege to just be boring with someone else and not feel the need to impress, entertain, or be interesting.

4. Acceptance is the appreciating all sides of someone including the flaws, and maybe even reframe them as superpowers.

5. Growth is progress with learning.

Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
Given the success of the first season of my podcast, It’s Nice to Hear You, I am embarking on a new season with another dating experiment! In an age where we have more access than ever through a plethora of dating apps, the process of dating is more draining than ever. The constant swiping, unexpected ghosting, and ironic feelings of endless choice but not enough options. Given my background in experiential retail, I believe there is an opportunity to reframe dating as an experience instead of a transaction. With an emphasis on connection instead of compatibility, I want to create a 30 days dating experience that has value because the participants showed up in search of connection in spite of the outcome. Romantic compatibility is hard to predict (this is true according to social science research on interpersonal connection!), but human connection doesn’t have to be. This experience will take place over a 30 days program where participants are matched with someone else. The twist is that everyone remains anonymous and there are no profile pictures. Similar to season 1, some stories and conversations from these matches will form the foundation for the podcast. If this sounds interesting to you, sign up at itsnicetohearyou.com!

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: itsnicetohearyou.com
• Instagram: itsnicetohearyou
• Other: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/its-nice-to-hear-you/id1550711873