This week on Five Rules for the Good Life, I sit down with chef, content creator, and author Jonathan Kung, a third culture trailblazer whose videos and cookbook, Kung Food, have brought millions into his creative kitchen. He shares his Five Rules For Harnessing Your Creativity, and we talk about where ideas really come from, why limitations help unlock creativity, and how sometimes the best dishes (and videos) are born when you’re cooking in the woods with two coolers and no plan. Jonathan’s five rules dig into the art of improvisation, the power of talking tools with your peers, and the deeper reason why we all create in the first place. Whether you’re a chef, artist, editor, or just someone trying to make cool stuff, this episode is a generous, honest guide to how it all gets done.
This conversation really hits home if you’re someone staring down the new year and thinking about how to keep making, building, and growing. Jonathan’s approach to creativity feels both grounded and expansive. He breaks down the pressure of the “feed,” the myth of chasing trend cycles, and reminds us that creativity isn’t about following, it’s about refining your voice, your ideas, and your pace. This episode is packed with the kind of real talk that helps you set intention without burning out. Whether you’re deep in a project or just trying to find your next concept, these five rules give you a compass for staying inspired and making work that actually matters to you.
Hello, and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I sit down with chef, content creator, and author Jonathan Kung, whose videos and cookbook Kung Food: Chinese American Recipes from a Third Culture Kitchen are enjoyed by millions of people all over the world. He shares his five rules for harnessing your creativity and talks about the importance of finding inspiration in limitation, learning how to improvise to create something new, and how the key to all great success is good communication. It’s a fantastic conversation for anyone who’s looking to head into the new year with good intention about what they want to make and create. So let’s get into the rules.
Jonathan, so great to meet you. Longtime fan of your content online and the food that you cook. Really appreciate you taking the time to sit down.
Thank you so much for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Being a content creator comes with the pressure of having to create something daily. How do you harness that consistency?
My background, actually, in school, I studied theater and creative writing as a dual major in college. Somehow that has managed to make itself really useful in my career shift as a content creator. Basically, what I’ve done is use the things that I have learned over the course of my schooling and over the course of my life as a cook to inform the things that I do as a content creator. And I pretty much just derive inspiration from all sorts of sources.
I’ve noticed that among my peers, one of the topics of discussion constantly when it comes to conventions for content creators and gatherings is: where do you get your ideas from? How do you ideate? When I was just starting out, I was like, oh, I have lots of ideas. Eventually, I will run out and I will need to listen to these people talk about where they get their ideas from. I’m over half a decade in and still I haven’t done a fraction of all of the things I wrote down. I’ve forgotten more ideas for videos to do than I’ve actually executed over five years.
Yeah, you think you’re coming up with something new, then you check an old notebook and you’re like, oh wait, never mind. I had that.
Do you see a difference between developing a tasting menu or making a video, or are you pulling from that same creative well for all the projects that you do?
My sources of inspiration tend to be from the same place in the sense that I look to specific places for inspiration. What I try to avoid is looking to see what my neighbor is doing. Of course, when I was a chef, the last place I would look is other restaurants and other tasting menu concepts that were similar to mine to see what they were doing. Same as a content creator—the last thing that I’m really interested in following is a trend, which goes against what a lot of social media managers will tell you.
In the context of social media, trends can give you short-term virality, but they really say nothing about you as an artist or creator or even as a person. When it comes to content, I love going to other mediums of art that are not necessarily connected to my own. When it was food, I loved going to the museum and looking at paintings. Watching films inspired me to do complete tasting menu concepts based off the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Though that is a concept that seems to have been done quite a bit now, I was doing that in 2008. There was really nothing like it, at least where I was. And people were coming in. I had this secret kitchen in Detroit that was completely unsanctioned and totally illegal. But I still had people coming in from Chicago and Toronto to try these things because they saw a Facebook event.
What a time. The mid-aughts, man. What a time to be cooking. It was such a time of great millennial naivete. I absolutely loved it. I look back so fondly on that.
Back to the thing about trends. Understand that trends are a tool for growth, but they are not a signature of your own expression. I think when you start basing a large collective of your creativity around trends, it might work on social media because it’s fleeting and it moves on. But when it comes time to something more permanent, like your first cookbook Kung Food, doing something on trends is a surefire way to only be on a few shelves.
What was the process in discovering what you wanted to say with this book—picking the stories that you want to have be more permanent in people’s collections?
One thing that short form media has done is really quickened the pace on how the general zeitgeist of any given topic works. It just accelerates the saturation so quickly. So when I was just starting off writing my book, I do believe it’s probably one of the first cookbooks with third culture cooking even in the title, and it was still a new concept back then. The inspiration for the book, I should say, is simply an expression of my own identity in food. There is an authenticity of self, and that was what I wanted to write in my cookbook. It’s not traditional Chinese food in any kind of way, but it is the Chinese food that is representative of who I am as a Chinese person and my experiences as a Chinese American.
Having those experiences and being able to tap into that across your body of work—whether it’s a video or tasting menu or a cookbook—is great to see, which makes me so excited for you to share your five rules for harnessing your creativity.
It’s easy to get lost in what other people are doing, especially when you’re doom scrolling or looking at other people’s Instagram feeds. And your first rule talks about focusing on yourself and ignoring that. What’s your rule number one?
Rule 1: Ignore your peers and look to other artists. Branching out and finding inspiration, not in the people that do the same thing you do, but from the wider world around you. Understanding that everything can be a source of inspiration if you just think a little laterally. Think outside the confines of your own niche or industry. With that basic tenet of where to find inspiration, it really just becomes limitless.
That being said, on the other side of the same coin, there is something great about creating a box and creating structure. Because today, there is the detriment of having unlimited options or choices or things at your fingertips that you become paralyzed.
Rule 2: Find inspiration in limitation. After saying that the world is boundless and unlimited, I go right to the opposite end and just tell you that being limited can actually give you such a sense of urgency and just really allows you to focus down.
One thing I like to do as a chef is go camping a lot. And I can’t take my kitchen with me. I can’t even take all the ingredients that I want with me. I’m extremely limited to what I can bring. I bring two coolers for fresh food. I have one box of unperishables—sugar, salt, spices, canned goods, camping staples, oats, some grains, what and whatnot, maybe some fried pasta. What I found was I was coming up with recipes that I would never have come up with in the kitchen. And what’s more, they are recipes that I find the average everyday cook is able to do. Because if I can do it in the woods with no running water, electricity, and just some logs and flame, it’s in general easy enough for somebody with a normal kitchen to execute.
So not only has it improved my ability to cook as a recipe developer, but it’s also improved my ability to cook as a former professional cook to now a teacher for people who are hobbyists and home cooks.
Rule 3: Learn how to improvise. Improvisation is, just like cooking, a skill on its own—the ability to not lock up under pressure. I realized that inspiration can come directly from the moment. I was cooking for another chef. They were catering a wedding. They had everything planned out. They knew who every guest was. But lo and behold, there was a surprise vegan. And I don’t hit on vegans. I was a vegan for two months and a vegetarian for two years.
In that moment when you have everything planned out and there wasn’t even really a kitchen there—we were doing banquet style cooking—everything was prepared. So I literally was taking sides here and there and concocting a sauce and came up with a really great dish that the person really liked. And of course, because that person liked it, the host really enjoyed it. In that time, I was just like, okay, plan as much as you can, but also save some room for improvisation because the spark of the moment can be just one of the biggest flashes in a creative career.
Rule 4: Talk to your peers about tools. I’m interested in what my peers and friends are doing, but I’m more interested in how they’re doing it because everyone’s creative process can be so wildly different. There are people who use amazing cameras and video equipment and really expensive software. I used to be that person. And now I just use iPhones. I use them to film at different angles. That allows me to be a one-person team. That allows me to not have to communicate my needs to anyone because I’m the only person there.
I do love learning about how other people create because it gives me the ability to consider different avenues I would not have originally considered. There have been times where somebody has talked to me about a tool—something as specific as a microphone. Instead of using a shotgun microphone, which is super directional, I learned to use two lavaliers. You can hide them off camera and get a more immersive sound. That became how I do things now, and it informed every other video I’ve filmed since. Talk to your friends and peers about how they do what they do. It’s a great conversation to have. And it has compounding effects on the things that you make.
Rule 5: At the end of the day, it’s all just communication. What all of us are ultimately doing is just trying to say or express something. Having that constantly in mind can really inform every narrative that you make. For me, every single summer— is it just a tomato? No, it’s never just a tomato. It’s a love letter to the season.
Even in how you say it—the different ways you say it—there’s meaning. I used to be just a point-and-shoot person until I got into video editing. And I found there’s a complete second layer of communication within the edit itself. The way you cut video communicates humor in a way that I could never do just in front of the camera. Remembering that you’re always just trying to say something will inform your work all the way through.
John, thank you so much for sharing all of your tips and a perspective of someone who’s been in the game about how to say what you want to say and make the work you want to make. If people want to watch the videos, order the cookbook, or hit you up to plan a tasting menu for them—where can they go?
You can find me on my socials. I’m just @jonkung across all platforms—YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. My cookbook is called Kung Food. It’s out in all bookstores now.
Congrats on everything. Really excited to see what videos come up next and to keep following your work as you put it out into the world.
Thank you so much.
